Nick yawned as he rounded the corner of the corridor. Jeez, he thought, I'm dog-tired. Okay, so the hours on swing shift were more sociable than those on graveyard, but they certainly weren't any shorter. He rifled through the file in his hands. Some geniuses had decided to commit an insider break-in at one of the forum shops, but used one of their own key cards to get in. He sighed. When they made it this easy, it was just boring. Still, a trip to the AV lab was in order; that at least offered an opportunity to tease Archie about how he made his girlfriend sit through an entire weekend of Star Trek. She hadn't been pleased, according to Greg.

When he got there, however, he didn't find the AV technician sitting at a computer terminal, but Sara, singing along to a CD she had playing. She hadn't noticed him, he realized, and was happily tapping her fingers on the desk as she waited for a database to load.

'Well hello, Little Miss Sunshine!'

Sara looked up from her place to see Nick waving at her from the doorway. 'Huh?'

'Maybe that should be Little Miss Disoriented. You seem to be in a good mood; what's happened to you that's put the sunshine in your veins?'

'Nothing,' she muttered hastily, cheeks coloring slightly. 'And no Little Miss-ing at all, if you know what's good for you, Mr Stokes,' she added as a warning.

'Okay, okay… I think I've got the message. Where's Archie?'

'On a break.'

'Right. And you're…?'

'Not on a break.' She gestured toward the computer screen. You know the Marshall case Greg and I are working on?'

'Jonathan Marshall, guy who owns those department stores? Yeah… I remember. Hodges was complaining about having to do the trace on his stomach contents. Something about a curry?'

Sara smiled. 'Yeah. Well anyway, Jacqui found a foreign print on a bag of chips, and lucky for us, our guy has a record. I was just looking him up; see if I could find any details.'

'And the, er, music?'

'Oh,' said Sara, embarrassed, 'It's just a Blondie CD. I only had it on tape, so Greg copied it for me. Just thought I'd try it out; haven't heard it in years. Do you want me to turn it off?'

'No, no, carry on. Ah, Greg,' sighed Nick, 'that explains it all. I never thought I'd hear myself saying this, but I kinda miss my daily dose of Greg noise with my DNA results.'

'If you feel like heading toward the layout room, I'm pretty sure you could get yourself a fix; when I left him he was air-drumming along to Paranoid Android.'

'What? Let me guess – British?'

'Yeah. Hold on, let me remember… it's Radiohead, or something, I think.'

'Well done, Sar! You're really coming along with that whole popular culture thing. Hey, Nick.'

Nick and Sara turned their heads to see the man himself amble into the AV room, customary grin on his face and coffee cup in his hand.

'I don't really have a whole lot of choice, do I?' countered Sara sarcastically. 'Not when you hijack the car stereo every time we get called out.'

'Come on Sar, you love it. And you're playing your present already, I see: proof.'

'Blondie's different. There's much less whining.'

'Thom Yorke does not whine,' countered Greg, aghast. 'That's the voice of… the tortured intellectual.'

'So intellectual he doesn't know how to spell his own name?' quipped Sara in reply.

Nick shook his head, a bemused smile on his face. 'You know what? I have no idea what you guys are talking about. Give me good ol' Willie Hank anytime.'

Greg's features contorted in mock disgust. 'You know, as soon as I'm finished working on Sara here, I'm moving straight onto you.'

'But I'm from Texas, man!' complained Nick. 'It's my heritage…'

'That's no excuse.'

'Sooo, Greg,' interrupted Sara, 'did you come here just to insult us, or did you have something important to say?'

'Obviously the latter, oh esteemed colleague,' he replied, performing a mocking little bow, and spilling his coffee in the process. 'Oh, shit… anyway, I've been on the case, as it were. I managed to pull our vic's medical records, and had a word with his psychiatrist, a Dr Yeoh. She said that he'd been responding well to treatment on his SNRI drugs – they're different to SSRIs like Prozac because they work on serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake simultaneously,' he explained. 'Seemed to be working; his last few visits he'd been feeling very positive, apparently. She certainly didn't seem to think that he was a suicide risk.'

'Right,' said Sara. 'So the professional's opinion says that suicide is looking less likely?'

'Yup. Pity she can't tell us what's looking more likely, though.'

'Well, I've been onto our friend Mr Chapman, the Chip Man…'

'Ha! You're a poet and you don't know it!' joked Greg.

Sara groaned. 'Hardly. His conviction was for fraud and identity theft, so he's got a fair list of aliases – pretty good ones too, by the look of it.'

'They can't be that good, or he wouldn't have ended up in jail.'

'Thanks for pointing that out. Anyway, my point is, if he's staying in the local area, it's highly unlikely he's going to be using his real name.'

'True. Any credit card transactions?'

'Nope; again, aliases… I've checked the known ones, but you can be pretty sure the guy still has his contacts and another identity up his sleeve.'

'Maybe your guy has family in the area, and that's why he came,' suggested Nick.

'It's a possibility, I guess,' replied Sara. 'I'll have a look into it. Still, what I can't get my head around is what this guy has to do with anything. I mean, we printed all over the house, windows, doorknobs, and he wasn't anywhere else. Maybe the chips bag is just a red herring – somehow it ended up in the yard and someone tidied up.'

'Hmm,' pondered Greg, 'I'd be willing to buy that if it weren't for the fact that the guy would have had to travel through five state borders just to leave that bag in the Marshalls' yard.'

'Thanks,' muttered Sara. 'Anything else you'd like to add?'

'Yeah, actually. What I really came to tell you is Brass called. He said he'd been looking into the Marshalls' finances and you'd told him to call, so he called. Wants us over at PD.'

'What?' Sara sighed. 'Why didn't you tell me that in the first place?'

'I got sidetracked.' Greg set the remains of his coffee down on the desk and held his hand toward the door. 'Anyway, coming?'

After much grumbling, dawdling and playful banter, Sara and Greg said their goodbyes and headed toward the parking lot. Nick plopped himself into the vacated chair and watched them leave. They were an odd pair. He thought back on all the times over the years when the then-technician had succeeded in rubbing her up the wrong way; he'd felt sure the two would come to blows one day. But then Sara had surprised him by actually volunteering to be Greg's mentor. The Lord works in mysterious ways, as his mother would say. Nick picked up Greg's abandoned mug and sniffed at its contents. He wasn't normally the type to pounce on someone else's leftovers, but he was tired, he reasoned; he couldn't be bothered to walk all the way to the break room to make another pot, and besides, by the look of it he'd finally got his hands on a sample of Greg's fabled Blue Hawaiian, forty-bucks-a-pound secret stash. He took a sip. Yup – this was definitely the good stuff, not the motor oil that he usually had to swallow now that Ecklie had cut back on the budget. Nick stretched for a moment, then set to work on his no-brainer burglars. It might be boring, he thought, but I'll be home the sooner for it.