Chapter One
Michelle Collins keyed in her four-digit code on the security pad outside dispatch and waited for the familiar click before rushing inside. “I heard about Chief Anderson’s chest pain call on the scanner. Is he going to be okay?”
“No news yet,” Kristin responded, snatching up a phone without looking away from her computer screen. “Will you call animal control about the kittens behind Murphy’s gas station? The caller stated that two of them have wandered out near the road and were almost hit by a car. I have to call Okaloosa County for a standby.”
Michelle picked up her headset. “Of course. Why the standby?”
“Two houses, fully engulfed inside Westwind subdivision,” Lisa Nelson, another coworker, answered for Kris.
“Damn. We’ll be lucky if the entire subdivision doesn’t burn to the ground.” Donning her headset, Michelle called animal control and filled them in on the kitten situation while logging on to the 911 system.
The emergency line lit up seconds later, and Michelle took a deep breath in anticipation of what was to come. “Walton County 911. Do you need police, fire, or ambulance?”
“Hello?”
“Yes? What’s your emergency?”
“You can hear me?” a distant voice asked in obvious surprise.
“Barely. Can you speak up?”
There was a long pause. “A small child is trapped in one of the burning houses at Westwind.”
Michelle’s heart squeezed with anxiety. “I’m sorry, sir. I can hardly hear you. Did you say a small child is trapped in one of the houses that is on fire?”
The masculine voice began to fade, sounding as if he stood a great distance from his phone. “Tell them to hurry.”
“Can I get your name?” Michelle asked as she continued typing instructions for the other dispatchers to pass on to the firefighters on scene. “Hello? Sir?”
Silence.
Michelle glanced over at Kristin, noticing her face had turned white. Michelle watched with bated breath as the other dispatcher conversed with the chief on duty about the possible child in danger.
“He didn’t say, sir. All we managed to get from the caller was a trapped child in one of the burning houses in the subdivision, and then his phone disconnected. I don’t know, sir. Stand by and I’ll find out.” Kristin looked back at Michelle. “Did you try calling him back?”
Michelle was currently doing that very thing. “I’m trying, but there is no log of his call.”
“There has to be,” Kristin cried. “Check again.”
“I am checking again, but it’s not there, I tell you. I’ve gone back into the log thirty minutes just in case there was a glitch or something, but it’s not there.”
Kristin brought the receiver back to her mouth. “I’m sorry, sir. Yes, we’ll keep looking, and I’ll also have Marsha pull the tapes.”
“I don’t understand how it could have just disappeared like that,” Michelle whispered, scrolling through the calls once again. “I just talked to him, Kris.”
The red emergency light lit up once again, and Michelle quickly pressed the call button. “Walton County—”
“I got her out. She’s lying in the backyard under a copse of trees. Hurry, she’s barely alive.”
“Can you yell out to one of the firefighters there, sir?” She was met with silence once again.
Jumping to her feet, Michelle recited the caller’s words verbatim, ending with, “He said she’s barely alive.”
Kristin passed on the information to Chief Colbert before turning back to Michelle. “How did he know she was in there? Better yet, how did he get to her without being seen by any of our guys? Why not just tell one of the firefighters which house she was in?”
“I have no idea.” Michelle pinched the bridge of her nose and picked up a landline. “Marsha? Can you come in here, please?”
“Let me guess,” Kristin added. “His number didn’t show once again?”
Michelle only shook her head. She’d checked the second the call came in. “Not even an unknown caller showed up on the log. It was just blank, as if it never happened.”
Marsha barreled through her office door and into dispatch. “What’s going on?”
“I received two separate calls from the same man about a small child in a structure fire in Freeport,” Michelle rushed out. “I’ve gone back and looked several times, and there is no number associated with that call.”
“Not even an unknown number notification shows up on the caller ID,” Kristin finished for her.
“So you didn’t get a name?” Marsha glanced at all the faces in the room before stopping her gaze on Michelle.
“He didn’t give a name. He said—”
“Medic Five to Walton Control,” the radio interrupted.
Michelle leaned forward and pressed the green key. “Go ahead, Medic Five.”
“Launch Careflight. I repeat, launch Careflight. The landing zone will be set up in the parking lot of the elementary school.” He rattled off the coordinates. “We have a six-year-old female suffering from smoke inhalation and third degree burns on both legs. Copy?”
“Control copies.” Michelle repeated back the landing zone coordinates as well as the patient information.
