THURSDAY, 10:44 A.M.
DOWNTOWN GRAYBACK
“Heath!” Harper couldn’t escape Liam’s strong arms. “Let me go. What are you doing? That’s your brother in there.”
“Stop, Harper. I can’t let you go inside.”
“Don’t you care about him?”
“He’s my blood! Of course I care. But he would kick me to the other side of the state if I let you go in after him. You watch. Heath will be okay. He always is.”
How could Liam believe his own words? How could he be so convinced as he said them? Her body refused to cooperate with her mind and her limbs went limp against him.
She couldn’t help but think of the story Heath had told her about how he’d tried to go in to save their mother, but his father had prevented him.
Heath. There was so much she had yet to say to him. She’d been about to lay it all out there when the explosion had changed all their lives forever.
While some firefighters held on to hoses and doused the flames, four others rushed from behind the depot, giving it a wide berth. Two carried a woman. Two practically dragged a coughing Heath.
Liam released her, and they both ran across the parking lot toward Heath. She could feel the heat from the flames. The men ushered Heath and the woman to an ambulance waiting nearby, and Harper and Liam followed.
Heath shrugged free and stood on his own. A fireman pressed an oxygen mask against his face. Heath sat on the edge of a gurney.
Heart pounding, Harper slowly approached. She wanted to berate him. To flail her fists at him. What had he been thinking, running into that burning building?
From the gurney where she lay, the woman he’d pulled from the burning building turned her head, her eyes blinking at Heath. Gratitude filled them.
A man approached, holding a child. The child she’d been looking for?
Harper ran her hand through Heath’s soot-covered hair. She finger-combed it, black dust flaking onto his shoulders. Much too personal, but affection for him brimmed inside and it needed to go somewhere. His eyes smiled up at her.
“You’re some kind of crazy,” she said. A hero.
Liam—the one who had proclaimed that Heath would always be okay—stared at his brother as if contemplating the grief he would have experienced if Heath had not escaped. Her eyes burned with unshed tears.
“Harper!” Taggart called her name.
She turned to find him rushing toward her. “Glad to see Heath’s okay. Now I need those pictures.”
A raindrop plopped on her forehead. “Right.”
The rain would help the firefighters as they battled what burned like it must have been napalm or an incendiary type of bomb. But the rain could be destructive to evidence, how well she knew.
Concern for Heath had distracted her, but now she had to leave him. “I have to get back to work.” Harper leaned over and planted a kiss on Heath’s forehead, then backed away. Behind the mask he protested her move to leave—he didn’t want her to get hurt, she was sure. Maybe if he wasn’t wearing the oxygen mask, she’d full-on kiss him in front of God and everyone.
She walked away and forced herself to focus. The scene was chaos at the moment. She knew how things went down. The sheriff’s department would secure the scene. Scour the area for fragments. They would mark the fragments with numbered evidence markers. All of them working together, not just one or two techs. All this they would do while they waited for the ATF or the bomb squad or even the FBI if their involvement was warranted.
In the meantime, Harper would give her best. Her all. She hoped her photographs could be used to find the person behind this and convict them in a court of law.
Another drop plopped on her head, and then another, until the rain beat the pavement and sounded like sizzling bacon.
Again, she took photographs of the crowds. Despite the storm, few had left the scene—other than to be herded back as crime scene tape was put in place. The raw grit of destruction hit her in waves, but she remained strong, as if an invisible force stood with her.
She photographed the sheer relief and joy, capturing the emotion on camera. Her heart skipped a beat. That she was emotionally compromised would be all over these photographs. Harper hoped her photographic documentation would remain admissible in court.
In her peripheral vision, Harper caught a man laughing with tears of joy as he squeezed his teenage son to him, so she swung the camera to capture them. She needed the reminder that life existed everywhere around her too. Not only death and destruction. She’d come full circle in her journey to free herself from survivor’s guilt. She had survived again. And that left her to pick up the pieces.
But this time, she wouldn’t run away. She wouldn’t turn away. She would embrace being a survivor because she could make a difference for the victims.