Issue/Publication: From VIRGINS AND MARTYRS: An Aria Quynn Novel (Five Star, April 2008)

Short Story

April 16, 2008

Virgins And Martyrs: Chapter 1

The uniformed Sheriff’s deputy waved me forward, and I edged carefully around a Lexus that partially
blocked the oncoming lane. Its driver’s-side door was winged out, left open as if in a careless discourtesy.

As I passed, I could see that it had locked bumpers with the car in front, a blue Toyota that was
itself angled hard against the street’s curb; apparently, the impact had come at a slow speed, given the
relative lack of damage to the Lexus’ grillwork.

But as I drove slowly forward, I could see the fan of blood spatter on the Toyota’s side windows.
It was a variegated pattern that grew heavier and darker as it moved toward the back of the
passenger compartment, until it appeared that some vandal had spray-painted a streaky, red-brown curtain
across the inside of the unbroken rear window. I braked alongside the vehicle, noting that the Toyota’s
windscreen was completely missing; where it should have been, black loops of weatherproofing dangled
amid twisted strips of chrome.

In any other circumstances, my first assumption would have been that the driver had been ejected,
violently and lethally, by the force of a head-on collision. It is a scene not uncommon to anyone in law
enforcement. In Spanish Bay—where the Northwest Florida sun and sugar-white beaches drew heavily
from map-distracted vacationers, the college-aged on spring break and laid-back locals whose disregard
for their own blood-alcohol level was legendary—it was a regular occurrence.

But here, no torn and bloody torso protruded through the empty windshield; even stranger, no
blood or pebbles of shattered safety glass glittered on the Toyota’s hood.

“Sweet Jesus,” Tara Kinsey muttered from beside me.

She had twisted in the seat, craned her head for a better look; the hair that brushed her
shoulders—currently, the color-of-the-month was a vivid scarlet that did not exist in nature—hung at an
awkward angle. From her vantage point in the passenger seat, she could see deep into the interior of the
ruined auto, inches away.

Then Tara swiveled wordlessly and stared forward, her face the impassive mask they teach at the
police academy. Only the muscle in her upper jaw, knotting restlessly as if she had been working at a
stubborn bit of gristle, hinted at what she had seen.

I pulled diagonally in front of the Toyota, noting that its headlights too had been shattered, and
parked where the deputy indicated. I had the tinted windows up and the air-conditioning cranked high
against the late-afternoon sun. When I shut down my engine and opened the door, the heat rolled over me
with an almost physical weight. It was a dead-air heaviness, not unusual for Northwest Florida in August.
But now it carried a sickly-sweet, smoky tang that stung the back of my throat like an astringent.

“Straight down th’ driveway, Lieutenant Quynn,” the deputy said, an odd huskiness in his voice.
“They waitin’ for th’ two of you, down there.” He turned away before I could reply, but not before I saw
the track marks where tears had washed lines in the soot on his face.

Further up the street, Mars lights from an army of various emergency vehicles painted a rotating
pattern of reds and blues against the windowless vehicles that lined the curb. On a number of these, the
hoods jutted skyward. It might have been another result of the blast, or merely an attempt by the firstresponders
to quiet the din from dozens of car alarms triggered by the concussion. If the latter, it was a
futile effort: two or three still squalled and warbled, discordant in what otherwise was now a shellshocked
silence. Not even a single bird chirped from the trees that arched over the pavement.

As we stepped from the car, the reason for that was obvious. The ground was covered with leaves
and fragments of palm fronds that had been stripped away, suddenly and violently.

Tara glanced at her wrist.

“Ninety-six minutes. That’ll teach you to take a long lunch hour, partner.”

I did not respond. I was divorcing Ron again. This time, I had retained a different lawyer, one
whose reputation gave me hope that he would be a match for Donald, the attorney through whom Ron
always filed his countersuit.

I had driven to Pensacola earlier today for a late-morning meeting at my new lawyer’s office, a
faux-antebellum building on the fringes of the city’s historic district. It had stretched into the lunch hour,
and he had suggested that we continue our discussion at a café across the square.

To that point, all had seemed encouraging; he had been all business, commenting neither on the
summer-weight suit I had selected for the occasion nor the amount of thigh that my worsted skirt
exposed. It was a relief, given my previous experiences with divorce lawyers. The most recent had begun
with a hand placed too casually above my knee. It had ended when the thumb-lock I turned on him had
dropped him to his own.

Alarmingly, at lunch my new counselor had showed a marked appetite for Glenlivet and soda. He
was just starting on his fourth when my pager went off. I had half carried him back to his office, and
cursed the impulse that had made me wear heels for the occasion.

By the time I had threaded my way through the tourist-season traffic and sped east along the coast
toward Spanish Bay, the bombing was already being carried on every news-radio station from Mobile to
Tallahassee.

Tara was still speaking.

“By now, it’s probably a real cluster-fuck at the crime scene.”

“Beaulieu caught the call.”

