Aftermath

by Terri Blackstock

  She followed him blindly between police cars and ambulances. Maybe her friends were sitting in the ambulances getting bandaged for scraped knees. Maybe they had forgotten where she’d parked the car. She looked inside each vehicle as they passed, but none of the victims inside with sooty faces and shocked stares were her friends.

  The officer led her to a group of police who were standing in front of a black van, talking on radios to the officers inside the concert hall, chattering in urgent voices.

  “I have a witness here,” he called to one of the men in regular clothes. “Detective, this is Taylor Reid. She was sitting on the third row but managed to get out.”

  The detective looked down at her bloody pants leg. “Taylor, can you come talk to me for a few minutes?”

  “Yeah, okay.” She followed him to the van. He stepped inside, and she got in and slid across the bench seat.

  He sat next to her. “I’m Detective Borden,” he said. “Can I get you some water?”

  She suddenly realized how thirsty she was. “Yes. Thank you.”

  He reached into an ice chest and pulled out a bottled water. She wondered if, on their way to answer the 911 call, they’d stopped to fill up the ice chest.

  “You’re shaking,” he said. “Are you cold?”

  She shook her head. “I’m fine.”

  “Is any of that blood on you yours?”

  She looked down at it again. “No. I don’t know whose it is.” She looked up at him through her tears. “Do you have a list or something of the people who were hurt? Maybe they’re at the hospital.”

  “We don’t yet. It’s still too early. If you’ll tell us what you saw, maybe it’ll help us find who did this.”

  She wiped her nose and took another resolute sniff. “It was . . . just as Ed Loran was coming onto the stage. The band had left the stage, and everybody was on their feet applauding. Then I heard this huge, deafening bang. I don’t know if it knocked me down or if I just dropped. There were people on the floor all around me. I don’t know if they were dead. I should have checked and helped them, but I didn’t. All I could think about was getting out of the building.”

  “Did you see anyone who looked suspicious before the blast? Someone on the stage or in the front rows?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone in the audience with a backpack or a big bag?”

  “No. We had to go through those metal detectors when we came in. We could have purses, but nothing bigger, and they searched those.” She thought of the band she had come to see. “The band . . . Did they get hurt, too?” She realized the question was ridiculous, since no one in the stage area could have survived an explosion of that size. She covered her eyes and her face twisted again. “They’re all dead, aren’t they?”

  “Tell me how you got out.”

  She could see that he was trying to refocus her thoughts, so she did the best she could. “I just felt panicked until I could get to the aisle. There was this crush of people all running toward the door.”

  “When you got outside, did anyone catch your eye?”

  “There were others running. People with soot on their faces . . . panicked people.”

  “Was anyone doing anything that seemed odd? Walking when others were running, looking calm instead of panicked, going the wrong way?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t notice anything like that.”

  “Do you have pictures from the concert?”

  “Yes.” She pulled out her phone and found the photos, then handed the phone to him.

  He took her phone and said, “Can you just wait here for a minute? I’ll bring your phone right back.”

  “Okay, but if someone calls will you pick up? I really need to hear from them.”

  He agreed, so she let him take it outside the van. She sat there alone, feeling oddly cut off without her phone and wishing she hadn’t agreed to let him take it. What if they wound up keeping it for evidence?

  When Detective Borden got back in, she reached for her phone. “I can email or text you the pictures.”

  “I’ve taken care of it. I air-dropped them to myself, but we’ll need to talk to you again later.”

  “Okay, but my friends. Seriously, I need to know . . . Can you find out if they were taken to the hospital?”

  Detective Borden said he would check and see what he could find out. He seemed to vanish into the frantic activity around the van. She waited for fifteen or twenty minutes, then realized he wasn’t coming back. She looked out the tinted van window. SWAT snipers stood inside the glass doors of the building, their weapons readied. They must suspect there were more threats.

  She stepped out of the van, and one of the cops standing there asked her for her contact information. She gave it to him, and he promised to get it to Detective Borden.

  “He was checking the hospital list for my friends. Please . . .”

  “We don’t have a list yet. Some of those who got out of the building were injured, and they were taken to the hospitals, but we haven’t been able to rescue anyone still in there.”

  Her jaw fell open. “Are you serious? Why not? They could die!”

  “Ma’am, we need for you to get out of this area. The whole place is an active crime scene. In the meantime, you could call University Hospital. That’s where the injured are being transported.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Can I just . . . stay here until I see them or hear from them?”

  “No, ma’am. We’ll need you to go back outside the perimeter. But please call the detective if you think of anything else we need to know. Did he give you his card?”

  She shook her head no, so he reached into the van. He handed her a card, and she stuffed it into her pants pocket.

  Looking back the way she had come, she realized she would be surrounded by media as soon as she stepped under the tape. The blood on her pants was like a waving flag. She wanted to change clothes so she wouldn’t have to dwell on whose blood it was. But she didn’t have any more clothes in her car, and she couldn’t imagine driving home to get some until she knew where Mara and Desiree were.

