Maura opened the envelope and pulled out a note. It read:
The murderer is hiding in plain sight in your midst. Find him before he kills one of you.
We both stared at the words, desperately trying to make sense of this situation.
"This must be a joke." I stated, finding my speech first.
"It's not funny if it really is." The doc replied somewhat breathless.
This sounded a lot like some horror movie I thought. Most of all it sounded very dramatic. I almost chuckled: what were they trying to achieve? Make some detectives freak out? Maybe it worked with the scientists, but I even doubted that it would touch them.
Fact was though that the two last hours of the afternoon were reserved to this workshop.
"What are we going to do now?" Maura asked, biting her lips.
"Fetching a good cup of coffee and see if the others got the same message or if they have got real cases." I replied full of wisdom, playing it cool. Maura who probably was in lack of a better idea agreed and we walked off to the café of the hotel.
It didn't take long until we encountered another team, that had a heated discussion in the hallway in front of the conference room. I didn't have to ask them about the note in the envelope as they spoke so loud that I could gather the information needed: they too had gotten this ominous message.
The funny thing was that they were basically accusing each other of being involved in some kind of fraud concerning this game. Maura stood wide eyed with her cup of tea in hand and followed the interaction of the two who obviously weren't aware of our presence.
In order to smoothen the things, I walked up to them, but they wouldn't listen as I tried to calm them down. Instead they suddenly focused their attention on me, making me a suspect. Now it was me who stared wide eyed at them, shaking my head in a lack of words as they began fabricating a story on how I could be involved in all of this. It never got clear if involved meant being the murderer that was mentioned in the piece of paper or if I was involved in putting up this story about the murder case.
It was Maura who dragged me away as i couldn't move.
"Well, either someone has exchanged the envelopes with the cases with these as a joke or this is what we are intended to solve.." I said as we walked away, taking a huge bow around another arguing team. "It's very simple" I continued, guiding her towards the conference room "we are going to ask one of the organizers if this was a mistake. Who knows, maybe they even forgot to put the case into the envelope. I waved with the envelope that still contained the message.
Maura nodded in agreement. "Sounds reasonable. We should really do that. I'm sure that we can clear up whether this is a misunderstanding.."
We looked everywhere but we couldn't find any of the organizers nor the professor who had given the welcome speech and that had later explained the game to us. By now 45 minutes had passed and we found some of the teams still fighting.
Tossing my empty coffee cup into a bin I decided that I had enough. I would give Cavanaugh a piece of my mind upon my return to Boston, because this conference appeared for me to be a total waste of time. Right now, I could be useful to the public by solving another case, put a real perp behind bars. My eyes turned to the petite whose mind was unreadable and shrugged.
We walked back to the palm tree and sat while waiting for dinner time to come around and the buffet to be opened. My stomach was silently rumbling at the thought of food, and I turned to Maura in order to get some deflection.
"So, tell me about yourself." The blonde said as I was about to speak.
"What do you want to know?" I asked hating when someone gave me that general question.
The blonde shrugged, seemingly intimidated and rating her question as a failure.
"I was born and raised in Boston." I quickly said in order to prevent the doc from retrieving into her shell again. "Somehow, I always knew that I wanted to join the forces, although at first, I thought that I'd join the army. But when a boy from my neighborhood disappeared and turned up murdered, I decided to become a detective. It wasn't that we had been best friends or so, but I felt sorry for him and the other kids that got killed by the same man. Police hadn't been able to catch the killer up to this day and sometimes when I have enough time on my hands, I try to solve the case because I want to know which monster could do such thing and I want him behind bars. Unfortunately, as it is, there is almost no such thing as enough time on my hands, because there are so many crimes."
I glanced up from the scars on the palms of my hands that I had been staring at while talking to find hazel eyes studying me with interest. To my surprise the good doc reached out to gently touch the scar on one of my hands. They were hurting again, and I could tell that she knew it.
Normally I would have pushed the hand away that wanted to touch the spot, but somehow, I couldn't when Mauras gentle fingers followed the lines. "It must have hurt badly." She mumbled in a gentle almost hypnotizing voice. Her thumb began drawing circles in the palm, massaging the tissue of the scar itself but also of the surroundings.
"No, it wasn't that bad." I murmured back, watching her ministrations with fascination, which surprisingly made the pain cease. Truth is, that the physical wounds had only been half as bad as the emotional ones. I had evaded Korsak for a long time after he had found and saved me, always remembering the circumstances: me laying half-naked pinned to the floor, sobbing like a teeny after her first break up. My breasts had been exposed but the worst thing was that I had peed my pants.
I literally saw some further questions forming in the blondes' head and rushed to ask her to tell me about herself in order to regain control. I always liked to be in control, and I wondered if Maura could tell that by now or not.
"There is not much to say." Maura stated, wearing a sad smile. "I was born in New York, lived for a while in Boston as a child until I joined a boarding school in Switzerland. I did a year with MSF after studying forensic science at Harvard and returned to the states to work in law enforcement here in LA."
Her words sounded rather clean and emotionless, but her facial expressions were betraying her indifferent tone by showing a mixture of sadness and frustration.
"Wow! Lucky me, I teamed up with one of the biggest brains in the room." I spoke before my mind could assess the words. Was this a compliment? Or a joke? Or the total stupid attempt of flirting? I had the tendency to do all 3 of them when feeling unsettled like I did now as Mauras thumb still caressed the palm, making the pain miraculously go away with each stroke.
After giving it a short thought, I decided that it must be all three things because I complimented when wanting someone to feel better (but my compliments were always the truth. I wouldn't lie. I joked when being nervous or having made me vulnerable to someone (the latter was usually a big exception) and I flirted if found someone intriguing or attractive.
And Dr. Isles definitively was attractive in a special way. There was no use to be ashamed to admit that. I had watched colleagues of the conference checking Maura out during the whole day – especially detectives to be honest but still… I could literally fall deep into those hazel eyes and get lost if I wanted to. But hell, I was 33 years old which was definitively too old to do stupid things that could threaten my comfort zone. So, I gave her a simple smile and pointed to my watch, announcing that it was time for dinner. A gong underlined my statement, and I was glad that Maura wasn't offended by the abrupt ending of our little moment under the palm tree.
