A/N: Thanks, again, to everyone for reading and especially to those who took the time to leave a review! I really enjoy reading your thoughts :)
I'm sorry, but Danny still doesn't make an appearance in this chapter. He definitely will be more in the second half of the story, so don't worry. But for now the others are still trying to figure out what's going on . . .
Chapter 4
A dull knocking sound woke Steve the next morning. He opened his eyes slowly and squinted when everything around him seemed to be unnaturally bright. This was definitely not his bedroom. Everything was white and sterile. The sunlight that flooded the room seemed to reflect off of everything, intensifying the brightness by a tenfold and making his head hurt.
Steve tried pushing himself upright, but had to realize that he was pinned down by a blanket. He looked around and found Grace, curled up into a small ball next to him. She was lying on top of the blanket, effectively weighing it down and trapping him under it, since the other side seemed to be tucked in under the mattress.
The door opened and Kono's head peeked around the corner, a bright smile lighting up her face when she realized his predicament. "Morning boss," she half-whispered, strolling into the room with Chin on tow.
"Morning," Steve whispered back. He ripped out the blanket from under the mattress and then carefully pushed it aside a little, trying not to wake up Grace as he slipped out of the bed. He remained seated on the edge and – to work out some of the tension in his muscles – he started stretching out his neck and shoulders. When he noticed that the entire left side of his back felt sore from the fall, he rolled the left arm in large circles a couple of times, but quickly reconsidered when the movement pulled painfully on the stitched in his side.
A cup of coffee appeared out of nowhere under his nose. "Thought you could use this," Kono said, still smiling. "How're you feeling?"
"I'm good," Steve said with a smile and gratefully took the paper cup from her hand. "Thanks."
"We stopped by your house and picked up some clean clothes for you and Grace," Chin said and set down a duffel bag next to Steve on the bed.
"Thanks, man." He took a sip of the still steaming hot coffee. "So, how bad is it?"
Chin sucked in a breath and then nodded to where Grace was still fast asleep on the bed. "Trust me, it was the right call to stay the night."
Steve just nodded. It was not like anyone had given him a choice in the matter. After the fall, he had been even woozier than before, seeing two of everything and everyone. It had taken not just Chin's help, but also the strong hands of a male nurse to drag his sorry ass to a room on the second floor without him face-planting into a wall. But now that his brain felt a lot less fuzzy, Steve remembered why he had agreed to go to Queens in the first place.
"So what about the guys from last night they brought in? Did you get anything from them yet?"
"Well, in case you don't remember," Chin said and raised his eyebrows at him questioningly, "one of them was D.O.A. We just checked in with the doctor on the other two. Unfortunately, one of them suffered a brain bleed. The doctor declared him brain dead about an hour ago. The other guy, Aaron Palea, had to have surgery but he's awake now. We can talk to him as soon as you're ready."
"Well, what are we waiting for?" Steve said, stretching out his left side once more to loosen the still stiff muscles. The movement pulled on the stitches in his side again, and this time he let out a small wince. That seemed to set off some sort of alarm with Grace. Her head shot up and, with the eyes still closed, slowly lolled from one side to the other and back again. She looked like a blind mole searching for something. Something she didn't seem to be able to find, though, so after a few seconds, her head just dropped back down, planting her face into the blanket.
Kono tried hard but failed to stifle a snort, while Chin just grinned at Steve. "Looks like someone is a little protective after the events of the night," he said.
"Well, Danny told her to make sure I don't get into trouble," Steve explained with a shrug. "Good to know someone listens to what he says."
He watched Grace sleep for a moment and smiled, glad that – after everything – she was still unharmed. Okay, maybe she was a little shaken after what had happened. And maybe that was the reason why she had refuse to go home with Kono last night, or why she had been too afraid to sleep alone in the big hospital bed next to his. But other than that, she was doing remarkably good. She was a tough little cookie. Plus, there was not a scratch on her, so Steve hoped that Danny would refrain from killing him once he heard about what had happened last night. Not that any of this was Steve's fault in the first place anyway, but Danny had a way of ignoring details like that.
Speaking of Danny. Steve grabbed his phone from the bedside table and checked if his partner had called at all, but found that he had only one missed call from Governor Jameson. Nothing else, not even a text. "Did Danny ever call you back?" he asked Kono, remembering that she had said something about leaving him voice mail messages last night.
The smile on her face faded and she shook her head. Steve watched as she exchanged a glance with her cousin. Chin's face was unreadable as ever, but he could clearly see uneasiness spread all over the rookie's features.
