He looked to Captain Terrell for support.
The captain considered the suggestion, then nodded. “Everyone do your homework. Kurt, you and I will look into this article ourselves, track down the author, find our leak.” He checked the time. “We’ll meet back here at four.” A couple of the people looked at their watches and seemed to be ready to argue with the announcement, but in the end kept their mouths shut.
Four o’clock would be perfect since I’d be boarding my plane to Chicago. “Great,” I said. “Jake can finish up then.”
Then Captain Terrell dismissed everyone, except for Reggie Greer, whom he asked to join him in the hall, and I guessed that the captain shared my suspicion that Reggie’s wife Amy Lynn was the author.
Everyone left the room, but I stayed behind. Something in the article had caught my eye. I opened my laptop and surfed to the webpage.
Reread it.
Yesterday, I’d scanned the transcripts of the 911 calls on the way to Taylor’s house, and whoever wrote this article had included the phrase “dusk is coming”-a fact that the author definitely shouldn’t have known.
And that was something I could look into right away. It was possible the 911 calls would lead us to the leak.
After grabbing my things, I stepped into the hall and was both surprised and pleased to find Cheyenne waiting for me.
“Hey,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about that article.”
“Me too. I was hoping to look into the anonymous calls. I need some more details. I think I’d like to hear the audio for myself.”
She looked at me with admiration and a touch of suspicion. “How about that? I was thinking the same thing.”
“Good. You’re keeping up with me.”
“Great minds,” she said. Then she started for the elevator bank. “Dispatch is in the basement. We can check it out right now.”
78
As we entered the elevator, Cheyenne glanced at me. “By the way, I was impressed by your self-control in there, during Jake’s briefing.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a tactful, self-controlled kind of guy.”
“Huh. That’s good to know.” She pressed “L” for the lower level, which was actually the floor above the underground parking garage. “Then can I ask you a personal question, Mr. Tact?” She watched the elevator doors close.
“Shoot.”
We descended.
“What happened between you and Lien-hua?”
OK, that came out of nowhere.
Even though it was a little awkward to talk about Lien-hua, I took it as a good sign that Cheyenne was asking about her. “I’m not exactly sure,” I said. “But honestly, it wasn’t the old cliche of work being more important than the relationship. We were careful about that.” The elevator stopped. Beeped. “One thing maybe: right before we started seeing each other, she nearly died. Actually, she did die, but I was able to bring her back.”
“Wow.” The doors opened and we exited.
“Yes, well, I think that in time it strained things between us, made for an awkward dynamic, as if there was some sort of an obligation for her to like me, not simply a choice.”
We started down the hall.
“In addition, before she died, for a short time I thought she was involved in a biotech conspiracy. She told me she didn’t hold that against me, but I have a feeling it affected things… then she was on leave for a while…”
“If you don’t want to talk about this,” Cheyenne said, “it’s OK.”
“Lien-hua is still in DC.” Only after I said the words did I realize how out of place they must have sounded. I didn’t even know why I’d said them. Maybe to let Cheyenne know Lien-hua wasn’t in the picture anymore.
“DC,” Cheyenne replied. “So, the same city where you’ll be living this summer?”
“Um. Yes.” I didn’t want to talk about Lien-hua anymore. We were halfway down the hallway. I ventured a personal question.
“So what about you?”
“You mean a guy?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing serious, not for a long time. This may surprise you, but I’ve been told I intimidate men.”
“You’re kidding. Really?”
“Shocking, I know. Although, I should tell you, I was married once, right out of college. We were together about five years.”
“Do you mind if I ask what happened?”
A small pause. “Every affair begins with a smile.”
With every moment the conversation was becoming more and more intimate, and my judgment told me to stop asking follow-up questions, but I went ahead anyway. “So, were you smiling or was he?”
I’d probably stepped way over the line, but Cheyenne didn’t seem to mind. “For a while we both were,” she said. “In the end, I left the guy I was smiling at, and Cody left me.” She paused and then added, “Cody Howard was my husband.”
“Cody Howard, the DPD’s helicopter pilot?”
“One and the same.”
I didn’t see that one coming.
At least that explained why she wouldn’t fly with him.
We arrived at the dispatch office, and as she was about to press the door open, I asked her to wait a second. “Listen, I wanted to say, I’m sorry about last night.”
“About what?”
“Sorry about when you said you were thinking I was going to kiss you…”
“Yes?”
“And I didn’t.”
A small pause. She looked amused. “Yes, I do remember that, come to think of it.”
“So anyway, I wasn’t trying to blow you off. I’m just… well, I felt kind of bad about how things ended.”
“Pat,” she said, straightening my collar. “I don’t think they ended.”
And as I was searching for a reply, she pushed open the door to the EMS dispatch center and stepped inside.
79
Once inside the dispatch room, Cheyenne went to locate the on-duty supervisor while I waited by the door and gazed around the room, which was lit only by the bluish glow of computer monitors and the few remaining overhead fluorescents that weren’t burned out.
A sign on the wall to my right read:
Remember the Three Ws!
Where is the Incident?
Are there Wounds?
Are there Weapons?
Lives depennd on YOU!!
A misspelled word. Overuse of exclamation points. Unnecessary capitalization. Tessa would have gone ballistic.
Nine dispatchers were on duty in the cluttered cubicles, and most of them had at least two computers, two headset mics, and a floor pedal for transferring and receiving calls. Everyone looked wired and sleep-deprived. The room smelled like old bologna and burned coffee. Eight cubicles sat empty.
With the stress, long hours, low pay, and emotional drain, it’s not easy to find people to be EMS dispatchers. I don’t know of any major city in the U.S. where the emergency services department isn’t short staffed and constantly looking to hire. In fact, one recent Johns Hopkins University study found that being a dispatcher in a major metropolitan area is just as stressful as being an air traffic controller. Maybe that’s what accounts for the 60 percent annual turnover rate.
And here’s the irony: most high schools have more up-to-date computer systems than EMS services do, and yet, even though dispatchers potentially hold a person’s life in their hands with every call, most states don’t even require applicants to have a high school degree.
When a call comes in, a dispatcher might hear a gunshot, hear a body fall, listen as the line goes dead, and sixty to seventy seconds later he’s on the phone again with someone else. The dispatchers never find out what happened to the previous caller unless they read about it in the paper or maybe catch the story on the evening news.
But none of the dispatchers I know watch the local news or read the paper.
It’s just too painful.
Cheyenne returned with a man who identified himself as Lancaster Cowler.
He swaggered toward me like an ex-jock but looked like he hadn’t done a push-up in the last twenty years. A roll of stomach fat oozed out of the space between his shirt and his belt like the tip of a giant tongue. “Special Agent Bowers,” he said, his voice moist and thick.