Page 1 of Aaron (Dresden Pride #1)

Aaron walked around the mess in the office and took note of the broken crockery all over the floor.

It was as if someone had taken a bunch of coffee mugs and tossed them up in the air to be like some kind of art project with broken pieces making up the gallery piece.

There were pencils and rulers along with the broken pieces, as well as a few stains of coffee, added to the mess.

But there was no blood. Not here at least.

“Detective Dresden, they want to know if you’re finished with the bodies. They’d like to get them to the hospital.” He said he was finished with them both. “Very good, sir. I’ll let them know. Anything I need to tell them?”

“Tell them I’ll be there for the autopsy of Shaller and Duncan.

” The kid, not more than twenty or so, walked away.

He’d tell them what he wanted, and they’d bitch, but since he was in charge, he didn’t care how much they put up a fuss.

“Also, before you leave, can you tell me where the principal is?”

“Still in his office. The staff is in there as well.” The staff had better not be in trouble for the mess they caused trying to get out of the way of the shooter. He’d have something to say about that. “Also, the chief is here. He just pulled in.”

“Great.” He said it under his breath, but as there were a few shifters around him, they’d hear what he had to say about his boss coming on scene. He’d already had to run off two other officers today, as they had kids in the school that had been targeted this morning.

At eighteen minutes after nine, just after school had started and the first bell had rang, two gunmen came to the school, thinking to make a name for themselves by killing a lot of teachers and students.

They might have gotten away with it had it not been for the school’s staff taking action and making sure they didn’t get in.

Even when they shot up the front window of the front office, they couldn’t breach the doors to get in.

The secretary had locked down the school in a way that, had they even been able to get past the front doors, they would have been trapped in the vestibule until the police arrived.

In less than a minute after the first call went out that they had an active shooter, police officer, Officer Joey Daniels, was on site as he just happened to be driving by the school on his tour of the little town.

He was able to hold the two of them down until the other officer, Officer Dan Bowling, arrived.

After killing both men, boys, at age seventeen respectively, they held their positions until the state troopers arrived.

Then the FBI. Heroes, according to the FBI.

But the real heroes, as far as he was concerned, were every teacher in the school and the staff that worked there.

Locking down the school was all that saved the entire classrooms full of students and teachers.

He went to the office of the principal to see what else he might need to know about what happened today.

They were still in shock after the encounter and were visibly terrified of what had happened. He told them that they’d done a terrific job and asked them if they’d thought of anything else that had happened.

“Mr. Jorden was just telling us that we’ll have to pay for the cleaning ourselves.

He seems to be more concerned about the carpet than he is about the men who tried to get into my school.

” Mr. Jorden, principal of the school, said that it wasn’t her school but one that was owned by the district.

“It’s my school and my students until I say differently.

You old goat. What makes you think I’m going to get down on my hands and knees and clean that carpet when we just watched two kids being killed?

I remember Jimmy Duncan when he went here as a little kid.

That other one, Henry he was a good kid, but for his parents.

I’ve no doubt that there will be a lot of walling in the houses of them two tonight.

” Mrs. Apple huffed before she sat down in the chair she’d been in.

“Some people are just plain stupid if you ask me. Even if you don’t, I’m telling you right now that those kids wouldn’t have been out there had it not been for their parents pushing them to be hooligans. ”

“Mrs. Apple, can you tell me what you did as soon as you saw they were armed?” She told him that she didn’t see Henry until a bit later, but Jimmy had his gun out and ready to do damage as soon as she pressed the button for him to be locked out.

“And the crockery? Can you tell me about that? If they didn’t get in, what made the mess? ”

“We were told that the glass front is bulletproof, but none of us had seen it being bulletproof, so when he started firing, we got ourselves out of the way of it. Those mugs were headed back to the teachers’ lounge after being cleaned up when they got in the way of us trying to hide under the desks we had up there.

Mr. Jorden, there, he ran to his office screaming like a little boy.

” He asked her if any of them had been hurt.

“No. We should have believed the men who put that in, and there’d be no mess, but like I said, seeing is believing. ”

He asked for written statements from each of the four women who had been in the office at the time of the shooting.

They’d been making announcements for the day when the building went into lockdown.

With the press of a button in the office, all the doors were locked with a special lock, and an announcement went to each room—not in the hallway that there was an active shooter in the building to take cover.

Each teacher had been given the way things were to go and had followed protocol to the letter, locking their windows, pulling down blinds, and making sure that the kids were under their desks and hidden away. He couldn’t have been more proud of them if he’d put in the procedures himself.

After getting everyone to write out what they’d done when the shooters came to the front door, they were asked to hand them over to Aaron.

Aaron knew that the FBI would want them and was trying to be helpful to them.

However, since he knew that there was one jerk in every ten agents, he didn’t expect to get a ‘thank you’ from them for his work. The odds were against him.

Once the bodies of the shooters were taken away, he had a talk with the two officers.

They’d already been asked to write out their statements and to hand them over to him.

There were things that he wanted to say to them, but he kept his mouth shut so that he’d not step on anyone’s toes.

Aaron wasn’t one to hold back, but in order for things to go the way they needed, he waited for someone to tell him what to do.

At ten forty-five, the classes were let out of lockdown.

Once things sort of went back to normal for the kids, he knew that they’d have questions.

He knew that he would if he were going to school there.

Principal Jorden decided to call an assembly and talk to everyone at once.

But his hands were tied until he got permission from the agents who were there to do anything.

Aaron wouldn’t have allowed him to stay in the building if it had been left up to him, but he wasn’t in charge of things like that. The guy was a pussy.

It wasn’t until nearly two in the afternoon that the parents who had shown up at nine-thirty to make sure that their kids were all right were able to take their kids out of the school and take them home.

A lot of nervous parents waited in line to get their kids and were told about the shooting, but nothing more. It made a lot of people frustrated.

Aaron made his way to the coroner’s office to make sure that the bodies hadn’t been started on before he got there.

Agent Phillips with the Bureau went with him.

They were expected to make sure that the autopsy went according to the rules that had been laid out and to make sure that the two of them were safe behind the walls.

It never ceased to amaze him what people would do when they heard someone had tried to hurt their children.

He might well have been the same way if he had any kids.

It didn’t matter if they were already dead; they’d want to know everything about them, including who their parents were when they found out.

That was one of the reasons that their names weren’t released to the public right away.

It was to give the grieving parents time to come up with a good cover story about why their kids decided to go on a shooting spree and kill a bunch of little kids and teachers.

“Is this the school’s first shooting?” Aaron told Brian that it was their first everything.

“You’ve handled it like a pro. I wish we had someone like you at other schools when things like this go down.

It sure would make our jobs easier. The simple fact that the shooters were both taken out before they got into the classrooms made everyone’s job easier.

Your presence made everyone calm because you were. ”

“I try really hard not to get all jumpy when things are going on. It makes for bad witnesses, too. Neither one of the cops had ever pulled their guns before, and one of them had been on the force for ten years.” He said that it was lucky for him that they didn’t freeze up.

“No. They did a good job, too, of being calm when it was over. I could tell that they wanted to run in the other direction, but they didn’t because they had each other’s back and knew the seriousness of the crime they had witnessed. ”