IV. Karma
Timeframe: Set between chapters ten and eleven of Lie a Little Better.
At the end of a briefing meeting, Diana walked right up to Neal's chair and put her hand out. Neal was leaning back, his feet up on the empty chair next to him, and he smiled at her handsomely.
"Give it, Caffrey," my probie demanded, not screwing around.
Derek and I shared a look while the agents we supervised in the division filtered out of the room. Derek tried to hide his smile behind his hands as he closed his computer, then by keeping his head down as he packed his laptop away.
Neal brought out his most innocent expression and sat upright, moving his feet to the floor. "What do you think I have?" He asked Diana in expertly-feigned confusion, folding his arms on the table.
"You took my phone charger." She accused flatly. "I'd like it back." Neal tilted his head, surveying her thoughtfully with a playful quirk of his lips. She was not amused. At least he wasn't still pretending he had no idea what she wanted. "So either you give me my phone charger, or I hold you upside down until your phone falls out of your pockets and I go home with it."
Laughing, Neal stood up and reached into his back pocket. He gave Diana back her black charging cord, twisted up and neatly coiled with a zip tie. Diana pocketed it, giving Neal a slight, smug smile, and shooting Derek a cocky grin.
"I told you," she said to my brother, sticking her tongue out at him on her way out the door.
I turned my eyes back to my consultant. "You're lucky she likes you," I commented.
He sighed and stretched. "That's not the impression I get."
"Trust me," I snorted. "If she didn't like you, you wouldn't have had an either/or threat. She'd have shaken out your pockets and taken her charger and your phone." I pulled on my jacket. "I'm heading out. Do you want a ride to June's or would you rather walk?" Neal could technically stay late, but then he would have to go straight home once he didn't have an FBI escort. It meant he couldn't take the detours necessary to get to the subway station.
"These shoes are new," Neal told me, looking indignant.
I stared at him blankly.
His shoulders fell. "I'll go with you," he answered. "I don't want scuff marks on these."
"Payment?" I prompted, holding out my hand to him like Diana had. With a weary, put-upon huff, Neal produced my billfold – from his front pockets this time – and dropped it into my open palm. I took it back with a smirk. "Sorry, Neal. You'd have better luck watching us scramble if we didn't already know your history of mischief-making."
He shrugged good-naturedly and held the door for me. "I still get you sometimes."
"No, you still get Derek sometimes, and that's only because he thinks that if he pisses you off by accusing you of taking something when you didn't, you'll start actually taking things."
He grinned. "It still counts."
"Whatever." I looked around the bullpen. It was gradually emptying out. There was a probationary agent hanging out around the front doors. He had blond hair and blue eyes, and his jacket looked a little worn. He had been in the debriefing, but I couldn't remember who he was working under. "Hey," I called to him. "What's your name?"
He looked up suddenly after tapping on his phone. When he saw me, he stood a little straighter, and he didn't so much as glance to Neal. "Smith, ma'am."
"Agent," I corrected him. "Do I look like someone's mother?" I teased with a straight face. The man chuckled nervously. I decided he probably hadn't been employed long enough to get used to interacting with higher-ranking agents and cut him some slack. "Go home soon," I advised. "You don't get brownie points with supervising agents by being late, no matter how much you get done after hours. Wait until you've got your own probie to screw up your sleep schedule."
He smiled at me like a boy scout and held his back awkwardly. I didn't comment – it would probably just embarrass him if I did, so I pretended not to see. "Yes, Agent Anderson."
I decided to just walk by him and let it pass. He wasn't actually a kid. It might seem cold, but even new recruits can't learn how to be agents if the senior staff hold their hands all the time. He was an adult, so he could choose his own bedtime.
"Come on, Neal," I said over my shoulder, pushing open the doors to the division and holding it for my consultant. "Let's get you back to June's before your fancy shoes start to gather dust."
"Kenna," Neal said imperiously, letting a hand fall to my back habitually while he walked me to the elevators. "It is not a crime to care about my clothes and shoes. How I look matters. First impressions are important."
"You're right, it's not a crime," I agreed with a small smirk tugging at my mouth. The elevator dinged. "It's just metrosexuality."
I felt his eyes on the back of my head. "Really? That's where we're at now?" He asked, clucking his tongue in disapproval.
