“Well, isn’t that just fine?” What would the task force think when she strolled in at a quarter past twelve? Not a thing, she decided, not once she wowed them all with her brilliance.

Still carrying the newspaper, she jogged along the walkway to the parking lot tucked off to one side of the complex. She was behind the wheel of her ten-year-old Camaro when she succumbed to an urge to pull the paper out of its protective plastic. She opened the reasonably dry pages against her steering wheel, then she saw the date at the top.

Year after year, memory after memory, it always happened to her the same way.

Her heart stopped for half a beat, then it raced. Something airy and light filled her limbs, then her head. And hot tears came unbidden to her eyes, though she refused to let them fall. It was February fifteenth. “Well, happy birthday.” Molly swallowed hard.

It was the day she had been born thirty years ago, the same day Mickey had died seventeen years later. Molly’s hands fumbled as she crushed the newspaper into a large, wadded ball. She tossed it into the passenger seat and shot the key into the ignition, revving the Camaro’s engine. She drove out of the lot, turning south onto Mission Creek Road.

This was not a day to dwell on the past, not this year. This February 15th she was going to find out what her future might hold.

It held three fellow officers who did not seem exceptionally overjoyed by her presence, Molly discovered ten minutes later.

By the time she stepped into the task-force war room, the rain had her hair zinging all over the place again. She blew a couple of damp locks out of her eyes and looked around. Chief Stone had converted the old lunch room for the task force’s efforts. The three Formica-topped tables had been jammed back against the far wall in a line. Some chairs were situated in front of them; others were littered about the empty room as though a band of rowdy children had suddenly abandoned a game of musical chairs.

The table farthest to the left supported a computer that was whining with a high-pitched hum that told Molly it might be about to exit this world. Beside it were photos from the bombing scene. Joe Gannon and Paulie McCauley stood there, flipping through them. The table in the middle held the crime book and a lot of pages and reports yet to be filed. She thought she could make herself useful there. It would be an excellent way to bring herself up to speed on what the task force had achieved this past month without her.

But first she went to the table on the right. It held the coffee machine, an empty box of donuts and a solitary slice of pizza abandoned in its super-size box. Molly lifted the lid to inspect the pizza. The cheese had hardened into yellowish-white nodules and the edges were curling.

Detective Frank Hasselman was standing there talking into a cell phone. His pale eyes lifted to her face at Molly’s expression. “Not to your liking, Officer?”

Molly gave a weak grin. “Not particularly.”

“Then find another restaurant.”

Her spine stiffened. Deliberately she lifted the slice from the box. “This’ll do.”

His brows climbed his forehead. “You’re not seriously going to eat that.”

“Watch me.” She bit in. Once, when she had been ten, Mickey had talked her into swallowing an earthworm. She reasoned that nothing could be worse than that.

She was wrong. Molly fought valiantly to swallow. At least the pizza didn’t curl in on itself on her tongue the way the worm had. “Yummy.”

“You’re crazy.” Hasselman put the telephone back to his mouth and turned away from her to continue talking.

“I’m tougher than I look,” she muttered. And she knew that she was going to have to be to get ahead here. After two years she was still the new kid on the block—which, in all honesty, perplexed her somewhat. It hadn’t taken her this long to break in back in Laredo when she’d been fresh out of the academy.

She poured herself a cup of coffee to wash down the truly bad pizza and went to the table in the middle. She pulled out the chair there and dragged a pile of filing toward her as she sat.

“What are you doing?” Hasselman said, disconnecting his call.

“The grunt work. Somebody has to.”

“She knows her place, got to give her that,” said McCauley.

“Ease off her,” Joe Gannon warned from the other table. At forty-three, he was pretty much the elder statesman of the task force. She’d looked into all fourteen officers and detectives who comprised the team. Gannon was two years from retirement.

Molly fought the urge to sigh in relief. He might be an ally…sort of.