"What's going on?"
Chin sighed and dropped down in a chair across from the bed. "Kono said you told her that Danny went to New Jersey to see his mother," he stated flatly.
"Yeah." Steve checked if Grace was still asleep before he elaborated. "He said his mother's sick and in the hospital and that he needed to fly down there and check in on her. Make sure she's going to be okay." Maybe his concussed brain was to blame, but only as he said it out loud, Steve realized how unlikely that scenario seemed to be even anywhere near the truth – especially with everything that had happened last night.
"Sooo," Kono started, nervously wrapping her fingers around each other. "There's nothing else he told you?"
"No." Steve just looked at her for a moment, doubt and worry were written all over her face. "Look, I know what this looks like," he started, not sure where he was going with this, because the whole situation looked so much like Danny went searching for his brother alone, without telling anyone – not even Steve, who was the only one who knew what exactly had happened that night Matt had disappeared. But defending Danny, even if it was in front of Chin and Kono, who he trusted unconditionally, was like a reflex. "But –"
"Danny never left the island," Chin interrupted him. "We checked the flight manifests of every flight out of Oahu yesterday. His name didn't pop up anywhere."
"Damnit, Danny," Steve mumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose. His headache suddenly felt ten times worse that it had just a minute ago.
"What the hell is he doing?" Kono threw up both hands in frustration. She was pacing around the room like a trapped animal now, apparently slowly going crazy with a combination of worry and the desire to smack the bejesus out of Danny.
"I don't know," Steve sighed. "I guess Danny still thinks he can convince Matt to turn himself in."
"Yeah, but why is he lying to us?" Kono stopped at the window and put her hands on her hips. "I mean, he could have just told us what's going on. We could have helped."
Steve smiled resigned. No, Danny would not ask them for help. "He doesn't want to get us into trouble." Which, clearly, was working out very well.
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"The night after we wrapped the Roan case, Danny and I went over to Matt's hotel room but he was gone. The FBI was there and . . . I sent them looking in the wrong direction."
"You did what?" Kono just stared at him.
"I told them Matt had a boat at Kawela Bay."
"So you lied to the FBI to help Matt escape?" she asked exasperatedly, not bothering to keep her voice down any longer. She crossed her arms in front of her chest and looked over to Chin. "Did you know about this?"
He shook his head. "Look, Kono-"
"What's going on?" a sleepy voice suddenly spoke up from behind Steve. He turned around to where Grace was still huddled up on his bed, looking at them with bleary eyes.
Kono forced a smile. "Nothing, honey. Don't worry about it."
"Okay." Grace untangled herself from the sheets, crawled over to where Steve was sitting and then looked at him very seriously. "Are you feeling better, Uncle Steve?"
"Much better," he said with a wink. "Hey Grace, Uncle Chin brought us some fresh clothes, so why don't you go into the bathroom and get changed real quickly so that we can get out of here and go have breakfast?"
Her face lit up with a huge smile. "Can we have pancakes?"
"Anything you want."
Grace grabbed her clothes from the bag and wandered off into the bathroom, closing the door behind her and leaving the rest of them sitting and standing around in awkward silence for a while.
"Why did you do it?" Kono asked eventually, staring out of the window. "And Chin, don't tell me that this is like you covering for Uncle when he took that money," she added and turned around, glaring at her cousin. "Because, guess what, that doesn't make it right."
She then looked at Steve with a somewhat forlorn expression on her face. "Look, I get that he's Danny's brother, but . . . we're cops, too. Aren't we supposed to be on the same side as the FBI?" She blew out a breath and shook her head helplessly. "Just . . . why did you do it?"
Steve shrugged, not sure what to tell her. That night, he hadn't really thought about what he was doing or why. He had just seen that look in Danny's eyes. That fear that he was losing his brother and that there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing he could do to make it right.
"In a way, it was the same as with the money we took from the asset forfeiture locker," he said, hoping she'd understand.
"But that was to save Chin's life," Kono argued, creasing her forehead in confusion. "Danny's brother messed up. I'm sorry, but don't you think he should face the consequences for what he did?"
"Of course, Kono. It's just that . . ." He trailed off, not sure how to explain to her that he hadn't lied to the FBI agents to help Matt escape. He hadn't done it for Matt at all. He'd done it for Danny, because Danny had needed things to be different that night. He had needed Matt to turn himself in and do the right thing. Not have him taken down like a criminal on the run. Danny had needed a chance to make things right, because that was just what big brothers did. Fixing things. Steve knew how it was. He was a big brother, too.
