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The Timer Game
Susan Arnout Smith
A searingly page-turning, totally gripping, rollercoaster of a read that will appeal to readers of PJ Tracy and Harlan Coben (and anyone who loves ‘24’ and the ‘CSI’ series).Grace Descanso is a young single mother working for CSI San Diego. It's a demanding job – Grace struggles to spend as much time as she would like with her 5-year-old daughter Katie. But when a routine crime scene turns into a bloodbath, Grace realises that someone is after her. Then Katie is snatched from their house, the place where they should both be safest. Katie is all she’s got – and Grace hasn't got much time to work out why and where she’s been taken. Welcome to ‘The Timer Game’.
SUSAN ARNOUT SMITH
The Timer Game
DEDICATION (#ulink_b5616d38-3a89-5406-a4fc-3b5cef7bdfb5)
For my husband, Alfred Toulon Smith, with love and gratitude – every day with you is a blessing.
EPIGRAPH (#ulink_5bde9af1-b16e-55aa-8d63-912dc71d18c3)
Beware the fury of a patient man.
– JOHN DRYDEN, Absalom and Achitophel
CONTENTS
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ONE (#ulink_82d23d0b-0208-5856-9fdf-3fe4f27e61f0)
Sunday
‘If somebody’s following us, would you know?’
Grace Descanso glanced at her daughter as they squeezed past an inflatable ghost at the entrance to Party Savers. Katie’s dark eyes studied her gravely. She was almost five, small for her age, her honey-colored curls bouncing in two high ponytails under a Padres baseball cap.
‘You mean right now this second?’
Grace kept her voice neutral but her gaze shifted to the salesclerk ringing up a line of customers and a group of teens clustered by a rack of spiders. The store was busy. Nothing jumped out.
‘Why, honey? Do you think somebody is?’ Grace picked up a shopping basket.
Katie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I finally decided. I want to be a doctor.’
‘When you grow up?’ Katie shifted gears at dizzying speed, and Grace trailed after her, trying to keep up.
Katie slowed at a rack of pumpkin lights and kept moving. ‘No, silly. For Halloween. That way I can wear that thing of yours.’
‘Stethoscope,’ Grace said. She blinked. ‘I’m not sure I can find it, Katie. I haven’t seen it for a long time. You could be a princess. They get to wear sparkly pink.’
The cell phone in her pocket rang and Grace’s first instinct was to ignore it. She’d put it on High and Vibrate and now it whirred in her pocket like an angry bee. It was Sunday, her first real day off in almost a month from the San Diego Police crime lab, and she wanted to spend it with Katie.
Katie cut a look at the phone and walked ahead down the aisle. They shared the same dark Portuguese eyes and angular grace, but Katie was tawny as a golden cat. Next to Grace’s ivory skin and dark hair, Katie always looked sun-kissed and radiantly healthy. Sleeping helped, too, Grace figured. She hadn’t been doing much of that lately.
They were both in shorts; for October in San Diego it was humid, and the store smelled of dust and suntan oil. The phone stopped ringing as Katie paused at a rack of fuzzy bat pencils, picking up one and examining it closely.
Katie’s birthday was coming up Saturday, the day before Halloween, and Grace didn’t have a lot of money to spend on treat bags. It embarrassed her that she was so tight for cash, but she was a single mother with no margin for mistakes, living in the house she’d grown up in, paying off her brother for his half, shoring up the leaky roof and splintery steps, repairing the gargling refrigerator and wheezing car, trying hard not to completely lose her mind.
‘Those are fun,’ Grace offered. And affordable, she added silently.
Katie nodded and put the pencil back in the rack.
The phone rang again and Katie looked at her. ‘You’re not going to get that?’
There was something tight in her young voice, and Grace knew that even at her age, Katie knew how much their fragile security depended on this job, on things going well.
Grace flipped open her cell and recognized Dispatch. She smiled reassuringly at Katie.
‘Grace Descanso.’
A man’s voice crackled over the line, his voice unrecognizable.
‘I can’t hear you.’
In Grace’s ear, the voice was irritable, distracted. ‘Sergeant Treble, headquarters. We got one. Let’s roll.’
‘I’m not on rotation this week.’
She transferred the phone to her other ear, watching her daughter. Katie was counting out seven pink erasers in the shape of porpoises and putting them into the shopping basket, along with a set of fake teeth.
‘Hell you are; you’re secondary after Larry and he’s not answering his beeper.’
‘You’re working the wrong sheet.’
