You could say that I wasn’t exactly happy with our progress, though I tried to keep in good spirits for the other agents’ sakes.
The files were mostly from the Atlanta airport. We were still on that lead, unfortunately, as nothing new had turned up yet. As the busiest airport in the world, there were seemingly endless documents and security tapes to go through. We got the cream of the crop, the stuff that someone else had flagged as potentially having something worth finding, and yet still nothing had turned up, and the volume was overwhelming.
I stood up and stretched out my whole body, allowing myself to admit a loud, satisfying yawn that coursed through my whole body.
“I guess I’ll just go lie down on one of the cots,” I said, knowing that the police station would have some tucked in a back room somewhere for just this purpose. “Let me know if you find anything.”
“Will do,” Birn said sardonically, his lips popping on the end of the phrase and his tone making it clear that he expected nothing even remotely helpful to show up in any of these files.
I didn’t really expect anything to turn up either, if I was honest, but there was always a possibility, so we kept at it.
All day, I’d been wanting to get myself out in one of the patrol cars with the other agents, getting out from behind a desk so that I could feel like I was actually doing something. But Diane wouldn’t allow it. I was needed here. She would tell me that every time I asked, just in case a suspect showed up and I needed to do a lineup, even though I barely saw the guy who attacked us, or if someone else came to interview me about it.
To say I was annoyed was an understatement, considering that no one had interviewed me since the morning and that no lineup had been arranged. But I couldn’t blame Diane. She didn’t know that the day would get away from us without my needing to do anything but go through files.
Birn and Muñoz had complained incessantly about being stuck on desk duty, too, but that hadn’t gotten them anywhere, either. Someone had to go through the files to make sure the airport and the FBI hadn’t missed anything, and the two of them were still recovering. They were the natural choice to stay back at the station along with Diane and me.
I meandered out of the back room and out into the front of the police station, where Diane had been feverishly talking with the FBI and the police chief since the other agency’s guys had arrived that afternoon.
“Anything yet?” I asked as I walked over to the water cooler to grab a crisp drink before heading off to bed for a couple of hours. I’d asked the exact same question over and over again all day, just to get the same answer just as many times. Zip, nada, zero. Just more of the same.
Suffice it to say I wasn’t expecting much this time, either.
“Actually, will you come over here?” Diane asked in a hushed tone, waving a hand to beckon me over to her side.
I couldn’t decide whether I was pleasantly surprised or annoyed that maybe something had happened just as I was finally about to get myself some well-needed rest.
Either way, I quickly crossed over to where she stood in the center of the room, staring at a whiteboard set up there and covered in different tidbits of information about the Hollands.
I was suddenly very aware of just how heavy my eyelids were and just how much I needed some sleep, and I cursed myself internally for not being more excited to get in on the action I’d wanted all day long.
Nonetheless, I found Diane clustered around that whiteboard with half a dozen guys in suits. I had to squeeze myself in since they didn’t make room for me themselves.
Once at the board, I looked over it, trying to see if it had changed at all since the last time I’d been out there. It no doubt had, but I didn’t notice much, probably due to a combination of my fatigue and the fact that the thing looked like a giant mass of unrelated blurry photographs and newspaper clippings to me.
I stared blankly at Diane.
“Am I supposed to be looking at something?” I asked her as she was looking at me expectantly.
“These are all the possible sightings of the Hollands over the past couple of years that we’ve been able to find, mostly at airports,” Diane explained, gesturing at the left-hand side of the board. “And these are all the corresponding real estate sales.”
She gestured at the right-hand side of the board now, which bore all the newspaper clippings.
I didn’t remember those from before, so I leaned in to squint at it and get a closer look, unceremoniously knocking the guy next to me and sending a portion of his coffee sloshing around in the air as I did so.
“Hey, watch it!” the guy hollered at me, looking at me as if I was the scum of the Earth.
“Don’t stand so close then, why don’t you?” I shot back, giving him and his FBI badge an equally irritated look. Who did he think he was, getting off on treating me as if I didn’t belong there? This was MBLIS territory. He was on my turf, and here he was, acting like I was some kind of bug he wanted to squash.
“Why don’t you just go on and mosey back to your hole in the wall and do grunt work with your little friends,” the man sneered back at me, a coffee stain dripping down the front of his white shirt.
I got in a good shot at least, then, if unintentionally.
“Whoa, whoa,” the guy