"Don't worry, human peacock." I glanced down the hall and into the bullpen. The doors were closed and I couldn't see the probie, so I assumed we were out of earshot. "I think it's cute."
~~~ Karma ~~~
The morning after the briefing, we were getting ready to go do some footwork recon on our suspect. We thought that we might have an in if we played it right, but we wanted to be sure about the crowd before we tried inserting any feds into the closed social circle.
A knock on my door made me look up. Neal was leaning into my office, a frown on his face and his fedora crooked, casting a shadow over his eyes. "Hey, Kenna, have you seen my watch?"
"Um…" I stood up straight and blinked, forgetting that I was holding a laptop and had intended to do something with it. What the…? What am I, cleaning staff? "No, because I'm generally confident that you can dress and accessorize on your own…? Wait, the one with the recorder?" Neal nodded, looking particularly annoyed that I had missed the point for a moment there. "Didn't you say you were keeping it in your desk so the FBI couldn't accuse you of taking our toys home?"
Neal nodded but then corrected me. "I said that I was leaving it here because I didn't want to risk bureau equipment coming to harm."
"Same difference," I waved it off. Neal didn't feel very strongly about bureau equipment, no matter what it was, but it sounded better than petulance on an official record. "Is it not there?"
His shoulders fell. Blue eyes stared at me with disappointment. "If it were there, why would I be asking?"
"Maybe it's a mind game."
Neal narrowed his eyes at me for a long moment. I started clearing off my desk and unplugging my phone to take it with me while we were out. "Don't go into comedy," he finally instructed flatly before leaving quickly, presumably on the hunt for the missing timepiece.
I dawdled and tried to kill time to give him a longer window to find it, but when I couldn't justify standing around any longer, I recruited him to be my field partner, as per usual, and we left. Neal's wrists were both bare of any watches, and I sent a message to the tech team to get a new one sent to my office.
This wasn't one of those cases where there turned out to be a drug cartel or an assassination attempt involved, to my disappointment. We got to talk to one of the coleaders of the little would-be criminals, but I could tell within the first ten minutes of playing billiards at the country club they frequented that not only did they suck at pool, but they sucked at masterminding thefts, too. We left – Neal almost a hundred dollars richer after placing a bet on the game – with distaste and irritation aplenty.
"These are not worth our time." Neal flipped his hat back on while we strode side by side on the sidewalk. "Trust me, Kenna, they're not getting anywhere. Not only have they completely forgotten to account for the security cameras covering the outside of the museum vault, but I doubt they even know that the microprinting exists."
"I agree, it's an easy case, but Hughes has a friend on the board of curators. He promised his best would personally ensure the gallery had an uneventful opening night, and if we pass it off to Cruz or Hallowell, then he'll probably put us both in Riker's." I commiserated and touched his elbow. "Let's just get back to work now and we can take off early tonight. The op warrant should come through by morning and we'll surveil from the inside tomorrow evening."
"We should grab dinner!" He suggested brightly.
"Only if you're paying."
"That's cold. You have a much larger salary."
"I also have to pay for all of my living expenses. June lets you get off easy."
"Sh!" Neal looked over his shoulder and hushed his voice. "Don't let anyone else know. Diana already threatened to break my legs if she thought I was doing any funny business to keep my suite."
I giggled. "I thought she was going to break your arms?"
"No, that was if I ever tried to con her," Neal cleared up.
"So what's left to break? Skull? Spirit? Ribs? Maybe some more delicate parts?"
Neal scowled, but I thought the scowl contained a little bit of nervousness. "So far she's only also threatened my hands and my spine. Let's not give her any more ideas on how best to torture your informants, alright?"
When we got back to the bullpen, we found that the tech team had already gotten us a new golden wristwatch for Neal, with an audio transmitter built in underneath the face. Derek brought it to us as soon as we entered and I fastened it to Neal's wrist for him. He solemnly admired it while a small collection of agents applauded the small scene.
Not five minutes later, the probie from the night before came up to us and interrupted Neal in the middle of a sentence. "Agent Anderson," he said, his hair messy and tie askew.
I bit the inside of my cheek. "I'll be with you in a moment." I canted my head at Neal for him to continue.
The blond didn't give him the chance. "It's important," he insisted.
"And for all you know, so is the discussion I'm trying to have with my CI about an active investigation involving a gallery heist and a known strongman." I rebuked firmly. "If you had just waited patiently, then he would probably be done speaking already. Neal, go on."
