The Printed Page

Do you really want to play?

Grace Descanso was going to be a pediatric heart surgeon–she was a brilliant up-and-comer with a bright future in a heart-breaking, innovative field. Then she took two months off to work in a clinic in Guatemala, and came back nearly destroyed. She won’t talk about why, but she quit medicine altogether. Now, five years later, Grace is a crime scene tech in San Diego, going to AA meetings, scraping by and living to be a mom to five-year old Katie.

Everything falls apart again when Grace is summoned to work what looks like a routine crime scene. Hours later, two colleagues have been brutally murdered and Grace herself is under investigation for shooting the killer. Katie’s all she’s got. But when Katie is snatched, Grace is thrown into a nightmare world of timed riddles that she must solve in order to find her daughter before it’s too late. Welcome to The Timer Game.

“Is your operation still viable?”
He motioned for a cigarette and she took another one out and flicked it across the table at him with such force it bounced into the air and sailed off the table.
“Easy,” he said mildly, catching it midair and pocketing it in his shirt. “Viable. I don’t run things from the inside, but I hear things.”
“What kind of things?” She tossed him another and he stowed it behind his ear.
“About how easy it is in San Diego to grab a kid, drug her, dye her hair. Matches.”
He waited as she slid the matches across. There was something, right on the edge of consciousness, if she could find it. He tore off a match.
“Things about people – bad people, oh, so bad – taking pictures of kids in – shall we say awkward positions? And then there are those children who are simply not as – tractable as one would wish and so they’re – sent on to perform a more useful function.”
She grew very still. A numbness was closing her throat, making it difficult to breathe. “Who? I need a name.”
He looked at her and for the first time laughed. Syzmanski’s face appeared in the glass viewing window and she waved him away. It was stronger now, the knowing. Something was off, something just out of reach. He struck the match and held it to a cigarette, inhaling deeply.
“Do you honestly think a candy bar and a couple of smokes can buy you that?”
She stared across the table at him and it clicked, the thing right on the edge of awareness. “San Diego.”
“What’s that?” The pungent smell of smoke filled the air.
“You said San Diego. You knew where I was from before I told you.”
~ Page 234 (partial), The Timer Game by Susan Arnout Smith ~