“Hey now, don’t go acting like you don’t agree with me,” the first guy groaned, wrestling his shoulder out of the other man’s grip.
“You’d better watch it, the both of you,” I snarled, glowering at the both of them. “This stuff might fly in Virginia, but you’re in MBLIS territory now.”
“Hey!” Diane barked, clapping her hands in the center of the group and snapping us all to attention. “What did I say earlier about us all working together? We’re not going to get anywhere on this case biting each other’s heads off, so stop acting like bullies butting heads at recess and remember you’re grown men. Start acting like it.”
“Hey, what’d I do?” I asked defensively. “I didn’t mean to knock his coffee.”
But one more look from Diane in my direction shut me up.
“Right, sorry,” the guy I’d spilled coffee on said, holding out his hand to me in a gesture of goodwill.
I glared down at it but knew that I’d have hell to pay with Diane if I didn’t take it.
“Fine,” I said sourly, shaking his hand, which was covered in coffee.
I pulled my hand back instinctively and wiped it off on my pants as the FBI guys all laughed at me and clapped the first guy on the shoulder. I gave Diane an exasperated look.
“Hey, you think that little speech was just for my guy?” she snapped at them. “Need I remind you that I outrank you, and any one of you would be off this case with one word from me.”
The guys all looked at each other uncomfortably, as if they hadn’t actually thought of this before.
I crossed my arms and gave them a smug look.
“Okay, okay, I sincerely apologize,” the guy next to me said, wiping his hand off on the hem of his shirt and then holding both his hands up in defeat. “Truce?”
His eyes met mine, and I bit my lower lip. I didn’t like this guy, not one bit. But that didn’t change the fact that I had to work with him, like it or not. And it was decidedly not.
“Truce,” I agreed, though I didn’t look at him. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
“Alright,” Diane said, seeming satisfied with this. “Agent Robbie Holm, meet Agents Smith, Corey, Barns, Dobbs, Forrester, and Hunt from the FBI. They’ll be here with us at least until we catch the guy who came after us last night.”
“I’d say good to meet you, but well…” I said, giving them a half-grin.
Diane shot me another look, and that was the end of that.
“So here’s the deal, we’ve been able to track down several aliases the Hollands have used to buy up real estate along the United States coasts and on some islands,” Diane continued, turning her attention back to the board. “We’ve done this by correlating real estate sales with times that Chester and Ashley Holland have been caught by security cameras near the properties in question. Then we’ve identified patterns and managed to link them to the aliases.”
“That’s good work,” I said, nodding appraisingly at the board as I finally got a chance to look at the newspaper clippings, and thinking that I would’ve liked to be in on this part of the investigation instead of stuck back there with Birn and Muñoz. “You found the sales in newspapers?”
“Some of them, yes,” the guy with the coffee stains, Smith, confirmed. “That’s the easiest way to find ‘em since a lot of local newspapers report on this stuff, especially in smaller towns.”
“Okay, so have any of these other aliases gotten us closer to figuring out where they are now?” I asked since I had my priorities straight. Who cared about old news when these guys were trying to kill us in the here and now?
“Unfortunately, no,” Diane said with a huff, clearly not liking admitting this. “But at least it finally feels like we’re getting somewhere.”
I had to admit that that was something, at least.
“Okay, then,” I said. “So how many of these aliases are new? We already knew about two, right? Three if we count their real names. If Chester and Ashley Holland even are their real names, that is.”
“I doubt they are, honestly,” Diane said, biting her lip as she looked over the board again. “These people are too damn smart to use their real names for much of anything. And yes, we had three before, including ‘Chester and Ashley Holland.’ Now we have six.”
“Six, that’s good, that’s good,” I said, nodding some more. “Do we have any hits on those names other than what’s on this board?”
“Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Diane said, turning away from the board and walking over to a nearby table that had a giant stack of files on it. She heaved them up and dumped them all into my waiting arms, causing me to drop my now-empty water cup on the floor.
All the FBI guys started snickering again.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I whined to Diane, my shoulders slumping under the weight of all the files. “I was about to go take a nap.”
“Oh, is Robbie missing out on his nap time?” Smith joked in a mock baby voice, and I immediately regretted saying anything about how tired I was at all.
“Then go take one,” Diane said flippantly. “Just drop those off with Birn and Muñoz on your way.”
I stared at the enormous pile, and a flicker of curiosity arose within me. I was a dead man walking because of how little sleep I had gotten. That was true. But it’d been hours since we’d had anything resembling something interesting to look through, and I didn’t want Birn and Muñoz picking all the good stuff out of it while I was asleep.
“No, no, I’ll be fine,” I said, hating myself even as I said the words. “I’ll start looking through it now.”
“That’s what I thought,” Diane said,
