Disclaimer: Everything from Law and Order: Criminal Intent belongs to Dick Wolf and NBC. No copyright infringement is intended, and no profit is being made from this story. The only character that is of my creation in this story is Miriam Sage, and accordingly, she belongs to me.
Author's Note: I know it's taken me a while to get this chapter up, but I have been quite busy for the past moth, having had a job for some of my summer holiday, etc. Anyway, it's here now and I hope you enjoy it. All the reviews I've gotten so far has been greatly appreciated, and it would make me very happy if you, who are reading this story, would leave a review for me. Enjoy!


She managed to avoid answering up until the moment when they settled at a table in a restaurant that seemed a little off the beaten path. Despite this, Goren seemed familiar with the menu and, not being so herself, she let him make the orders. When the waiter had left them, he looked across the table at her, and the look in his eyes were of such a character that she had no opportunity to mistake it for anything else than what it was; curiosity. Still, it was different than the curiosity she herself possessed in alarming amounts. She got the impression that it wasn't just curiosity about where she had been, and how she was planning to answer him. It was bigger than that, he seemed curious about her.

Needless to say, it surprised her. She was not accustomed to having anyone being curious about her. The reason was that so far, every man she had come across had displayed a look of utter boredom the split second she said what she did for a living. Sometimes she felt as if being an archivist was equal to being a nun, trying to get lucky. But, when she came to think of it, it wasn't just the men. Almost everyone she came across exhibited a mental yawn when they got the response to their question about her occupation. It had stopped bothering her long ago, because to her it seemed that most of these people that she met, had never been to a library in their lifetime, much less an archive.

"Where were you?"
The question, put forward in a direct, but not unfriendly manner, was asked for what had to be at least the fifth time since she had entered Major Case to find no one there but Goren.
"The library. Where else?"
She took a sip from her glass and studied him across the table. Now he seemed somewhat surprised, like he hadn't expected the answer.
"Really?"
"What better place is there, when you need someone to just give you the facts? Books don't have their own opinions, whereas people tend to throw in their opinion for good measure, whether you asked for it or not."

He smiled, and for some reason seemed to be enjoying himself, without her quite understanding why. It hit her that this was the first time she had seen him smile, really smile and she thought of how well that suited him. She smiled back, but a second later she gave herself a mental reprimand. This was hardly the time or place to start flirting, she reminded herself. He had a job to do, and so did she. But the reprimand didn't manage to wipe the smile off her lips.

"You're smiling…" she remarked, "A fellow book lover, then."
"What makes you say that?"
"If you hadn't been, you wouldn't understand my attraction towards books. Perhaps you would claim that one could get the same information from the internet or from another source. And you would have been right, to a degree… The fact that you haven't said anything makes me think that we're alike, at least in that."

There was a pause when the food came, and they ate a while in silence. Both were hungry after a long day of work. "I'm impressed," he said suddenly. She looked up from her meal, bewildered. "What? Why?"He shrugged, and finished chewing a piece of broccoli before he decided to elaborate his answer.

"You're right. I suppose book lover is an accurate description… It's rather useful actually, in this line of work. Knowing a little about many things can come in handy some times."
"I can imagine…"
"Did anything come of it? Your visit to the library, I mean…"

Now it was her turn to shrug, and before she answered him she took a sip of wine and leant back in her chair. "Confirmation mostly. I didn't want to misinterpret anything now. There's other things at stake here than my pride in my work."
He nodded in agreement. "The parents didn't give us much we could use… The mother gave us the name of a woman she thought was her son's girlfriend. We're going to try and trace her tomorrow. But if that turns out to be dead end, we're back at square one."
"Not a good place to be right now…" she agreed.

They had both finished their meals now, and each sat there for a moment measuring the other. Then, suddenly, Goren was on his feet, a dangerously eager glimmer appearing in his eyes like a flash of lightning from a clear sky. He searched around in the pockets of his jacket, found what he was looking for, and threw the payment for their meal down on the table. She just sat there, astonished over the sudden change in his behavior. He now stood, putting on his coat, and giving her a look of anticipation. He was clearly waiting for her to follow his lead. When she didn't show any immediate signs of doing that, he fixed her with a gaze of impatience.
"Come on. We have to go."

