AN EMT ON the ambulance held Tana down while he cinched a strap across her waist. He struggled to keep her from getting off the gurney as she twisted and turned in an effort to get up. Sirens outside the vehicle scolded vehicles to make way for the vehicle, and the ambulance sped down the road on the way to the medical center.
“Oh, God, no. No!” Tana kicked and fought against the restraints, but they were just tight enough to keep her from hurting the EMT or herself. The EMT watched her as he drew a syringe with a sedative. He put the vial containing the drug down, then jabbed the needle into Tana’s arm.
She stilled and fell quiet. They’d covered the burns on her face and arms with Kling dressing, ointment oozing out the sides of the gauzy bandages.
“What the hell was she going on about?” the ambulance driver asked.
“I don’t know. Must be trauma.”
“She was with the police chief, right?”
“That’s what I was told.”
“But his name is Jett…why was she crying ‘Michael?’”
“I don’t know. Like I said, I guess she’s traumatized.”
“No shit, seeing someone killed like that.”
At the hospital, nurses and several doctors examined Tana’s burns more carefully. She had second-degree burns on a spot on her left forearm and another on her right cheek which the staff tenderly redressed.
When finished, Tana stood and walked to the emergency room exit in a daze. As she stepped through the exit door, a tall red-headed woman in her mid-40s stopped her.
“Ms. Stone?” Tana gave the woman an empty look. “My name is Kris Linicum, ABI Major Crimes. I understand you were with Jett this evening.”
Tana blinked a few times and furrowed her eyebrows as she worked to think through everything that had just happened. “Jett? Yes, we had dinner.”
She looked around anxiously. “Where is he? Did he get burned badly?”
Kris placed a hand on Tana’s arm and pulled her over to a group of chairs in the waiting room. They sat down.
“Ms. Stone, Jett was killed in the explosion that caused your burns.”
“But he’ll be…”
Kris waited patiently as her words seeped through Tana’s clouded mind. Tana started crying. “It’s pretty clear this was an assassination. We think you were also targeted.”
She paused again, carefully watching Tana digest each piece of information.
“I need to know what you remember.”
Another pause.
“What happened, Tana? Can you tell me what you remember?”
Tana thought hard. They were sitting at the table in the restaurant. She remembered looking out at the bay. They are talking about his office. They walked to the door.
“I left my phone on the table…” Tana said weakly.
“OK.”
“I went to get it and Jett went to his truck.”
“And then?”
“I came out, and it just…oh, God. It just exploded.”
Kris waited another minute before continuing. “Tana, several witnesses said you screamed ‘Michael.’ Do you know why you did that? Did you see someone you knew, someone named Michael? Maybe the person who killed Jett…”
“Michael?” Her eyes suddenly widened. “I…I can’t…oh…oh, God…”
She swooned and collapsed in the chair, nearly slipping to the floor before Kris caught ahold of her and held her up.
Kris called for help and two nurses came with a stretcher to take Tana back into one of the curtained bays. She took a chair in a corner of the little curtained room and waited for Tana to recover.
Tana opened her eyes after a few minutes. She rolled her eyes to look around the room, momentarily uncertain of where she was. Kris jumped up and stepped to the side of the bed.
Before Kris could say anything, Tana began sobbing. She rolled onto her side, and curled up, fists in her eyes to block out the world.
“Tana, I need to know if you saw anything that will help us,” she said in a calming low tone. “Is this Michael connected to what happened to Jett?”
Tana sniffed and eventually rolled back to look at Kris. “No,” she said. Tears flooded her eyes, and she wiped at the tears with shaking hands. “No, Michael was my husband.”
Kris took Tana’s hand. She didn’t understand––no one mentioned Tana had husband. Why was she out with Jett? Didn’t one of the White Sands officers say they were dating or something when Kris called after hearing Jett was killed? “No one told me you’re married.”
Tana sat up. Her face was pale and her eyes reddened. She struggled to control her breathing, with every other breath interrupted by a gasping sob. “It was…a while ago.”
“Tana, do you remember seeing anything tonight that might help us? We need to find the people responsible for Jett’s death.”
Tana closed her eyes and worked to regain control over her emotions. She cleared her head, then thought back over the seconds just after the blast.
“A car. I saw a car driving away at the same time.” She focused her eyes on the bed’s footboard and focused her mind on the car. “I’ve seen it before, it’s an old car but I saw it…”
She looked up at Kris. “I saw the same car last week at Robert’s funeral. Some guy who talked to Jett drove away in it.”
“Who was this guy? What was his name?”
Tana tried to think. She hadn’t really been paying too much attention to the brief conversation Jett had with the man, but she remembered something about the man troubled Jett.
