Chapter 24
As Jojo turned to leave, Sergeant Michael Donnelly stepped into Conor’s office.
“Yo, Jojo,” he said, smiling. “Haven’t seen you in a while. How you doing?”
“Hi Mike. Better than I deserve.”
And she left. Donnelly looked after her as he approached Conor’s desk. He didn’t ask what she’d been doing there, though Conor could tell he was curious.
“Do you know what she did Wednesday night?” Donnelly asked.
“She called 911 from the slope—was specific and believable and got us there fast.”
Not that it had mattered. By the time Conor went roaring into the parking lot at the Royal Oaks Ski Resort seven people were already dead and the shooter was gone.
“Oh, that’s not all she did.”
No, it wasn’t. Conor thought about the scene where the Amish woman had leapt out of the buggy and had come running down the hillside.
The woman Jojo had just told him wanted Jojo to find the monster who’d shot out her little girl’s heart.
He was thinking about that and missed the first part of what Sergeant Donnelly was saying.
“I’m sorry, Sergeant, what did you say?”
“I said, Hank Peterson, that’s the guy who was running the ski lift, told me she shut it down, wouldn’t let anybody else get on and made him speed the lift up and hold everybody at the top.”
The ski lifts had been running when Conor and the troops arrived. He did notice they were moving really fast, and then somebody turned them off.
“Jojo came down the hill on a sled with a little girl, I think it’s her niece. He said she shoved the little girl at an Amish woman, told her to look after the child and then ordered him not to allow anyone else to get on the ski lift.”
“I did not know that.”
“At that time nobody knew what was happening. The sound of the gunshots didn’t carry over all those snowmaking machines. And you couldn’t see anything through the snow.”
“And what did he say?”
“Oh, he stood up to her, said he told her to stick it—” He paused and cleared his throat. “As I understand it, sir, he politely suggested a spot where she might like to place that request … where it wouldn’t get a sunburn.”
“Did he do what she?—?”
“He was using the outside controls so he could help people get into the chairs—had another fella working with him. There’s kind of an art, a rhythm to getting on a lift and the Amish were totally clueless.
She shoved his helper aside and dragged an Amish couple out of a chair and told Hank not to put anybody else on. ”
“Did she explain why?”
“Nope.”
Conor wasn’t surprised. Explaining had no good outcomes. Either she wouldn’t be believed and she’d sound crazy or she would be believed and start a panic. And it would have taken time. “What did this Hank guy do then?”
“He told her she was nuts.”
“So how’d she convince him to do what she said?”
“She used that dog of hers. She told him, her voice as deep as a man’s, ‘You’ve got two choices. Either do what I told you to do or my dog will rip your leg off.’ And then the dog stood there glaring at him, growling, and he didn’t dare cross her, so he did what she said.”
“How about that,” Conor murmured.
“He said Dan Gillis, the man at the top of the lift, tried to tell him there was blood on some of the empty chairs coming up, but you know, at the time … he just blew Dan off.”
Empty lift chairs with blood on them. Conor pushed the image away.
“And that’s not all Jojo did. She pulled a gun on the security guard in the resort.”
“Pulled a gun?”
“She left the dog ‘guarding’ Hank and went running into the resort to get them to kill the floodlights on the ski slope and the snowmaking machines.”
The lights had not been on when Conor arrived, but had been turned back on so that they could search the area.
“She didn’t have a dog to use then as persuasion, I guess, so she pulled a gun to get the security guard to take her to the switches for the lights and machines.”
“Why the snowmaking?—?”
“Have you ever heard the roar of a snowmaking machine?”
Conor shook his head.
“They sound like a 747 taking off. Each one of them. And they’re on both sides of the slope at intervals all the way up. That’s why nobody heard the shots.”
“Somebody planned for everything …”
“Might have planned to shoot a bunch more people if Jojo hadn’t turned the lights off and stopped people from getting on the lift.” Donnelly handed Conor a folder. “Didn’t mean to get sidetracked about Jojo. Here’s the ATF report on the bullet fragments.”
After Donnelly left, Conor sat for a few moments holding the unopened folder, considering what he’d learned about Jojo Kaufmann. She’d taken matters into her own hands in a crisis and probably saved lives. Then her words came back to him: you don’t understand their language.
And the flames blossomed in front of his eyes.
A fire call goes out to the area known locally as the “Stan” Hills, a neighborhood settled by immigrants from that part of Asia—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan.
Conor has just finished a domestic violence call two blocks away and he’s the first unit on the scene—before the fire department—and finds a three-story apartment house leaking smoke out all the windows and flames licking out of the roof.
He leaps out of his cruiser and is almost tackled by a large, older woman, babbling hysterically in a language he doesn’t even recognize, much less understand.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry. I don’t speak … you’ll have to speak English.”
Clearly, she doesn’t understand what he’s saying, is crying hysterically, pulling on his arm, dragging him toward the fire, pointing at it, and babbling.
He digs in his heels to stop her, then makes elaborate shoulder shrugging motions, pointing to his ears, looking confused, everything he can think of to show her he doesn’t understand what she is saying.
Other crying, traumatized people who have run from the building quickly fill up the small space covered with weeds and worn-down grass out front, and he calls out to them, asking if anyone speaks English. No one does.
The woman yanks on his arm to get his attention. She makes a motion, like rocking a baby, then holds her hand out about waist high.
Children. Maybe a baby and a small child are in the building.
“Where?” he cries. “Tell me where they are!”
The woman starts crying again, pointing and babbling as the fire devours the building.
He looks around in desperation, asking the growing crowd, “Does anybody speak English?” A man says he does, but he doesn’t speak the same language as the sobbing woman … eating up precious seconds.
Conor can’t wait any longer. He doesn’t know how many children there are or where they are, but he has to try.
The fire apparently started somewhere on the second floor.
It’s still possible to get the front door open.
He runs to it, squinting in the billowing smoke, yanks it open and shouts, “Police, this is the police, where are you?”
He hears what sounds like a child’s voice off to the right.
Maybe it’s just the squall and cry of the beams protesting as the fire spreads, but it sounds like a voice.
He runs toward it, squinting in the smoke, knowing he won’t last more than a minute or two before he goes down from smoke inhalation.
There’s the sound again … he runs through a smoldering living room, dining area toward a flaming kitchen, calling, “Where are you? Police!”
And that’s when the child starts screaming.
Conor bursts into the kitchen and finds a little boy on fire, his clothes in flames, dancing in agony, shrieking.
Conor dives on top of him, burning his own arms and chest in the process, and throws him to the floor, rolling over, batting the flames out.
Then he scoops the little boy up into his arms, and runs toward the door.
He makes it out to the porch before he collapses, coughing.
And then the fire department is there, and there’s a mask on his face and he’s being rushed to an ambulance. He tries to ask about the boy, but he has no air, all he can do is cough and watch the child being loaded into a separate ambulance.
Conor unconsciously rubbed his arms, the skin tight in places from the burn scars, second- and third-degree burns, the most pain he’d ever felt in his life. But he had survived. The little boy had not.
If Conor’d gotten to the child sooner … but he didn’t understand the language.