Hidden in the Blood: A Novel of the Terribly Acronymed Detective Club (Book 5)

Chapter Twenty-Six: Joanie, Tuesday

He chuckled and said, "If I can be frank with you, I didn't want it when they offered it to me. I thought I'd be terrible at it."

She blinked in surprise. "Really? But you're a natural on camera. I've seen you many times, and you come across as personable and competent."

He beamed and said, "It just came with a bit of practice. Everyone's a little stiff at their first media scrum. You don't have to worry about what you're going to say, though, if that's what you're worried about. You get the talking points about the case you're addressing from the higher ups. The trick is to take the questions the reporters will ask and bend it back to those talking points, and not let them make you go off script." 

She nodded, but his words didn't make her feel better.

"Hey, look," he said, glancing at his watch, "I've been asked to give a statement at the scene of an accident in the Willowbrook Mall area. The super's authorized me to bring you along so you can shadow me and see how it's done. That's the real reason I'm at your desk. We're due there in fifteen minutes."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, feeling her chest tighten in panic. "Uh, I don't know..."

"Look, you don't have to say a word," he said. "You don't even have to be on camera. You'll just stand off to the side and watch how I address the press, the words I use, the body language I convey. Then we'll have a debrief to go over what you saw." He smiled. "At the very least, you can get out from behind that desk for half an hour."

She sighed in resignation and said, "They really want me to do this, don't they."

"Yup. Come on."

She put on a uniform jacket and her kepi, something she hadn't needed to do since she began riding a desk, and followed him out the back door of the detachment to the parking lot, where an unmarked cruiser waited for them.

They drove west to the 200th Street area, technically the City of Langley but still policed by the RCMP. They used their lights and sirens to skirt around the traffic jam leading up to the accident, and arrived at quite the mess. Now Joanie understood the need for an official word. Normally a single two-vehicle accident wouldn't warrant more than an exchange of insurance information and maybe, if things got tense or there were injuries, a visit by police and emergency services. This was different. Multiple vehicles, injuries if not fatalities, fire trucks and ambulances greeted them when they arrived. Worse, a traffic light post had been hit so hard that it had fallen over, knocking out traffic management to the entire intersection and causing hours of inconvenience for drivers in an already busy area of the city.

They parked just on the other side of a blockade formed by two cruisers parked across the road. When they exited, the constables manning the blockade greeted Natychuk and discussed what they knew so far. While they did, Joanie wandered past them and took a closer look at the mess.

The car that hit the traffic light post had taken the most damage. The others were mainly fender benders as the chain reaction of cars avoiding the initial accident spread down the road, although the front most cars before the accident with the post were t-boned as they'd braked hard and swerved.

She passed by other police and emergency workers tending to the victims, exchanging commiserary nods. She stopped at the post. The car that hit it had both its airbags deployed, and its front was smashed in. She imagined the victims were already on their way to hospital.

Something about the make and model of the car twigged with her. She pulled out her phone and checked the text Joe sent her. Her eyes widened, and she checked the plate number.

Holy shit. It was the car Lauren spotted following Patrick yesterday.

She quickly put her phone away and looked around, noticing Natychuk was waving her over. Members of the media were converging on him, and it looked like they were getting started. She hurried over, feeling her stomach drop. Seeing those microphones brandished like weapons at the corporal, she felt an irrational urge to pull out her gun and defend him. Probably not a good thing for a potential future media relations officer to do; that wouldn't represent the detachment well.