LITMIR.BIZ

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Brush.

      Flick hopped down and rummaged through the drawer in the small metal chest beside the bed. She found a boar-bristle hairbrush, set it on the bed, then climbed back up beside him. “Where do you want your part?”

      He turned relieved eyes to Kristin and said, “O. I ine.”

      Go. I’m fine.

      Kristin hurried from the room before she could reconsider. She couldn’t miss her investigative meeting with SIRT. And maybe, if Flick had enough trouble communicating with her grandfather, he’d reconsider the speech therapy he’d been refusing.

      Kristin headed east from Jackson Memorial on the Dolphin Expressway and kept her fingers crossed as she merged onto I-95 North toward the Miami Field Office. On paper, the MFO was only a seventeen-minute drive straight up the Interstate from the hospital. But all it took was one fender bender to turn I-95 into a parking lot in the middle of the day.

      She exhaled when she found traffic moving freely. But she hadn’t driven more than a mile before she found herself slowing to a crawl. “Come on!” she muttered, pounding the steering wheel of her Camry. She checked her watch. She’d given herself an extra twenty minutes to get there, just in case, and it looked like she was going to need every second of it.

      She turned the radio to a station that played upbeat Latin music and imagined herself sitting on a warm beach under a colorful umbrella with an ice-cold mojito in hand. She was doing a lot of imagining these days, because her life kept shifting out of her control.

      During the past week, she had been asked to spy in London, called 911 to come get her father after his stroke, been involved in another shooting incident at work, in which her partner was seriously wounded, and picked up her errant daughter at the airport after she’d been thrown out of school.

      Kristin felt like she’d hit her limit of bad news for one week. Except she now had to face the Shooting Incident Review Team, which held her fate in its hands. What if the board decided to suspend her? Or fire her? She felt a knot forming in the pit of her stomach.

      Breathe, Kristin. This, too, shall pass.

      But where would she be when it did?

      It took fifteen minutes before she passed a two-car accident, which wasn’t even blocking the lane, but which motorists had slowed down to ogle. She made fast time the rest of the way to the exit for North Miami Beach, but she could almost feel the minutes ticking away.

      The concrete-and-glass MFO building took up an entire city block and more. The FBI had set up shop in Miami as far back as 1924, and there were still enough criminals—and violations of the rights of American citizens in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America—to keep the MFO hopping.

      Kristin heard a clap of thunder and eyed the dark clouds overhead. “Do not rain,” she muttered. “Do not rain.” It had been unseasonably hot the entire month of April and unseasonably rainy, as well. She drove as fast as she dared around the enormous MFO parking lot searching for a spot, anxious to get inside before the downpour started.

      She started jogging when the first large raindrops hit her cheeks and eyelashes, but before she reached the door, the heavens let go. Kristin was breathing hard by the time she got inside and stood dripping—and swearing under her breath—at the security checkpoint.

      “You look like a drowned rat, Lassiter.”

      Kristin turned and saw her boss, Special Agent in Charge Rudy Rodriguez, ready to exit the building, umbrella in hand. In the four years since she’d come to Miami from the FBI Academy at Quantico, Kristin had never seen the Miami SAC caught unprepared.

      Rudy was several inches under six feet, big-chested, with a thick waist and dark, sharp eyes. The SAC brushed his receding black hairline straight back from his brow with a palm and said, “I thought your meeting with SIRT was at 3:00.”

      “It is.” Kristin had never gotten used to the SAC’s gravelly voice, the result of being nearly strangled to death in an undercover drug operation gone bad.

      Rudy glanced at his watch, then reached into his suit coat pocket and came out with a neatly ironed white handkerchief, which he handed to her. “You might want to dry off a little before you head upstairs.”

      She took the monogrammed cotton cloth, dabbed at her forehead, cheeks and chin, brushed off the shoulders and lapels of her suit jacket, and handed it back. “Thanks.”

      She noticed Rudy didn’t offer advice about what she should say at the hearing. Or console her for having to go through the process of being questioned by SIRT again.

      “Good luck,” he said. Then he was gone.

      Kristin cleared security as quickly as she could, then took the elevator up to the office of Supervisory Special Agent Roberta Harrison, who was in charge of the MFO’s Office of Professional Responsibility. The OPR was charged with ensuring that agents conducted themselves with the highest level of integrity and professionalism. SSA Harrison did everything by the book, which made her good at her job.

      But Harrison had never worked in the field, so she had very little idea how quickly decisions had to be made in moments of extreme duress. And therefore little—make that no—tolerance for honest mistakes.

      Which was what the shooting incident Kristin had been involved in four months ago had been. Kristin was aware of how much it had irked SSA Harrison that no disciplinary action had been mandated by the Shooting Incident Review Team in that instance.

      Unfortunately, there was no way to excuse what Kristin had done four days ago as an honest mistake. It was dereliction of duty, at the very least. Agent Harrison was finally going to get her pound of flesh. And maybe Kristin’s badge and gun.

      Kristin’s crisply ironed shirt had been wilted by the rain, but she squared her shoulders anyway as she was ushered into the hearing room by a civil service secretary. Because she’d so recently been examined—interrogated—by SIRT, she knew what was coming.

      Her heartbeat ratcheted up another notch and she took a calming breath to try to slow it down. Her stomach made a rumbling sound and she realized she hadn’t eaten lunch. Maybe that was the reason she felt so nauseous. Or maybe it was the result of a life rocketing out of her control.

      “Sit down, please, Agent Lassiter,” SSA Harrison said. Technically, Agent Harrison wasn’t part of SIRT, but she’d apparently decided to attend the meeting.

      Kristin seated herself and looked from one sober face on the SIRT panel to the next seated across from her. Three of the four FBI special agents on the Shooting Incident Review Team identified themselves as being from the Criminal Investigative Division, Training Division (Ballistics) and the Office of General Counsel.

      “We’ve met,” the fourth special agent reminded her. “I’m Todd Akers, Inspector in Charge of this investigation.” Akers reminded her he was from the Inspection Division.

      Kristin surreptitiously wiped her sweaty palms on the front of her trousers under the conference table as she eyed her inquisitors. No one on the Shooting Incident Review Team looked sympathetic.

      She didn’t blame them. The charges against her were serious. She and her partner had been ambushed inside a home in Liberty City while they were questioning the occupants about an armed bank robbery. Because she’d hesitated before drawing her weapon—and then hesitated too long before firing it—her partner had been shot and seriously wounded. And because she’d fallen apart after her partner was wounded, the suspected bank robbers had escaped.

      “I wondered whether SIRT was letting you off too lightly the last time, Agent Lassiter,” Roberta Harrison said. “I thought at the time you were acting with reckless disregard for human life when you shot that sixteen-year-old boy. You were lucky the local authorities decided not to prosecute.”

      “I believed he had a gun.” Kristin felt her face flushing with the heat of anger. She’d been cleared of any wrongdoing in the previous shooting incident by SIRT, and here was Roberta Harrison, who wasn’t even part

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