ANGEL BLUE [1]

LEAD 1: jane doe

• • •

Four months later

• • •

      The text on my page grows blurry as my vision clouds. The familiar spinning of my chair slows as the thick book regarding serial profiling drops with a dull thud onto my keyboard, causing a blip of alarm to echo through the empty precinct―telling me that I pressed the wrong key.

      I’m about to drift off to sleep with my forehead against the smooth paper cover of the serial profilers book when my phone starts to ring. Since I’m alone in the precinct, the ringtone of my phone screams at me like a bleep of a car horn. Come to think of it, it could’ve been a car horn but I was too drugged up to think straight.

      I fumble for the small orange canister of prescription medication to try and stop the whispers that always surround me. It’s gotten worse throughout my time as a detective but have only been able to dismiss it as something minor. I sleepily shake two pills into my hand and swallow them dry, before I grab my cup of piss-black coffee and take a swig, grimacing.

      By the time I pull my bearings together, I have three missed calls and four messages. I scrub at my eyes and stretch before I reach for my phone. I tap the screen and the three bubbles said: ‘six missed calls from PRAT; this is no charge to you. Would you like to delete this message?’ PRAT is the codename for my partner in law enforcement, Special Agent Samuel Pingelly from the FBI. He’s a total prat, even at the best of times.

      I’m able to pick up his next call as my phone starts blaring the annoying pop culture song that Banks set it to. I’m in the middle of resting my forehead back on the desk when Sam’s voice screeches over the speaker, “Where the hell are you?”

      “Good evening to you too, Prat,” I slur with mock cheer and take another sip of black coffee, sneering with every swallow.

      “Have you been smoking marijuana? I’ve been trying to call you for forty-five minutes, DC Stevens doesn’t know where you are now stop slacking we have a case to solve,” he informs me rather crudely. 

      Right now, Sam’s broken his usual too-cool-for-the-NYPD composure and I can hear the anger and supposition creep into his voice, that I was in fact, high. If you can get high from taking ADHD medication as requested by the general practitioner, then lock me up. I simply groan in response which just seems to ignite his fury even more, but he does me the grace of simply muttering under his breath over the line.

      “I’m at the precinct,” I clench my jaw as the whispers return almost immediately, speaking in tongues and saying incoherent things. I guess its Sam’s harsh words that’ve kept me grounded for so long, for a prat, he certainly knew how to somehow shut out the whispering. I don’t know how, he’s not even aware that he does anything―simply by being near him, gives me a few moments of peace and quiet.

      “At one in the morning?” Sam replies, incredulous.

      “Problem with that, Prat?” I raise my voice and then groan. The reverberation sends my head into a frenzy of pounds like a jackhammer to my skull, “look do you reckon you can tackle the case alone…I think I’m going to be sick.”

      When grainy static only responds to my remark, I know that Sam’s hung up on me. I sigh and move my arms so that my head rests on my hands. Banks tells me how much her FED-dar goes off whenever she’s near Sam; apparently her first judgment on the FBI agent was misleading. Sam has a wild sense of humour when not on duty, but is a complete tight arse when it comes to the job. I can’t even get a word in sometimes in a conversation, all he does is raise a hand to me and says, ‘now-now Detective Stevens, let someone with experience handle this’.