Vanished. Elizabeth Heiter
have a specific reason to suspect Walter?”
“I don’t know,” Tomas replied. “Two of my officers are bringing Mark Douglas in.”
When Evelyn started to follow him to the front of the station, Tomas warned, “I’d stay where you are. We just arrested the victim’s father. No one’s happy with us.” Instead of returning to the CARD command post, Evelyn picked up her pace to match Tomas’s stride.
He glanced at her, looking surprised, then warned, “Everyone was terrified already. Now we’ve pissed them off. Things are volatile out there.”
As she walked to the front of the station with him, she saw that volatile was an understatement. Angry residents swarmed the parking lot, held at bay by a pair of cops. The crowd was mostly men, between twenty and sixty. They wore everything from shorts and T-shirts to suits and ties. Evelyn guessed there were thirty of them, but with only three cops who hadn’t been expecting this kind of trouble, it was too many.
The crowd was pushing and screaming and the cops, even though they were obvious veterans, looked overwhelmed. Evelyn had never seen her hometown like this, even eighteen years ago. Despite what she’d seen in the Bureau, it was actually a little scary.
Especially as a police car pulled up as close to the station door as it could get and two officers dragged a man out of the backseat who had to be Mark Douglas. His eyes were bloodshot, his face ragged with grief, his hands raw and bloodied.
The cops were young, clearly rookies. One held tight to Mark’s arm. The other’s hand lingered near his sidearm, his gaze darting nervously around the crowd as it rushed in on him.
“Pigs!” someone shouted. “We do your job for you and get arrested for it?”
“Let him go!” someone else yelled.
“Shit,” Tomas said. “Jack! T.J.! Get out here! Grab your batons!”
“Maybe...” Evelyn began.
“Stay inside the station,” Tomas told her, heading for the front door. “Most of our officers are out running down leads, and this could get ugly.”
Evelyn grabbed his arm. “Do you have a bullhorn?”
Tomas gave her an incredulous look. “In my office,” he said, pulling free and opening the front door.
The yelling roared several decibels louder. The pair of cops trying to manage the crowd was being pushed back toward the station. The cops trying to bring Mark inside were trapped against their patrol car. One of them pulled his weapon, and just like that, two residents had him slammed into the car.
Evelyn saw the weapon drop to the ground and Tomas raced into the crowd as she spun for his office. She wasn’t a negotiator, but she’d worked with the best the FBI had. And she knew calming the crowd down fast was the best chance to avoid getting someone hurt.
As she sprinted into Tomas’s office and found the bullhorn, Jack and T.J. hurried past, carrying heavy shields she hadn’t expected a small town like Rose Bay would have.
Jack and T.J. shoved their way through the crowd with their shields, trying to get to the rookies by the car.
Evelyn spotted Tomas in the middle, his hands out in a calming gesture. A broad-shouldered man with silver-streaked hair who seemed to be the closest thing the mob had to an instigator yelled back at him, slapping Tomas’s hands away.
The two cops who’d been holding back the crowd were yelling, too. It sounded as if they were agreeing with their neighbors that Brittany’s dad shouldn’t have been arrested, and promising to let him go if the crowd went home.
The rookies who’d brought in Mark Douglas were down near their patrol car. One had crawled half-underneath it to avoid getting trampled, while the other struggled to get back to his feet, his hand pressed to his bleeding head.
Mark, still in cuffs, was being dragged through the crowd. He kept looking backward, and seemed to be arguing with the crowd to let him get arrested, which was only making them angrier.
Evelyn opened the door, stepped to the edge of the crowd and lifted the bullhorn. She pressed the button to broadcast, knowing she needed to return their focus to what really mattered. “This isn’t helping Brittany. You need to leave the investigation to the police!”
The crowd quieted, seeming to still almost instantly. But that only lasted a fraction of a second. Then the man talking to Tomas yelled, “Was it your idea to arrest the victim’s father?” And the crowd surged forward, shifting direction, toward the front of the station, toward her.
Evelyn took a quick step back, pressing the button on the bullhorn again. But it was too late. Two people closest to her shoved her sideways, away from the station door, and the bullhorn fell from her hands.
She regained her balance, put her right hand near her hip to protect her weapon and tried to move backward. But someone else came in from the other side, blocking her way.
Then Jack’s voice cut through the yelling. “Evelyn! Hey! Move away from her!” He started pushing toward her, leading with his shield, and knocked someone out of his way.
Suddenly everyone seemed to be moving at once, in different directions. The men on her left spun to face Jack, knocking her backward.
She stumbled, and righted herself just as a cloud of pepper spray dispersed into the air. It filled her lungs, making her cough with every breath. Her eyes burned, watering until it was hard to see.
The crowd moved fast to get away from it, shoving and pushing away from the station, and Evelyn went down hard on one knee.
She tried to get to her feet, but the crowd suddenly shifted again as a gunshot rang out. Someone slammed into her, and she fell to the ground. Then all she could do was curl up and try to protect her head, hoping she wasn’t about to get trampled.
Gabe slammed on the brakes, getting their rental car close to the rioting crowd in front of the Rose Bay PD, and wrenching Kyle against his seat belt. He’d unbuckled and opened his door before Gabe had the car in Park.
Kyle stepped outside and pepper spray stung his eyes, burned in his nose and throat. Instead of wading immediately into the crowd, he hopped on top of the rental car for a better view.
More reinforcements were right behind them. He’d heard the call come over the radios at the search party, drawing the cops and FBI agents back to the station. Since Gabe had spent extra time on the FBI’s defensive driving course, he’d driven. At every turn, Kyle had urged him to go faster, so they’d beaten everyone else back to the station.
Whatever got them to Evelyn the fastest.
But where was she? Kyle peered through the crowd, assessing. Residents fleeing the pepper spray, fighting with the cops, pushing a handcuffed man toward a truck. Two cops down by a patrol car. Two more standing back-to-back, holding shields to protect themselves as the crowd jostled them. The police chief ducking as a resident threw a punch. And there, by the side of the station... Kyle squinted. Was that Evelyn?
The crowd shifted and, oh, shit, it was. She was down, and in real danger of being trampled.
He had to get to her now. Kyle jumped down next to Gabe and pointed. “She’s over there.”
“Let’s go.”
They’d been partners for three years, so he and Gabe didn’t need to talk. They spent hundreds of hours each year training with live rounds, when knowing exactly where your partner was meant the difference between a successful training exercise and a real death.
They’d also been friends for three years, so Gabe knew how deep his feelings for Evelyn ran, how complicated they’d become. Gabe would understand that, right now, he was feeling pretty damn desperate.
Kyle