Page 2 of Fire Harbor
Chapter One
Present Day
One mile south of Pelican Pointe
Into the eighth hour of a twelve-hour shift, paramedic Linus Canfield pulled the county ambulance to the side of the road just before reaching the bridge overlooking a small harbor full of spring wildflowers with orange and fire-red poppies dotting the landscape.
Fifteen minutes earlier, he’d received a call from dispatch about a car accident near the lagoon after a sedan left the roadway and flew over the guard rail before landing in the shallow, marshy dunes below. The driver had walked away without a scratch on him. The Toyota SUV he’d been driving hadn’t fared as well. On impact, the car’s front windshield had popped out, not to mention the four flat tires now buried in the marsh. The vehicle would need to be yanked out of the bog.
Luckily for the driver, Linus knew every tow truck operator within fifty miles. With almost a dozen years of seniority over his current partner, Jimmy Diaz, an EMT looking to become a fully certified paramedic one day, Linus knew every square inch of Santa Cruz County’s coastline by heart. He often wrote his shift notes in excruciating detail, something he’d learned in the military under the roughest of combat conditions. Trained by the Army, Linus could start an IV on a dehydrated hiker who’d gotten stranded in the mountains, revive a housebound senior with a heart condition, analyze an EKG as well as any heart surgeon, deliver a baby on the darkest of roads during a thunderstorm, provide emergency treatment to a burn victim pulled from a raging wildfire, or perform a tracheotomy in a ritzy restaurant if the situation called for it.
His skills were legendary countywide. If you ever suffered a medical emergency and needed a paramedic, you wanted to look up and see Linus Canfield’s face. His no-nonsense approach made him an excellent first responder. He had a habit of writing down facts and figures at the scene, even taking measurements. When time permitted, he often lingered around an accident site for no reason other than to make sure he understood why the mishap had happened in the first place.
Today, he took out a notepad and glared past the California Highway Patrol officer who had responded via motorcycle and aimed his disapproval at the hapless driver, who hadn’t even broken a fingernail. After treating the man’s non-life-threatening scrapes and bruises to his face, after ruling out a concussion, Linus had taken the time to walk the surrounding area of the wreck, looking for anything else that might have caused the man to send his car careening over a bridge. “How do you send your car flying over a guard rail and not end up in the hospital with a broken neck?”
“Some idiots are just plain lucky,” Jimmy answered, shadowing Linus’s footsteps. “Do you think he might’ve done this on purpose?”
“Nah. He’s probably just a lead-foot hipster with a snotty attitude. He mentioned how he’d been in a hurry to meet up with someone at the boardwalk in Santa Cruz this afternoon. If you ask me, it’s just a typical Thursday.”
“At least his B.A.C. showed he wasn’t drunk,” Jimmy noted, turning his attention back to the trail Linus had taken. “The cop’s ready to take off.”
From Watsonville to the south and Redwoods State Park to the north, Linus had covered every scenario in his dozen years on the job. Now, looking down at the sandbank, he shifted his weight and shivered in the March breeze.
“Yeah, well, he might want to stick around,” Linus muttered in return. “I thought I’d seen it all.” He pointed to a specific patch of sand before squatting on his haunches to study the macabre scene laid out before him. “Check this out.”
Fascinated with the horrific sight, Jimmy stepped closer to the human skull lodged between the beachgrass and the sandbank. There were additional, smaller bones scattered under the brush. “Is that thing real?”
Linus frowned at his partner. “Are you telling me you’ve never seen a human skull before?”
Jimmy lifted his shoulder. “I guess it’s way too late for Halloween. Sue me because I wasn’t in a war zone like you, okay?” His eyes tracked to something else that had caught Linus’s attention. “Are those rib bones?”
“Yep, part of a ribcage,” Linus mumbled, his greenish-gray eyes scanning the length of the sandbar.
“What do you make of them being here?”
“The recent drought likely caused the bones to surface after an initial shallow burial in an attempt to hide the body.”
Jimmy leaned down to take a closer look. “You think those bones were buried? Like in a grave? How long would you say that person has been out here?”
“Several months by my estimate. The wind off the ocean, coupled with the wet weather we had in January and February, probably made it possible for these bones to resurface. See how the marshland where we’re standing eroded in the heavy rains. And it was much drier conditions last November.”
“Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?”
“It’s obvious someone tried to bury a body somewhere in the general vicinity probably before November. I’ll radio the sheriff’s department.”
“We could have the cop do it,” Jimmy suggested.
“Nope. I’ll make the call. I’m the one who found it. I’m the one responsible for calling it in.”
“And they’ll send out a forensic team?”
“Oh, yeah,” Linus determined, glancing up at the bridge. “This is still the county’s jurisdiction. I’d feel better if we were dealing with local law enforcement out of Pelican Pointe. But we can’t change the location of the remains.”
“That means we need to wait around for the responding deputy to get here.”
Linus raised a brow. “I didn’t realize you had somewhere else to be?”
“It’s not that. I just like taking care of the call, transporting the injured party to the hospital, handling the situation, getting back on the road, and making ourselves available for the next call. You know, like a normal run.”