Blind Instinct by Fiona Brand Page B

recognized?”
    Sun had been slanting across the windscreen, glittering off the chrome grill ….
    She shook her head, unable to pinpoint exactly what it was that had made her so sure it had been the same guy.
    â€œNothing. I’m sorry.”
    He made a note on his report and checked his watch.
    She checked her own wristwatch. She had been here for approximately an hour. Her lunchhour was long gone. At a guess she had caught Detective Thorpe just as he was going off for lunch.
    Thorpe sat back in his chair. “We have the license plate, so that’s a start. With any luck, we should be able to ID the driver, providing the vehicle wasn’t stolen.”
    A second detective stopped by his desk. “We’ve checked the plate. It’s a rental, hired out of Dallas-Fort Worth Airport by one J. F. Delgado. Plus, I just pulled this off NCIS. Looks like your boy’s got a record.”
    Sara stared at the black and white. The photo was of a much younger version of the man who had attacked her. “That’s him.”
    Thorpe frowned. “Damn, that’s strange.”
    The other detective grinned. “I was wondering when you were going to pick up on that little detail.”
    Thorpe flipped the sheet around on the desktop so she could read the note at the bottom of the page and her blood ran cold. According to the file, Joe Delgado had died more than ten years ago.
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    At two thirty-five in the morning, she woke to find herself in the front hall of her apartment, her fingers curled around the door handle.
    She had taken the chain off the door. Just a few more seconds and she would have been in the corridor. She could have made it outside and maybe even walked onto the road, if the soreness of her palms hadn’t jerked her awake.
    Shaken, she put the chain back on and flicked on lights. According to the clock on the sitting room wall she had slept for just over five hours. She had needed a good night’s sleep. Instead, she had walked again.
    She limped to the window and twitched the drapes aside. The city shimmered quietly, sprawled out and familiar. In the distance, she could just glimpse the hot pulse of a casino sign. The moon was up—
    Shining with the same cold light that had flowed over the dark hills and forests around Vassigny .
    Recoiling from the flash of memory, she turned on her heel and walked through to the bathroom, flicked on the light and rinsed her face, gritting her teeth against the sting of grazes on her palms. She dried off with a towel and stared at her reflection. It was the same face that had stared back at her all of her adult life. She had been born in Shreveport and brought up here. She had attended LSU inShreveport. Apart from a postgraduate course at Oxford, she hadn’t traveled. In a family of footloose soldiers, she was plain, ordinary, stay-at-home Sara.
    She had studied both German and French, but she had never been to either country. There was no way she should know about a place called Vassigny , let alone remember that she had actually been there.
    Walking back into her bedroom, she shrugged into her robe. She would make herself a hot drink and read until she was relaxed enough to sleep again. Courtesy of her late shift the previous night, she didn’t have to be at work until one, so she could sleep in if she wanted.
    Minutes later, chamomile tea steaming gently on a side table, she examined the piles of magazines and books on the coffee table. The knapsack caught her eye, reminding her that she still hadn’t heard back from Bayard, which was unusual. If she didn’t hear from him tomorrow, she would call again.
    Unfastening the knapsack, she took out the codebook. Other than the cursory look at the first few pages when she had been in her father’s attic, she hadn’t touched it.
    She flipped to pages fifteen and sixteen, automatically expelling a breath when there was no red thread lodged between the pages.
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