Both the recruit and myself turned to Neal expectantly. The blue-eyed con opened his mouth, but thought better of it and waved passively at the man next to me. "You know, I think I've conveyed the general idea," Neal excused himself uncomfortably, sending me an apologetic glance as he went to his desk.
I sighed and raked a hand through my hair. He still did that sometimes, avoiding hostile agents. I wished he'd stand his ground instead of backing down. The people who needed to learn to respect him as a coworker were never going to start if he didn't start showing that he had a backbone.
"What do you want?" I demanded shortly, turning to the recruit.
"Cameron," he supplied me with his name, assuming I had been prompting for it. I let no sign of acknowledgment or recognition show on my face, and he squirmed around a little bit before he got on with it. "I just wanted to return this." He took a hand out of his pocket and showed me a golden watch, identical to the one I'd just placed on Neal. "I found it in the men's room yesterday. I'd have given it to you straight away, but I didn't know until you got the new one that it was case equipment."
I took the watch and turned it over a full time. It was definitely the kind that the tech labs made. They were modeled after the most generic wristwatches they could base them off of, then polished to look extra shiny and expensive to fit with Neal's typical undercover aliases.
"Thanks for giving it back," I said to him uncertainly. In the bathroom? That was weird. Sure, Neal was the type to take care of his things meticulously, so it was plausible that he'd taken a watch off to wash his hands, but leaving it there was a kind of forgetfulness that just didn't apply to my friend. Still, everyone had their off days. "But in the future, you should deliver lost things to the people who lost them. I promise, Caffrey doesn't bite."
~~~ Karma ~~~
Although there were no more weird accounts of finding things where they shouldn't be, there was a noticeable increase to Neal's bad luck with losing things over the next couple of days. They weren't important things, really, but they were still things he noticed. The first time, when we'd come in on the morning of the gallery opening, he complained to me that one of his pencils was missing, a special one for drawing that he'd ordered online. I told him he'd probably left it home by mistake, and though he was clearly unconvinced, he agreed.
After we brought in all three of the attempted thieves, I went to inform Hughes that it was all taken care of. When I left, Neal found me and told me that he was now missing his sketchbook. I sighed and decided that was harder to write off. Neal prized his sketchbook and thought it to be a very personal object, so he wouldn't misplace it, especially not in the middle of the FBI – he had drawings in there that were modeled off of me, Katie, and other agents. Most of them were fine for viewing, but it wasn't the kind of content he'd want people to know he sat and sketched.
The third thing was the very next day. Neal, looking irate, came into my office without knocking to voice his issues with the number of things going missing from his desk as his phone charger was added to the list.
The phone charger rang a bell. It was awfully soon after he'd playfully swiped Diana's for his favorite workplace game. He thought of that, too, and he had already asked her, but Diana swore she had nothing to do with his missing belongings, and then bluntly expressed that unless it was covered in glitter, she wouldn't know the difference between a normal pencil and an artist's special order.
Neal wasn't the kind of person who lost things. Conmen didn't get very far if they were careless, and losing so many items in such a small time frame was weird, no matter who it was. I didn't say anything to Neal, but I started to get a worrisome feeling that maybe he wasn't actually losing anything.
To test my theory, I drove Neal home for the night and promised him I'd ask Derek and Diana to pick up any untitled books they saw and put them in my office. My artist was unappeased. The entire car ride had been spent mostly in silence. He was more distressed by the missing book than I had anticipated, and it had been affecting his behavior ever since it vanished.
Once he was safe at home, I doubled back to Federal Plaza and made a quick trip back up to the offices. Most of the mysterious disappearances seemed to happen overnight, so I just wanted to make sure no one was staying very late. Maybe if someone planned to do overtime, and I trusted them, I could ask them to keep an eye on Neal's desk for me.
There were a couple of agents still there, including Spencer and the blond probie. Cameron was near Spencer, so it occurred to me at last that he was the accountant's junior agent. I was tired and had no intentions of staying all night, so I went to go ask Spencer to do me a favor.
It was as I was passing Cameron's desk space that I stopped and did a double-take. He was writing something into a spreadsheet with an inky black pencil. A thin ring of white was near the top, but there was no eraser. I knew I'd seen it before, or pencils like it, in craft stores.
