BANG BANG BANG

Adalet groaned, "Fili . . . Get the door!"

There was no movement from the bed and the banging on her front door continued growing louder and more urgent. Adalet groaned once again and slung her arm over to the other side of the bed but felt nothing but cold sheets.

"Oh right . . ." Adalet's brain slowly began to remember things, "not here . . . Agh, what time is it?"

She glanced over at her bedside clock with the digital green numbers telling her it was 2:25 a.m. Who was banging at her door at just a couple of hours after midnight? Only one way to find out!

Adalet forced herself to sit up, throw the covers off her body and swing her legs over the side of the bed. She shoved her feet into her fluffy NASA moon boot slippers (they were a gift from Fili!). After putting on the extra-large housecoat her husband had left behind, and grabbing the gun she kept under her pillow, she made her way down the stairs to the door.

"I'm coming! I'm coming!" Adalet yells, "I swear if this is a prank . . ."

Dean and Hunter were already at the door barking up a storm at it. Adalet shooed them off and unlocked all the locks on the door. She peeked through the peephole but saw no one in sight. She slowly pulled open the door with her gun's safety off and stepped outside.

"Hello?" Adalet calls, "I swear, if you kids are trying to play ding-dong ditch, you'll regre- Mph!"

A body tackled her from behind and a sack was shoved over her head. Adalet fought back but another person came and held her from the front, thus pinning her arms to her sides and preventing her from moving. She could hear her door being closed as she was dragged away towards the road, one of the people cuffed her hands behind her back and another got her ankles. She heard a strong engine start-up as she was shoved into the back of a van with the others people joining her inside.

The van drove off and she couldn't tell where they were going but there were a lot of twists and turns and gravel roads. The drive was a long one but eventually, the van came to a stop and she was forced out. The air was hotter in the new location than her home below the mountains, but it didn't give her any more clues to her location.

Adalet was kept outside for a couple more minutes before they entered an air-conditioned building. She was walked down a long hall, into a short elevator ride and around some corners before a door was opened and she was brought into a room. Her body was forced into an uncomfortable metal chair and her arms were uncuffed then re-cuffed to the chair's arms. Her legs were also uncuffed and the sack was removed from her head.

Adalet whipped her head around the room so quickly that she got a case of whiplash. It was a bare, black painted room with the chair she was sitting in set in the center of the gray carpet. On the wall in front of her were four large monitors that took up most of the wall space, and she could just see the desk with computers behind her. But what really surprised her was the man standing in the center of the monitors, Colonel Spangler.

"Colonel Spangler," Adalet yawned, "to what do I owe the pleasure of being kidnapped at two in the morning?"

"The Super Serum Bone Growth," Colonel Spangler answered, "you and your ex-team are the only ones who know the formula and have all the research from the experiment, the government is taking it back."

"What?!" she yelled now really awake, "you can't seriously think that we'd just hand over our case file to you just so you guys could recreate the formula?!"

"No," he hummed, "which is why we are taking it back to prevent anyone from recreating the formula, and to do so we need you and your ex-team to tell us everything you know about The S.S.B.G. project."

"Say that I believe you," she stretched out in the chair as much as she could, "just how do you plan on getting that information out of the six of us?"

A smirk grew on the Colonel's face, "like this, Captain . . ."

Colonel Spangler walked to the other side of the room and picked something up off of the desk. He returned to the front and stood on Adalet's right side allowing her to see the remote in his hand. He pressed a button on the remote and the monitors in front of them lit up with colours. It was set up in a conference video chat, with five separate windows for each person.

In the middle one was Adalet's old partner, Inspector David Jones. In the top left-hand corner was her best friend, Dr. Nathan Pandit, below him in the bottom left was Officer Eduardo Ramirez. Then on the right side was Dr. Grace Delaney on the top corner and Tech expert Alex Turner in the bottom corner.

"Adalet!" Ramirez exclaimed, "do you know why I was kidnapped by the government?"

Adalet sighed, "yes, Ramirez, it has to do with The S.S.B.G. project."

Grace gasped, "but, I thought we burned all those files!?"

"You did what?!" Colonel Spangler demands.

"We burned everything we confiscated from that case, made a nice bonfire and roasted some marshmallows too," Adalet answered with a smirk, "that's why I told you you'd have a problem with getting the information."

"And just who are you?" Jones asked, "and Adalet, what did you do to your hand?!"

