Unravelling

But the case that went wrong—the one still unsolved—is even older. It happened one of his first years on the job, before he got involved in counterintelligence. When my mom was pregnant with me—just after she’d found out I was a girl.

A seventeen-year-old girl—captain of the swim team, with an academic scholarship to USC, a boyfriend, friends, the perfect family, with a dog and white picket fence—went missing from her bedroom. All her possessions were untouched and in their rightful place. No forced entry, no signs of a break-in, no one heard or saw anything unusual—it was like she just . . . disappeared into thin air.

Except for a bloody partial handprint on her wall.

The files are all still on the corner of his desk. My dad reads them every night before he goes to sleep. If he even sleeps at all.

When I get to the bottom of the stairs and peek inside his office, it’s empty. The boxes are all over the place, some of them open, piles of papers laid out everywhere. My dad’s one of those visual/tactile learners. He’s got to lay everything out, move it around, and really study it, and then answers just come to him.

Obviously, he and Struz were working, and on an older case, something ongoing if it has this much of a paper trail, but everything looks like he just left it and went up to bed.

Which isn’t like him.

Although his oldest child did just come back from the dead. I suppose I could cut him some slack.

The “light” box that Alex strategically placed so I could snoop through it is one of the open ones. Only it doesn’t have anything to do with my truck or the driver. It’s an old case file from 1983, a series of deaths in California and Nevada, where the victims were killed from radiation poisoning. Deep gamma burns practically disfigured the bodies, most likely the result of some kind of nuclear exposure.

I leaf through the pages, scanning them for anything that might explain why these old files are in my dad’s study. Apparently, nothing other than the actual bodies had any kind of radiation residue—as if the bodies had been dumped somewhere else after exposure.

“All the nuclear plants nearby were searched, and nothing was found amiss.” I jump and drop the folders back into the box. “And the victims were never identified. Not even by dental records.”

When I turn around, my dad is leaning in the doorway to the office. He’s in sweatpants and an old army T-shirt—one that he doesn’t quite fill out the way he used to—his tattoos peeking out from under the sleeves. The lines in his face are starting to show, and his hair is starting to gray. He wears “tired” like an old friend.

“So they just stopped investigating?”

“I’ve got boxes full of theories and investigation notes,” he says with a shrug. “But they never found anything, and there were only three victims. After that, it seemed like just the Bureau’s presence stopped whatever was happening.”

This bothers me more than knowing that there are people out there who we know are guilty, but can’t prove it. This is more than just a flaw in the system. Because no one figured it out. These people died alone, and they’re the only ones who know how it happened—them and whoever was responsible. Someone else should know.

I’m about to say something when I see a photograph on top of a stack of papers on my dad’s desk. It looks like the body of a man—I think—and I can’t tell how old he is, because his body is so badly distorted by the radiation burns that he doesn’t even look human.

Nausea rolls through me. This photograph isn’t from the eighties. Based on the time stamp at the bottom corner, it’s from last week. Six days ago.

“Don’t ask,” my dad says before I can open my mouth. He moves farther into the room and flips over the photograph. “You know I can’t talk about active cases.”

The distorted image of the dead man in the photo is burned into my retinas, and I have to blink a few times to try to see something else. And that’s when I realize there was something else in the photograph—a set of numbers, written in marker on top of the picture. 29:21:33:21.

hat are the numbers?” I ask as I reach for the photo and turn it over. For a minute I feel a sense of déjà vu, like I’ve seen them before. Then I realize why. They’re similar to a set of numbers I saw out of the corner of my eye when I walked in, written on top of another picture—one I hadn’t really looked at.

There are photos everywhere in this office. Reaching across the table, I grab a different one. This one is the body of a woman. The whole right side of her body is covered in burns that render her unrecognizable. The left side of her body looks pristine. It makes it even harder to look at her.

The numbers are there, though, in my dad’s handwriting. Written in black Sharpie in the top corner of the image. 44:14:38:44. I look back at the other set of numbers and the photograph of the dead man. The dates of the incidents on the time stamps are fifteen days apart. “It’s a countdown, but to what?”

A quick look of surprise flits across my dad’s face before he looks even-keeled again, and I know I’ve hit it right.

He shakes his head the way he does when he can’t figure something out.

