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unable to do anything about it but curse Jack Hale under her breath and move on.
    “From Atlanta?” Jaworski asked, puzzled. A cough shook his wasting frame. He took a long sip of ice water. Ariel thought his fingers looked like dying twigs wrapped ‘round the sweating glass.
    “The orders were approved by Washington,” Ariel said. And mustn’t that have been a trick for Jack Hale to arrange overnight.
    “I can see the signature, Agent Grace, but what I can’t see is why I’m getting you from all the way down south. I’ve requested additional personnel, but usually they get pulled from somewhere close.”
    “I didn’t request this, sir. But I’m here, and I’m ready to work.”
    “Sit down, Agent Grace.” She took the only other seat, a government issue facing Jaworski’s desk, stiff and gray, vinyl and metal. He looked at the orders again as she shifted for a comfortable position. “What did you work in Atlanta?”
    “I ran task force five,” she said, surprised that he didn’t know that.
    Jaworski looked to her, squinting a bit. “You ran a most wanted task force?”
    “Looking for Mills DeVane, sir.”
    He considered her for a moment. Businesslike, she was, in matching blue blazer and slacks. Her hair was brown and fell just below the collar, coiffed very proper. Voice clear, blue gaze steady. All things very right—very purposely right. She was trying hard to not be something. To not be seen as something.
    “How old are you Agent Grace?”
    There was the briefest pause before she replied. “I’ll be thirty in December, sir.”
    “Twenty nine then, are you?”
    She nodded to his ‘clarifying’ query.
    “Twenty nine and running a task force,” he said as comment. “How long have you been with the Bureau?”
    “Six years, sir,” she told him. No hesitation this time. “I was fully capable of doing the job.”
    He nodded. “So why aren’t you still?”
    That pause stalled her again. Jaworski had her number. Had her dialed in. She wasn’t sure she liked that.
    “One of my warrant services went bad,” she told him. That was one man’s opinion, anyway.
    Lines cleaved his brow. Hell, he’d been living and breathing his own task force, number ten, night and day, but he hadn’t been that disconnected from Bureau happenings, had he? “People get hurt?”
    She shook her head.
    Now he was really lost. “No one was hurt. So what went bad about it?”
    “DeVane wasn’t there.” Would have been, except for that car...that car that was and wasn’t there.
    “Wait,” Jaworski said, sitting back, letting the chair’s soft cushion nearly swallow him. “You got yanked and spanked because your guy wasn’t there? Because you missed him?”
    That might seem the reason, but Ariel knew better. Knew as soon as she’d read her orders Saturday morning. The orders that also mentioned her replacement.
    “ASAC Hale made the call, sir. It’s his task force now.”
    “I see that,” Jaworski said. Right there, in the orders, it was spelled out. And wasn’t that odd? Why in the hell was the number two agent in Atlanta taking on a task force? There had to be something more to this.
    But whatever that might be, it was not Jaworski’s concern. He had no time for it. More pressing matters were at hand. Like catching his own freak, who was very much out there, and very much active. And now he had one more body to throw at his boy. One more body that he had to get up to speed. Fast.
    “You’re all squared away, then, Grace?”
    “Sir?”
    “Ride, place to stay? The F.O. get you what you need?”
    “Yes, sir.” She’d flown in on Sunday and had been issued a Bureau Taurus by the Albany Field Office, and vouchers for the Bright I Motor Hotel here in Damascus. She’d spent a restless night there watching an old horror flick on the tube and eating take-out Chinese. When sleep finally dragged her down she dreamt of Jack Hale. He was getting the shit stomped out of him by some Frankensteinish