Free The Survivor by Gregg Hurwitz Page B

through the hospital-issue T-shirt.
    Footsteps approached, and Nate closed his eyes, gathered himself. A pleasant woman in her forties answered, her husband behind her in gym clothes, a folded Wall Street Journal under his arm. The woman’s eyebrows rose with surprise. “Hi…?”
    He took quick note of the marble floor of the entry. “I’m Nate Overbay. Are you Erica? Sean?”
    “Yup.” Sean glanced at a runner’s watch with an angled face. He was a husky man, former athlete, with a wedge of dense copper hair. “What can we help you with?”
    “I work with LAPD. May I come in?” Nate wanted to get them seated; Sean O’Doherty was a big guy, and it was a long fall to that hard marble floor if he fainted.
    Erica nodded nervously. On their way to the couches, Sean let the newspaper drop. They sat, and Nate asked, “Just the two of you home?”
    Sean said nervously, “Yeah, yeah, just us.”
    Nate set his hands on his knees. He hated this moment most, the moment before the world flew apart.
    He cleared his throat. “At two-thirty today, your son Aiden was driving from his dorm room to guitar practice. He was struck by another car and brought into the USC Medical Center with severe injuries to his head and chest. He was unconscious. The medical staff did everything they could to revive him, but they failed, and he died.”
    A cry flew out of Erica. Her face turned red, and she leaned back into the cushions. Sean was standing; he’d moved so fast that Nate had missed the transition from couch to feet, and the man wobbled a moment and then sat down again. He was breathing hard, nostrils flaring. Nate gave them maybe ten seconds, which stretched longer than ten seconds seemed like they could.
    “I am so sorry to be here,” Nate said. “But I will help in any way I can and answer any questions.”
    The first reaction was often an unexpected one. Sean’s mouth tightened. “Who did you say you are again?”
    “Nate Overbay. I’m a Professional Crisis Responder.”
    The overblown title served to make up for the fact that he was not a social worker, a chaplain, or a paramedic. Though deployed by LAPD, he didn’t carry a badge and was not a sworn officer. When he first started nearly five years ago, a social-services team was supposed to go out every time, but budget cuts had whittled down the cast until he was the last man standing. Now, when he wasn’t available, death-notification service fell to whichever patrol officer drew the short straw. So Nate had done his best to be available for every call. To strive to better himself, to find one more way to diminish, however slightly, a family’s pain the next time around. He was not so dumb as to be unaware that he was trying again and again for personal redemption but not so smart as to figure out how to break the cycle.
    Erica’s voice fluttered, so fragile that Nate could barely make out the words: “This is a mistake. How can you be sure there wasn’t some mistake?”
    Nate had pulled the incident report, gone to the morgue to talk with the coroner, sat with Aiden and held his cold hand. To make sure he didn’t terrorize the wrong family, Nate had checked the driver’s license in Aiden’s wallet against the database in case the nineteen-year-old boy had been carrying a fake ID.
    “I’m certain,” Nate said. “Aiden was identified and pronounced dead at the hospital.”
    Experience had taught him that to overpower denial he needed to say to the bereaved, frequently and boldly, that the person had died. It had also taught him not to say that time heals all wounds, that he knew how they felt, that there was a reason for everything. He had learned when to pause, to let them breathe, when to lead and when to follow. But mostly he had learned to ignore everything he had learned, at a moment’s notice.
    Erica withdrew into herself, shoulders curling, chin dipping. Sean looked at her, his mouth downturning violently, almost a sob. “You’re the cops,” Sean