Aaron dresden pride book.., p.1
Aaron (Dresden Pride Book 1), page 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
World Castle Publishing, LLC
Pensacola, Florida
Copyright © 2025 Kathi S. Barton
Paperback ISBN: 9798891264694
eBook ISBN: 9798891264700
First Edition World Castle Publishing, LLC, September 22, 2025
http://www.worldcastlepublishing.com
Licensing Notes
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.
Cover: Cover Designs by Karen
Editor: Karen Fuller
Chapter 1
Aaron walked around the mess in the office and took note of the broken crockery all over the floor. It was as if someone had taken a bunch of coffee mugs and tossed them up in the air to be like some kind of art project with broken pieces making up the gallery piece. There were pencils and rulers along with the broken pieces, as well as a few stains of coffee, added to the mess. But there was no blood. Not here at least.
“Detective Dresden, they want to know if you’re finished with the bodies. They’d like to get them to the hospital.” He said he was finished with them both. “Very good, sir. I’ll let them know. Anything I need to tell them?”
“Tell them I’ll be there for the autopsy of Shaller and Duncan.” The kid, not more than twenty or so, walked away. He’d tell them what he wanted, and they’d bitch, but since he was in charge, he didn’t care how much they put up a fuss. “Also, before you leave, can you tell me where the principal is?”
“Still in his office. The staff is in there as well.” The staff had better not be in trouble for the mess they caused trying to get out of the way of the shooter. He’d have something to say about that. “Also, the chief is here. He just pulled in.”
“Great.” He said it under his breath, but as there were a few shifters around him, they’d hear what he had to say about his boss coming on scene. He’d already had to run off two other officers today, as they had kids in the school that had been targeted this morning.
At eighteen minutes after nine, just after school had started and the first bell had rang, two gunmen came to the school, thinking to make a name for themselves by killing a lot of teachers and students. They might have gotten away with it had it not been for the school’s staff taking action and making sure they didn’t get in. Even when they shot up the front window of the front office, they couldn’t breach the doors to get in. The secretary had locked down the school in a way that, had they even been able to get past the front doors, they would have been trapped in the vestibule until the police arrived.
In less than a minute after the first call went out that they had an active shooter, police officer, Officer Joey Daniels, was on site as he just happened to be driving by the school on his tour of the little town. He was able to hold the two of them down until the other officer, Officer Dan Bowling, arrived. After killing both men, boys, at age seventeen respectively, they held their positions until the state troopers arrived. Then the FBI. Heroes, according to the FBI.
But the real heroes, as far as he was concerned, were every teacher in the school and the staff that worked there. Locking down the school was all that saved the entire classrooms full of students and teachers. He went to the office of the principal to see what else he might need to know about what happened today.
They were still in shock after the encounter and were visibly terrified of what had happened. He told them that they’d done a terrific job and asked them if they’d thought of anything else that had happened.
“Mr. Jorden was just telling us that we’ll have to pay for the cleaning ourselves. He seems to be more concerned about the carpet than he is about the men who tried to get into my school.” Mr. Jorden, principal of the school, said that it wasn’t her school but one that was owned by the district. “It’s my school and my students until I say differently. You old goat. What makes you think I’m going to get down on my hands and knees and clean that carpet when we just watched two kids being killed? I remember Jimmy Duncan when he went here as a little kid. That other one, Henry he was a good kid, but for his parents. I’ve no doubt that there will be a lot of walling in the houses of them two tonight.” Mrs. Apple huffed before she sat down in the chair she’d been in. “Some people are just plain stupid if you ask me. Even if you don’t, I’m telling you right now that those kids wouldn’t have been out there had it not been for their parents pushing them to be hooligans.”
“Mrs. Apple, can you tell me what you did as soon as you saw they were armed?” She told him that she didn’t see Henry until a bit later, but Jimmy had his gun out and ready to do damage as soon as she pressed the button for him to be locked out. “And the crockery? Can you tell me about that? If they didn’t get in, what made the mess?”
“We were told that the glass front is bulletproof, but none of us had seen it being bulletproof, so when he started firing, we got ourselves out of the way of it. Those mugs were headed back to the teachers’ lounge after being cleaned up when they got in the way of us trying to hide under the desks we had up there. Mr. Jorden, there, he ran to his office screaming like a little boy.” He asked her if any of them had been hurt. “No. We should have believed the men who put that in, and there’d be no mess, but like I said, seeing is believing.”
He asked for written statements from each of the four women who had been in the office at the time of the shooting. They’d been making announcements for the day when the building went into lockdown. With the press of a button in the office, all the doors were locked with a special lock, and an announcement went to each room—not in the hallway that there was an active shooter in the building to take cover.