"It's just that sometimes," Chin said, his voice still soft and patient, "especially when family gets involved, the line between right and wrong gets blurry. I'm not saying that it makes breaking the law right, but the people you care about have to come first, Kono. Always. Sometimes you just have to trust your gut. Sometimes you have to do what your gut tells you is right. And that doesn't mean that you don't respect the job, or the oath we took. It's just that sometimes things are –"
"Not that simple," Kono finished the thought for him. "Yeah, you told me that before."
She still didn't look convinced, though, and Steve couldn't blame her. It was a hard and painful process – especially for a rookie, fresh out of the academy, with all that textbook knowledge and that image of a black and white world in her head – to learn that there were different definitions of what's right and what's wrong. Sometimes you had to make tough choices in life, especially as a cop. You took that oath on that first day of the job and wasn't just an empty promise. You meant it, protect and serve, be one of the good guys. But what if breaking that promise was the only way to save someone you cared about?
"Look, Kono, I didn't do it to help Matt escape, I did it to help Danny give his brother another chance to turn himself in. Maybe it wasn't the right thing to do, but Danny . . . he just wasn't ready to give up on Matt. I know that why I did it doesn't really make a difference in the end, but-"
"No, it does. It does make a difference," Kono said, her voice softer now. She sighed and looked at him, a hint of a smile crossing her lips. "It makes a difference to me," she added earnestly and Steve knew she understood.
"Good," he said, smiling back at her.
"And, besides, I guess getting your head bashed in with a coffeemaker is punishment enough." Kono raised her eyebrows and pointedly looked at the cut on his forehead before she dropped down on a chair next to Chin.
"She's got a point there," Chin said with a relieved smile. He put a hand on his cousin's knee and gave it a light squeeze.
"So . . . all this is my fault after all," Steve said, shaking his head in disbelieve.
"Absolutely," Kono confirmed with a dimply smile.
"It's always your fault, brah," Chin agreed.
"Right."
"So, what are we going to do about Danny?" Chin asked after a short pause, his demeanor serious again. "He's not answering his phone. I guess he turned it off."
"How do you figure?" Steve asked with a frown.
"When we couldn't find his name on any of the flight manifests, I tried triangulating the GPS in his cell, but no luck," Chin explained. "Unfortunately, it can't be turned on remotely."
"Did you guys get any sleep last night?"
Chin and Kono just smiled at each other.
"Alright," Steve said, getting up off the bed just a bit too quickly. The whole room started spinning for a moment and he tried hard to not let the dizziness show in front of his team. He grabbed the bedside table for support and tried to concentrate on Chin and Kono. All four of them. "Only way to find Danny is to find Matt," he said through gritted teeth.
"Hmmhm." Kono looked at him skeptically, a smile tugging at her lips. "Can you even walk straight?"
"Don't push it," Steve warned, stabbing a finger in her general direction. He grabbed the bag with his clothes off the bed and went to knock on the bathroom door. "You almost done in there, Grace?"
When Steve came back out of the bathroom a few minutes later, he found Kono sitting on his bed behind Grace, trying to braid her hair in pigtails like she usually wore it. With a mighty frown on her face and her tongue sticking out between her lips, Kono looked wildly determined and intensely concentrated. Grace, on the other hand, looked like she was in a substantial amount of pain. Chin was watching the scene with a mixed expression – partly sympathy for Grace's suffering, and partly amusement about Kono's failure at mastering the basics of being a girl.
Steve shook his head and patted Kono on the shoulder. "Scoot over."
"You know how to braid pigtails, boss?" she asked, raising an eyebrow at him and not believing it for a second. But she still slipped off the bed and offered him her spot. "They teach you this stuff in the boy scouts?"
"I had a little sister growing up, remember?" Steve sat down on the bed and started on Grace's hair, parting it expertly with just the hairbrush. "Mary is way too uncoordinated to braid her own pigtails. But she went through this Pippi Longstocking phase and wouldn't wear her hair any other way," he explained, leaving out the part about their mother's death being the only reason why he had to learn how to braid pigtails in the first place. There was just no one else to do it for Mary and Steve had figured that the least he could do for his baby sister was to learn how to braid two goddamn pigtails.
Just as Steve was done tugging on both finished pigtails to see if they were perfectly even, his phone started ringing. He grabbed it from the bedside table but froze when he saw the caller ID.
Rachel.
Shit.