“You’re counting down to something. I mean, what’s the end date?” Because that’s the bottom line—what’s important. Countdowns lead to something. What and when are the important questions to answer first. The how and why will come later.

He doesn’t answer. Not that I really expected him to. The fact that he hasn’t shooed me back upstairs to bed yet means he’s frustrated enough to forget the rules.

I set down the photograph and reach for one of the reports, skimming for numbers. I see them—46:05:49:21—and a reference to forty-six days only a sentence later. But I see something else too—UIED—before my dad remembers himself and pulls the report from my hand, placing it back on his desk.

“There’s something off about this one.” I have no idea what he means by “off.” He’s investigated thousands of cases, and there’s always one keeping him up at night.

But I know what UIED means—Unidentified Improvised Explosive Device.

How a countdown factors into a UIED is relatively easy to deduce. The countdown is a timer for some kind of explosive. But what it has to do with the bodies and the radiation is well beyond me.

“Where did you find an unidentified explosive device?” I ask. “Is it a bomb?” I grab the report back from him and flip through it.

“San Diego PD followed a lead and found it in an abandoned motel room after the first crime scene two months ago. They called in the bomb squad and us.”

“And?” But I’m still flipping through the report, and one line catches my eye.

So far all attempts to stop the countdown have been unsuccessful.

“This thing isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen,” my dad says, but it’s clear from his quiet, distant tone that he’s talking to himself. Then he sees the look on my face and adds, “The bodies and the UIED might not be connected,” but I can tell he doesn’t believe that.

I gesture to the countdown on the photographs. “You’re keeping track of how it relates to these deaths. How does it?” He must at least think it does, if he’s gone to the trouble to cross-reference them down to the second of the countdown. But even with my photographic memory and affinity for numbers, I don’t see an obvious connection. “Is there some kind of pattern?” If there is, I don’t see it.

My dad shakes his head, and for a minute I think he’s going to tell me—to say something else about the case. But instead he nods toward the door. “Go on, go back to bed.”

My skin itches—or rather, something underneath my skin itches—everywhere.

“You have to be exhausted, J-baby,” my dad says. “Don’t worry about this one. You know I’ll figure it out.”

I nod and leave the room, even though I’m not convinced the way I usually am.

I was exhausted. But now I’m not. Because I have the same feeling I did when I watched Ben Michaels ride his bike up Highway 101. Deep-seated conviction. A feeling of absolute certainty I couldn’t ignore even if I wanted to.

I glance at my watch and hope being resurrected from the dead didn’t affect my ability to do math in my head. Based on the time stamps of the photographs, we’re at twenty-one days, seventeen hours, thirty-nine minutes, seventeen seconds. And counting.

t’s been four days, and I still haven’t been able to figure out how the UIED fits in with my dad’s case. I’ve tried to do some more snooping, but Dad has taken to locking his office when he knows I’m around and he isn’t. I can’t stop thinking about it, though. Those radiation burns are all I see when I close my eyes.

But the first person I see when I get out of Nick’s car in Eastview’s student lot is Ben Michaels.

He looks exactly like the Ben Michaels I would have pictured before: standing with a group of other nondescript stoners, all wearing similar dark hoodies and grungy, no-name-band T-shirts, most of them smoking something more than conventional cigarettes, some of them drinking something more than water from a water bottle. Elijah Palma and Reid Suitor stand in the center of the group; Ben’s on the outskirts, shoulders slumped and his hands buried deep in the pockets of his baggy jeans while he half leans against some rich kid’s SUV. I can’t see his eyes under the mess of dark brown curls, but I wonder if he’s staring back at me.

And I feel like my forehead—the exact spot where his cool lips brushed my skin—is on fire, and I have this crazy urge to reach up and somehow wipe his touch away.

“Janelle, c’mon!”

Jared and Nick are a car’s length away from me, walking toward the school. I shift my bag and follow them, ignoring Nick’s raised eyebrow and the flood of heat rushing to my face.

Just like I ignore the stares from half the senior class when Nick puts his arm around my shoulder and we walk through the front gate.

Normally I’d be driving myself and getting to school early but I’m not allowed to drive. Once you have a seizure, even if it’s just one, you’re marked as a possible epileptic. Not that I don’t get it, I do. I’m just not a fan of this rule when it applies to me.