Page 19

Adam landed about five hundred meters away from the chief’s home, near the clothing cache, got dressed at lightning speed, then ran the rest of the way…to emerge into a blaze of emergency lights. The ambulance he’d seen from the air stood in the drive, its back doors thrown wide open.

Though its lights continued to strobe, the siren was off.

A paramedic jumped out of the back—a former local who’d shifted to be closer to the main hospital. “Adam.” He jolted. “Shit, where’d you come from?”

Adam ignored the question. “What happened?”

“Massive heart attack,” the stocky Black man said as he headed back inside with a stretcher. “We just stabilized him for transport.”

No one stopped Adam when he followed the other man inside, and the chief’s wife sobbed in what looked like relief when she saw him.

The usually perfectly dressed woman’s hair was a rain of silver-black around her, her face devoid of the red lipstick that was her trademark.

“Adam, oh God, Adam,” she said from where she crouched bedside the chief.

“My Barry, he just fell.” She shifted from English to Diné Bizaad, the rhythms of her speech the same as his mother and grandmother’s, for the Diné, like all of the world’s peoples, ran the gamut from human to Psy to changeling.

Rafina Cross was human but had spent many a dinner up at the Canyon.

“You know how he is in the mornings, loves to get up with his cup of coffee when the world is quiet. Like your sister—he still uses that ‘early bird’ mug she gave him.” A trembling lower lip.

“Remember how they both laughed when I told them they were taking greeting the sun and letting its spirit suffuse them too far?”

Having come down beside her, Adam cradled her suddenly fragile-seeming frame to his side. “How did he fall, Rafina?”

“We didn’t get in till one, but still he was up at four thirty.

He usually wakes me at about five thirty with a cup of coffee and a kiss, and when I woke it was six already and he hadn’t been…

I don’t know how long he was lying here!

” Her sobs were heartbreaking, her hands fluttering into the air as the paramedics moved her husband onto the stretcher.

The older man was pale, his lips holding a bluish tinge and his sturdy body limp.

Adam had run into him right before he left for his “thirtieth honeymoon,” as he’d put it, and the seventy-five-year-old man had looked as fit as ever.

Add in the fact that it had happened now…

the pile of coincidences was getting far too big, but Adam didn’t know how anyone could incite a heart attack in a healthy man.

There was also the question of why anyone would want to attack the chief—if he’d known something about Jacques’s shooting, he’d have already called Adam…

except it had been extremely early in the day when he went down, and the chief knew enough about changeling healing to know that Adam would’ve been assisting Naia for hours.

It was possible he’d waited to speak to Adam.

It was also possible this was just bad luck and bad timing. The chief had, after all, returned home only hours ago. The chances of him having discovered anything probative were close to nil.

Whatever the answer, Adam let it go for now and helped Rafina out to the ambulance, so she could ride to the nearest hospital—fifty high-speed minutes away—with her grievously ill husband.

Naia often stepped in to assist with Raintree emergencies, but with her exhausted and the chief having suffered a major incident, that wasn’t an option.

Naia couldn’t reach humans with her healing abilities.

He wasn’t surprised to see a squad car parked on the road when he emerged from the house—whoever was on duty would’ve alerted the others as soon as they got word of the emergency request.

All three—Beaufort, Whitten, and Hendricks—were hovering near the ambulance but didn’t interfere or ask questions as the paramedics loaded the chief inside.

Adam then all but lifted Rafina into the ambulance.

“I’ll call Laurel,” he told her because he knew she’d start to worry about that as soon as she could think straight again.

“Make sure she knows where you’ll both be. ”

Laurel was the Crosses’ only daughter and lived about an hour out of Raintree—close to the hospital where her father was being taken.

Married with two kids, she’d gone to school the same time as Saoirse, been friends with Adam’s sister.

They still kept in touch in the distant way of old high school friends.

Rafina Cross squeezed his hand. “She’s pregnant.” A shaky tremor in her voice. “Tell her husband instead, then he can…”

“Got it. You just worry about the chief.” Stepping back, Adam shut the doors, then watched the ambulance move out of the drive and down the quiet suburban street. The siren didn’t streak into the air until about a minute later, when they would’ve turned onto a main thoroughfare and picked up speed.

