Listen ...Final Sin

FINAL SIN by Chelle Cordero
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PROLOGUE

There wasn’t anyone there who didn’t look like they weren’t ready to heave. Julie felt sorry for the vollies, the members of the local volunteer ambulance corps. At least she and Matt were being paid to be there. Then again, no amount of money was worth witnessing the carnage that was lying there before them.

Matt had done the unwelcome task and already pronounced one of the girls dead. It was obvious death, obvious to anyone. Trying her best not to step into the pool of blood or disturb anything else vital to the crime scene investigation that would follow, she finished preparing the one girl who was still alive for transport.

A young man in his late twenties or early thirties, Julie wasn't sure without reading the patient care report, had been burnt when his shirt had caught fire. He was sitting huddled and guarding his severely burnt arm as Matt treated him. He looked scared and in shock at the events around him and wouldn't look at any of the police officers who had responded. Julie assumed that it was his need to deny the trauma.

A broad shouldered officer came through the door and took command of the scene. He seemed hardened to the butchery, almost as if he had seen too many gruesome scenes just like this one. Dressed in a dark blue baseball jacket, open collar knit shirt and khaki pants, he donned a pair of latex gloves he had carried in his pocket and began an almost detached visual inspection of the room. The springy snap of the elastic gloves stretching to fit his large hands was in sharp contrast to his motionless stance. Other officers at the scene deferred to his judgment and took instructions from him as he calmly took in the entire scene. He was concerned with the best way to collect the pertinent evidence to tell the story of what had happened.

As Julie and one of the ambulance crewmembers moved the surviving girl to the gurney, she risked a quick look at the tall officer’s dark eyes and noted that there was a thinly disguised veil of dismay. He had intrigued her with his stony expression and seeming aloofness to the horrors, and his complete focus on the collection of relevant clues. Somewhere in the recesses of her mind, it was a comfort to Julie that the cop was not completely indifferent to this horror or detached from the human cost.

For Matt and Julie, their tour of duty had started out like many others. There had been a call to a minor motor vehicle accident, another for chest pains and one more for a cancer patient who needed to go to the hospital for treatment. Many of the upstate New York communities had contracted with Paramedic services to complement the existing ambulance corps and provide emergency medical response. Whether paid or unpaid, the certified corps always responded with Emergency Medical Technicians who were capable of handling most emergencies. When the Paramedics were dispatched as well, IV drugs and additional hands could often help make critical differences when necessary.

This call had gone out over the radio for a burn victim, so none of the responding police, fire fighters, volunteer ambulance crew nor paramedics were prepared for what they found when they reached this isolated tool shed. From the outside, the grayed wood had seemed serene enough, and the one small window had been caked over with dirt. She didn't think that she would have given the shed a second glance under normal circumstances. But this was far from normal. No one had anticipated the horror scene inside.

Two young women were staked to the dirt floor, both had bled profusely from a variety of wounds. Although one was still alive, barely breathing after severe mutilation and a huge loss of blood, the other had been burned and was only the charred remains of who she once was. Julie wasn’t alone in her prayers that the young woman had died long before the flames had destroyed her body. It didn't look like she had struggled and yet her mouth was open, Julie feared that she might have died screaming. She had still been smoldering when the fire department had arrived and the puddle of water around her had quickly turned into mud.

The young man told them tearfully that he had tried to douse the flames and had been injured when his own shirtsleeves caught fire. If he hadn’t run from the remote little building into the night, none of them might even have been discovered until they had all perished. A passing motorist with a cell phone caught sight of the man running with his clothes on fire and dialed nine-one-one before he got out to help. Apparently a second man, the monster responsible for the imprisonment and torture of these three young people, had already disappeared into the murky darkness.

