Swat Standoff

“No. I mean, yes. Both.” She swiped at her bangs, something she rarely did unless she was upset. “After Dillon...ordered you to leave, I...uh...went home early. Like you said. You know, because I didn’t have a partner.”

“Okay. He continued the training without you, then. Like I said, the communications might not be working. Or maybe the storm caught them by surprise, and they had to wait it out. A rain-swollen creek could have prevented them crossing, and they’re sitting it out until it goes down.”

“No. That’s not it. He did send me home early. But training was over for the day. All that was left was for the team to clean the equipment and stow it in their trunks for next time. You know what a stickler Dillon is about maintaining equipment, even fake guns. Cleaning them and prepping the gear for the trip back would have taken a good half hour, maybe forty-five minutes. But he wouldn’t have kept anyone longer than that. He kept up with the weather reports, knew a storm was moving in. No way would he risk anyone’s safety by having them out in the middle of it. I’m telling you, they’re not training.”

The gravel ended, and the remaining fifty yards of road was dirt. The truck bounced around the last curve, and the clearing was revealed up ahead. But it wasn’t empty. Five trucks sat parked side by side, exactly as they’d been that morning. Blake gave Donna a puzzled glance as he parked beside them. He killed the engine and looked over at the obviously empty vehicles.

“Why would they still be up here?” he asked. “It doesn’t look like the vehicles have moved at all. I thought you said Dillon wanted everyone home, safe, with the storm coming in.”

“He did.” Her voice was quiet and strained, her face pale with worry for her friends. She opened her door.

“Wait. Did you call the station when you were making all those calls earlier?”

“Yes. The chief and the team hadn’t checked in. But I was careful not to alarm the skeleton night staff. I was blasé in how I asked the question.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “Let’s see if there’s a reasonable explanation, or whether we need to raise the alarm after all.”

He left the engine running with the headlights on to help them see better. But even with that, and a bright moon overhead, it was difficult to see much beyond the beams of their flashlights.

They took turns shouting out to the team. But no one answered. After a few minutes of searching, they were back at the parking area, with no clue about where their friends had gone.

Or, rather, where Donna’s friends had gone.

To Blake, they’d always been just coworkers. Now, after he’d been fired, they weren’t even that. But they all bled blue. If something had happened, he was darn well going to do everything he could to help them.

Whether they wanted him to or not.

“Maybe there was a medical emergency,” Blake theorized. “If they stayed up here awhile after you left—maybe to do another training exercise—and they got caught in the storm—”

“Dillon wouldn’t let that happen. He would have gotten them out of here before the storm let loose.”

Her steadfast trust in Dillon was a little irritating. Blake didn’t think the man could walk on water the way Donna did. “He’s not a meteorologist. Let’s assume for a moment that he misjudged the storm, that after you left he decided they should train a little longer, and they got caught out here. They took shelter somewhere, maybe in the old barn, where our fake perpetrator was hiding during the paint ball exercise. They could have holed up inside to wait out the storm. After the lightning stopped, something else happened. Maybe the chief had a heart attack, or one of them got cut or something. So they needed to take him back down the mountain to get him help.”

He pointed to the puddles still in the dirt, the wet spots on the trunks of the trees closest to the clearing. “Judging by the way the slope runs here, this parking lot is probably like a bowl in the rain. It could have been a small lake by the time the storm passed, and they couldn’t get to their vehicles.”

“So they just, what, trekked through the woods and got lost? Even if someone was hurt and they had to hoof it down the mountain, where are they now? They grew up around here. Getting lost isn’t something that would happen.”

“What else could have happened? I don’t see any tire tracks or footprints. No signs of anyone else coming up here. In spite of my fears earlier, foul play against an entire SWAT team seems hard to believe.”

“A SWAT team with fake guns,” she said, her voice quiet. “Dillon was all about safety. He made us lock up our real guns and ammo while we did the exercises. He didn’t want to risk an accidental shooting.”

He studied her. “What are you saying? That instead of accepting that they could be lost in the woods, you think someone came up here and...what? What did he do with them?”

“No, I’m not saying that at all. I’m just throwing out the facts as we know them. The team drove up but didn’t drive back down. They aren’t answering their phones, radios or us yelling at the top of our lungs. Something bad must have happened.”

