Only Murder (A Sadie Price FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 1)

CHAPTER TWO-1

CHAPTER TWO

“Jessica!”

Sadie screamed as she ran down the hill, skidding on the ice as she did so. Behind her, her friends called for her to come back, to not look, but Sadie felt hope filling her even though she somehow already knew it was futile.

Jessica had been missing for three days in the middle of a winter that was harsh even for the hinterlands. If it was indeed her sister that they were fishing out of the frozen lake at the bottom of the hill, then there was no way that she could still be alive.

Yet still, Sadie hoped.

Jessica couldn’t be gone. Her older sister was her rock, the person she relied on, and the one who shielded her from their father’s drunken rages which for some reason always seemed to be directed straight at Sadie. After a few drinks, he blamed Sadie for everything.

He would find a way to blame her for this, too. He always did.

The flicker of hope changed to despair as Sadie reached the bottom of the hill and ran to the lake. A crowd of onlookers had gathered, watching to see what – or who – the Dive and Search team had found. Faces turned her way as she approached, and she heard a murmur ripple through the crowd.

She heard the pity in their voices even before she could make out what they were saying, and that was when she knew. Really knew.

Jessica was gone. But the body they were pulling out of the lake, which she could see now, couldn’t be her sister. Underneath the blue tinge and the bloating, it might look like her, it might have her long dark hair, but it wasn’t Jessica. A frozen pile of flesh could not be her vibrant, beautiful sister. Perhaps it had housed her once, but Jessica was no longer there.

Someone stepped in front of her, hands outstretched, preventing her from getting any closer.

“Sadie, sweetheart,” she recognized the voice of one of her father’s friends, “stay here. You don’t want to see her like this.”

“It’s not Jessica,” she said stubbornly, trying to push her way past. Hands gripped her arms. There were other adults surrounding her now, speaking to her in hushed tones that infuriated her. She struggled against them. A State Trooper walked towards her, his face etched with the same pity as the others.

“Let me go!” she screamed. She didn’t want to talk to him, to any of them. She didn’t want to hear it.

A loud sobbing noise came from somewhere, a sound that seemed to echo around the lakes, disembodied from its source. It took Sadie a while before she realized that it was coming from her.

She crumpled then, sinking to the floor and into the soft snow. Someone’s arms went around her, but Sadie pushed them away. Someone was talking to her, trying to soothe her. Telling her that everything was going to be all right.

Sadie knew that they were lying.

Nothing was going to be all right ever again.

*

Sadie jolted awake, looking wildly around and expecting to see the lake and the crowd of people, confused when she saw that she was inside a taxicab.

It was just a dream, she told herself as she breathed deeply, trying to calm her racing heartbeat. Just a dream.

It had been a long time since she had experienced those dreams. Glimpses from a past that she had worked hard to file away in her memory.

But now she was driving straight back into it.

Sadie saw the taxi driver looking at her in the rearview mirror, his eyes concerned. She hoped that she hadn’t been thrashing about or talking in her fractured sleep.

It had been nine hours since the taxicab had picked her up from the airport at Juneau, and apart from a few toilet breaks there had been no chance to stretch her legs. Before her dream, she had tried to sleep on and off, only to jerk awake as her head knocked against the window and she was reminded of where she was and where she was going.

Home.

It was funny, but it didn’t feel like home at all.

The Alaskan landscape stretched on for miles on either side of her, the snow-covered mountains towering over her and making her feel so much smaller than she had in the city. The pitch black of night had given way to the dull gray of early morning and her surroundings were starting to take shape. At this time of the year the whole place was covered in different shades of white, from the deceptively fluffy looking blankets of snow that covered the evergreens to the blue-white mountain tips above her. It was both familiar and strange, a different world from the one she had been used to in the decade since she had left.

On either side of the road, snowbanks twice her own height hemmed them in. There were few other cars on the road that morning, other than the odd snow truck and another, lone taxicab going in the opposite direction. Leaving Anchorage just as Sadie was returning.

Unlike her, the landscape hadn’t changed. Long after she was gone, the same mountains would be here, looking down impassively at the travelers below, unimpressed by their comings and goings. As impervious to Sadie’s return as they had been the day that she had left, vowing never to set eyes on them again.

Unlike many who left Alaska though, it hadn’t been the unforgiving landscape or the harsh climate that had prompted her departure.

Although it wasn’t cold inside the cab, Sadie shivered and pulled her coat tighter around herself as though she could prevent the memories from assailing her. The closer that she got to her childhood home, the clearer they became. Why had she thought that the passage of time would make them any easier to bear? Not for the first time, she questioned her decision to return. To escape to the first place that she had ever needed to escape from.

“Nearly there now, ma’am,” the driver said gruffly, cutting into her thoughts. Sadie murmured a thank you, taking her eyes off the mountains and the ice and looking ahead as they started to approach something resembling civilization again.

