[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/hMmnlhb.png[/img][/center] [b]Heroes for Hire Offices Midtown[/b] Chase leaned back in his chair and sighed before he loosened the knot on his tie. On the desk in front of him was a sea of paperwork, just a small portion of the files he had on the FBI’s investigation into Angelo Campisi. He’d come in at five that morning to start pouring over it. Gladys showed up at nine like usual and started to help him. Almost six hours he'd been reading reports and intelligence files written in redundant and dry copspeak. Adrian fought the urge to nod off several times during it. And after hours and hours of reading through the files… something wasn’t right. Adrian could feel the answer floating somewhere in his mind, just out of reach. “Gladys,” Chase said as he stood. “How’s it going? “It’s going,” Gladys Murphy said from the reception desk out front. Adrian leaned against the frame of the door that separated his back office from the reception area. Like is own desk, Gladys’ was covered in papers and boxes. Her wrinkled hands clutched an open binder with the FBI logo on the cover. Adrian wasn’t sure, but if he had to guess he would say Gladys was somewhere between eighty and [i]one-hundred and eighty[/i]. He was sure he could hire a secretary/paralegal half her age, but probably not one as skilled. Gladys was the only nonagenarian Chase knew that could make a mean cup of coffee and type one hundred and fifty words per minute. “Anything at all?” Gladys looked up from the pages, her thick glasses making her eyes seem huge. “Besides documents riddled with spelling errors? Not so much, Mr. C.” The phone on her desk began to ring. Ever the professional, Gladys picked it up by the third ring. “Heroes for Hire…. Yeah… yes, ma’am. Well, ‘metric shitton’ isn’t a legal quantity. How much marijuana was he caught with? Right...” Listening to Gladys talk made something click with Adrian. He hurried back to his office and started to root through files until he found what he was looking for. After double checking, he folded the piece of paper up and slipped his suit jacket back on. “Angelo, you son of a bitch.” “Potential client, Mr. Chase,” Gladys said as Chase headed towards the front door. “Referral?” “Throw Barry Fitzwaller a bone,” said Adrian. “And make sure he knows that he owes me one. Also, keep looking into the discovery files and let me know if something catches your eye. I’ve got to go meet with our client and get to the bottom of this.” ---- [b]Crown Heights Brooklyn[/b] Misty flicked the butterfly knife open. She ran the blade down the red tape with the NYPD seal on it, warning that it was a crime to break the tape. With the tape cut, Misty pulled a pair of disposable nylon gloves out of her back pocket and slipped them on. She tested the doorknob and found it was unlocked. In the event of most crime scenes, cops rarely locked the doors when they left. Usually they didn’t have the keys and figured that the seal would do the job. If someone wanted to break in they would just break in. Misty guessed she was proof of that. She stepped through the door and shut it behind her. The living room where Rosa’s body had been found had all the tell-tale signs of NYPD CSI work. There was still black powder on the floor and, ironically, luminol stains on the couch. Because their job was to just collect physical evidence, the crime techs mainly focused on the room where the deceased had been found because it was almost always the site of the murder. Homicide detectives would have walked through the apartment to see something, but Misty knew how the job went. The guys at the Seven-Seven may be fine, upstanding detectives, but they probably had an already heavy caseload of unsolveds that they were working. With the dead body in the living room, they wouldn’t look too hard in the other rooms besides passing glances at personal effects. Misty walked through the living room/kitchen towards the bedroom. That would be the place to start. She thought about her conversation with Stone on the way up to Brooklyn. No forced entry and with a single shot to the back of the head, the Seven-Seven was working on the theory that Rosa knew who killed her. No cellphone had been recovered and the working theory was the killer took it because the call or text record had some kind of evidence. The detectives were in the process of running down the phone while looking up her nearest and dearest. Both tasks had them stumped. Rosa Torres was a ghost. She had no criminal record, no voting history, and no employment. Stone said she had no driver’s license or photo ID. Rosa Torres was just a social security number. Someone was busy combing through birth records from the late eighties and early nineties, but that would take awhile. Even the apartment was paid for by a mailed money order to the landlord. “Who were you?” Misty muttered to herself as she looked around the bedroom. She hadn’t gone back here when she found the body but it was decorated just like the front of the apartment. Very spartan, very plain. There was no sense of what type of woman Rosa was. Misty looked around the walls and searched the dresser and closet. Anything valuable there would have been taken by the NYPD, but maybe she would find something they hadn’t. After not finding anything, she turned the flashlight of her phone on and bent down to look underneath the bed. There was nothing under the bed but dust bunnies. Misty started to get back up when she paused. The reflection of her flashlight caught the hardwood floor funny and reflected back something odd. There was a section of floor that had a different consistency than the rest. The grain ran a different direction. Misty scuttled under the bed to examine it. She ran her gloved fingers around it and felt the shape of a square. The square popped open after she worked it, a hidey hole underneath the panel. Misty crawled out of the bed with a few pieces of paper, a flash drive, and a phone. She tucked the flash drive into her pocket and started to turn on the phone. An icon flashed on the screen indicating it needed to be charged. She tucked that into her pocket and looked at the papers in the dim light. “Shit.” She pulled her phone out and dialed Chase’s number. --- [b]Manhattan Detention Complex “The Tombs”[/b] “I want the truth, Angelo.” Angelo furrowed his brow at Adrian in his best attempt at looking confused. Chase noticed the black eye on Angelo’s face that hadn’t been there the day before. “What are you talking about?” “This.” Chase put the paper to the glass. It was a photocopy of an FBI intelligence report. The report contained a conversation between Angelo and someone whose name had been redacted. According to the report, it was a phone conversation recorded a week before. “This report here is bullshit, and you know it?” “What the fuck are you--” “Look at the notes, Angelo. You use that same tired ass story about your girlfriend doing something crazy with her finger. But in the transcription, it describes you gesturing with your finger the act. If you’re on the phone, how the hell do they know you made that gesture?” Angelo’s face went white as Chase pulled the paper away. “I don’t--” “I don’t want to hear your bullshit,” Adrian hissed into the phone. “You lied to me. You’re already an informant to the feds, aren’t you? For some reason, they doctored all this evidence to make it seem like otherwise. Now, why?” “I can’t tell you,” Angelo said tightly. “I’m your lawyer. We have attorney-client privilege.” Angelo scoffed. “You think that matters to them? They’re always listening.” He pointed to the black eye and said, "How do you think I got this?" Adrian tapped the glass. “Two people are dead, Angelo. The truck driver in Jersey, and now Rosa. We need to find out what happened.” “Rosa’s dead?” Angelo’s hand faltered and he placed the phone down. Chase couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he could read lips well enough to know it wasn’t pleasant. “Okay,” Angelo said after he picked the phone back up. “I’ll tell you what I know.” --- “This is big, Chase. Call me when you get this.” Misty hung the phone up as she came out the apartment and on to the street. She heard the sound of a revving engine and looked up in time to see a black sedan with blacked out windows racing along the sidewalk towards her.