Each teacher had been given the way things were to go and had followed protocol to the letter, locking their windows, pulling down blinds, and making sure that the kids were under their desks and hidden away. He couldn’t have been more proud of them if he’d put in the procedures himself.
After getting everyone to write out what they’d done when the shooters came to the front door, they were asked to hand them over to Aaron. Aaron knew that the FBI would want them and was trying to be helpful to them. However, since he knew that there was one jerk in every ten agents, he didn’t expect to get a ‘thank you’ from them for his work. The odds were against him.
Once the bodies of the shooters were taken away, he had a talk with the two officers. They’d already been asked to write out their statements and to hand them over to him. There were things that he wanted to say to them, but he kept his mouth shut so that he’d not step on anyone’s toes. Aaron wasn’t one to hold back, but in order for things to go the way they needed, he waited for someone to tell him what to do.
At ten forty-five, the classes were let out of lockdown. Once things sort of went back to normal for the kids, he knew that they’d have questions. He knew that he would if he were going to school there. Principal Jorden decided to call an assembly and talk to everyone at once. But his hands were tied until he got permission from the agents who were there to do anything. Aaron wouldn’t have allowed him to stay in the building if it had been left up to him, but he wasn’t in charge of things like that. The guy was a pussy.
It wasn’t until nearly two in the afternoon that the parents who had shown up at nine-thirty to make sure that their kids were all right were able to take their kids out of the school and take them home. A lot of nervous parents waited in line to get their kids and were told about the shooting, but nothing more. It made a lot of people frustrated.
Aaron made his way to the coroner’s office to make sure that the bodies hadn’t been started on before he got there. Agent Phillips with the Bureau went with him. They were expected to make sure that the autopsy went according to the rules that had been laid out and to make sure that the two of them were safe behind the walls. It never ceased to amaze him what people would do when they heard someone had tried to hurt their children. He might well have been the same way if he had any kids.
It didn’t matter if they were already dead; they’d want to know everything about them, including who their parents were when they found out. That was one of the reasons that their names weren’t released to the public right away. It was to give the grieving parents time to come up with a good cover story about why their kids decided to go on a shooting spree and kill a bunch of little kids and teachers.
“Is this the school’s first shooting?” Aaron told Brian that it was their first everything. “You’ve handled it like a pro. I wish we had someone like you at other schools when things like this go down. It sure would make our jobs easier. The simple fact that the shooters were both taken out before they got into the classrooms made everyone’s job easier. Your presence made everyone calm because you were.”
“I try really hard not to get all jumpy when things are going on. It makes for bad witnesses, too. Neither one of the cops had ever pulled their guns before, and one of them had been on the force for ten years.” He said that it was lucky for him that they didn’t freeze up. “No. They did a good job, too, of being calm when it was over. I could tell that they wanted to run in the other direction, but they didn’t because they had each other’s back and knew the seriousness of the crime they had witnessed.”
“Like I said, they were calm because you were. When this hits the paper, however, I’d not expect things to go as well as they went today.” He said he would expect it to be just as chaotic as it could go. “That’s about right. They’ll want answers, and since one of my team members will stay behind to answer them, you let them take the heat off the parents. They’re going to want to know why things got as far as they did, even though everyone was safe inside their classrooms.”
They pulled up in front of the medical examiner’s office and went into the big gray building. There were cops all around, most of them he knew who they were. But they weren’t causing any trouble, so he didn’t send them on their way. Two of the female officers he knew had kids at the school, so they had a vested interest that things went according to plan. He was glad that he was able to let them know that all the kids were safe and hadn’t known what was going on until it was over.
“Mary is only in preschool, and I was worried she’d get upset when the doors were locked down. I spoke to the teachers, a couple of them anyway, and they were telling me that they knew something was going on, but figured it was just a drill again. They’d been practicing all year with what to do with different strategies with shooters to tornadoes.” He figured as much. “Ms. Apple let the teachers know through a phone call that things would be in lockdown for a few more hours, and that was when they realized that things were real this time.”
“They all did a good job. I can’t say that enough. Without their having it drilled into them the way things were supposed to go, there is no telling what might have happened. But no one was hurt other than the shooters, and that’s all one can hope for. Not that I wish them dead, but it was better than we could have hoped for.” She hugged him. “Not that I mind, but what was that for? I only showed up after everything was finished up.”
“You just happened to give me the most information that I heard today. Thanks for that.” He told her that it was all right and started to say that it was his job. But all he did was nod at her and tell her he had to go. Aaron wanted to get the next part of the day over with.
