The Dead Room Read Online Free PDF Page B

no reason for Coop to be out here supervising photography. Darby knew the real reason: he was pretending to be busy so he could keep an eye on her.
    Both Coop and the photographer wore protective goggles and breathing masks. Grey and white clouds of smoke drifted through the woods and into the backyard. On her way out, she had found a grenade still hissing smoke. The grenades had a slow burn rate. It would be at least another hour before anyone could go back inside the woods.
    By some miracle of God none of the officers had disturbed the bloody handprint during their mad rush into the woods. The same couldn’t be said for the blood she’d found on the grass. The evidence markers had been trampled.
    Only one patrolman had been seriously injured in the skirmish. A stun grenade had exploded near his head.
    ‘Christ, this shit stings,’ Pine said. ‘What the hell is it?’
    ‘Hexachloroethane. It’s a chemical used in smoke grenades. Keep flushing out your eyes.’
    ‘My lungs feel like they’re on fire.’
    ‘You should get to one of the ambulances for some oxygen.’
    ‘In a minute.’ Pine rubbed his eyes under the running water. ‘Something exploded in front of me. There was this bright light and then I couldn’t see.’
    ‘That was a stun grenade. It causes momentary blindness.’
    ‘How do you know so much about this shit?’
    ‘SWAT training.’
    Pine drank from the hose, wincing as he swallowed.
    ‘The guy you saw, the one wearing those night-vision glasses?’
    ‘Goggles,’ Darby said.
    ‘Whatever. You get a good look at him?’
    ‘No. I just saw a flash before he ducked behind the tree. Black clothing and black gloves, a tactical vest holding grenades.’
    ‘Any way you can trace them?’
    ‘The stun grenades explode on impact. If we find enough fragments, we might be able to locate a serial or model number. As for the smoke grenades, we can give the numbers to the manufacturer and see where they were sold. Maybe they were stolen from a munitions locker at a police station or an army base.’
    ‘You don’t sound too confident.’
    ‘You can buy them on the black market. Go to any gun show in the South and you can have your pick. A lot of weekend-warrior types collect them. We’ll run the numbers but most likely it’s going to lead to a dead end. The guy with the night vision is too smart to leave us something to trace.’
    ‘How do you know this guy is smart and not some sort of Rambo douche bag?’
    ‘He came prepared.’
    ‘For what? A shootout in the woods?’
    ‘He came prepared for a fight. Artie, what time did the 911 call come through?’
    ‘Ten twenty.’
    ‘And how long before the first responding officers arrived?’
    ‘Ten thirty-three. There was a unit in the area.’
    ‘Did the officers search the woods?’
    Pine shook his head under the running water. ‘I was the only one who went back there.’
    ‘What time was that?’
    He thought about it for a moment.
    ‘I’d say around quarter past eleven, give or take.’
    ‘So we’re talking almost an hour between the 911 call and the time you entered the woods,’ Darby said. ‘If those men had been back there watching the house, they would’ve had plenty of time to haul away the body.’
    ‘But you saw it.’
    ‘He had a lot of blood on his shirt. If this person got shot with one of the Magnum rounds, you’re talking a massive amount of blood loss in a short amount of time. He could have bled out while running through the woods.’
    ‘And somehow his buddies found him.’
    ‘Which leads me to believe he placed a call before he passed out,’ Darby said.
    Pine dropped the hose. He shut off the tap and reached inside his pocket.
    ‘You thinking these guys arrived the same time you did?’ he asked, mopping his face with a handkerchief.
    ‘They were in the woods when we were talking by the back gate. I think they were waiting for us to leave before they started to haul the body. If they’d started moving around, they