“Jett thought there was something off with the guy. He’s tall, almost as tall as Jett, and thin. Twenties, I think. He said his name, but I can’t…”
Tana tried to find the right name. She remembered it started with “b,” but what was it?
“Buss…Bust…Brewster? No, not that. Something like Brewster, though.”
Kris sat down. “Broussard?”
“Yes! Broussard.”
Kris began filling Tana with the investigation into the warehouse and barge operation that got Robert killed, much of it information Jett had already told her.
“You might remember someone at the FBI I’ve been working with, Donald Morgan?”
“Jett told me he was on the barge,” Tana said flatly.
“Yes, he was undercover in a trafficking operation we knew was working in the area, we just didn’t know how it was operating.”
Kris then described the setup inside the warehouse that Tana helped break up, and how a man named Atlas Mironoff ran the operation.
“I saw Mironoff. He’s a scary one.”
“Oh, yeah, you could say that,” Kris said. “From what we know, he’s been operating in a number of countries around the world, doing anything and everything from mercenary work for dictators, to industrial espionage, drug running, and of course, trafficking. He had set up an organized, industrial-scale human trafficking operation.”
She paused for a moment before continuing.
“Broussard was his right-hand man.”
“Oh my God.” The connections Mironoff’s operation had to so many recent events surprised Tana. “Where’s Broussard now?”
“He’s poolside at one of the condos on the beach,” Kris said. “Seems to have fallen from one of the upper-floor balconies a little while ago.”
“And Mironoff?”
Kris raised an eyebrow.
“Oh. Oh, shit.”
“Yes. Oh, shit.”
“The women on the barge, some of them were upset when I got them away. I remember one woman was really mad because she said she was losing a good job. I thought most would be used as sex workers, but this woman said something about a hotel job.”
“Not surprising,” Kris said. “I can show you statistics that only about half of the women trafficked in this country are placed in any of the sex trades. About ten percent are headed for hotels and motels, so your woman was probably talking about that.”
“Some guards told us Mironoff set up the warehouse as a ‘holding’ spot to divide up and send off people he was trafficking,” she continued. “He had people coming in from across the country, from other countries…it was incredible.”
“But he’s still out there?”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“Am I in danger?”
Kris took a deep breath. “I don’t know. He may think you were killed with Jett. He may know otherwise, though.”
Tana rested and closed her eyes. Kris saw another tear forming in the corner of her eye.
“Tell me about Michael.”
Tana rolled her head and looked at Kris.
“We met in college, at Columbia. Columbia, Missouri, not the university Columbia. We both majored in criminal justice, but he went to law school after.”
Tana inhaled deeply, then continued.
“We kinda lost track of each other for a few years, but I saw him in court one day when I was in to testify.” She looked at Kris. “He wasn’t working the case I was testifying for, just to be clear…things might have gone differently if he had been, but, anyway, we started dating and well, got married.”
Tana stopped talking. Kris knew she was coming to the hard part and was gathering whatever strength she had left to say it.
“We were out one night, and started arguing over something…I think it was a case he was working on, but I’m really not sure.”
Tana reached for a Kleenex box on the table next to her bed. “We were in the car, I remember. He started to get out of the car and as I turned to him, someone…a bang…he got shot.”
Tana began sobbing uncontrollably again and Kris stood. She stroked Tana’s arm trying to comfort her, and let Tana sob as much as she needed. A nurse entered the room, holding a clipboard.
“I need to check…”
“Get out. Get the fuck out now!” Kris said, scaring the nurse away. She turned her attention back to Tana. “That must have been horrible, Tana. And then with your father getting murdered…”
Tana opened her eyes and sat up.
“That was…that happened…it was only two days later…” Tana’s memories of Michael’s death had been buried behind her father’s own murder; the shock of the two events so close together. She’d built a wall to block the hardest and most painful memory, putting it away behind one almost as painful.
And ever since, she had grieved for John Stone, her father, and not for Michael James, her husband. Without even realizing what she had done, she locked away all of her memories of the ten years she and Michael were married. She all but forgot about their shared moments, and her love for Michael––and his love for her.
It was all bricked up in her mind she couldn’t see behind it, a wall of protection, or maybe a wall of shock.
“Oh, my God,” Tana whispered. “I’ve been blocking these memories of Michael, but it was just hidden behind my father’s death. All this time.”
Kris studied Tana. My God, what this woman has been through, she thought. She wanted to stay and help Tana get home, get to know her better, but she needed to get back to Mobile and the ongoing hunt for Atlas Mironoff.
“Tana, I don’t know how you’re going to get through the next few days,” she said. “But if you need to talk, or if there’s something you need me to do, just call me. OK?”
She tucked one of her Bureau of Investigation cards under Tana’s phone on the table.
Tana nodded at her, then rolled onto her side.