“That’s what I mean.” I caught her sideways glance. “You okay with this? Getting sent out here
to baby-sit that jerk?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

She snorted. “Yeah, right. Well, let me do the talking when we see him, okay?”

I glanced at her profile, guessed at what she thought. “He left Beaulieu in charge because he
knows it won’t last long. Not with this target. The FBI will take it over faster than you can spell ‘Federal
jurisdiction.’ ”

Tara nodded, curling her lip. “Yeah,” she said. “Well, working with the Feds is always like
Christmas and Mardi Gras wrapped up in one. We get to root around in the dumpsters, they get to handle
the press conferences. I’d almost rather leave it in Beaulieu’s little mitts. He might be an incompetent
prick, but at least he’s our incompetent prick.” She shrugged, a cynical resignation in the gesture. “Oh,
hell—let’s get this over with. I got my hair appointment after work. Want to know the color for next
month?”

“Surprise me.”

“Don’t I always?”

As we picked our way down the driveway, I felt the crunch of glass and other debris underfoot.
Once again, I wished that I had selected footwear more appropriate to the event. For the devastation I was
surveying, that would have meant steel-toed workboots.

The blast had been indiscriminate, seemingly haphazard in the level of damage it inflicted on the
largely residential neighborhood. Some buildings appeared virtually untouched, at least structurally.
Others displayed exterior walls caved in or peeled back to show the inside furnishings. But the most
universal effect was to the windows. Few had survived intact, and none that had been facing the blast site.
As the bomb sent out its concussive force, the ring of its shockwave had immediately transformed most
glass into fast-flying shards of razor-edged shrapnel.

Unbidden, into my mind came an image of a woman—a young mother, perhaps—passing in front
of her picture window when the room lit up with an intense, dirty-yellow flash. Depending on the
distance, her mind might have had just enough time to register this curiosity when, almost
simultaneously, the sound and the pressure wave would have arrived.

For her, and for any others doomed by proximity and the flukes of wave mechanics, it would
have been the last conscious thought they ever experienced.

We edged past one of the several ambulances that remained on-scene, parked at random angles
along the curbs. Above the low murmurs of the first responders tending the walking wounded, a woman’s
voice rose.

“You. Miss. You’re a police officer, are you not?”

She was physically small, even shorter than I. Her fine-boned face was grimed with soot, and
drying blood matted her dark, shoulder-length hair. A latex-gloved paramedic was swabbing at a gash on
her cheek that appeared painful and deep. But even in her current situation there was an unmistakable
intensity in the eyes that looked past the paramedic to focus first on the badge I had affixed to my blouse,
then on my face.

“Are you in charge?” she demanded. “I want to know about my husband.”

Tara answered before I could speak.

“We’ve just arrived, ma’am. You need to let these people—”

The woman shook her head angrily. She pushed away the hand of the paramedic, an action that
seemed more than slightly imperious.

“I am Susan DeBourche,” she said. “Doctor DeBourche. My husband is David DeBourche, and
that is our clinic. I want to know if he is still alive.”

“You were in the building, Doctor?” I asked. My voice surprised me. As if of its own volition, it
had slipped into the impassive monotone that allowed me distance from the pain of people I encountered
on the job.

“No. No. I have an office downtown, a private psychiatric practice. I counsel women here on
Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. I was parking when ... when the explosion ...” Her voice sharpened
again. “I asked about my husband.”

“Are you certain he was in the clinic?”

“As necessary, I perform procedures here. Today I had a scheduling conflict. He offered to—”
Her words stopped abruptly, as if they had caught in her throat. “David is dead, isn’t he?”

“I’m sorry. We have no information yet.” Tara’s eyes flickered significantly to the paramedic,
and he resumed his ministrations as we moved away.

“Parking her car,” Tara muttered, her eyes down as she picked a path through the fallen debris. “Lucky woman.”

“Probably not,” I answered, and something in my voice made Tara look up sharply.

We had turned the corner, stepping through the looking glass into a surreal world. On the street,
the damage merely had resembled a war zone. Here the devastation was virtually complete.

The clinic had once been a private home, a three-story summerhouse constructed in an
unflinching opulence typical of the robber barons who had been the first wave of Yankees to invade
Spanish Bay a century ago. Part of the green-shingled roof still stood at a crooked angle, though much of
the top floor had collapsed into a yawing gap where the front entrance should have been. What was left of
the upper balcony’s wrought-iron railing now corkscrewed crazily, dangling over the blast-shattered void.

The initial detonation had created a vacuum behind itself, and the return wash of superheated air
had vomited great chunks of shattered redbrick out onto the circular drive. Paramedics clambered over the
mounded debris, checking the vehicles beneath for additional victims. Nearer the clinic, teams of
firefighters directed streams of water into the still-smoldering ruins.

