After the FBI suspends her for bending its rules, Special Agent Raleigh Harmon is looking for a chance to redeem her career and re-start her life.

Sent undercover to a thoroughbred horse track, Raleigh takes on a double life to find out who’s fixing the races. But when horses start dying and then her own life is threatened, Raleigh realizes something bigger—and more sinister—is ruining Emerald Meadows.

She’s never felt more alone.

Her one contact with the FBI is Special Agent Jack Stephanson, a guy who seems to jump from antagonistic to genuine friend depending on the time of day. And she can’t turn to her family for support. They’re off-limits while she’s undercover, and her mother isn’t speaking to her anyway, having been confined to a mental hospital following a psychotic breakdown. Adding insult to her isolation, Raleigh’s fiancé wants them to begin their life together—now—precisely when she’s been ordered not to be herself.

With just days left before the season ends, Raleigh races to stop the killing and find out who’s behind the track’s trouble, all the while trying to determine if Jack is friend or foe, and whether marrying her fiancé will make things better—or worse.

Raleigh is walking through the darkest night she’s faced, searching for a place where the stars shine bright.

The Stars Shine Bright

A RALEIGH HARMON NOVELBy SIBELLA GIORELLO

Thomas Nelson

Copyright © 2012 Sibella Giorello
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59554-536-7

Chapter One

The glass skyscrapers towered over Puget Sound, like crystalline prisons for office slaves. I stood at the corner of Third and Madison and watched the hurried workers, toting their Starbucks and battered briefcases, while down the hill, between the city's steep reflective walls, a basin of salt water sparkled under late-summer sunshine. Puget Sound looked dappled and calm, nothing like the busy people. Nothing like the emotions warring inside me. And nothing like the woman who walked beside me, gripping a strand of pink pearls.

"Don't do this," said Aunt Charlotte. Her pudgy fingers worried the silken beads. "Come work in my shop."

"It won't help."

"I'll pay you double minimum wage."

I waited for the crosswalk light to change. Hurry up. The breeze tunneled through the buildings, bearing scents of wet salt and city pavement and the close of summer. A city bus wheezed to a stop on Madison and belched diesel fumes before releasing more serfs. They lurched out, sighing like pneumatic doors.

I glanced at Aunt Charlotte.

She had switched the pearls to her other hand, presumably because her fingers were fatigued from all that rubbing. It had started early this morning, when she told me I needed some geological magic to save my job. I looked back at the light. It refused to change.

"I'm fine," I told her.

"I'll send you to all my rock shows," she said. "You're a geologist—they'll love you."

I was a geologist, a forensic geologist, but I doubted the poor souls attending Aunt Charlotte's rock shows would love me. They were wannabe celebrities, pop musicians, New Agers all of them, believing Charlotte Harmon when she said malachite could enhance their visionary powers. That marble kept time with the earth's internal clock. That pearls provided clarity and wisdom.

My aunt was the most loyal of relatives, and she was a total kook.

The light changed, I stepped off the curb.

She hurried beside me. "You're afraid, I can feel it."

"No," I lied. "I just want my old job back."

"You're in denial. And who wouldn't be, with what you're facing?"

A sarcastic Thank you perched on the tip of my tongue. But we had now reached my own urban prison. Nine stories of pale steel, the building stood at the corner of Third and Spring with its cross-hatched architecture looking as unfriendly as graph paper.

"Take the pearls," she said.

"No, really—"

But she had already shoved the strand into my shoulder bag and was gathering me into her arms, squeezing tight. Plump and warm, loving and lost, Charlotte Harmon was one of the world's all-time great huggers. I breathed in the last of her patchouli scent.

Then I turned and walked away, without saying good-bye.

* * *

At the guard's desk inside, I flashed the credentials that identified me as a Special Agent for the FBI, rode the elevator to the building's top floor, and headed straight for the receptionist who sat behind the largest console desk. She wore the blank mask of the dedicated assistant.

"Raleigh Harmon," I told her. "I have an appointment."

She pressed a button on her phone and spoke into the tiny headset receiver wrapped around her ear. Her controlled contralto was barely audible from two feet away, and the mask betrayed nothing as she listened to the response. Then she pushed the button again.

"They need a few more minutes," she said. "Please have a seat."

I nodded, as though agreeing. But I bypassed the leather club chairs and stood at the elongated windows that framed the view of Spring Street. Down below, pedestrians were bent at the waist, trying to climb the hill's forty-degree angle. They looked snapped in half, and I felt a pang tingling across my abdomen. Sympathy? Or maybe self-pity, if I were being honest.

I heard a door open behind me.

Don't look desperate.

The middle-aged man stepping out wore a white oxford shirt. Starched, but wrinkled around his waist, as though the meeting had gone on for hours. He nodded at the receptionist, but when he looked at me I couldn't read his eyes. The sunlight from the windows was flashing across his wire-rim glasses, turning the lenses opaque. He walked quickly to the elevator and pushed the down button. Twice, hard.

"Agent Harmon?" The receptionist's voice sounded almost tender. But maybe I was imagining that. "You may go in now."

The elevator dinged like the bell announcing the next round of a boxing match. The man in the wrinkled shirt stepped inside, then turned to face me. His mouth tightened as though he had tasted something bitter.

* * *

The Special Agent in Charge of the Seattle field office had the best view in the building, naturally. But the chief had positioned his desk so that his back was to the window. When I walked in, he stood and placed a hand on his red tie. To his right, another man waited. He was leaning against a matching cherrywood console, his red suspenders flecked with small oily stains. Allen McLeod. Head of the Violent Crimes unit. My direct boss. Or so I hoped.

The SAC kept one hand on his tie, leaning over the desk to shake my hand. "Raleigh, good to see you again."

"Yes, sir."

The SAC had a spare and focused gaze, the expression of someone who realized anything could go wrong at any moment, and who was already working out various contingency plans.

I took the chair directly in front of his clean desk. The seat was warm.

"OPR was just here," he said. "They wanted to make sure I understood their concerns about you."

OPR was the Office of Professional Responsibility. The FBI's internal affairs unit. They had opened a file on me. In June. Right after I stepped off a cruise from Alaska.

"They're discussing your situation with the SAC in the Richmond office. Victoria Phaup?"

I nodded. Phaup was my boss in Richmond, Virginia.

"She's recommending a full suspension for at least six months."

No real surprise. Phaup had spent several years riding her broom over my career. We had disagreed from the start, and at one point she transferred me from Richmond to Seattle, a disciplinary transfer that first introduced me to the gentlemen in the room. And now I felt a prickle of sweat on my palms. And because I needed my job, I slid the receptionist's bland mask over my face.

"But," the SAC said, glancing at McLeod to his right, "Allen has been vigorously arguing against such stringent disciplinary action. He wants to keep you with us, Raleigh. And he insists a full suspension would force you to leave the Bureau altogether."

He waited for me to say something, and I stared at his blue shirt, waiting for the correct words to come. The shirt was starched, of course. The stainless appearance reminded me of an elegant tablecloth, the kind that made red wine bead up and roll away without a trace. He continued to wait for my response, and I decided my words would sound defensive, almost petulant. Seven weeks ago, the FBI had suspended me without pay. I had moved in with my aunt Charlotte and was struggling to pay for groceries and the gasoline needed to drive her old diesel Volvo to the state mental asylum that was holding my mother. My mother, who had lost her mind on the cruise to Alaska. My mother, who learned I was lying to her. My mother, whose paranoia now convinced her I was the enemy.

Somehow, I doubted the SAC would understand any of that. His honed appearance told me he didn't make...