"Got into a fight with a mirror and lost," she waved off his concern, "and from the looks of it, the time difference wasn't in you guys' favour either."

"Worst. Wake-up. Call. Ever," Alex complained, clearly lacking sleep and coffee, "so this guy what to know about what we found during The Secret Experiment?"

"Yup!" Adalet popped the p, "meet Colonel Spangler, met him on my last case involving The S.S.B.G.'s sister project, think of the same thing but on plants."

"Wow!" Nathan remarked, "that sounds fascinating!"

"Nathan!" she rolled her eyes, "we're all trapped in government facilities, this is not the time to fanboy at their experiments!"

"Right," he flushed, "so what does he want?"

"What I want," Colonel Spangler says through clenched teeth slowly growing annoyed, "is for you all to give me whatever it is you still have or remember about the project!"

"Oh, that's easy!" Ramirez beamed, "Nathan knows-!"

"Ramirez!" Jones yelled, "what he meant to say is that Nathan, our coroner, knows how the serum affects a female body. As he was the one who autopsied the victim's body."

Colonel Spangler turned to that window, "and?"

"It's unstable to a female's body," Nathan said, "while with a male's body their bones eventually stop growing, there is something with a female's that does not allow for the growth to stop. This leads to the bones growing until the skin is torn, nails pop off and it becomes impossible to breathe, in short, it will kill the woman in just a couple hours."

"Which we learned by testing it on a rat," Grace jumped in, "the rat's bones and muscles grew ten times their size in just over an hour, giving us a time-frame to estimate from."

"And just how does this give us anything?" Colonel Spangler asked.

"Well, that the project was unfinished," Alex responded, "even for it to be used on a man, the capability of the serum varied from man to man. What it did to one it might not do to another."

"And how does that help us get the formula!?" he growled.

"It doesn't!" Adalet quipped, "we don't know the formula, and all hard and digital copies of it we destroyed . . . There's nothing left, Colonel."

"There has to be something?!" Colonel Spangler roared, "one of you must know something!"

"The formula involved calcium," Nathan spoke up, "other than that . . . I'm drawing a blank!"

He made a strangled noise, "you lot are the worst cops I've seen! How can you forget something so big from one of your cases?!"

"Biology was never my strong suit," Jones shrugged and earned a "me neither" from both Alex and Ramirez.

Colonel Spangler made an exasperated sigh, "how about the ones who went to school for it?!"

"I went to school for space, not the human body!" Adalet says backing out of the conversation . . . Metaphorically.

"I already told you what I found out from the autopsy!" Nathan spoke up.

"And I see so many chemical formulas in a day, they all blend together!" Grace chimed in.

"Fine!" Colonel Spangler spat, "we'll find a way to get the research, someone must have it!"

"So are we free to go?" Adalet asked jingling her cuffs.

"Yes," he replies, "I'll go get the keys to your cuffs, but know that this won't be the last time we met."

"Aw! You like me Colonel!" she calls as he left the room. Once the man's footsteps had faded away she looked back at the screen, "nice one, Nathan, I think he fell for it!"

"I hope so!" the coroner breathed, "it's a good thing he didn't read our files, or I wouldn't be leaving this place!"

"Yeah!" Alex agreed, "I just hope they didn't tear my computers apart trying to find any of my data from that case!"

"Or my lab with all the chemicals in it!" Grace says, "there a nightmare to clean!"

"You think that's bad? Try cleaning up bodies!" Nathan argued, "if they got them out of order..."

"But on the plus side, it's good to see you again, Adalet!" Jones smiled, "how's Pacific Bay treating you?"

"Great!" Adalet grins, "my new team is awesome, I think you guys would love them, we even have a profiler!"

"Cool!" Ramirez exclaimed, "maybe we'll get to meet them!"

"I hope so," she smiles softly, "oh! I got a letter from Fili, he thinks he might be back in a month!"

"That's great!" Grace squeals, "you two are perfect for each other . . . We all miss you."

"Especially Avi and the Ramirez girls," Nathan adds.

"Oh yeah!" Ramirez beamed, "they've been drawing pictures off all your cases! Not the murders of course!"

"Well maybe one day I'll take a trip to Grimsborough to see them," Adalet says as Colonel Spangler returned, "bye guys!"

"Bye!" they all yelled back as the monitors were turned off.