How on earth was he going to explain to her what had happened last night? Not telling her or playing things down significantly was kind of out of the question, since Grace would make sure that her mother got every last detail of her exciting night at Uncle Steve's house sooner or later anyway.
"Hey Rachel," he said into the phone, trying hard to keep his tone casual. Next to him, Grace started bouncing up and down at the mention of her mother's name.
"Hello Steve, I hope it's not too early to call? What time is it there now, eight in the morning?"
"Don't worry about it, we're up," Steve said and frowned. Wasn't she back in their time zone yet?
"Listen, Steve, I'm really sorry about this, but I'm not going to be able to pick up Grace at noon."
"Is everything okay?" Steve tried to not sound too concerned. He didn't want to worry Grace.
"The weather here has been awful all day. They had to ground all the planes. I have been stuck at this bloody airport for hours now." She sighed and continued after a short pause, "It's clearing up now and I've been told that the plane will leave within the next couple hours, but . . . with layover and all, I probably won't be back until tomorrow, and Stan is in Indonesia all week, so-"
"Don't worry about Grace, Rachel," Steve tried to reassure her. "We're getting along great. She can stay with me until either you or Danny get back here."
"I am so terribly sorry about this, Steve," she said, sounding more distraught than before. "I'm sure this is not what you had planned for the weekend."
"No, but spending time with Grace beats pretty much anything, so, again, don't worry about it." Out of the corner of his eye, Steve saw Kono draw a heart with her fingers on her chest while she drawled out a mushy 'awww' sound. Grace giggled.
Rachel sighed, this time in relief. "Thank you, Steve, I really appreciate what you're doing. Would you mind putting Grace on for just a minute, please?"
"Sure." He held the phone out to Grace, carefully covering the mouthpiece with his thumb. "Here's your mommy for you," he said, leaning over to her and dropping his voice conspiratorial, "Just don't tell her about what happened last night yet, okay? I don't want her to be worried."
Grace pouted a little confused, but then nodded and took the phone from him. "Hey mommy," she said cheerily and Steve prayed that she would stick to the plan.
"Hey boss? What are we gonna do with her?" Kono asked, waving a hand at Grace. "I thought we were gonna go looking for Danny?"
Steve shrugged. He hadn't planned that far ahead.
". . . Daddy wanted to take me to the water park but . . ."
"Maybe ask Kamekona if he'll watch her for a few hours?" Chin suggested. "At least she knows him."
Steve shook his head. "I don't think that's such a good idea after last night. She's putting on a tough front now, but I think she's still kind of freaked out by everything." He was half listening to what Grace was saying on the phone while he spoke to make sure she didn't accidentally slip up.
". . . and then we spent the entire afternoon snorkeling. I saw a fish that looked exactly like the one from The Little Mermaid . . ."
"Well, we can take her with us to HQ for now," Kono said. "We can put her in Danny's office and she can draw or something."
"Yeah, that's probably best for now."
". . . okay, bye mommy. I love you too!"
Good girl.
"What are we gonna do about Palea?" Chin asked.
"We're going to get some answers from him. Kono, can you take Grace somewhere for breakfast while we talk to him?" Steve asked, grabbing his wallet from the bedside table. "It's on me," he added, pulling out his credit card.
"You might not want give her that," Chin warned with a smile.
"Breakfast," Steve reminded Kono, holding the card in front of her face.
She just shook her head with pursed lips and took the card from him.
The night had been about six hours too short for Edith's taste. With a styrofoam cup of strong, black coffee in her hand, she tiredly shuffled behind her partner across the lobby of Queens Medical and towards the elevators.
"So," Bixler said as they walked into the shiny silver cabin that forced Edith to look at her over-tiredly looking reflection from every possible angle, "fourth or second floor?" He expectantly raised a brow at her and let his index finger hover over the buttons.
Edith sighed. Palea was on the fourth floor, McGarrett on the second. They would have to talk to both of them eventually, and Edith wasn't exactly looking forward to either of those conversations. A part of her hoped that McGarrett had gotten his head bashed in really good last night and that he would be out of commission for a few days. She had heard some pretty alarming stories about the guy's unorthodox methods and, why yes, she was mildly concerned that it was now up to her and Bix to make sure that he stayed in line and didn't go after Matt Williams himself.
"Hmmm, fourth," Edith decided and took another sip from her coffee. "You know me, I like to aim high," she added with a sheepish smile, pleased with her own little joke.
Bixler snorted. "You're just avoiding confrontation," he said as he pushed the button with the big four on it.