A number of cars had been parked here; now they were upended and twisted, toys strewn
randomly in a giant’s tantrum. One was upside down, wrapped half around the trunk of a massive live oak
where a knot of men conferred. There, a thickset man, red-faced and with a shaved pate shiny with sweat,
watched with ill-concealed hostility as Tara and I approached.

“Just don’t start up with him,” Tara warned me in a low voice. “Let’s not get stuck here all day,
okay?” Then, louder, “Hey, Beaulieu. What’s the score now?”

I leaned my back against the trunk of the live oak, which was as wide as a double doorway. It did
nothing to ease the ache in my feet. But I said nothing, and Beaulieu did not look at me.

“Two dead, both inside the clinic,” he said, “including the doctor who actually does—did—the
abortions. Guy named DeBourche. Bodies still in there. The bomb squad and the evidence technicians
gotta do their thing first.”

“Injuries?”

“Four from the building,” he said. “We’ve carried out three more so far from houses around the
neighborhood—a woman, a retired guy maybe in his seventies. And a four-month-old kid who was taking
a nap. Bedroom faced the clinic.”

“You come up with any witnesses—anybody who might have seen who set this thing?”

“Yeah, witnesses. Maybe we’ll find somebody who’s still alive that saw something.” Beaulieu
looked disgusted. “Okay, they had a surveillance camera hanging on their building—hell, these days
everybody has one of the damn things. Except the clinic had theirs feeding into a recording system at a
security station just inside the entrance. Between the blast and the fire—” He shook his head, his message
clear.

“The G-men show yet?” Tara’s tone was carefully neutral.

Beaulieu’s head jerked in the direction of the street. “Half dozen of ’em, more on the way over
from Mobile. Probably comin’ from Atlanta, too. I’m using ’em as support manpower. ’Til Cornelieus
says different, it’s still my crime scene.”

I spoke up, despite my earlier resolve.

“You have people exposed all over the street, Beaulieu. Whoever set this just might know what
he’s doing. If there’s a second bomb waiting—”

“There was a second bomb,” he interrupted, though his gaze did not leave Tara’s face. “Smart-ass
bastard set it to detonate at maybe twenty minutes after the one that took out the clinic.”

He nodded at a shredded Subaru the blast had pushed hard against a jumble of other vehicles, a
dozen yards from what had been the clinic’s entrance. “My guys found it in there, out on the front seat.
Disarmed it in place. Six minutes left on the timer.”

His words triggered an alarm somewhere inside my head. I opened my mouth to speak, but Tara
shot me a warning glance.

“Good going.” Tara glanced over her shoulder at the activity around us. “You got it all under
control now, I’m sure.”

“Hell, it’s comin’ up on two hours since the damn thing went off. When the rest of the Feds
arrive, I’m gonna be up to my ass in people steppin’ on my evidence.”

“Cheer up. They show, it won’t be your headache anymore.”

Beaulieu grunted. “We’ll see ’bout that.”

“Uh-huh. I don’t guess you’re going to need Quynn or me here?”

“Nope.” His voice was flat. “Tits on a bull, the pair of you hangin’ around.” He kept his
expression deadpan as he looked at Tara steadily. “No offense, of course.”

“Okay,” Tara said. “We’re going to take a quick look around, then get out of your hair.” She
smiled without humor at his expression. “No offense, of course. C’mon, Quynn.”

She turned and walked off, so abruptly that it took me by surprise. By the time I pushed myself
away from the tree trunk to follow her, Tara was a half dozen paces away.

At that instant, her scarlet hair flared out like fire that has been fanned by a sudden gust of wind.

My mind had not yet begun to process that oddity when the main part of the pressure wave
reached us, traveling at a supersonic speed that outstripped the flat reptilian roar of the detonation itself.

I had the sensation of a massive impact, as if I had been struck from the side by some speeding
truck, enormous but unseen. Then I was weightless, my world a cartwheeling maelstrom of light and
blurred color and formless sound.

I can summon no memory of my impact with the earth. There was only the realization that I lay
facedown, partially covered with twigs and smoking leaves. More fluttered down, torn from the oak tree
that had shielded me from the full force of the blast. There must have been noise, a chaotic tumult that is
the aftermath of such events. But as I lifted my head I heard nothing but a vague rushing, like swift water
over rocks.

Everything was bathed in an eerie lemon light that turned the world into a stark and unreal place
of blacks and primary colors with nothing in between. Figures moved on the periphery of my vision, like
fairies in an enchanted woods. But they too were unclear, indistinct in form or purpose.

All that was clear was a strangely familiar figure that struggled to rise, hauling itself hand-overhand
up a crazily angled auto—a scorched form trailing tattered strips of blackened flesh and topped by a
smoking mane of tangled scarlet.

Swaying slightly, it stood upright as if in victory.

But only for an instant.

Then Tara Kinsey pushed herself forward on her single remaining leg and tumbled back to the
ground. My last conscious memory, before a darkness blacker than night closed around me, was of the
bright red blood that pulsed in a rich, unstoppable flow from the stump of her charred thigh.

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