The autopsies had begun before he entered the room for which it was designated for. With the agents in charge of it, all he did was stand back and listen. He was good at listening to things like this. It was getting up close with the bodies that bothered him on some level. When they started on the second body, he was asked if he had any questions about body one. There would be no more names to those who had been killed, nor the person who killed them. There wasn’t any way they were going to make either of them famous for what had transpired today.
“They were both killed with multiple bullets?” The agent answered for him. “So they were both shot by each officer. That’s good to know. I know you’ve retrieved the bullets, and they’ll go a long way in saying who had the killing shot, but I’d rather it wasn’t posted anywhere. I don’t want any harm to come to my officers.” The agent agreed, saying that his office would ensure that no one was named on who did the final shot. “Thank you for that. From this point forward, they won’t be named either, correct? Again for the same reason.”
“They’ll simply be called shooter one and shooter two. Does that make you feel better?” He said that it did and thanked the man. “I understand where you’re going, but I have a feeling that for every person who doesn’t mention names, there will be that many more saying it around your town. If nothing else, small towns get better intel than we do when we’re doing the investigation.”
With both bodies being finished, Aaron was ready to go home. It had been a very long day for him and the others, and he just wanted a hot meal and a nice, relaxing evening in front of the television. After making sure that his officers were home too, he made his way to the house that he’d been living in since he was eighteen, having moved out of his parents’ home. Sometimes he had to stop and really think about how long that had been. It seemed forever, but it had only been ten years. Christ, he just wanted things to be back to normal.
~*~
Betty hated hospitals with a passion. She’d been coming to this one since she was old enough to walk. And since getting married, she’d been here more than most. Having a deadbeat husband around made it so she was his punching bag for—
“Mrs. Palmer, when did you say you fell again?” She knew that the nurse knew she’d no more fallen than she’d gotten up winning the lottery this morning. But they both played the game so she could hold her head up high. She told her earlier this morning. “You have some other bruises on your back that look older. Have you fallen more than the one time?”
“I’m pretty clumsy.” The nurse, whose name tag said her name was Megan, asked her when that fall had been. “Three days ago now. That’s when I thought that I’d broken my leg.”
She still couldn’t look at her leg the way it was bruised up. From the knee to the bottom of her foot was all bruised. And some of the colors on it, red to a dark blue black color blended together in a way that reminded her of the darkest nightmares she’d ever had. Larry had taken a baseball bat to her body when he thought that dinner wasn’t coming to the table for him quick enough. Dirty bastard. She hated him with a passion that couldn’t be described. He’d been beating her up for the last five years, and she was sick of it and of him.
“The doctor wants to set you up with a head scan to make sure you don’t have a concussion.” She didn’t even glance at Larry to see if it was all right. He’d be the loving husband until they got home. He told Megan that he’d be all right with her getting one, so long as he could go with her. “I’m sorry, sir, but the room that they have to do it in has restrictions. You’d have to take off all metal, and that would include your wallet that’s connected to that chain. Not to mention all the rings you have on your face. That nose one would cause the machine to tear it from your face.”
“I guess it will be all right then. I don’t want to have to take out my piercings. A couple of them are new.” She knew that too. The one that he had on his lip was new, as was one of the ones on his ear. She didn’t have a single earring in her body and liked it just fine. But she did have to remove her watch. She hated to do that, especially when Larry said he’d hold onto it for her.
The watch had been a gift from her mom when she’d graduated from high school. It meant the world to her, and that’s why Larry would hold onto it. He knew she wouldn’t leave without it. Or so he thought. She thought that living without him around would be well worth losing the watch over. And she knew that her mother would agree with her had she been alive.
They wheeled her down to the room for the scan, and as soon as the door was closed behind her, Megan turned into this other person. Like she was a she bear and she was one of her cubs. All the indifference that she had before was gone.
“We’ve been waiting for you to come back in. Did you want out of this mess you’re in? We can and will help you.” She told her that he’d find her. “No, he won’t. He will have no idea where you are, especially if you press charges against him to put him in jail for a few days.”
The police officer that she was introduced to was Joey Dillon. She knew him from high school. He told her that he was there to take her statement if she was leaving tonight. It all seemed so rushed, but she had a feeling with the way things were going that this nurse and Joey had done this before. He smiled at her and told her that she’d be correct. She’d not even realized that she’d said anything out loud, but he seemed to understand that, too.
“I’m not human and can read your mind. That’s why we were so sure that you wanted out of this with Larry. He’s a mean bastard.” She said that he’d hurt her if he even thought that she was leaving him. “We’ve done this dozens of times before, and we’ve had no trouble. You just tell me what you want to do and you’ll be gone before he has any idea that you’ve been taken away.”
