Page 7 of Wrong Way

She smiled briefly. "Happy to be your reality check."

Miles set his plate down on the coffee table and leaned back. The beer was cold and the food had been good. Also, the apartment felt less empty than it had in a while, and he was aware of all of that simultaneously in a way that made him slightly uncomfortable. It had been seven months since Elena had passed away. He had thought about this dinner more than he'd thought about most things in the past two weeks, which was its own piece of information that he was not ready to do anything with. He had told himself he was simply glad to have someone to eat dinner with who wasn't Vic, which was true, but it was not the complete truth.

He looked at Sarah and found her already looking at him. They both looked away at slightly different moments, like kids across the lunch table, harboring crushes.

They talked for another forty minutes or so, easy and enjoyable. The longer they spoke, the more Miles felt the particular tension of the past two weeks ease down to something closer to manageable. He was on his second beer and Sarah was finishing her first when his phone lit up on the cushion beside him.

He glanced at the screen and saw HAYES on the display.

"Sorry, it’s Hayes,” he told Sarah. He then answered the call with, “This is Sterling.”

"Sterling." Hayes sounded clipped and alert, which at 8:20 on a weeknight meant something had come in. "We have a suspicious death in Austin, Texas that could track with Kane. A fortune teller was found dead in her shop, and responding officers initially called it accidental. But after the autopsy, the medical examiner flagged it due to electrical burns consistent with high-voltage exposure. Local detectives discovered that there's an electrical setup in the shop that doesn't match any normal commercial equipment configuration. The local field office reached out."

Miles was already sitting forward. "How high voltage?"

"That's part of what needs to be established. The equipment in the shop is being held for examination. There's a neon sign apparatus that the ME thinks may have been the source, but it's not a straightforward conclusion."

"Neon sign transformers run at several thousand volts," Miles said. "If the ground was disconnected and someone made contact with the secondary terminal, it would be sufficient."

"Which is why I'm calling you and not leaving this to the Austin field office." Hayes paused briefly. "I want you and Stone on a flight tomorrow morning. I'll have the local contacts ready for you when you land."

"Understood." Miles stood and walked toward the kitchen, lowering his voice out of habit rather than necessity. "What about Kim? She's been running chemical compound surveillance for the disciple work, but if this is elemental, she could be useful on the ground."

"I'd rather keep her where she is," Hayes said without much thought. "She's in the middle of three active screening cases and I don't want to pull her off that. You and Stone are sufficient for the initial assessment. If it develops, we'll reassess. And if it doesn’t, we’ll hopefully have you back home in less than two days."

"Understood."

"I've got you and Stone on a 7 a.m. flight out of Dulles. I'll send the details."

Hayes ended the call, leaving Miles to stand in his kitchen for a moment. He considered the details—not quite sure it did track with Kane and his disciples, before walking back to the living room. Sarah was already reading his expression, smiling sadly.

"You have to go," she said.

"Tomorrow morning. Austin." He sat back down and reached for his beer. "There’s a death that looks like it might be elemental. And I stress looks like.”

She absorbed that without visible reaction, which was one of the things he had come to rely on in her. She didn't perform alarm. "What's the element?"

"That's what we're going there to find out. And because it’s not so clear, it makes me think it could be a wild goose chase.”

“Better safe than sorry, though…right?”

He nodded and began gathering the takeout containers into a loose stack, consolidating what was left. As he threw it all in the bin, Miles looked back to her for a moment and thought about saying something else, something that acknowledged the evening for what it had been. He didn't quite get there.

"This was good," he said instead. "I'm glad you came over."

Sarah looked up at him. "Me, too," she said, and her voice was straightforward and without any subtlety. She held his gaze for just a second longer than the words required before she looked back down at her beer bottle.

Miles finished his beer and felt a small war begin to form in his head as he wondered what it might be like to kiss Sarah while standing in the shadow of grief that was Elena's memory.

CHAPTER FIVE

Hahn's cubicle was the cleanest workstation on the floor, and he knew it because he had looked. Every other desk in the task force section had the particular entropy of people working too fast on too many things at once: stacked folders, empty cups, charging cables draped across keyboards, sticky notes overlapping other sticky notes. Hahn's desk had none of that. His monitor sat at a precise distance from the edge. His two charging cables were routed along the back of the desk and held together with a Velcro strap. He kept one personal item among it all—a small, framed photo of his mother taken at her retirement party two years ago. Everything else was either in use or in a drawer.

It was not a performance. He simply found it easier to think when the physical environment didn't create noise, and right now he needed to think clearly.

He had spent the better part of two days building his file on Jennifer Parsons. What he had was not conclusive, but it was coherent, and coherent was more than most of the task force's screening leads had managed in the past month. The information Reyes had given him centered around Portland, Maine but the profile he had put together for Jennier Parsons told a much more complicated story.

Parsons was thirty-six years old and worked as a regional procurement coordinator for a medical supply distributor based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire before moving to Maine. The job gave her legitimate access to chemical suppliers and a working knowledge of procurement systems, which explained how she was spacing her purchases across multiple vendors without triggering any single company's internal flagging protocols. She knew how the ordering infrastructure worked and she was using that knowledge deliberately.