Internal Affairs by Jessica Andersen

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    Instead, she closed and locked her sticky office door, and broke the seal on the folder. A quick scan confirmed the negative results on the DNA profiling, and added two critical pieces of information, one good, one bad. On the good side, the bullet hadn’t come from an official weapon and it didn’t match any of the personal sidearms belonging to task force officers, which suggested Romo hadn’t been shot by one of the good guys. On the bad side, the spatter pattern—what Cassie had been able to get off the small pieces of black T-shirt, anyway—was consistent with close-range arterial spray from a severed throat, and the shirt’s wearer had most likely wielded the knife.
    Sara had taken a good look at the patterns on the shirt, and though she was no expert, she’d been certain that the blood from Romo’s injury had soaked in atop the edges of the spatter, giving the incidents a time frame. Adding the information together, she could come up with a hypothesis of sorts, namely that sometime the prior day, just before—or during—the op that led to the manhunt, Romo had cut a man’s throat and then been shot in the back by someone other than a cop.
    Sara blew out a breath. Between the blood and bullet evidence, it seemed reasonable to conclude that Romo had been the unidentified man who had escaped alone from the manhunt. She tried to tell herself that didn’t necessarily mean he was one of the good guys, but on some level it felt that way. He’d turned on the terrorists, or they’d turned on him. Either way, didn’t it stand to reason that the enemy of Bear Claw’s enemies was on their side, more or less?
    The logic wasn’t perfect, she knew, but she thought it might be enough to help her convince Romo to give himself up to Fax or Tucker, both of whom she trusted implicitly.
    Her friends might not have liked him much after the breakup, but they were all task force members, and at this point would take whatever help they could get whenit came to getting al-Jihad, Lee Mawadi, Jane Doe and the others into custody. They would help…assuming she could talk Romo into turning himself in. Problem was, he could be seriously stubborn, and Sara had never once been able to make him do something he didn’t want to.
    “You’d better start now,” she told herself. “Lives might depend on it.” Hers. His. Those of the citizens of Bear Claw.
    Thinking fast, she turned to her computer, logged on to one of the larger international databases of medical literature and started keying in queries on retrograde amnesia, and techniques for retrieving blocked memories. She pulled together a basic information kit that gave her a few ideas on how she might be able to help Romo, and then started shutting down for the day. Stephen waved on his way out, having completed the agents’ autopsies and filed the necessary reports. Once she was alone in the ME’s office, Sara told herself she was okay, that there was no reason for her to feel exposed. This was her space, her place in the world.
    For now, anyway. She’d just that morning received yet another of Proudfoot’s aggrieved memos, warning that she needed to minimize her department’s overtime. Which she’d be able to do if he let her hire another examiner, damn it.
    That added stress dragged at her, worried her and had her jumping at shadows as she headed to her car. Although it was Saturday, the lot between the PD and ME’s office was nearly full, mute evidence of the double and triple shifts being pulled by the members ofthe task force. She didn’t see anyone else headed out, but felt a strange prickling between her shoulder blades, as though someone was watching her.
    She took a look around as she unlocked her hybrid, checking out the windows of the buildings nearby, but didn’t see anyone there, either. Under other circumstances, she would’ve brushed it off as her imagination, fueled by the manhunt and the pall of fear that hung citywide. Given what was going on