Adele jerked awake, gasping, her teeth clenched around the edge of her blanket, biting hard to stop the scream bubbling in her throat.
She sat there in her bed, in her and Angus’s small apartment, staring across the darkened room, breathing rapidly. It was all right; it was over. She was fine.
She reached out, groping for the comforting warmth of Angus, but her fingertips brushed only cool sheets. Then she remembered the previous night.
Adele clenched her teeth, closing her eyes for a moment. The air felt chilly all of a sudden. She reached up and brushed back her hair. Every bone in her wanted to lie back down, to return to the warmth and safety of her covers. Sleep frightened her sometimes, but her bed was always a welcome shelter.
She forced her eyes open, clenching one fist and bunching it around her pajamas beneath the covers.
Safety and warmth bred weakness. The Sergeant had often said, when she was growing up, that the difference between sluggards and winners was their first decision in the morning. Those who put their heads back to the pillow would never amount to much in life.
And while she was no longer a six-year-old little girl, Adele still swung her legs over the side of the bed, kicking off her covers. slapping her feet against the vinyl floor. With practiced and deft motions she made her bed, arranging her sheets and tucking the corners of the blankets beneath the mattress.
She moved across the room toward where the turtle sat in her glass display case. She and Angus had argued about the gender of the creature—they still weren’t sure. Angus thought of him as a boy, yet to Adele, the turtle was clearly a girl. The thought of Angus sent a jolt of discomfort through her, and she swallowed, pushing back the surge of emotion.
Using the provided spoon, she measured the turtle’s food into its aquarium, watching the creature meander slowly around the habitat of small stones and faux leaves. Gregory had woken up before her—how embarrassing.
She glanced at the red numbers on the digital clock by her bedside. 4:25 a.m. Perfect. She’d woken before the alarm had gone off. The start to any good routine required an attuned body.
Adele quickly dressed into her jogging clothes and left her apartment. There was no sense in waking early unless she put her time to good use, so 4:30 to 6:00 every morning was the slot for her morning run. Some people listened to music while they exercised, but Adele found that it distracted her. Effort and discomfort required attention.
When she returned from her jog, Adele went directly to the cupboard over the stove, dragging out a box of Chocapic. She wiped sweat from her forehead and focused on her breathing as she poured herself a bowl of the chocolate cereal. She ordered it from France—a small luxury, but a childhood favorite. They didn’t make cereal the same way in the US.
Adele grabbed her cereal and a spoon, then hurried to the shower. Small habits compounded through time. Minutes wasted in the morning led to minutes wasted in the day. Angus had often teased her about eating cereal in the shower, especially that time when she’d accidentally swallowed soap, but it was another habit of hers she refused to give up. The secret to success lay in routine.
It was as she stepped out of the shower, toweling her hair with one hand and carrying an empty bowl in the other, that Adele heard her phone chirp from the other room.
She glanced at the digital clock beneath the steamed mirror, frowning. She kept a clock in every room. 6:12 a.m.
Strange. Who would be calling her this early?
Adele quickly dried off and got dressed, pulling her shirt on as she hurried out the bathroom door and stumbled into the kitchen.
“Hello?” she said, lifting the phone to her ear.
“Agent Sharp?” said the voice on the other end.
“Yes?”
“It’s Sam. We need you to come in.”
Adele frowned, lowering her faded, plastic Mickey Mouse bowl into the sink. “As in now?”
“As in an hour ago. You better hurry.”
“You sure? I was told I had three days.”
There was a sigh on the other end and the sound of voices in the background.
“Vacation is going to have to wait, Sharp.”
“Can I ask why?”
“The Benjamin Killer dropped another body last night. How soon can you—”
“I’m on my way.”
Adele didn’t even clean her bowl—normally a sacrilege in her house—before rushing to don her work clothes, shoes, and jacket and racing out the door.
Twenty-six. Twenty-five. Twenty-four.
CHAPTER FOUR
Speed limits often felt like suggestions when new leads developed in a case. Still, Adele did her best not to rankle San Francisco’s finest—especially not this early in the day. The closer she got to the heart of the city, the more the traffic slowed.
She tapped her fingers against the wheel in frustration, berating the drivers around her silently in her head. As she glared out of the tinted window of her Ford sedan, Adele couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps Angus was right. Maybe she was married to the job.
A three-day vacation—that’s what they’d promised her. Yet, here she was, rushing into work the moment they snapped their fingers and whistled. Just like a good little girl.
Adele clenched her teeth, pushing the thought from her mind. It wouldn’t do to dwell on such things. Especially not with what was at stake.
Who had he killed? Would they be able to find new evidence?
“I’m coming for you, you bastard,” she murmured. “I’ll get you this time.” Adele had spent years trying to shed the accent developed over a life lived overseas. But when she got upset or angry, traces of her heritage would peek through, making themselves known in the lilt of her words. “Damn it,” she muttered, slowing her speech, flattening the vowels. “Damn it,” she repeated, more precise, more careful. No emotion. No accent. “Damn it,” a final time. Hours like this, in front of a mirror, had all but chased the reminders of her past from her speech.
She nodded in satisfaction, then glanced over and realized the woman in the lane next to her had her window down and was staring at Adele, her plucked eyebrows high on her fat-injected forehead.
Sheepishly, Adele rolled up her own window. She flashed a smile and a wave, then stared resolutely ahead for the rest of the slow, snail’s pace of a drive. She made one more stop just before reaching the office—pulling through a Starbucks drive-through and grabbing a large black, no sugar.
She reached the private lot for the San Francisco field office a half hour later. The two layers of security hadn’t caused trouble once she flashed her ID. She adjusted her jacket and doubled-checked the buttons as she hurried into the east branch through the elevator from the car park.
Another row of metal detectors and men in suits with bored expressions, who smelled like stale coffee and cigarettes, eventually gave way to a long, beige hallway.
“Agent Sharp,” said one of the older men, tipping an imaginary cap in her direction from where he squatted on a three-legged stool between the metal detectors.
“Hey, Doug,” she greeted him with a wave. She smiled at the man, admiring the neat press of his collar and the shine of his shoes. “Looking sharp as always.”
He chuckled, a low, rasping sound. Doug had been a field worker about twenty years ago, but had taken some shrapnel on his last assignment which had confined him to the office. His inability to make rank, however, had nothing to do with shrapnel and everything to do with a complete disdain for office politics. Some in the office thought the elevators needed a “Beware of Doug!” sign. He rarely played nice with others, yet had taken a fondness to Adele that had nothing to do with her gender or her looks. She extended the black, sugarless coffee on top of the X-ray machine, leaving the steaming liquid next to the security officer’s scarred hand—two fingers were missing, also courtesy of the car bomb that had claimed his career.