The North Face of the Heart - Dolores Redondo Page 0,8

“Arrogant son of a bitch!”

She knew Emerson had heard her. She didn’t care.

3

INTENTIONS OF THE GALE

Quantico, Virginia

They’d already dimmed the lights by the time she got to class. Agent Emerson stopped at the door, turned, and stalked back down the hall without a word. Inside the conference room, a storm was raging. A video on the huge screen showed rain pelting down and winds gusting, ripping off roofs and sending them flying through the air. Power lines were down, and huge waves battered the coast. Trying to avoid notice, Amaia found a place in the back. A second, similar television news video followed and then came a series of still photos of tornados, typhoons, hurricanes, and other natural disasters.

“Natural disasters!” a woman’s voice rang out in the back of the room.

Amaia recognized the slightly nasal voice of Agent Stella Tucker. Though Tucker was hidden in the dark, Amaia remembered her clearly as a fiftyish African American woman with a strikingly beautiful face. She wore her hair cut short like a marine, perhaps to contrast with the exuberantly fleshy body that made her appear shorter than she actually was. Tucker was one of Dupree’s colleagues. She was his chief liaison with the media, families, and victims. Dupree was the only member on the team with more seniority than Tucker.

“Disasters leave dozens of victims, and inevitably the dead have multiple injuries. Standard operating procedure for disasters requires rescuing survivors as quickly as possible and disposing of decomposing bodies to limit the danger of disease. That’s part of the reason why everyone involved in rescue work and investigation is under tremendous stress. These are scenes of pure chaos, places where rapidly developing events can easily cause an investigator to miss indications of a crime. Some bodies are crushed. Others may hang from trees, so battered that their clothes have been torn off.

“On your desks you have a folder with all the details about the next exercise. This past spring, during one of the hottest Marches on record, tornados and storms struck many parts of the country. One of those storms battered a small settlement near Killeen, Texas. Dozens of people were killed, including the Mason family: father, mother, three teenage children, and the elderly grandmother who lived with them.”

The screen lit up with a picture of a typical Texan farmhouse with a smiling family posing on the front porch. The disaster photos that followed were of poor quality, presumably taken by an inexperienced amateur. The victims’ injuries hadn’t been photographed close up. A couple of the wide views showed the bodies lying close together, indicating they’d probably huddled there before the roof collapsed. Amaia imagined them trying to reassure one another, fighting back their fears. Debris, wood fragments, and a few bulky pieces of furniture lay across the bodies.

Tucker let them take in the images before she continued.

“There was a rush to bury the dead, common after natural disasters. At first, no one saw the deaths as suspicious. The coroner issued death certificates and didn’t order autopsies.

“About a month later, freezing winds from Canada and pockets of warm air from the Gulf of Mexico collided, generating violent storms, a supercell that had the potential to produce tornados. This one exploded over Oklahoma, and a tornado took out the Jones family farm near Brooksville.”

Another farmhouse appeared on the screen, this one photographed from the air. The next photo showed everything in the same scene smashed to bits.

“The Joneses were found dead inside their ranch house. The father, his elderly mother who lived with them, his wife, and their three children, all the same ages and sexes as the Mason family.”

The death scenes were shown side by side on the screen. The similarities were astonishing. In both images, the bodies lay very close to one another under a scattering of dust, debris, and overturned furniture. Amaia didn’t know the geographic coordinates of the two farms, but she had the impression the bodies might be oriented in the same direction. She made a mental note.

Agent Tucker paused and listened in evident satisfaction to the murmurs of the European police officers. The next set of images was of excellent quality. Even an untrained observer would be able to see these were taken by a professional.

“If the rescuers had followed the same procedures with the Jones family as were followed with the Masons,” Agent Tucker continued, “these murders might easily have escaped detection. The entire family was found in what had been the living room. The bodies were