Page 25 of Unnatural (Men and Monsters #2)

Agent Mark Gallagher assessed the scene.

The emergency vehicles were long gone, as were the first responders.

And so are the victims. And the survivors who will spend the rest of their lives surviving what was experienced here, in ways both big and small.

Tragedies like this one were never over, not after the crime scene had been cleaned up and processed.

Not after the funerals. Not even after the worst of the grief had begun to diminish and the rest of the world got back on the merry-go-round of life.

His gaze went to one of the outlines. It was smaller, likely one of the young women who had lost their lives out here.

There were another two nearby and one more in the building.

In addition, two children and another adult had been shot, but as of now, it looked like they’d all survive.

Thank God. A madman had fired at little children and the adults protecting them.

Mark had survived his own tragic loss—continued to survive it—when his daughter, Abbi, passed from cancer, but she hadn’t been that small.

He and his wife had received twenty blessed years with their precious girl.

As he thought about how close two sets of parents had come to losing their little ones, it struck him that he’d been lucky.

And as God was his witness, he never thought he’d feel lucky again.

Especially not where Abbi was concerned.

But he was. Standing there, he was so grateful for what he’d gotten, even if it wasn’t close to enough.

“Agent Gallagher?” The lead detective on the case, a potbellied man in his sixties with a bald head and a mustache, approached him, a thin young woman with a ponytail next to him.

The woman looked shaken, her eyes wide, skin ashen.

Lord help her. She’d never unsee what had happened that day.

“This is Ms. Maples. She was in that classroom right there,” he said in his thick New York accent, pointing to a room that had a direct view to the playground. “She saw everything.”

Mark stepped forward, reaching out and taking the woman’s hand in his.

“Ms. Maples. Thank you for meeting me here today. I’m sure it’s the last place you wanted to come after what you witnessed yesterday.

After the losses you suffered.” He dropped her hand, and she pulled it back, stretching her fingers, not seeming to know what to do with her arms, finally dropping them by her sides.

“It’s okay, Agent,” she said, her voice clear and remarkably steady.

“I’ll do whatever I can to…” Her lip did tremble then, but only minutely, and she quickly got hold of her emotions.

“I’ll do whatever I can to help.” She lifted her chin, and despite her obvious distress and the fact that she might be suffering from an understandable case of PTSD, he saw that she contained grit too.

He was good at recognizing that quality because it was rare, especially in the wake of a very recent trauma.

“One of those kids who’s fighting for her life in the hospital was mine,” she said, her lip trembling again.

“I don’t mean mine as in she was my daughter but…

she was in my class, and when you’re a teacher, well, they’re all yours.

Twenty-three sets of parents entrusted them to me. ”

“What happened was not your fault, Ms. Maples. You could not have done any better.”

“I don’t blame myself, Agent. I followed protocol and locked down the classroom as soon as the warning signal went off. Erica was in the bathroom though, and he shot her as she came out.”

Jesus. From what he understood from the initial briefing, the gunman had initially entered the building through the front door, shot a teacher near the entrance immediately, and then begun shooting anyone he encountered in the hallways.

Luckily, the school had a good plan in place for such an event—a tragedy in itself that one was needed—and had implemented it to perfection.

It’d saved lives. The gunman had attempted to enter a couple rooms, but when he was unsuccessful, he’d exited through a side door and gone around back to the playground.

The kids on the playground had begun lining up to hunker down in the open stairwell, but the gunman had arrived before the stragglers near the back of the playground had made it to safety.

It’d all happened in six and a half minutes.

“Can you tell me about the other man? The one who you said shielded the children? Walk me through it if you can.”

Ms. Maples pointed to the spot outside the exposed staircase.

“The teachers who were outside with the kids started calling them to the designated spot when the siren went off over the loudspeaker. They seemed calm, as they might have thought it was a drill. I considered pounding on the window but then thought better of it. It might have wasted time, them looking around for the source of the noise, me signaling, them trying to read my lips from above…” She waved her hand around.

Good, Mark thought. A clear thinker in a moment of extreme stress. And she’d likely been right not to distract them and waste precious seconds. Precious lives.

“Anyway, all the kids were gathering. I was praying that the gunman had left the property, that he’d given up, but then he emerged from right there”—she pointed to a spot just beyond the jungle gym—“and he began shooting.” Ms. Maples gulped back what was obviously a sob of grief.

“Where was the other man?” he asked.

“The blond man… No, it wasn’t blond so much as white. A silvery sort of white, hard to explain—”

“Wait, he had white hair? Was he old?” That surprised Mark.

He hadn’t waited for the full description of either the gunman or anyone else involved before hopping on a plane.

But when he’d heard about a second man who’d acted as a Good Samaritan of sorts but then disappeared, he hadn’t pictured him being old—because he’d taken a slew of gunfire to the midsection and the legs and then walked away.

But Ms. Maples shook her head. “No, quite young actually. I know, strange. And he didn’t have albinism, because his skin was tan.”

