Chapter 7: Brice's POV

Brice's POV

I don't sleep after a rescue.

I go to the dispatch office instead and read.

At two in the morning the county's emergency dispatch room is lit by three monitors and a night operator who has stopped asking me why I'm there.

"Report for the DA," I told her. "Need the Lyle address history."

She shrugged and gave me the login for the public call log.

Every ambulance run in Redrock County lands in that log.

Address, time, nature of call, and nothing else.

I typed in Lance Lyle's name.

The log gave me nothing.

Not one ambulance to his house in three years.

Not one call for chest pain, a fall, a fever, a flu.

I leaned back.

That is possible for a healthy man, I told myself.

Then I typed Lorena Hartwell's address.

The screen scrolled for a long time.

I scanned the lines, bracing myself against what I was looking at.

Forty-one ambulance runs in thirty-six months.

*Female, unresponsive.*

*Female, high fever.*

*Female, chest pain.*

*Female, fell, hit head.*

*Female, can't breathe.*

Forty-one times, and she had walked into a vet clinic and gone to work after nearly every one of them.

I thought of her in the elevator, saying "I'm just tired" about a hand mark on her wrist.

I made myself keep going.

The sheriff's accident reports are public too.

I searched Lance's name there.

The first hit was last March.

He had rolled his truck on Highway 80 at midnight, and the report said it was a total loss.

*Driver walked away. No injuries. Declined transport.*

I wrote the date in my notebook.

Then I went back to the ambulance log and checked Lorena's address for the same night.

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