Page 29 of Last Chance Christmas
He looked around while rain soaked down his face and into the collar of his shirt.
Captain Crawford came back over the radio. “I’ll inform the police they need to tow that into evidence. Any sign of the convicts?”
“I’ll keep searching.” Izan slid the door closed so the rain didn’t wash away all the evidence. “Maybe they’re here.”
“Be careful.”
Izan signed off, going around the van to another car farther down the hill. Who knew how far some of the cars had been washed down?
He spotted a couple of their firefighters making their way down the stable dirt beside the wash of mud and debris, going to the end of the devastation. They would find out how far the farthest vehicle had traveled and make sure every single victim was rescued. That no one was missed or forgotten.
Kind of like the way Izan had been rescued as a child. He hadn’t done anything, but he’d been cared for and placed with people who had raised him in a good home.
Kind of like the way he’d been saved by Jesus Christ. Rescued. Set free. Cared for enough that God hadn’t let him slip through the cracks to suffer destruction.
If Izan had the chance, he was going to share that with anyone who wanted to listen. He wanted the lost and forgotten to know that he’d been rescued, and they could be as well. He wasn’t the Savior, even if he did that sometimes as part of his job, but he could point them in the right direction.
Toward the cross.
His feet slipped out from under him, and he slid through the mud to slam against the side of a Jeep. Inside the car, he spotted a terrified couple in the front seats. The driver, a male, rolled his window down. “Help us.”
Izan nodded. “I’m going to get you out of there.”
Thirteen
Olivia stood at the top of the hill in the rain, watching the pickup being dragged up toward them. The winch whined, forcing the truck through the mud. Finally it crested the lip onto the road, and the wrecker driver called back to his buddy, who shut off the winch.
She’d told Junior to stay in the office and had come alone to do evidence collection. After the day they’d had, he should be home in bed. But no one was willing to stay on the sidelines when multiple convicts were out, loose and able to hurt people.
The next time they found a body, it might not be that of a bad guy. It could be the body of someone innocent caught in the crossfire. In the wrong place at the wrong time. Because the police hadn’t found the convict fast enough.
“Need a hand?”
She glanced over at Izan in his full firefighter gear. “You look exhausted.”
“I could use a cheeseburger.” He shrugged, taking a drink from a water bottle. “But I’m good.”
“Sure.” A cheeseburger sounded good.
Olivia pulled on a pair of the gloves she used for evidence collection and said, “Just don’t touch anything.”
“I doubt you’ll get much in the way of prints from that.”
“That’s not what I’m after, though I will be dusting for prints. They take weeks to be run, and we need these escaped convicts caught before the results come back.”
Wind blew along the highway, flipping up her collar. She had a rain jacket on, the hood pulled up over her head. The wind whipped her hood back, so the rain soaked her hair and face. But what else was she going to do? It was far too windy for an umbrella, and she needed both hands.
She had evidence bags and collection tools. Olivia bent into the car, which shielded her from the pouring rain. But it did nothing to keep her warm. Even with base layers on and a sweater over her long-sleeve shirt, she was still chilled—and she hadn’t even started.
The first orange jumpsuit had the number on the back that she knew belonged to Mackey. Blair Mackey had been coercing foster kids to steal for him like he was Fagin from Oliver Twist, even going so far as to take the life of kids he should have cared for. The whole thing turned her stomach. This wasn’t a man who should be out on the streets, loose so he could profit from his disgusting tactics. He only cared about money. He didn’t value human life at all.
Olivia tucked the jumpsuit in an evidence bag and sealed it. She marked her notebook with the relevant information.
Someone else would be doing a deep dive on fibers and trace evidence. She didn’t have the patience for it. Olivia would much rather kick a door down and throw cuffs on the bad guy.
“Do you guys have any idea where they all ran off to?”
She glanced at Izan, who was watching what she was doing, and then turned back to continue putting jumpsuits in bags. “We know that in the days before the breakout, Mackey received a series of calls from the same number. There was no call the day of the breakout. The number belonged to an unregistered phone.”
