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-Note to self
Castiel
“What do you mean you’re letting some guy use my office?” I asked, sounding just as pissed off as I felt.
The Chief, Waldrop, shook his head.
“You don’t use it,” he said. “And it’s only for a couple of weeks while he investigates this area. Once he’s done, you can have your office back.”
That was true.
“I store my uniform shirts in there, as well as my lunch,” I told him.
“And he’s not going to stop you from coming in there and he won’t eat your lunch,” he said. “Hell, he’s not even going to use your desk. He brought a folding table and a computer chair with him. Your office is the biggest besides mine.”
I sighed. “Fine. What case is he working on?”
“The Firewall Case,” he said, instantly making my gut clench.
The Firewall Case was one of the ones I’d started to investigate and had hit a dead end on. It’d been a murder of a young woman that’d been about twenty-three years old. She was a feisty young woman that decided that her best way to make money was to sell her body on the internet.
What started out as a way to make quick cash by a young woman had turned into her own nightmare. Four months after she’d started to undress for money on a porn site, she started getting threatening letters through her computer.
After the fourth instance, she’d taken her computer and her worry to me.
However, as I’d started to look into it, the fucking shit had disappeared as if it’d never been there in the first place.
I’d gotten only a glimpse of it, then nothing.
The next day, the girl had been dead, and I had zero evidence to go on.
Luckily, or unluckily depending on how you looked at it, there were similar cases to the girl’s, and I’d been able to turn in what little information I had to help with just a small piece of the puzzle that was forming.
“Son of a bitch,” I mumbled. “FBI?”
“Yes,” he answered. “He’ll be here around noon. He asked to hear your findings before you left for the day.”
I thought about what I had to do the rest of the day and nodded once.
“I have some paperwork to do that I usually do in the cruiser,” I said. “I can hang out here until then.”
Chief Waldrop nodded once. “Sounds good. Thank you for cooperating.”
I grinned. “Chief, did you expect me not to?”
He flipped me off. “Go fuck yourself.”
***
Three hours later, I had a man standing in my office that I never would’ve pegged as an FBI agent…let alone a computer/cyber crimes specialist.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, holding out my hand to the man. “My name is Castiel Hendrix.”
“FBI Special Agent Easton McKennick.” He took my hand and shook it once before letting it go. “Nice to meet you, too. I hope I’m not intruding.”
Polite as well as very well dressed.
Noted.
“No, you’re not.” I shook my head. “I very rarely have time to use this office, which is why the chief suggested you take over mine. I’m here really early, and really late, for about an hour or two a day, if that. Most of my work is done out of the cruiser, and at my home. So don’t worry about intruding at all.”
Easton nodded once.
His hair, which was perfectly styled, moved with him.
“Thank you,” he said. “Is there a particular part of the office you’d like me to occupy? I’ll try my best to stay out of your way.”
I gestured to the large space in the corner of the room that was closest to the door but still allotted him enough space to set up a table and a computer chair with plenty of room to spare.
“That has the most space,” I indicated to the spot. “But honestly, if you want to move my desk over, I’m more than happy to do that. It’s a big office.”
The special agent was already shaking his head in the negative.
“No, that’s not necessary,” he said. “Tell me about this case that you worked while I set my computer up?”
So I did, telling him about each and every detail that I could remember.
By the time I was finished, the table was set up, his computer was humming on top of it, and he was staring at me as if he’d seen an apparition.
“You got more than anybody else did.” He shook his head. “You actually saw the notes. I can see the notes, too. Well, forensic whispers of them. As if I know something was once there that isn’t any longer.” He sighed.
“Means he slipped up,” I guessed.
Easton nodded. “It does.”
Easton crossed his arms over his perfectly-pressed dress shirt, then stared down at his boots.
He was dressed as you’d expect an FBI agent to dress, but you could tell that he actually took pride in what he was wearing. The shirt he had on didn’t come from Target. No, the way it fit him screamed ‘custom made.’