Her voice was barely above a whisper the next time she spoke. “I think we may be in over our heads. We should call the station, get some volunteers out here to help us conduct a more thorough search. Even if they’re not lost, they could be stranded somewhere, maybe in a cell phone and radio dead zone. Obviously something happened to them or their vehicles wouldn’t still be here.”

“Agreed. We need to get some help out here.”

He raised his flashlight beam, training it straight ahead, slicing a path of light through the darkness of trees and bushes about twenty feet away. “While you make that call, I’m going to go deeper in to check that barn and the clearing in front of it. There have to be some footprints there, maybe a piece of torn fabric caught on a branch. I’d like to find some tangible proof that might show us where the team was last. The trackers will want to start from the last known position.”

She shoved her cell phone back into her pocket. “We’re not splitting up. I’m your partner. We’ll check it out together. Then I’ll call this in.”

The wobble in her voice had him hesitating. He looked down at her, noted the intensity in her expression, the shine of unshed tears sparkling in her eyes. He’d been with Destiny P.D. since late fall of the previous year and had been her partner for over four months. In all that time, she’d always been decisive, in control, never breaking down no matter how tough things got. He’d never once seen her rattled. But right now she seemed...fragile, vulnerable. And he’d bet it wasn’t just because she was worried about her friends. There was something else going on here. And he thought he knew what it was.

“Donna?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s not your fault.”

She frowned. “What’s not my fault?”

“Whatever happened, whatever is going on with the team. I think you’re second-guessing yourself, feeling guilty. But if anyone’s to blame, it’s me. If I’d been a good partner to you, we’d have both been here with them when—”

“When what? When aliens beamed them up to the mother ship? Come on, Blake. This is crazy. Four highly trained SWAT team members and the chief of police don’t just disappear off the face of the earth. You know what I’m starting to think is going on? Group hysteria, or mass hysteria, or whatever psychologists call it. We’re both feeding off each other’s fears and making this into something it’s not.”

“I honestly hope you’re right.”

“But you don’t think I am.”

“I didn’t say that.” Before she could interrogate him about what he really thought, he said, “How about we finish our due diligence and get this over with? This whole place is giving me the creeps.”

“You won’t get any argument from me about that,” she mumbled, scanning left and right with her flashlight, before training it in front of her again.

They headed into the woods, side by side. The truck’s headlights didn’t penetrate more than a dozen feet in, because trees blocked the light. Forced to rely solely on their flashlights and the moonlight overhead, they studied the ground, the branches and the bark of trees they passed.

When they stopped by a tree with red and blue paint splotches on it, Donna gave a small smile. “So much for Dillon’s claim that our biodegradable paint will fade in the first rain. He’s not going to be happy about that. He’ll probably drop the vendor and start researching a new one.” Her smile died a quick death as fears for her friends obviously invaded her thoughts. She stalked past the tree, and he rushed to catch up.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the law-enforcement family cruise?” he asked, trying to steer her thoughts to more innocuous ones while they performed their search.

She hesitated, then continued forward, sweeping her flashlight across the ground. “Honestly, I guess it never occurred to me to bring it up in conversation. It’s not like you ever socialize with the rest of us after work. Not very often, anyway. I’m not even sure you’ve ever met Chris’s wife, Julie. And you probably only know Max’s wife, Bex, from your first real case with us last year, when someone was trying to kill her. Dillon’s wife, Ashley, of course, everyone knows. The station would probably riot if she ever stopped dropping off her homemade treats.”

“She does bake a mean oatmeal raisin cookie.”

“Banana nut bread. That’s my favorite. Her recipe is to die for, and she refuses to share it. Trust me, I’ve asked. Many times. That stuff is amazing.” She pressed a hand to her heart as if paying homage.

“Yuck on bananas,” he said. “Not my thing.”

“No banana pudding?”

He wrinkled his nose. “Not even if I was starving.”

“No wonder you don’t fit in with the team,” she teased. “Banana pudding is a staple of any well-balanced diet. Especially in the South.”

“And yet somehow I’ve survived all these years without it.” He stopped and looked around. “This is about where I first spotted the guy I ended up shooting in the second floor of the barn.”

“Larry. The second guy, the one you caught at the river, was Tim. Mike was the third guy. I don’t think you ever saw him though.”