Sharp by Alex Hughes

Author:Alex Hughes
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Science Fiction, Thriller, Fantasy
Publisher: Roc
Published: 2013-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Thursday morning, bright and early, I was relieved to be back at work. Back to where, for now at least, Stone couldn’t ambush me, and I could do some good, even with a reaction-headache the size of Texas from last night’s occurrences and this morning’s too-difficult exercises. Mindspace was steady, though, if painful; I was getting stronger over time. If I’d stop pushing it, if I’d let it be, I’d probably be healed up in a few weeks.

I needed to stick to crosswords and stretching for a while.

I reported to the conference room. Cherabino had told Michael to send all the information about the case to Piccanonni, the state-level Georgia Bureau of Investigation profiler who’d helped us out previously. Now it was time for the woman to call us back.

Michael was there when I arrived. I sat a respectable distance from him, still within arm’s reach of Cherabino, but I gestured to the coffee I’d brought him. Olive branch bringer, that was me.

“Am I early?”

“She’s running late, apparently.” Cherabino was blocking me, visualizing a brick wall between us so starkly I could actually see the bricks. “Are you okay?” she asked, in a tone designed not to travel the length of the table to Michael.

I ignored the overture. “Did she get any information for us?”

She looked down at the table, then back at me. She wanted to push it. I could feel how much she wanted to push it, but she was a cop. A cop who was surrounded with guys in the middle of some really horrible emotional stuff. She knew the code.

“Did Michael’s research help?”

“This is the first I’ve heard from her in days. You know what I know.” She paused. “The GBI is doing us a favor. We’ll wait as long as it takes.”

I pulled a few sheets from the stack of recycled fiber paper in the small supply hutch in the corner. We were in the smaller of the two conference rooms, this one called Dupin after some fictional detective I’d never heard of. Other than the hutch and the ridiculously large table and chairs, there wasn’t room for anything else in the room but walls. The walls themselves were dotted with hundreds of tiny holes, the occasional pushpin still sticking to a scrap of paper. This wasn’t the conference room for guests.

The phone in the center of the table started ringing right when I sat down. I creased the paper as Cherabino answered, on speaker.

“Cherabino. Nice to hear from you,” the phone said in a precise soprano. “Thank you for waiting. You’ve stumbled across one of the big question marks in our department, and I had to go up the chain of command to get clearance for the details.” What I remembered about Piccanonni from our one in-person meeting was her overly ordered mind, every thought organized, every idea tagged and arranged in precise cubbies. As for physical appearance, she wasn’t young, she didn’t wear a lot of makeup, and she wasn’t abnormally thin or fat or tall or short.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.