Night Sins Read Free Page B

flicked on the desk lamp. “How's Craig's patient?”
    Kathleen slid into the visitor's chair. She crossed a sneaker over one knee and rubbed absently at an ink mark on the leg of her scrub pants. “He'll be fine. A couple of broken bones, a slight concussion, whiplash. He was lucky. His car was turned sideways at the moment of impact. The other car hit him on the passenger side.
    “Poor kid. He feels terrible about the accident. He keeps going on and on about how the road was dry and then suddenly there was this big patch of ice and he was out of control.”
    “I guess life can be that way sometimes,” Hannah murmured, fingering the small cube-shaped clock on her desk. The wood was bird's-eye maple, smooth and satiny beneath her fingertips. An anniversary gift from Paul four years ago. A clock so she would always know how long it would be before they could be together again.
    “Yeah, well, you've hit your patch of ice for the night,” Kathleen said. “Time to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get home to the munchkins.”
    A chill went through Hannah like a dagger of ice. Her fingers tightened on the clock and tilted the face up to the light. Six-fifty.
    “Oh, my God. Josh. I forgot about Josh!”

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    J OURNAL ENTRY
D AY 1
    The plan has been perfected.
    The players have been chosen.
    The game begins today.

CHAPTER 2
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    D AY 1
6:42 P.M.          22°
    M egan O'Malley had never expected to meet a chief of police in his underwear, but then again, it had been that kind of day. She had not allotted enough time for moving into the new apartment. Rather, she had not allowed for as many screwups as she had encountered before, during, and after the move. She kicked herself for that. Should have known.
    Of course, there were things that couldn't have been foreseen. She couldn't have foreseen the key breaking off in the ignition of the moving van yesterday, for example. She couldn't have foreseen her new landlord hitting it big on the pull tabs at the American Legion hall and skipping town on a charter trip to Vegas. She couldn't have imagined that tracking down the keys to her apartment would involve a manhunt into the deepest, darkest reaches of the BuckLand cheese factory, or that once she got into the apartment, none of the utilities that were to have been turned on two days before were operational. No phone. No electricity. No gas.
    The disasters and delays clustered together in a spot above her right eye. Pain nibbled at the edge of her brain, threatening a full-blown headache. The last thing she needed was to start her new assignment with a migraine. That would establish her all right—as weak. Small and weak—an image she had to fight even when she was in the best of health.
    As of today she was a field agent for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, one of the top law enforcement agencies in the Midwest. As of today she was one of only eleven field agents in the state. The only woman. The first female to crash the testosterone barrier of the BCA field ranks. Someone somewhere was probably proud of her for that, but Megan doubted that sentiment would extend to the male bastions of outstate law enforcement. Feminists would call her a pioneer. Others would use words omitted from standard dictionaries for the sake of propriety.
    Megan called herself a cop. She was sick and tired of having gender enter into the discussion. She had taken all required courses, passed all tests—in the classroom and on the streets. She knew how to handle herself, knew how to handle anything that could shoot. She'd done her time on patrol, earned her stripes as a detective. She'd put in the hours at headquarters and had been passed over twice for a field assignment. Then finally her time had come.
    Leo Kozlowski, the Deer Lake district agent, dropped dead from a heart attack at the age of fifty-three. Thirty years of doughnuts and cheap cigars had finally caught up with him and landed poor old Leo facedown