Internal Affairs. Jessica Andersen

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СКАЧАТЬ to unfold an elaborate, devastating plan that the task force just couldn’t seem to get a handle on. The cops and agents had uncovered pieces and hints, but the terrorists’ main goal continued to elude them, even as the groundswell of suspicious activity seemed to suggest that an attack was imminent.

      Of course, the general population knew only some of what was going on. Sara knew more than most because her office was intimately involved with the BCCPD, and because she was close friends with a tightly knit group of cops and agents, three couples plus her as a spare wheel.

      The seven friends had banded together the previous year when FBI trainee Chelsea Swan—though back then she’d been one of Sara’s medical examiners—had fallen in with FBI agent Jonah Fairfax. Fax had assisted in the jailbreak in his role as a deep undercover operative, only to learn in the devastating aftermath that his superior was a traitor and he’d been unknowingly working on al-Jihad’s behalf. Sara, Chelsea, Fax and the others had managed to foil al-Jihad’s next planned attack, but they’d only managed to capture one of the terrorists, Muhammad Feyd, who’d proven to be a loyal soldier and had defied all efforts to get him talking.

      Al-Jihad and his remaining lieutenant, Lee Mawadi, along with Fax’s former boss, the eponymous Jane Doe, remained at large even now, ten months later. In that interim, there had been other, smaller incidents, along with a deadly riot at the ARX Supermax. Which Sara so wasn’t thinking about right now.

      She didn’t want to remember the men who’d died in the riot, or the one man in particular whose death had hit her far harder than it should have.

      Focus, girl, she told herself. The day’s only getting longer the more you stall.

      Concentrating on the innards at hand, Sara went through the process by rote, weighing and sampling, dictating notes as she worked. But although the actions were automatic—they ought to be, after six years on the job, two heading the Bear Claw ME’s office—they weren’t without compassion. Sara’s top-flight surgeon mother might consider her daughter’s medical skills wasted on the dead, but Sara knew she worked for the families as much as the corpses, and took satisfaction from providing answers, shedding light onto causes of death that might otherwise be misinterpreted.

      Contrary to what some popular TV shows might portray, only a small fraction of the bodies coming through the ME’s office were instances of foul play. The vast majority was made up of an almost equal balance between natural causes and accidental fatalities. Her current case fell into the former, i.e., a catastrophic cardiac event brought on by a high-risk lifestyle and inconsistently treated hypertension.

      As she stripped off her protective gear and headed for her office to finish up the necessary paperwork, Sara found herself wishing that more of her recent cases had been so straightforward. It wasn’t that she wanted her life to be easy or boring, but she’d gone into pathology because she’d grown up a passenger of her parents’ roller-coaster ride of emotions, and she hadn’t wanted the highs and lows of living medicine.

      Little had she known she’d wind up in the middle of a terror threat that had the entire city by the throat, and that she’d be far more enmeshed in the case than she would’ve preferred. Granted, the investigation had moved away from her office in the months since the prison riot, but her close ties to members of the task force kept her involved, as did the caseload she’d been forced to assume in the face of a serious manpower shortage.

      The lack of staff members in the ME’s office was yet another of Acting Mayor Proudfoot’s unsubtle efforts to get rid of all the young, energetic hires made by his forward-thinking predecessor, who had been disgraced and ousted when damning photographs had surfaced involving the mayor and several girls of questionable age.

      That had been too bad as far as Sara was concerned; she didn’t condone the former mayor’s ethical lapses, but she thought he’d been taking the city in a positive direction by bringing fresh blood into the crime scene unit, the ME’s office and several other tech-based divisions of city government. Since the ex-mayor’s departure, Proudfoot had been undoing those advances, piece by piece, making no bones about the fact that he intended to return Bear Claw Creek to the “good old days”—i.e., the days of minimal technology and pay-to-play politics.

      Proudfoot’s efforts had been blunted somewhat by the terrorist threat, but his image lurked at the back of Sara’s mind on a daily basis. She knew he was just waiting for her to mess up badly enough that he could get rid of her and return the ME’s office to the age of dinosaurs, with his cronies in charge.

      “Which is another thing that belongs in the category of ‘things I don’t want to think about right now,’” she said to herself on a long sigh, pinching the bridge of her nose to stave off the headache that always encroached when she thought about all the things she was trying not to think about these days.

      The list was long. And frankly, it didn’t leave her much to think about.

      “Hey, boss.” The hail came from Stephen, the sole remaining medical examiner beside herself. He was tall, lean and graying, a good ten years older than her own thirty-five, and had worked in the Bear Claw ME’s office for nearly a dozen years. Miraculously, though, he didn’t seem to resent that Sara—young, female, relatively inexperienced—had been hired in above him as his boss. If anything, he seemed happy to let her have the headaches that came with the position.

      “Hey yourself.” Sara didn’t ask about the manhunt, didn’t want to know. “You’re headed out early today, right?”

      He nodded, a soft smile touching his lips, lighting his usual neutral expression. “Celia and I are bringing Chrissy for a checkup.” Chrissy was the change-of-life baby, nearly twenty years younger than their eldest, who had surprised Stephen and his wife the year before. By all indications, little Chrissy would grow up dearly beloved by their entire extended family, and most likely spoiled rotten.

      The quiet joy on the older man’s face squeezed at Sara’s heart. She nodded, forcing herself to feel happy for him rather than sorry for herself. “Tell Celia I said hi.”

      “I’ll do that. I can come back after, if you want me to.” He glanced at the wipe board that hung in the hallway opposite their office doors, where the pending cases were listed. “Things are backing up.”

      They were, indeed, and a large part of Sara wanted to keep the office running around the clock until they’d cleared the board and gotten ahead of the looming mountains of paperwork. But logic said that Proudfoot wouldn’t be impressed with that show of efficiency. If anything, he’d take it as an indication that she’d manage just fine with an even smaller staff.

      She shook her head. “Thanks for the offer, but no. Head on home. I’ll clear what I can, and we can start over tomorrow.”

      He sent her a long look. “Promise me you won’t stay past normal human quitting time? It is Friday. You know…the weekend?”

      She winced. “You got me. We’ll start over on Monday.” Which didn’t mean she wouldn’t be in over the next two days. She had abolished the weekend and overnight shifts due to staff constraints, but she still liked to come into the office herself, when everything was relatively quiet.

      Two years earlier, it would’ve been easy to promise Stephen she’d leave for the weekend, because she would’ve known there was someone waiting for her at home—someone to cook with, eat with, laugh with, love with.

      Even a year ago, having more or less recovered from the catastrophic implosion of that relationship, she would’ve had plans of some sort. She and Chelsea would’ve hooked up with Cassie Dumont-Varitek СКАЧАТЬ