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run, have a long bath, and then go to bed. She would not sit up all night, monitoring the hours as they ticked by and waiting for Alex to call; she refused to allow herself to fall into that kind of pattern. Alex was a cop. When they had gotten back from their travels and the job opportunity had arisen, Sarah had actively encouraged her to go back to the force. They both knew and accepted the potential risks that the job entailed, and Avery wasn’t exactly a hotbed of violent crime, which made tonight’s raid the exception rather than the norm.
    Her feet pounding rhythmically against the rough path, Sarah nodded in appreciation at her inner monologue’s sensible tone. She whistled for Tilly just as the path hooked back around into the twilight of the forest. The change in light was so abrupt that she had to wait for her vision to adjust before she picked up her pace again. The sweat that had chilled against her skin began to run freely as the breeze disappeared, and she wiped a damp hand across her forehead. She looked ahead into the gloom, the fears she had managed to quell so effectively beginning to inch back into her thoughts. She knew how easy it was to be rational in the daylight, but painful experience had taught her that the hours in the depths of the night were the ones to dread.

    *

    Still rubbing her hair dry, Sarah slipped and skidded barefoot across the wooden floor of the bedroom. She launched her towel onto the bed and took hold of her pager, silencing its shrieking with the press of a button and picking up the phone to dial through to dispatch. Sod’s law, she thought, as the number slowly connected and all hopes for an early night disappeared. So much for best laid plans.
    “Hey, Esther.”
    “Sarah. Thank goodness.” Esther sounded incredibly stressed. Sarah, immediately thinking of the raid, glanced at her watch, even though she was certain that the teams weren’t scheduled to move on the warehouse for at least another hour. “It’s Jo Bair,” Esther continued, putting her mind at rest on that score at least. “She’s in labor and bleeding.”
    Sarah propped the phone between her ear and shoulder and started to get dressed. “ETA on the ambulance?” she asked.
    “That’s the problem. Frances Stokes had a heart attack not twenty minutes since. The ambulance only just left for Cary.”
    “Shit.” She stopped dead, her keys in her hand. “Esther, I don’t—”
    “I know,” Esther said softly. “I got hold of a midwife in Tawny, but she’s a good hour out and all the police resources are tied up with the raid so I can’t get her there any quicker. I’m afraid you’re it, honey.”
    Sarah nodded, even though Esther couldn’t see her. “Don’t say anything to Alex. She’s going to have enough on her mind.”
    “Not a word.”
    “Thanks, Esther.” She picked up her bag. “Give me the address.”

    *

    The briefing room at the station house was two storage closets that Bill Quinn had long ago knocked through with a sledgehammer and a fair amount of devil-may-care enthusiasm. As such, it was cramped, windowless, and—with ten people crammed inside—verging on airless. Its back wall was dominated by a whiteboard on which Quinn had sketched the layout of the warehouse. A series of scribbles and numbers delineated the tactics he intended to put into play during the raid.
    Alex watched the progress of her designated number as blue Sharpie arrows made it sweep from the rear to cut off any fleeing perpetrators and then directed it to search the offices clustered at the left of the building. Scott Emerson and Larry Tobin—one of the reserve officers, who at twenty-eight was becoming increasingly desperate to be employed on a full-time basis—would be the other members of her small team.
    While Sarah had been teaching at the lake, Alex had spent the day studying the blueprints of the warehouse, cleaning and checking her service weapon, and reading through the rap sheets of the men