Internal Affairs Read Free Page A

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 and Alyssa McDermott, their friends in the BCCPD crime scene unit, and had a girls’ night out. Or maybe they would’ve “double dated,” with Cassie and Alyssa pairing up with their husbands, while Chelsea and Sara hung together.
    It wasn’t the same these days with Chelsea gone into the FBI training program on the East Coast, though. Sara had tried going out with the others, and had felt like a fifth wheel. Chelsea had been the glue holding them together. Without her, it felt as if the rest of them were trying too hard. Even when Chelsea and Fax came back to the city, they were most often there on task force business, maybe with a little wedding planning snuck in on the side.
    Things had changed. The others had moved on, leaving Sara behind.
    Summoning a smile, she waved Stephen away. “Go on, get moving. You wouldn’t want to keep your women waiting.”
    But he didn’t move. Instead, he gave her a long, intense look. “I’ll do the agents when they come in, if you’d like. I can be here tomorrow morning, assuming they release the bodies that early.”
    He was talking about the manhunt, the men who’d died. She closed her eyes, feeling guilty over the stab of relief brought by the offer. “Have they announced the names?”
    “Not yet.”
    She nodded, knowing that even though she hadn’t been paying attention to the reports, the knowledge of the deaths, and the echoes it brought, had permeated her. “I’ll let you know.” Which was as close as she was going to get to confessing that she couldn’t handle how close the terrorists were hitting, and how much it bothered her that things seemed to be ramping up rather than settling down these days. It was hard not to wonder where it would all stop, and how many would die in the attack most of the task force members thought was imminent.
    Her mother and father were in rare agreement that she should give notice and get the hell out of Bear Claw Creek. Sara had seriously considered the option…for about thirty seconds before coming to the realization that she couldn’t do it. This was her home; she wasn’t giving up on it. And what was more, she wasn’t walking away from her job or her remaining staff members.
    This was her department, damn it. She might be going down, but she was going down fighting.
    After another long look, Stephen headed out. Telling herself she appreciated his concern, that it didn’t make her feel even lonelier than she had before, Sara completed the necessary paperwork on the cases she’d autopsied so far that day, then suited back up and returned to work.
    She processed three more routine cases over the remainder of the day and did her best to tune out the news bulletins when she passed through the break room, or got near Della’s desk, where the fiftysomething admin assistant had a police band radio turned low. Still, Sara couldn’t avoid knowing that the senior agents had called off the op, that the search dogs had followed two different trails ascribed to the terrorists, both of which had dead-ended in vehicle tracks heading for the main roads.
    It seemed that the op had been a quick scramble into the state forest, based on intel that several of al-Jihad’s people were holed up in a remote cabin, strategizing. Sara didn’t want to know but couldn’t help hearing that the two agents had lost their lives in pursuit of a small knot of men who appeared to have been carrying bodies, while a lone man had escaped in the opposite direction, and vanished into the wind. She didn’t want to know that the cabin had been stripped bare, and had burst into flames within minutes of the terrorists’ escape, torched by a hidden incendiary device.
    As usual, al-Jihad’s people had