Double Vision (A Dr. Jenna Ramey Novel, Band 2) - Softcover

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Colby Marshall is also the author of Color Blind, the first Dr. Jenna Ramey novel. She is a member of International Thriller Writers and Sisters in Crime. She is especially qualified to write about grapheme-color synesthesia, as she has this rare condition.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2015 Colby Marshall 

Chapter 1

“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

“I’m at the grocery store, and someone is shooting people,” Molly said. She had no trouble remembering the number for 911. It was the date they went to the memorial in the city. The highest single digit and the lowest single digit twice. Her birthday.

“Honey, how old are you?”

“Six,” Molly answered. The number of strings on a guitar. Points in a football touchdown. One away from seven.

Molly pocketed the phone, climbed into the bin of refrigerated meats, and slipped into the other side, the side where the butcher cut them. She’d seen the hole where he could stick the meat through to refill the refrigerator once before. She ducked down behind the bin.

POP. POP. POP.

“I’m back,” she said as she held the phone to her ear again.

“What grocery store? Can you tell me where?”

“Lowman’s Wholesale,” Molly answered. She and Mommy never came here. Mommy said the crowds drove her batty, whatever that meant. G-Ma liked to save money, though. She told Molly a penny saved doesn’t do much good, but a hundred pennies is a dollar.

“What’s your name, hon?”

G-Ma also said don’t give your name to strangers, but this was the person on the other end of 911. He didn’t count.

“Molly Keegan.”

“Help is coming, Molly. Stay on the phone, okay? Did you see the person who’s hurting people?”

POP.

“Sort of,” she answered.

“Is it a man or a woman?”

“Don’t know,” Molly whispered. Masks weren’t good for that kind of thing.

Quiet. Finally quiet.

“They might be gone,” she said.

“Where are you, Molly?” the 911 operator asked.

“Hiding.”

“Stay put, okay?”

But Molly couldn’t stay put. She had to see. G-Ma.

She peered up from behind the bin, peeked out. No one there. She stood, climbed out. People lay still in an aisle, and red slicked the floors. Don’t look at the red.

On tiptoes, she crept to the cereal row where she’d last seen G-Ma. A dazed man, probably about her Pop-Pop’s age, sat slumped against the shelves. Another man was closer to the far end of the aisle on the left side. The one close to Pop-Pop’s age wasn’t bleeding. He just looked scared.

“Have you seen my G-Ma?” Molly whispered.

Then, sirens wailing. Footsteps running. The person with the gun appeared at the far end of the cereal aisle, glanced toward the grocery store doors where the police sirens sounded in the distance.

The man closer to the far end of the cereal aisle yelled as the gun came up.

Molly dove under the half-filled bottom shelf, tuckinge her feet. Boxes crashed around her, and her head burned as it hit the back of the metal.

POP.

“Molly? Molly! Are you there?” Twenty-five-year-old Yancy Vogul yelled into the phone. Dispatchers were supposed to be calm under pressure, keep the callers calm, but this was a child. He wasn’t ready for this.

Ragged panting met his ears. “I’m here,” the little voice said.

Shit pickle. Thank you, God.

“Help is coming,” Yancy relayed again. He’d done his job, so the cops would know what they were walking into. They depended on him to get the information right, to make sure they knew enough so they wouldn’t be blindsided. Enough that they could go home to their families that night.

But damn if he wasn’t just happy right now to hear the six-year-old say she was alive.

“Are you hurt?”

“No,” she answered. “They ran away.”

“The shooter?” Yancy asked.

“Yes.”

He wanted to ask which way the gunman had gone, what the child had seen, but for all he knew, if he asked her, she’d go gallivanting around the store trying to find out. Better to sit here, talk to her. Wait for reinforcements.

He entered the child’s latest update into his log, hoped it would be enough.

“Seven,” Molly’s voice said in his ear.

Yancy hadn’t asked anything. “Seven?”

“Mm-hm,” she said. “Seven shots.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

He heard Molly’s sigh on the other end of the phone. When she spoke again, she sounded confused, frustrated at his stupidity. “Because I counted.”

Chapter 2

Jenna Ramey thrust a set of keys into her brother’s hand.

“And don’t forget to lock both the front door set and the side door set when you and Dad are in the house, and if you go out, leave the side set open. I reset the password today on the alarm, and it’s—”

“Sri Lanka 49 Captain C 2. I know, I know. You told me,” Charley grumbled, plucking Ayana from Jenna’s arms. “I thought you going back to the BAU meant you’d decided Dad and I could be trusted with the fortress. You did uproot us all and drag us to Virginia for this gig, after all. And we did do this for years.”

That was before. “I know, I know. Chalk it up to me being the nervous mother of a toddler, okay?”

The fact that her daughter happened to be a toddler had nothing to do with it, of course. When her dad and Charley had kept Ayana before, Claudia was safely locked away in a mental institution. Last year, her mother had managed to weasel her way out of the system, and now she roamed the streets unchecked.

Charley plopped Ayana onto the floor in front of the TV, pressed play on the DVD player. Ayana, pacifier still firmly attached to her lips at age three, clapped her hands as Finding Nemo’s opening graphics appeared on the screen.

Charley fast-forwarded until the scary part with the barracuda had passed, just like he always did. “Rain Man, I know why you do what you do, I’m just reminding you that we’ve already talked about it, I’ve consented to implement the iron will that is your weird key system, and we even took a home safety course designed by someone more paranoid than you. Now that’s saying something. This house is better protected from home invasion than that guy down the road who took the Halloween movies way too seriously. Now get out!”

Jenna kissed Ayana on top of her fine, blond hair, but the little girl didn’t notice. On the TV, Marlin instructed Nemo to swim into the anemone, out of the anemone.

“Love you!” Jenna whispered in her ear.

At this, Ayana unplugged her mouth. “Wuv oo!”

Then, the paci went back in, and Ayana’s eyes were back to the TV.

Charley shrugged. “Disney waits for no one.”

“Come lock me out,” Jenna said.

She waited patiently as Charley unbolted each lock. The key system was straightforward if you knew it well enough, but the instructions weren’t written anywhere. Each key was color coded, but the key colors didn’t match the colors of the locks. In order to know which key went with each lock, you had to have the combination memorized. Red key to green lock, orange key to light blue lock, yellow key to purple lock. In order to open them all, you had to open them in that order, too. Otherwise the bolts of the others would get in the way of the first, causing the door to remain locked. Only one set of the right keys existed and they were kept on the “lead person” in the house at all...