Adam had joined the cops by then, to be asked by them if he knew anything further. “Heart attack—no more details yet,” he said. “I arrived as the paramedics did.”

“How did they beat us here?” Hendricks asked, the twenty-six-year-old’s uniform as snug as always on his muscular frame; the handsome deputy’s favorite off-work activity was lifting weights, a hobby he shared with a couple of Adam’s clanmates.

Today, however, his normally crisp uniform bore the wrinkles of a long night. “Usually,” Hendricks added, “we’re the first responders in Raintree.”

“They were already nearby,” Beaufort said; while he was in full uniform, too, his was much fresher, his silver-tinged black hair neatly combed.

Adam guessed he’d come back on shift halfway through Hendricks’s, doing much the same as Adam: juggling people so no one was left alone too long and everyone had a chance to rest. Not a concern in sleepy Raintree most of the time, but this wasn’t a usual situation by any measure.

“Mildred called about chest pains and she looked pretty bad when I swung by to see her,” Beaufort said, “so I tagged the paramedics. Turned out to be gas, but by my reckoning, they would’ve been barely on the way out when the call came about the chief.”

Whitten—in street clothes, her braids in a messy bun—whistled. “Our resident hypochondriac might’ve saved the chief’s life.” She shook her head. “I’ll have to stop moaning every time I have to respond to a call from her.”

“Damn, the chief’s lucky it wasn’t me that took that call,” Hendricks admitted with a long face, his dark eyes awash in worry. “I’m so over Mildred I would’ve probably just told her to take antacids and ended up killing the chief.”

Whitten patted his arm in silent sympathy.

“Did any of you know the chief had heart problems?” Adam asked, also well aware of Mildred Abernathy’s long list of imagined health complaints; according to his grandmother, Mildred had been dying of one illness or another since they were in kindergarten together.

How Aria would’ve grinned at this turn of events.

Beaufort and Whitten shook their heads, but Hendricks shoved a hand through the dark brown of his curls and frowned. “He was complaining about feeling off when he called to say he was headed home, but he said he probably just ate something wrong.”

“I wish I’d had the chance to talk to him,” Beaufort said.

“I asked,” Hendricks told his superior officer, no longer the macho young male who was a favorite with the women in town, but a young deputy afraid he’d done something wrong. “But he said to let you sleep and he’d call you once he was awake and you could give him a full debrief.”

“Talking of which…” Beaufort reached into his squad car and retrieved an organizer that he passed on to Adam. “Here’s the interim report from the forensics people. They worked late to process at least some of the materials.”

“Thanks.”

“The chief always said to share things with you when it concerned WindHaven, and I know you’ve got an excellent team after what I saw at the site.” The experienced detective put his hands on his hips, his gray eyes narrowed. “The J, you met her?”

Adam was in no mood to think about Eleri, much less discuss her; he just said a clipped “Yes” as he scanned the forensic report.

“She’s got a good eye, was the one who first located the tire tracks.”

Passing back the organizer—the interim report held nothing that could help them hunt down the person who’d shot Jacques—he said, “You’ll update us as you get more data?”

“Yes, I know it’s what the chief would want.”

“I appreciate that, Rex.” Adam shook hands with the other man.

“I can clean up the chief’s place if anything got messed up during his heart attack,” Hendricks offered hesitantly as the group went to part ways.

“I’ll make it nice like Mrs. Cross always keeps it.

I know when my granddad had a stroke and fell, he hit a shelf and everything fell out.

The mess made my grandma cry because it was a reminder, you know? ”

Adam found himself speaking without thinking about it. “Rafina Cross is also pretty territorial about how she likes things arranged. I wouldn’t touch anything, just lock up the house. From what I saw, there isn’t much of a mess regardless.”

Beaufort chuckled and it was weak. “Yeah, she’s real particular. I think Adam’s right—we leave it as it is, and turn up to ask if she needs help once she’s back.”

That decided, Adam watched Beaufort lock up the house. Whitten left at the same time to shower and change in readiness for her day shift, while Hendricks headed back to the station to write up his reports before he clocked out.

“You know you can always call us if you need help dealing with anything?” Adam said to the detective when they were alone.

“We consider Raintree part of our home, want to keep it safe.” He’d always before dealt with Chief Cross—and the older man had long ago had these conversations with Adam’s grandmother.