A/N: I think this is one of my favorite chapters in the whole story. What do you guys think?

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Feeling like children playing hooky, they sat out on a wooden bench in the park, savoring the warm sunlight, much longer than their lunch hour should have allowed. Alex munched happily on the bag of candied almonds Bobby had bought for her, occasionally offering one to him as he leaned his head against hers; Bobby was content to simply sit, think, and enjoy her company.

"Thanks," she said as she ate the last almond. "These hit the spot."

He smiled at her. "You're welcome. It's nice to know a way to make you smile if I ever need to."

She chucked the crumpled-up bag at him. "You're making mental notes, aren't you - what I like, what I don't like . . ."

He ducked his head. "Guilty as charged. But it doesn't . . . do any harm, right?"

She could hear the apprehension in his voice; he seemed to be afraid to displease her today. "I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Most girls would kill for a guy who remembers that stuff. Add that to the fact that you always remember my birthday, and, well . . ." When he relaxed, she shifted a little closer to him and laid her head on his shoulder. "The 'thank you' wasn't only for the nuts."

He looked down at her. "Hmm?"

"Thank you for stopping me. Upstairs, I mean. I know you don't like him; I would have expected you to cheer me on."

He sighed and raised a hand to stroke her hair. "You're right, I don't like him. But I like you, and I didn't want to see you do anything to hurt yourself. And beating Logan up wouldn't have reflected well on you, even if it did feel good."

"I know. So . . . thanks."

He gently lifted her head off his shoulder and gave her a self-effacing smile. "I'm your partner, I'm supposed to watch out for you. No thanks needed." He paused for a second. "And I should thank you for standing up for me. I didn't realize he thought I -"

He was cut off by the sound of his phone ringing. They both groaned, then looked at each other and laughed. "It had to happen sometime," she said with a shrug. "Better answer it."

Wishing the distraction would just disappear, he opened the phone. "Goren."

"Detective Goren, hello. It's Dan from Computer Forensics."

He looked at Alex and nodded, pointing to the phone. "Hi, Dan. Have you got anything for us?"

Next to him, Eames made a sound that was a cross between a choke and laugh. He scowled at her and made a mental note to do the same thing to her the next time someone hit on her.

"Well, I put your machine at the top of my list, and I've given your hard drive a thorough once-over. I had to do a bit of digging, since the kid seemed to have a pretty good grasp of security, but I found some file fragments and search results that look promising. Are you and your partner available to come take a look?"

"Definitely," Goren said. "When can you see us?"

"Well, I'm supposed to be on my lunch hour, but for you, I'll stay hungry for a little longer. This is an interesting case."

He wondered if the guy was trying to flirt with him. He'd have to check with Eames after he hung up; he was pretty sure he wouldn't recognize male flirting directed at him unless he was hit in the face with it.

"That would be great, Dan," he said after a tiny pause. "You're on the ninth floor?"

"Yup."

"Perfect. We can be up there in about . . ." He checked his watch. ". . . ten minutes."

"Sounds good."

Goren disconnected the phone and glared at the woman sitting next to him, whose eyes were twinkling with obvious amusement. "Did he invite you up for coffee?" she teased.

He gave her a look that threatened retribution and stood up. "No, but he did offer me some interesting 'file fragments'."

"Sounds kinky," she said as she stood. "We going right now?"

"Yep."

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She had to admit that Dan wasn't bad-looking, for a computer geek. Not her type - which was convenient, given his obvious preference for Goren - but at least he wasn't short, fat, and pimply. It was a refreshing change to see Bobby try to deal with the type of amorous person she got stuck with way too often, she decided. Besides, it would provide plenty of teasing and blackmail material, should she need it in the near future.

The tech appeared genuinely excited to show them what he'd found. "Come on," he said, dropping Alex's hand after a perfunctory shake and trotting farther into the room, where a waist-high bench sat covered with three desktop computers, two laptops, the multicolored wires that ran between and around them, and an assortment of tools.

"Where's . . ." Alex began, not seeing the laptop they'd brought in.

"Hmm?" Dan asked, looking puzzled for a second. "Oh," he said, pointing to a keyboardless machine that looked like Dr. Frankenstein had gotten to it. "That one."

"You just . . . took it apart?" asked Goren.

"No, not exactly. I opened it up, as you can see. Wanted to check the physical specs and make sure there wasn't anything in there that wasn't supposed to be. I found a dime bag of heroin in one of these once," he explained. "You'd be amazed.

"But anyway," he continued, "The inside was clean. The hardware all looks original. Completely uninteresting, so I moved on to the software. This one was more fun than usual; he was running Linux. Got to flex my root muscles."

"I'm not going to ask," Eames said dryly.