  It was getting dark. She hovered in the shadows until a group of other victims appeared near the reporters, eager to share their stories. The press descended on them, and she took the opportunity to escape. She walked a block down the road, where no media lurked, and sat down on a bus stop bench. She could see the lights of the police cars from here, and anyone who might spill down the steps of the building.

  She tried calling Desiree again but got another voicemail. Mara didn’t pick up, either. She knew their phones were on, because they’d been Snapchatting the whole time.

  Snapchat! She opened the Snapchat app on her phone and went to her feed. The last thing she’d gotten from Desiree was a video of Blue Fire singing her favorite song. Mara’s last post was a Snap of the three of them before the lights went off in the auditorium. Taylor remembered that Mara had still been recording video as the band left the stage and Loran was coming out. Which meant that she might have been recording when the explosion happened. But she hadn’t posted it.

  If Mara was conscious, she would have posted. Mara never missed an opportunity for a dramatic Snap.

  Taylor scrolled down her feed and saw that the news was already out. People were already posting about what had happened.

  Her ringtone played, and her heart lurched. But instead of Mara’s or Desiree’s face, she saw that it was Mara’s fiancé. Maybe Mara was calling from his phone! She swiped it on. “Mara?”

  “It’s Lucas,” he said. “She isn’t with you?”

  She started to cry again as she told him what she knew. He quickly got off the phone, intent on finding Mara. She hoped he would remember to call back if he found her.

  Minutes later, it rang again. This time it was her older sister. She clicked the phone icon and said, “Harper!”

  “Taylor! Thank God you’re alive!”

  Those sobs rushed up again, overtaking her.

  “Are you all
right?”

  She twisted her lips, trying to control her voice, but when she spoke, it was a jumble of words that she knew her sister couldn’t decipher.

  “What? Where are you?”

  She sucked in a breath and tried to calm down. “I’m a block down from Trudeau Hall. I can’t find Desiree and Mara! They could have been injured. There’s blood on my clothes and I didn’t even look to see if they were hurt. I was just trying to get out and I didn’t think—”

  “I’m coming to get you, Taylor.”

  “No, I have my car. I just can’t leave.”

  “What street are you on?”

  She looked up, trying to see a street sign. “Government Street, I think. I’m on a bench, but I’m going to go back to my car on President Street.” She got up and started walking. “How will they get home if I leave?”

  “They can call Uber. Honey, listen to me. You’re in shock. You’re not thinking clearly. The news said they haven’t found the people who did this yet. Whoever did it is still out there, probably nearby. Just go to your car and wait for me. I’m almost there already.”

  Harper’s call cut off, and Taylor continued walking. She wiped her nose on her sleeve. She hadn’t done that since she was four. To reach her car, she had to pass the concert hall again. As she approached the barricade where media were crowded, she slipped past and headed around the block to her car. Still no Mara or Desiree.

  She moved her car up to the spot closest to the corner, where she had a better view of the distance to the building where her friends might still be. She called Emory University Hospital, where the police officer said the injured were being taken, but they didn’t have a record yet of the people who had been brought in.

  She needed the news. She turned on her ignition, and the radio paired with her phone and started blaring Blue Fire’s latest album. She and her friends had been listening to it in anticipation all the way here. The band had been the draw that got them to the rally. Where else could you see them for free, when crazy-expensive tickets for their concerts sold out in minutes?

  She clicked on her radio mode and found a station that was reporting the news.

  “Police say they’re canvassing the building for other bombs. Family members are being told to assemble at St. Mary’s Lutheran Church several blocks from the conference hall to await word on the condition of their loved ones.”

  She wasn’t a family member. Would they let her in?

  She sat there for several more minutes, listening and watching up the street. She jumped when she heard a horn and looked to see her sister’s car idling beside her. Harper’s passenger window was down.

  Taylor let her window down. “Hey.”

  “Get in.”

  “I can’t! I have to stay.”

  Her sister left her car in the road, engine running, and came around to Taylor’s door. Harper opened it and bent down to hug her. She had been crying, too, and for a moment Taylor let her cling to her.

  When Harper could speak, she said, “Leave them a note. If they come to your car, they’ll see it. But you’re coming with me. You have got to change clothes, and you’re shivering. Are you cold?”

  “No, I’m sweating.”

  Harper took over and leaned into the back seat. She dug through Taylor’s bag until she found a notepad and pen. “Desiree and Mara, please call me immediately!” she wrote in big letters that covered the whole page.

  She left the pad on the passenger seat and pulled out Taylor’s car keys and her bag. “Come on. This is not negotiable.”

  “There’s another location for family to wait for news. I want to go there.”

  “I heard that, too. At St. Mary’s. Come on, that’s where we’ll go.”

  As Taylor slid into Harper’s car, she tried calling her friends again. This time, the screen went black. “Oh no, no, no! My phone died.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not! Do you have a charger in here?”

  Harper pulled one from her console. “Here. But you know, it probably wouldn’t be a bad thing for you to stay off social media. At least until you hear what’s going on with them, anyway.”