They turned off the main road into the city and the snowbanks and evergreen-covered peaks became a backdrop to rows of gray buildings and scattered local businesses. A man on a dog sled crossed the road in front of them and the taxicab driver tutted with annoyance, no doubt in a hurry to drop Sadie off and get some sleep.

She was reminded suddenly of driving along this very road with her dad, heading into the town center to do a monthly shop, stocking up on goods to see them through a winter that had been harsher than this one. Not that Alaskan winters were ever anyone’s idea of mild.

He had been shouting at her, his knuckles white as they gripped the steering wheel, spit flying from his ranting mouth to hit the dashboard in front of him. Sadie couldn’t remember what he had been shouting about, but it didn’t matter. He was always shouting.

Especially at her. Somehow, everything had always been Sadie’s fault, in her father’s eyes at least.

They pulled up outside the square, brown building of the Anchorage FBI Field Office, and Sadie let out a breath she only then became aware that she was holding. She was here, at her new base. The implications of her decision to transfer all the way to Alaska from DC suddenly felt very real to Sadie, but she squared her shoulders, pulled up her hood and scarf, and reminded herself that her decision had been the right one, before she opened the cab door to step outside onto High Street, the muscles in her legs protesting after hours of being static in the cab.

Sadie gasped as the cold hit her like a slap.

She had expected it, of course, but had forgotten that here, in the depths of Alaska, the word cold carried very different connotations than it had down south. Especially in midwinter. This was a bone-deep numbness that left frost on her eyelashes, in spite of the furry hood that she wore and the thick scarf that was wrapped around her face. The back of her throat froze with every inhalation as she took her case from the cab driver and thanked him for his service.

It wasn’t just physical, either. The shock of the temperature after the warmth inside the taxicab seemed to chill her very thought processes and it took a few minutes for Sadie to collect herself before she headed into the office to find an empty reception.

Stamping her feet on the plastic grid that served as a welcome mat to get the snow off her boots, Sadie took her first look around the Field Office for Anchorage.

It was a lot smaller and shabbier than she was used to, a far cry from the shining and polished halls of the headquarters at DC. There, Sadie had been one of hundreds of people milling about, all with an air of importance as they went about federal business. This place was almost eerily quiet, and a layer of dust seemed to cling to every available surface. Her certainty about her decision flickered for a moment as she looked around and realized what she had left behind.

Anchorage had been regarded as a dead end down south, in terms of career progression, but Sadie knew that was no reflection on the caliber of the agents. Alaskans were rugged, resilient people in Sadie’s experience, and she was under no illusions that this would be an easy post, although quieter than she had previously been used to.

That quiet, she reminded herself, was why she had requested it. Alaska was what her mother had always referred to as a ‘place of the edges,’ and with the never-ending whiteness that stretched on up to the Arctic Ocean, it had always felt like the edge of the world to Sadie.

Then, of course, there were the people. ‘Edgy’ was a good description. As well as the hardy endurance of the natives, the fishermen and the oil-rig workers, there were those who had moved here from other places, seeking the silence and the snow. Misfits, usually, or outlaws. People running away from something.

Sadie thought that maybe she would fit right back in.

“Can I help you?”

A young field agent came through an adjoining door into the reception area, bright blue eyes looking suspiciously at Sadie. She pulled her badge out from under the thick confines of her jacket.

“Special Agent Price, reporting for duty,” Sadie said and watched the respect gleam in the other agent’s eyes. He looked young and freshly qualified, without the jaded look that all agents got eventually.

Give him time, Sadie thought. Her ten years on the job were enough to leave anyone jaded. He practically bounced over to shake her hand, which was still encased in her padded gloves. She couldn’t imagine ever feeling warm enough to take them off.

“Field Agent O’Hara,” he said. Sadie noticed the wispy stubble on his chin. “We will be working together at some point, I’m sure.”

Sadie smiled politely, not wanting to burst the younger agent’s bubble by telling him that, wherever possible, she preferred to work alone. These days, anyway.

O’Hara must have been expecting a more enthusiastic response as his smile dimmed slightly. “Right, I’ll take you through,” he said. Sadie followed him back through the door he had entered and down the corridor to the office of the ASAC, or Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge. Anchorage wasn’t big enough to warrant an Assistant Director, even though it covered the whole state.

Sadie had done her homework before arriving, and she knew that the ASAC, Paul Golightly, was a veteran agent with decades in the field. Originally from Ketchikan, he had stayed put in Alaska his whole life, stubbornly refusing transfers to other states even though Sadie suspected he would have been able to achieve a higher rank if he had done so.

Suddenly nervous, she wondered how she would be received, and how Golightly would feel about one of Quantico’s finest pitching up at his office. She had been so focused on getting away from her old post that she had given little thought to the new one, including her new colleagues. Now though, she felt her palms go clammy with anticipation.