Waking from hibernation
驚蟄 [12] / [20]
"Aww, you're so sweet,"
she slurred, still drunk. He put her down on the bed, pulled the covers up over her, and kissed her forehead.
"You should sleep,"
he said.
She smiled, and, closing her eyes, fell almost instantly to sleep. He crept up beside her, put his arms around her, kissed her neck, then allowed himself to drift off into a deep sleep.
On the first day of the next month, they both returned to work. What Alexander heard about Anna and Ed was that they had sexual relations on the night of the party, and Anna accepted Ed without any rejection, but that was all. During the annual personnel reshuffling, Ed was moved to the Traffic Department, and Anna was assigned to the Budget Section. From then on, they gradually and naturally grew apart from each other.
Cynthia was assigned as head of the cold-case investigation team, and Alexander became a member of her team. The good thing was, since all the cases they took on were cold cases, and were unlike current cases which demand immediate action and situational urgency, there's no need for more than two people to work them. This meant that they two alone could consist of one team.
What they now drilled into most was Sarah's case, the woman who attempted to murder Alexander. As John was moved to the Criminal Intelligence team, he handed over to Cynthia all materials pertaining to the case that he'd compiled throughout the course of his investigation.
It had been quite awhile since Alexander and Cynthia had even thought of police work, and though they often occupied time discussing the investigation into Sarah over the past several weeks, neither of them were all that focused on work.
Alexander, who now split his time between his own apartment and Cynthia's, was ready to get back into it, and he was happy to be by Cynthia's side. One Monday morning, a few days after they both officially returned to the office, Alexander and Cynthia were going over the case file, and discussing strategies for dealing with the increasingly cold trail left by Sarah.
"We need to find her before she tries to kill anyone else,"
said Alexander, drinking his coffee.
"I was lucky. I could've ended up like that poor dude I found in the bedroom next door,”
Alexander spoke in a joking way, but her expression was grave.
"According to the reports that John handed over to me, there are 5 cases including yours in the last 3 years which seemed to have been committed by Sarah, or someone very like her. More precisely, grown men missing, or murder cases committed in a manner similar to Sarah's known victims whose real names we don't know,"
she said.