Dan blinked, then turned red. "Oh, root's the base directory. Yeah, I guess that did sound pretty bad, huh?" he said with a bashful laugh, rubbing his neck. "But anyway, uh, I pretty much just combed the drive for information that was still there, then ran it through my pet program, which inspects the drive for data remaining from deletes."

"Isn't that kind of oxymoronic? To have traces of something that was deleted?" she asked.

Goren shook his head. "When you delete a file on a computer, it's not actually erased. It's just marked as information that can be overwritten the next time that slot in the memory is needed."

"Exactly right, Detective," said the tech. "Unless you run a shredder program, you're going to have remnants of stuff you thought was long gone. Which is what happened here. His visible files were clean, mostly term papers full of big words and complicated games that involve 3D graphics, but when I got into the recovered data . . . Well, here," he said, handing Goren a sheet of paper. "Look for yourself."

He did, scanning the list of recovered files before passing it to Eames. "Could you, uh, translate this for us?"

"Sure, sure." He took the sheet back from Eames and pointed to the first item. "First, he had a bunch of cookies from sites like eMedicine and Medline. Doesn't tell us what he was doing there, but I thought it was interesting. Then you have this deleted OpenOffice file. It's got some holes in it from the deletion, but it looks to me like a to-do list. It also contains the words 'rat' and 'coffee,' which you said might be significant when I spoke to you earlier."

Eames raised her eyebrows. "Definitely something we need to take a look at."

"All in good time, my dear," Dan said. Pointing to the next item, he said, "A temp file from an opened flash drive file. Contains the word 'warfarin.' And then here," he said, pointing to the last few file names, which all differed from each other by only one character, "not directly linked to any of your key words, since they're jpegs, but considering that he deleted them at the same time he did the other stuff, I thought they might be important."

"I'm impressed," Alex admitted. "I didn't realize you guys could get that sort of data back after it's gone."

"It may be gone, but it's almost never forgotten, Detective Eames." He smiled at both of them. "I'm going to keep picking at this some more before I turn in my final results. I'll give you guys a call if I find anything else."

"Right," Goren mumbled, already heading for the door. "This is good."

She rolled her eyes and shook the tech's hand. "He means 'thank you.' He's just a little ADD."

"Oh, ok." Dan leaned a little closer. "So, do you, uh, know if he's single?"

She had to bite her lip almost hard enough to draw blood to keep from cracking up, but she managed it. "Er . . . I'm pretty sure he has a girlfriend." Or at least a bedmate . . . No, she'd worry about that distinction later.

Sighing dramatically, Dan said, "Damn. Why are all the hot ones straight?"

She patted his shoulder. "Not all of them, just most. Tell you what, I'll keep my eyes open for any non-straight guys in the building I think you might like."

He grinned. "We computer geeks don't get much socialization. Thanks, Detective."

She rolled her eyes as she waved goodbye. "Just call me Cupid."

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"I think we have more than enough to pick him up," Eames told Deakins a little while later. "With this computer evidence, we can link him to research on the drug and planning that involved it."

"But until we get the results back on the stuff we found in his coffee," Goren argued, "we can't show that he actually had the means."

"We've arrested lots of people before we had the results of lab work back," she retorted

"The kid isn't going anywhere, Alex. We don't need to bring him in yet."

Deakins, who had been watching the argument like it was a tennis match, blinked. Had Goren just called her "Alex"? He'd never done that before, at least in Deakins's presence.

"Oh, you want to tell that to Sara King if she gets attacked again?"

"He has no reason to attack her again! I'm telling you, we don't want to give him any more time to think his way out than we need to."

"You actually think he's going to outwit the famous Bobby Goren? What put a pinprick in your ego today?"

"Children!" barked Deakins. "Stop bickering, would you? You're giving me the kind of headache I usually only get when my girls start fighting."

"Well I just don't understand why he wants to hang back on this," Eames said. "We've been chasing the guy's trail for the better part of a week and it's getting ridiculous."

"Because we -" Goren began.

"Quiet!" Deakins said, holding up his hand to cut off whatever retort Goren had been about to make. "What did I just tell you about bickering? Listen: go to the gym, take a walk, fly a kite, I don't care - just go keep yourselves busy until we get the tox results. That means both of you," he added, noting the glares they gave each other. "Stay together, because I'm calling you back in as soon as I get the report. And for god's sake," he said as he waved them out the door, "don't kill each other."

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A/N 2: I hope "Dan" didn't offend anybody. I was trying very hard to make it clear that the humor was in someone coming on to Bobby, not a man coming on to him. Dan just popped up into my mind when I tried to think of someone, and he turned out to be a pretty fun guy, I thought...