Mark’s brow furrowed. “Could his hair have been dyed?” The good thing about the description was a man like that wouldn’t be difficult to spot.

Ms. Maples shrugged. “I guess that could be it. Anyway, he was over there,” she said, pointing to a spot by the gate.

“And when the gunman appeared, he yelled something at him. It sounded like Damon maybe. Or Aiden. I don’t know.

The window was shut, and there was lots of shouting from both inside and out.

I was watching but also trying to keep the kids away from the window.

But his voice was deep, and he yelled as if he knew the gunman.

The gunman seemed to know the white-haired man too, because he yelled something back that I didn’t catch.

He was angry, and I don’t know…I got the impression the white-haired man was there to stop the gunman.

And then…he just threw his arms out wide and…

well, he jumped in front of the children, shielding them.

” She closed her eyes, no doubt imagining it.

Then she whispered, “It looked like he took a dozen hits before he fell.” She grimaced.

“It was awful. But it was enough time for those kids to get to safety.”

“Is that when the gunman brought the weapon to his own head?”

“Yes, but first he pointed it at a woman standing by the fence.”

“A woman?” No one had mentioned a woman.

“Yes. I just remembered her actually.” She shook her head.

“Sorry, in all the confusion, I didn’t remember her.

Yes, there was a woman, and she wasn’t a teacher here, because she was outside the gate at first. She was…

wearing jeans and a bulky sweater.” She furrowed her brow.

“Red maybe? Or pink? Anyway, the gunman raised the gun and pointed it at her, and she seemed to brace, but then he brought it to his head instead and fired. I guess the shock of seeing that…what happened right before it sort of disappeared from my mind temporarily.”

“That’s not unusual, Ms. Maples.” It was why he liked to interview witnesses right after the event and then after some time. “Where did the woman go after the gunman shot himself?”

“I don’t know. The police cars arrived out front, and I ushered all the kids to the door.

I knew from watching that the gunman was no longer a threat.

Even so, we waited behind the door for help to arrive.

When they did, we exited out the front door.

I didn’t see the white-haired man or the woman in the sweater after that. ”

“Can you tell me anything else about what the woman looked like?”

Ms. Maples rubbed her temple, obviously straining to recollect. After a moment, she shook her head. “I’m sorry. I see her outline in my mind and that sweater, but…I just can’t remember anything else about her.”

“Okay. You’ve been a big help. Thank you, Ms. Maples. You’re meeting with the sketch artist now?”

“Yes.”

“Will you see if you can remember anything more specific about the woman too, and if so, have a sketch drawn up for the team of investigators?”

“Of course.”

Mark removed a card from his wallet and handed it to her. “If you think of anything else, please give me a call.”

She glanced at it and nodded. “I will, Agent.”

A deputy escorted her back through the crime scene where techs still worked collecting evidence from the pavement, and the lead detective turned back toward Mark.

“My boss told me the FBI wasn’t going to arrive for a couple days.

Some holdup or another. Can I ask why you came alone, Agent? And all the way from Montana?”

Mark looked at the detective. There was a holdup in the FBI getting there? That was concerning. And familiar. And made him all the more certain that his instincts were correct regarding this event. He cleared his throat. “I’m here because this might be connected to a larger case.”

The detective considered him for a moment. “What makes you think that?”

“Some similarities.” Mark couldn’t say much more than that, not on that point anyway.

He might be wildly off base anyway. But his gut told him he wasn’t.

Especially in light of the second man who’d been there, the one who’d tried to stop the gunman and then disappeared.

The shooter was dead and could no longer provide answers, but the white-haired man was not.

And that man hadn’t fled the scene for no reason.

Mark did not believe he’d been there randomly.

“Are you collecting camera footage from the surrounding area?”

“Yup. There’s a business district that way,” the detective said, pointing in front of Mark.

“So there’s a lot. Unfortunately, there aren’t any good views of the back of the school, but we’re scouring the surrounding streets.

It will be a lot of tape to go through, but at least we have the timing to narrow things down.

And in the meantime, we’ve got an APB out for the man with the white hair.

It’s just too bad we don’t have more than that one descriptor to go on.

Hopefully the sketch provided by that teacher helps. ”

Mark nodded. “Detective…I need to ask you not to release a sketch to the public just yet.”

The detective looked momentarily taken aback. “Someone might be able to identify him. It might not be a lot to go on, but a head of white hair on a young man is quite a descriptor.”

“I think it’s important that we identify him first. Let’s go back to your office, and I can explain more.” Not everything, but some.

The detective considered him for a moment, stroking his mustache before giving a nod. “I can give you a lift.”

Mark followed the detective from the schoolyard, glancing at the spot where the man with the white hair’s blood had soaked into the concrete after he’d taken a slew of bullets and then evidently walked away. Or been helped.

The man with the white hair.

Was he one of the lost?

And if he wasn’t, who the hell was he?