  “Are you serious? I want to know what’s going on, and I have to keep my phone on so they can call me.”

  “Okay,” Harper said. “Just sayin’.”

  Fatigue hit Taylor as she leaned back on the headrest. While her phone charged, she felt cut off again, unnatural, out of touch. It seemed like an eternity before her phone came on after a few minutes of charging.

  As they approached St. Mary’s parking lot, she saw others pulling in. Family members got out of their cars wearing looks of anguish.

  Taylor wasn’t ready for this. She looked at her phone. It was only 3 percent charged. “I need to sit here for a few minutes until I can get enough of a charge, unless you have a charger I can plug into the wall in there.”

  Harper dug through her console and came up with a power adapter. She unplugged the car charger and plugged the cord into the adapter. “Here you go.”

  Taylor checked her phone. It was only at 4 percent now. She hadn’t missed any calls while it was off. “Okay, let’s go.”

  More people were arriving now, all of them distraught. She and Harper followed a group of new arrivals into the church’s gym.

  Police officers had set up a table at the entrance and were checking each family into the gym. Three people ahead of her, a reporter with a camera was being turned away.

  When she got to the front, the officer asked, “Are you family?”

  “I . . . I’m looking for my friends . . .”

  “I’m sorry. We’re trying to keep this limited to family members—”

  Harper jumped in front of her. “Excuse me, do you see the blood on her clothes? She was there, in that building, and she escaped—but she hasn’t found the friends she came with. Are you seriously going to turn her away while she’s still in shock and can’t think about anything else until she knows if they’re okay?”

  The reporter turned around and lifted his camera.

  The cop cleared his throat. “No . . . you can go in. Just give me the names of the people you’re waiting to hear about. We’ll let you know as soon as we get the lists.”

  The lists . . . the wounded and the dead. Which list would her friends be on? She gave him their names.

  “The bathrooms are around that corner. We’re going to have food and drinks brought in soon. For now, we’re trying to keep everyone in here, but we may have to move to the sanctuary if there’s overflow.”

  As they started to go inside, the reporter stopped her. “Excuse me. Were you at Trudeau Hall when the bomb went off?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Could you tell me what you saw?”

  The camera lens lowered to the blood on her pants, then moved up to her face.

  “She can’t talk to you right now,” Harper said. “Please just let us get by.”

  He backed out of their way when a cop turned around to intervene.

  Taylor shot inside the gym and found the bathroom. She pushed inside before Harper had caught up to her, and went to the mirror for her first look at herself. Her brown hair was speckled with gray ash, and her face was covered with soot. Her eyes were red and swollen. “I look awful.”

  “We really need to get you changed. I have my gym bag in my car.”

  “I don’t want to wear your dirty gym clothes.”

  “They’re not dirty. I never go. I just carry it in case the urge hits me, which it never does. It’s yoga pants and a long T-shirt. You’ll look better in it than I do.”

  Taylor soaped up her hands and washed her face. “I don’t care about changing.”

  “But the families shouldn’t see you with bloodstains on your clothes. Trust me, honey. Would you want Desiree’s or Mara’s family to see that if they wind up here?”

  Taylor started to cry again and shook her head. Harper held her for a long moment. Then Harper led her into a stall
and made her sit on the toilet to wait for her. In minutes, Harper was back, a little out of breath. She shoved the gym bag under the door.

  Others came in. The sounds of sniffing and nose blowing silenced Harper and Taylor. Taylor pulled off her jeans and her blouse and rolled them up. She slipped into Harper’s clothes. Her sister was a size bigger, so the clothes were loose. But she yearned for comfort, so they would work. She wished she could shower.

  When she came out, her sister hugged her and led her to the sink to splash water on her face again. Then she took her hand and led her out to the growing, grieving crowd.

  06

  Jamie had dressed for TV interviews today in case the verdict came in, not for butting heads with police officers on behalf of a criminal defendant. She looked in her console for a hair tie and pulled her hair back in a more severe ponytail. But it did nothing to make her look more intimidating.

  She gave up and let it fall to her shoulders. It was all about attitude, anyway. She simply had to convey that she was a bulwark for her client, a wall that couldn’t be breached. She grabbed her briefcase and walked quickly into the building, then shot through the room to the person at the desk.

  “I’m Jamie Powell,” she said. “I’m here to see my client, Dustin Webb.”

  The uniformed officer pointed to the back. “He’s in an interview room.”

  “Who’s the lead officer on his case?”

  “Detective Borden is our lead detective working with the feds. He just got back from Trudeau Hall. He’s very busy. Do you need to see him?”

  “Only if he expects to interview my client.”

  Jamie ran through what the officer had said as she waited for him to call upstairs. If Borden was the lead detective on the explosion, then the charges against Dustin must be connected to the bombing.

  Borden approached her a few minutes later with two others.

  “I’m about to meet with my client before you interview him,” Jamie said before they greeted her. “But I’ll need to see an inventory of what you took from my client’s car.”

  “We’re still logging things, and the car is at the lab.”