A cold chill snakes through my chest. Tomorrow. My flight home to San Diego leaves at nine tonight. And what have I accomplished? I kissed Angela’s boyfriend, ruining my relationship with my guide to this city. I met with Nour and Hugo and learned Angela might have a stalker. I think Angela is alive, but I signed away any suspicion that she may still be breathing somewhere, confirming her dead. Have I accomplished anything? More likely I’ve left things worse than when I arrived.

That body in the morgue wearing Angela’s toe tag is not my sister.

Whose sister is it?

“You are American.” I jump at the slurred English hissed into my ear. “You should not be so proud to be an American.” A man with wiry, white-streaked hair, who’d been sleeping on one of the wall benches, teeters two inches from my face. Something brown stains his T-shirt, and he smells of whiskey. Sweat covers the deep wrinkles of his forehead.

“I’m sorry?”

He sneers. “Your country thinks it can do whatever it wants whenever it wants.” Angry English dissolves into angry French, alerting everyone else in the lobby that we are not friends, that I don’t know who the hell this person is or why he grabs me by the shoulders. “You are all damned! Americans, you are damned by God himself!”

“Olivier, au secours! Monsieur, arrêtez!” The receptionist waves frantically for the security guard.

A man launches toward us and rips the guy off me, wrestling him to the ground. Expletives in French howl from the drunk’s mouth as he struggles against the full nelson laid on him. Olivier, the security guard, handcuffs my assailant, then drags him away by the scruffy collar.

I straighten my shirt and massage my skin where I couldn’t shake him loose. The receptionist asks me whether I’m okay. I nod. She smiles reassuringly, then turns back to her crossword game. I peer around the lobby. Everyone resumes their conversations, my brush with violence forgotten. Did that just happen?

Lunatics: a normal part of police life.

How quickly are other events, cases, and missing persons forgotten? I hate to think what will happen to Angela’s case in a week, or a month from now. Will her file gather dust in Valentin’s office until he tosses it somewhere in the basement? The idea of actually leaving, knowing my sister’s body isn’t on a metal tray, but lying—dead or alive—somewhere else, causes me to shudder. Our secret language on the whiteboard is a warning.

I can’t fly out tonight.