My intuition told me it wasn't just a coincidence. After all, the missing pencil wasn't the first thing that actually went missing, and Cameron had returned the first victim of property theft as soon as he realized it didn't actually belong, in that sense, to Neal.
I crossed my arms and tapped my foot. "Agent Smith," I said clearly with a stern and angry expression, lips pursed tightly to be intimidating. He jumped, dropped the pencil, and banged his knee on the inside of his desk. "Do you have a problem with my consultant?"
Spencer looked up from his desk and slid off his reading glasses. "Agent Anderson, has something happened that I should know about?" He looked between Cameron and I attentively.
Cameron chuckled. A flash of anxiety ran across his face and his eyes darted to a drawer before he made eye contact again. "Well, he's a convict. Shouldn't everyone here have a problem with him?"
My frown deepened. Spencer rubbed his forehead as if sensing a headache.
"Open that." I commanded, pointing down to the drawer he had thoughtlessly looked to.
The nerves in his posture made me happy. "Do I have to?" He asked, huffing weakly. "What for?"
Spencer was a fair tutor, but he was never one for wasting time. He was the one who leaned over to see what was going on and snapped, "Just do as she asks, Cameron. If you're not up to anything, then there shouldn't be a problem."
Caught and pinned, the probie sank his teeth into his lip and looked down into his lap. Meekly, he pulled out the drawer by the handle. I sank down to my knees in front of it and reached in, taking out files focusing on fiscal spending on a company whose audits he was supposed to be reviewing with Spencer's guidance. Underneath those was a plain, leather-bound book of canvas paper.
I took out Neal's sketchbook and looked in the recesses of the drawer. I came up with yet another missing thing – Neal's phone charger was stuffed away, wrapped up messily and held together with a purple rubber band. I cleared my throat and pointed at the pencil Cameron had been using, holding the sketchbook under one arm, the charger in hand, and expectantly waiting for him to give up the final belonging that wasn't his.
As Cameron did so, his face turning an alarming shade of red both in embarrassment and anger, I turned to Spencer and pleasantly showed him everything I'd just confiscated. "The reason Caffrey's been in a sour mood the last couple of days is because personal affects he quite enjoys having were being stolen from his desk," I explained. Spencer's look of confusion turned to shock, and he glared at Cameron furiously. The brat was going to get a harsh talking-to from his supervising agent. "I don't want to supersede your authority over your trainee, but I strongly recommend he be relegated for a while and be forced to apologize publicly to my CI. He seems to be under the impression that theft is condoned by the bureau, so I wouldn't fret too much about writing him up, either."
Spencer was glowering at his probie, quietly seething. I was glad not to be Cameron. "I fully agree, Anderson," he stated seriously.
Cameron gaped. "You can't be serious!" He raised his voice. I tapped the sketchbook with the pencil for emphasis; it was his own actions that got him where he was. He sneered at me, respect forgone as I determined disciplinary action. Not many, but some people no longer respected their senior agents when they weren't getting what they wanted. "I was just giving that crook what he deserves! He's constantly lifting things from Berrigan's desk. I saw him take Johnson's phone the other day, did you notice? Who knows what he's taken from you!"
I bit my tongue before I said something scathing and waited a second until I could control my temper. "The correct course of action, in that case, would be to inform those of us involved." I curtly reprimanded. "Not to take the law into your own hands. You are not God, and you are not a vigilante. New York punishes petty larceny with up to a thousand in fees and/or up to six months in a level-one incarceration facility. Mr. Caffrey would be well within his rights to press charges if he likes.
"And yes, Cameron, I did just say that he has rights," I nodded derisively. "Caffrey's work-release states that he has the right to both defend himself from and initiate litigation with the permission of whomever holds his power of attorney. That would be me. I hardly think you have the right to steal from other people if you would punish another person for it. If you had bothered to make the adult decision, you would have been told that we are all well aware that he likes to take our things. You would've also been told that it's our entertainment and that he returns our belongings as soon as we ask for them. It's hardly property theft if we assent to it," I pointed out.
By now, Cameron's face was outraged. "What kind of man feels like he has to even pretend to take things to be useful?!"
Spencer and I shared a look and we both stared down Cameron incredulously.
"You… you do realize that that's exactly what you've been doing, right…?"