Kristin moved to the console reserved for the air ambulance and sent out the tones for the flight crew. After logging their takeoff time, she remained in her seat to follow the flight coordinates until they could arrive safely on the ground. “How did your caller get inside that house and rescue the child without being noticed? Better yet, why would he rush in there with all the firefighters on scene?”
Michelle turned toward Kris, understanding completely where her coworker’s thoughts were. “I wish I knew. The same thing happened with the Shueller fire a few months back. You heard the call come in, right?”
Kris just stared at her before dropping her gaze and turning back to her console to answer the radio traffic.
Marsha spun toward her office. “Give me half an hour, and I’ll have the tapes pulled. I’m sure S.O. will be requesting them shortly anyhow.”
“What makes you think the sheriff’s office would want a copy of the call?” Michelle called out to Marsha’s retreating back.
The supervisor stopped inside her door and glanced back over her shoulder. “Like the rest of us, they will want to know why the caller would disappear after moving the child to safety and why his call didn’t show up in our CAD either time.”
Michelle could understand why the sheriff’s office would want a copy of the call. A computer-aided dispatch, or CAD for short, recorded every incoming and outgoing call on their server. Yet it had failed not once but twice now.
“Do you think he may have been the one who called in the Shueller fire a few months ago as well?” Michelle couldn’t wrap her mind around something so heinous.
“Who knows?” Marsha responded. “Anything is possible. All I can tell you is that I think it’s awfully suspicious that he knew she was in there but didn’t approach any of the crew on scene. Instead he calls 911 and runs inside the house himself, then saves the little girl before dumping her body in the backyard and not in an ambulance. Sure sounds strange to me.” She softly closed the door behind her.
As much as Michelle hated to admit it, she knew Marsha spoke the truth. Everything the man had done thus far had been weird. And the fact that his number had mysteriously vanished exactly like the man who’d called in the Shueller fire was even more perplexing.
* * * *
Utah Baines gritted his teeth as the world around him spun out of control. He braced himself against the side of a building, waiting for the agony to recede and the screams to stop.
He had been experiencing the unnatural wailing almost daily for the past three years. Saving a life seemed to be his one reprieve from the nightmare… The only time the cries stopped haunting him.
The pain gradually faded along with the screams, allowing him to breathe again. His legs buckled beneath him, and he slid to the ground in relief.
She could hear him. The woman who’d answered his 911 call had heard his voice. But how was that possible? He’d been dead for three years now, and other than the strange connection when he’d reached out about a house fire a few months ago, no one had ever responded to him. Until her…
He honestly hadn’t thought it would be possible to connect with a person’s mind from such a distance, especially since rescuing the victims always drained him of precious energy. But he’d connected with her.
The last time he’d attempted to reach out to 911, he’d burned all his energy racing into a house fire in DeFuniak Springs. Yet, when he’d attempted to connect with someone who could help, he couldn’t remember anything past the sound of an angel’s voice. Her voice.
Utah had always been taught that upon dying, a soul left the body to travel to its forever home. So why hadn’t his? He seemed to be trapped inside his skin, wearing the same clothes and reeking of the same smoke he’d inhaled on the day he’d died.
And why couldn’t he see other dead people? Was he destined to remain in his current form, lost and alone for eternity?
A vision of his younger sister suddenly took shape behind his eyes. She’d been gone for eight years, and the pain of her disappearance haunted him still.
Leanne Baines had been listed as a runaway for months before FBI agent Nolan Delaney discovered evidence that tied Leanne’s case to several other missing girls in the area.
After years of investigating the disappearances of more than twenty-three women, the FBI had found only one body. Until an unidentified female washed ashore on the Choctawhatchee Bay only weeks before the fire that had claimed Utah’s life.
Extensive DNA testing had identified Jane Doe as Cara Perez, Leanne’s best friend and the girl she happened to be with the day she’d vanished all those years ago.
Utah abruptly stood. He couldn’t allow his mind to linger on his sister, not in his weakened state.
He slowly pushed off from the wall and staggered toward the one place he could find solitude—the shipyard. Something about the water felt serene and harmonic. Perhaps the murky shoreline would be the only place he would ever find peace in his nightmare of an afterlife.
He threw his head back and cried, “Why have you forsaken me?” The silence that followed was deafening. As with all the times before, he wasn’t really expecting an answer.
Utah had been taught from an early age that when a person died, their soul either went to heaven or hell. Not someplace in between where you wandered the earth aimlessly, cold and alone.
His body shivered in response to his thoughts. No matter how many fires he continued to run into or how many bodies he saved, he could never seem to feel warm.
It stopped the screams though, he numbly admitted to himself. He’d take the cold any day over the endless screams, the soul-wrenching cries for help.