Unravelling. Elizabeth Norris

      hen my cell phone beeps in the middle of the night, I almost say Whatever and go back to sleep. A stolen Toyota—or whatever it is—is hardly worth waking up to check out.

      Except for the fact that the driver is dead, when it should have been me.

      I roll out of bed and fumble into the hallway. We’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve done the get-up-in-the-middle-ofthe-night stunt enough that I don’t need to turn on the lights. But I curse silently as I head down the stairs and see the sliver of light coming from my dad’s study. Either he and poor Struz are still working, or he’s fallen asleep at his desk.

      I imagine it’s this way for all law-enforcement agents—long hours, sleepless nights, obsessive attention to detail, poring over case files. Every FBI agent I know has at least two cases they’ll never forget and never stop thinking about, investigations they’ll carry with them in the back of their minds always, for their entire lives. The one that went right. And the one that went wrong.

      For my dad, the case that went right was the one that made his career.

      It was more than ten years ago. It was his first case with Struz, who was a junior analyst at the time. I was too young to remember any of the details now, except the ones I heard repeated whenever he relived the story.

      Ten Russian spies were discovered and arrested in Temecula, of all places. One was a Fox News reporter, popular with the public and, of course, beautiful. She ended up getting caught in a trap an undercover FBI agent set for her, and as a result all ten of them—and some guy bankrolling them in Budapest—went down. The undercover agent? My dad.

      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