The police were questioning the male victim while Matt finished cutting away his charred shirtsleeve. He said his name was Andrew and that he and the other man had picked the two girls up in a bar in Westchester. With the two girls in the back seat, Andrew drove into the northern Hudson Valley town following the step-by-step directions of the second man. Andrew said he didn’t know the other man’s name, he had used more than one and Andrew didn’t think any of them were real. They snorted some coke, he assumed it was supplied by the unknown assailant, and had sex. That was when the other man had pulled a gun and forced Andrew to tie the two girls to stakes he pounded into the ground. Then Andrew was led outside and locked in the trunk of the car.

He heard muffled screams, he couldn't tell where they were coming from. He was disoriented and felt like he was suffocating in the trunk of that car, but he said it sounded like the screaming went on for hours. He was finally released and led back into the smokehouse by gunpoint to see the horrible results. It was when the perpetrator doused the first girl with gasoline and lit a match that Andrew finally tried to fight. The man warded off the attack and pushed Andrew to the ground. Then he ran. Andrew stayed behind to try to extinguish the flames and save the poor girl.

Julie used her walkie-talkie to call dispatch and request a chopper to bring her patient to the trauma center. The voice on the radio squawked back that there was a multi-car and multi-patient accident on the local highway, the chopper was already enroute to that scene and wasn’t available for their call, nor was there a second rig available to transport the patients separately. Matt, listening on his own talkie, motioned that they could transport the victims together since his patient, although burned, was stable.

They moved their patients to the ambulance with the surviving girl lying motionless on the gurney. Julie started a line to get some much-needed fluids into her patient. She kept her hands steady as she inserted the first of two large bore IV’s into the young girl’s arm and attached the saline drip. Matt was stepping into the truck as she was carefully inserting a tube down the throat to intubate the girl.

The broad shouldered officer followed Matt to the open rear doors of the rig as he transferred Andrew to the bench in the box rig. Matt made sure that his patient was seat belted in place, his arm had been wrapped in wet gauze. The cop watched quietly as Julie adjusted the rate of drips coming out of the hanging saline bag that fed into the young girl's arm. A bottle of sterile water was placed nearby to keep the burn patient's dressing wet enroute to the hospital.

Obviously there were questions to be asked, but the paramedics and EMT’s had important work to do and the officer discreetly tried to stay out of their way. Finally, as the cop saw Julie turn to jot something onto her clipboard, he stepped into the rig. Matt threw an annoyed territorial look in the direction of the officer at his invasion. The cop had to stoop to accommodate his large six-foot-plus frame. Stepping closer to Julie, he quietly asked her to stop in at the local police station upon her return to help fill in some patient information that he needed for his reports. Even though he worded the suggestion politely like a request, it wasn't really a question. He let her know he would be expecting her later.

Piercing tones squelched over the walkie talkies on the paramedics' belts and the ambulance radio. Matt left to answer the other call for help and left Julie and the two EMT’s in the back of the rig with the patients. He was needed elsewhere. Matt brushed past the man just as the officer backed out of the way and stepped down from the step at the big double doors. Julie reached for the grab bar on one of the doors and the policeman helped by swinging the doors closed. He mouthed the word "later" through the glass panes. The ambulance driver waited for Julie's word before he shifted the truck into gear.

The girl, Andrew had called her Holly, didn’t survive the thirty-five-minute trip to the hospital. Her heart stopped. One of the EMT's started CPR while the second hooked up the leads from the monitor. They shared a hopeful moment as they watched the screen show a normal sinus rhythm only to lose their optimism when CPR was briefly stopped to obtain a true reading. At the same time the EMT took pride in the competent CPR, he was disheartened that the young girl's heart could not maintain the rhythm on its own.

Julie injected epinephrine and sodium bicarb twice in an effort to restart her heart, but they couldn’t get her back. She had lost too much blood and had suffered too many traumas. It was almost as if she was surrendering to the peaceful cloak of death. It was a frustrating twenty-five minutes while the crew worked hard to save the young woman’s life.

Andrew sat quietly on the bench as the ambulance crew worked non-stop, his eyes were brimming with unshed tears.