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Our friends are dead.
Our president is—
Brennan is—
I can’t think the word.
Instead, I watch our forensic team move over the fire-ravaged crash in their blue coveralls. Secret Service investigators from Uniformed Division huddle on the road, measuring a fifty-yard skid of burned rubber leading to the SUV’s death roll into the gully.
Searing heat still rises from the wreckage. The chemical tang of the foam has lodged in my throat. Grit crunches between my molars. Ash, debris, human remains, I’m not sure.
Sheridan and I stare at the crash, backs to our vehicle, leaning into one another.
My sanity is disassembling, and the longer I smell charred flesh and taste bone dust on the back of my tongue, the closer I am to coming irrevocably apart. This is a moment that will never cauterize, a tear in my soul that will go forever, into a black beyond that will envelop the rest of my existence.
A calcined skeleton hangs upside down over the melted dashboard.
Fire does strange things to a body. Muscles boil and twist. Bones snap and fracture. I can make out what looks like an arm pulled close to a burned rib cage.
Another body, only barely recognizable as human, lies beside the driver’s door. Were they ejected in the crash? Or did they try to crawl for freedom before they were overcome?
The rear passenger compartment took the brunt of the blaze. There’s nothing left but melted steel and ash finer than sand.
Snippets of my training fall out of my memories. Human bones burn at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. It takes three hours to burn a human body completely. Less if the temperature exceeds 2,000 degrees.
“Agent Theriot?” Detective Hudson from Uniformed Division calls.
He’s squatting at the start of the burned-rubber skid. “These burnout marks,” he says, pointing to the initial darker, heavier deposit. “They were made while the vehicle was stopped.”
Henry should have seen nothing but his headlights gliding on the blacktop as he wound through the trees. The park was closed. There would be no reason for Henry to stop. Even if a deer had picked the exact wrong time to cross, Henry would have only eased up on the gas and drifted the wheel.
Sheridan hovers behind me. He’s breathing fast, little puffs that sound like an animal in distress. Henry was his best friend, his mentor, and now he’s watching a forensic team separate fragments of blackened bones from the dirt as they collect what are most likely Henry’s remains. “Why would he stop?”
I shake my head. “Henry wouldn’t have stopped. Not for anything.”
“I’m telling you, sir,” Hudson says, “these marks were made by a stationary vehicle. The excess rubber”—he points to the thicker layer on the asphalt—“indicates the wheels spun out before gaining traction.”
“Our SUVs are all-wheel drive. That’s impossible.”
“It is possible if the vehicle was reversing at high speed and then quickly shifted into drive while slamming down on the accelerator. That’s part of our evasive driving training. We minimize stopping time, but with that shift, there’s milliseconds where the tires can spin out.” Hudson points to a separate deposit twenty yards in front of us, parallel lines of black rubber. “That’s where he slammed on the brakes.”
Hudson knows how fucked this situation is, how we need to get everything right. The investigations into what happened here will go on for years. Tonight will burn down everyone and everything. Careers are ending. Mine, for sure. Which is fine by me, because the best part of my life—my unexpected everything—is gone.
“I can’t tell you what happened,” Hudson says carefully. “I can only tell you what the evidence shows. Agent Ellis braked there, reversed at a high rate of speed, and then accelerated so fast he left a fifty-yard burnout before losing control of his vehicle and going over the side.”
Why, Henry? What did you see?
“Thanks. Good work, Hudson.”
Hudson’s eyes skate over the smoldering wreck in the gully. His jaw clenches. He moves off before I can say another word.
“Sir?” the pathologist, June Ahn, calls from the passenger side of the SUV. “I’ve got some things you need to see.”
Sheridan and I pick our way to the crash. The ground is slick, and my shoes sink into the mud. Behind me, Sheridan slips.
Up close, the odor is dizzying. Smell is the recognition of particulates in the air. I’m breathing death, the burned molecules of my friends’ bodies. My lover’s body.
The heat is unbearable. Sweat rolls down my temples and the back of my neck as I kneel beside Ahn. She’s taking photos of the inside front passenger door, next to the skeleton hanging upside down in the seat. The seat belt has burned away, but the fire melted this body to the frame, joining tissue and bone and steel.
