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“H ey, Kylie. Are you ready for this?”
Kylie Okovi turned to look at Detective Porter Hanson. Kind compassionate eyes searched hers, and she realized that he must have noted her clenched fist and her white-knuckled grip on her sketch pad. She took a deep breath and said, “I will be, but I don’t think any of us will walk away from this unscathed.”
“We’re not supposed to,” he said, “from any crime scene.”
“But this one”—she motioned at the evidence of the mass shooting all around her—“this,… this,” And she stopped, the words dying in her throat.
He nodded. “I understand,” he said. “Nobody should ever have to go through something like this and certainly never twice.”
“And this is your second, isn’t it?” she asked, turning to face him.
He winced and nodded. “Not as if we’re counting or anything, because I don’t want to keep track of it in that way.”
“No, I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“I wasn’t expecting to come to work today and to deal with twenty-two deaths.” He hesitated, then added, “Twenty-three now. The latest victim… died in the hospital.”
Kylie took a deep breath and slowly nodded. “And the killer?”
“We have no idea at the moment. They’re running through videos, looking for him. There were eyewitnesses, but they’re all fairly contradictory.”
“How is that possible?” she asked, staring at him. “I know I’m fairly new to the detective side of this, just being a sketch artist, but… is that normal?”
He smiled, nodded. “Particularly under stress, people think what they see is what they’re seeing, but often it isn’t. Their minds try to make logical sense of the jumble of events in their memories, when really it doesn’t work because this can never make sense. It’s not intended to make sense. It’s supposed to be horrific. The people doing this want it to be horrific. They’re after a big show, some final ending to whatever it is that they have planned.”
“How could anybody have planned this?” she whispered, her gaze going to the chaos of the masses in the casino all around her. It’s just too unbelievable.
“That’s why we’re here, to make sense of the chaos,” he said. “If it’s too much for you…”
She held up a hand and said, “Don’t.”
“I’m just letting you know this will affect all of us.”
“And I’ll turn your words back on you and say it’s supposed to,” she replied ever-so-simply.
He patted her on the back and suggested, “If you need some downtime, let us know. In the meantime, I don’t even know if you can do anything here.”
“I was called in,” she stated, turning to look around. “I’m not sure why. I think they just want sketches of the scene and more photographs.”
He waved a hand at that. “You and I both know how the boss feels about that.”
“I do. I’m here to put some personality into it,” she confirmed. “That also makes it something we can use on the stand.”
“But it’s never been about the trial with you, has it?”
She winced and then shook her head. “No, I’m not so much about making them pay as making sure that they’re caught,” she whispered.
“So you do you, whatever that means in this instance, and I’ll check in with you in a little bit.” And, with that, Porter disappeared.
Kylie adjusted the cap on her head—to keep her hair from contaminating the crime scene—took a deep breath, and slowly walked forward. It was all about impressions, all about sights and sounds and scenes. Yet everything was running through her brain at top speed, and something inside her screamed that this crime wasn’t something anybody could make sense of.
Kylie stood inside one of the largest casinos in Vegas. Somebody had decided to walk through with heavy artillery and had gunned down their victims in what appeared to be random shootings. Twenty-three at last count. Yet in the chaos, random people, EMTs, rescue workers, volunteers had moved the dead, had picked up the wounded, had quickly raced away with survivors and everyone else who was looking for medical assistance. Some were families and friends, who had grabbed their loved ones, some dead, some alive, and had moved them.
Yet Kylie also knew instinctively that, once the shooting began, people scattered, as self-preservation kicked in. Yet, had she been here during this mass shooting, she’s not sure how she would have handled it.
To even think about leaving a loved one behind, for more bullets to be riddled into their prone body, seemed so completely wrong, and yet most people would instinctively run. In this case, at least three families had grabbed their loved ones, trying to save them, and had booked it to the other side, where they had all been attacked instead of saved. Several were still alive and now in the hospital, and several others hadn’t made it that far.
Kylie was here with her sketchbook to try and sort out some of this evil, at least as much of it as she could.
It was an odd case for her, and she was here more at the request of the detective than anything else. She still didn’t quite understand why. She was a police sketch artist, but occasionally she had also worked crime scenes. This type of crime scene was one she never ever wanted to get called in on again.
With a deep breath, she pulled out her sketch pencil, walked to one corner, figuring that that might be the easiest place to start, and turned to a clean page on her sketchbook and started drawing.