"I am not avoiding confrontation," Edith replied with mock outrage. "I'm choosing to confront the criminal over confronting the cop. I would call that courageous."
Bixler was not impressed. "You're choosing the drugged up criminal with a broken face over the scary Navy SEAL. I'll either call that avoiding or being a coward. Your choice."
"Whatever," Edith scowled and marched out of the elevator as soon as the doors slid open with a soft 'ding'.
"Hey, what's going on over there?" Bixler suddenly asked, his voice urgent and serious, as they walked down one of the ever identical looking hospital corridors.
Edith had noticed the commotion a little further down the hallway, too. "I don't know," she said with a shrug, picking up the pace. "Shit, that's Palea's room." Doctors and nurses were rushing past them, yelling all kinds of medical mumbo-jumbo at each other.
Edith didn't dare enter the small room, afraid she would only be in the way. Bixler remained right behind her. The drapes in front of the window were only halfway closed, so Edith took a peeked inside Palea's room. She saw a whole bunch of doctors working on their patient. Machines were beeping frantically in the background and lights flickered along in their rhythm.
There was a young doctor standing at the nurses' desk in the hallway. He was staring blankly ahead to where his colleagues were apparently in the process of trying to save Palea's life.
"Hey, sorry." Edith hurried over to the young man. "What's wrong with him?" she asked, jerking a thumb towards the room behind her.
They guy kept staring straight ahead and shrugged. "I'm just an intern," he said absently.
Edith grabbed his arm. "Hey," she said firmly. "You do know what the blinky lights and the alarms mean though, right?" She pulled out her badge from the back pocket of her pants and shoved it into the intern's face. "I'm with the FBI, that man is in our custody. Just . . . give me some answers."
The intern shrugged again. "He just all of a sudden became tachypnic, no idea why."
Frustrated, Edith pressed her lips together in a thin line. "Is that bad?" she asked through gritted teeth and mentally cursed herself (and McDreamy's perfect hair) for never paying attention to the medical stuff on Grey's Anatomy.
"That depends, really, but yeah, looks like that guy's in serious trouble," the intern said with a slow motion nod.
Edith just glared at the young doctor, unsatisfied with the answer. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"He started having trouble breathing, okay," the intern said, sounding like a belligerent child. "His heart rate shot through the roof, the rest of his vitals were tanking . . . he was fine just a minute ago, though. I've never seen anything like this."
Oh, really, with all those years and years of experience under your belt? Edith could barely suppress the urge to roll her eyes at the guy. She took a deep breath and focused on Palea instead. "How serious is this?"
Another shrug. "Doesn't look good."
"Shit."
"Hey, what's going on here?" a familiar voice droned from a few yards down the hallway.
Shit indeed.
McGarrett and Kelly had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. The two men rushed to Palea's room but they, too, stopped at the door when they saw the frantically working doctors and nurses inside. McGarrett turned around to Edith and Bixler and just raised his eyebrows at them, apparently expecting an explanation of what the hell was going on.
So, this is what she got for wishing the man an incapacitating head injury: their only lead dying right in front of them, and, on top of that, a pissed off McGarrett.
Karma, you incessant bitch.
"Doesn't look good," Bixler explained and unnecessarily added, "maybe a brain bleed," nudging Edith in the side with his elbow.
McGarrett just gave him an irritated look, either not getting the joke or not finding it funny. Probably both.
"No, the symptoms don't suggest any kind of intracranial hemorrhage," the intern said, dead serious.
This time, Edith did roll her eyes at the guy. It was only then that she noticed how quiet everyone and everything in Palea's room had gotten. A grey-haired doctor (whose name Edith couldn't quite remember) stepped out, snapping a pair of latex gloves off his hands and tossing them into a medical waste bin next to the nurses' station. He looked at the four of them and shook his head. "Sorry," he simply said, "there was nothing we could do for him."
"What happened?" McGarrett asked before Edith had even processed the news. "Was there some kind of complication from the surgery?"
"I doubt it," the doctor said and waved a nurse from Palea's room over to join them. She carried something in her gloved hand. The doctor grabbed her wrist and raised it up, showing the object she was holding to the four of them without having to touch it himself. "We found this on the floor next to the bed," he explained.
"A syringe," Edith said, only partly because she felt like someone needed to state the obvious. She also hoped it would maybe make them take that gigantic thing out of her face a lot faster. God, she hated needles. And hospitals in general, at least as long as they came with old, non-McDreamy doctors.
Next to Edith, McGarrett leaned forward and squinted at the huge syringe. She shuddered a bit in spite of herself. Show-off. Okay, so the big Navy SEAL is not scared of torture instruments. Great. She could cross those off her list of things that would help her keep the guy in line. "You think someone injected him with something?" McGarrett asked when he was finished staring.
The doctor sighed heavily and then spoke, sounding incredible bored. "My guess would be that someone injected air into the patient's IV, causing an air embolism."
"That's what killed him?" Edith asked.
"When air is injected into an IV, the bubble – we call this an air embolism – travels to the heart and then to the lungs," the doctor explained. "The capillaries in the lungs are far too narrow to allow for the embolism to pass. The bubbles get entangled in the blood vessels, effectively stopping the blood flow. It fits the symptoms Mr. Palea presented with. The body thinks the blood cannot be sufficiently oxygenated because of lack of air, which leads to increased respiration. Unfortunately, we only realized what was going on when it was already too late."
Edith had zoned out at some point during the doctor's lecture. It was all gibberish to her anyway. Everyone else seemed to be really interested in what he had to say, though, so she waited patiently until the doctor's lips stopped moving. "So, what you're saying is that someone just killed him?" It was more of a statement than a question.
"That's what it looks like anyway. We'll have to get a chest x-ray to confirm it."
"Then we will take that syringe to go, please," Edith said, grinning a little and thinking she was being funny.
The doctor just raised an eyebrow at her, before he turned to the nurse who was still holding the syringe. "Nela, please see if you can find a bag for that." Nela nodded and went to rummage through drawers behind the nurses' station.
"What kind of timeframe are we looking at here?" McGarrett asked.
The doctor shrugged. "A couple minutes between injection and the first symptoms . . . another ten to fifteen minutes of resuscitation attempts."
"So, whoever did this is long gone."
"I don't get it," Bixler said, shaking his head. "Who would kill Palea?"
"Looks like whoever sent these guys to my house last night is tying up loose ends," McGarrett said and ran a hand over his mouth, fingers lingering on his lips. He looked lost in thought for just a moment but then quickly snapped out of it. "Doctor, did you or anyone on your staff notice something suspicious or out of the ordinary around here? Maybe someone snooping around who doesn't belong here?"
"I didn't. I will check with the other doctors and nurses, but they would have said something if they had seen anything suspicious." He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his white coat and shrugged. "As you can see, it's a busy floor, we're constantly moving people in and out –" he trailed off and shook his head.
"Please ask anyway," McGarrett said, nodding his head in understanding.
"Sure."
"Do you have surveillance cameras on this floor?" Kelly asked.
"We have cameras covering the access points, elevator, staircase, and one covering the front of the nurses' station," the doctor added, indicating a small round camera above them with a nod of his head.
"Good," McGarrett said. "Chin, can you check in with building security, make sure they get us the footage from these cameras asap. Doctor, can you make sure no one touches anything in that room until the crime scene techs have been over it? I also want our ME, Max Bergman, to do the autopsy."
"Woah, hold on there for a second," Edith burst out before either the doctor or Kelly could answer. "Who put you in charge?" she asked, glaring at McGarrett. She put her hands on her hips and tried to make herself as tall as possible, but with her five foot and four inches, she didn't even come anywhere close to being physically intimidating. Her three inch heels couldn't do much about that either.
McGarrett gave her a perplexed look as if he had completely forgotten that she was there in the first place.
"You're not very good at this whole collaboration thing, are you?" Edith asked, raising an eyebrow at him and his puppy eyes. When McGarrett just continued to stare, she huffed. Was this guy seriously playing the concussion card now? "Okay," she said after a short pause. "Compromise, your people handle the crime scene and the body and get the footage and everything, but we do the researching and video watching at our office."
McGarrett smiled at her in a sarcastic, arrogant and fake kind of way. "Okay, sure," he said. "We'll meet you there."
Edith was a little taken aback by the quick concession. "Okay, good," she said hesitantly and offered him an honest smile.
McGarrett just nodded. He and Kelly said their goodbyes to the doctor and turned around to leave.
"Well, that went better than expected," Edith said, pleased with herself, as she watched the two walk towards the elevator.
Bixler let out a little snort and shook his head.
"What?" Edith snapped.
"You do realize that he was fucking with you, right?"
"What are you talking about?"
"They're not going to come to our office, Edie."
"What?" Edith stared blankly at her partner, then at McGarrett and Kelly. "That bastard!"
-to be continued-