She studied him for a moment to see if he was serious, and when she had to conclude that indeed he was, she got up rather gingerly from her seat and fetched her coat from the back of her chair. While putting it on, she sent him a look of wonder, and raised an eyebrow at him. He ignored them both, waiting impatiently for her to finish.

Back out on the street he strode along so fast that she almost had to break into a run to keep up with him.
"Goren! Wait!"
It was as if he snapped out of a form of trance, and only now realized that she was there. He slowed down enough for her to reach him and break into a stride beside him. The night had become colder than the day that had gone before it, and a fine mist came from her mouth when she spoke to him. "Where on earth are we going, and why are you in such a hurry to get there?!?"

He looked at her, and his eyes gave away a boyish eagerness. "A different perspective, another angle…"
"Would you stop talking in riddles please?"
Now the look in his eyes changed to something more mischievous, and he smiled a smile that seemed destined to annoy her.
"I thought you had your daily dealings in riddles, Miriam."
"I would have thought a Police Detective would be better informed, I'm an archivist, not a cryptologist. Are you going to tell me where we're going at the speed of sound, or not?"
The smile was still there, and to her surprise he shook his head. "Nope. You've had your chance to be secretive this evening, and you took it. Now it's my turn."

They kept walking for a while in silence, and Miriam's curiosity about what they were doing grew to become almost unbearable. She hated the fact that she had not been able to resist the temptation of keeping Goren on his toes for a while, because now she was being treated to a dose of her own medicine, and she didn't like it. She didn't like anything that made her feel left out, and she knew that in one way that was wrong of her. She couldn't expect people to share everything with her, but lord knows it didn't stop her from trying.

They had been walking for what seemed like an eternity when she found that she was in a familiar place.
"Wait a second; I've been here before…"Again she saw the smile on his lips, as a apartment building she knew from earlier that day came into view in front of them.
"You're going back to Huntley's apartment?!?"
"Yes."
"At this hour in the night?"
"Yes."
"What on earth could you expect to find here now, that you didn't find this afternoon?"
This time he didn't answer her, but lead the way into the building. There was another door man there now, and as opposed to his predecessor, this one gave her a smile as he held the door open to her.

There was absolute darkness when they stepped out of the elevator, and the only thing that illuminated the place was the thousands of lights from the city outside the large, magnificent windows in the living room. Only now did Robert Goren say something.
"Different hour, different perspective. We're alone…we have all night, we can search this place from floor to ceiling if we need to."
"What makes you so sure we'll find anything?"
"Experience. I haven't yet been to a crime scene that hasn't held one single clue to the case's solution."

Silence fell between them for a moment, and Goren searched around to find the light switch. After a few seconds light came spilling down from the spotlights in the ceiling, casting light and shadow around the apartment. She jumped when suddenly she felt his hands on her shoulders, and realized that he had again materialized behind her without her noticing.
"Look around," he urged her. "Tell me what you see."She turned around, towards him, surprised of him saying that.
"Why? You're the detective…"

Miriam had hoped for an answer, but all she got was a challenging look and a half smile.
"Right…different viewer, different perspective."
When she spoke the words his smile turned into a grin. "Very good. You're catching on…"
"What exactly do you want me to look for?"
He had started walking with slow steps around the apartment, and, still hesitant, she followed him, taking a few cautious steps after him.
"I don't want you to look for anything. I want you to look, and then tell me what you see."

After that, none of them spoke for a long while. Miriam felt that she was really just strolling around in a dead man's apartment, being of precious little use. On a whim she found herself in his kitchen, opening a few of the cupboards and drawers. She found nothing of interest or out of place, there was only what could be considered the normal kitchen cutlery and appliances, however high end they were compared to others of their kind. When she came to the fridge, she opened it more out of boredom than hope of actually finding something. At first she saw nothing out of the ordinary, lots of take-out and little else. Not unusual for a 23-year old, she thought to herself. She was about to slam the door of the fridge shut when something stopped her. It was a smell that didn't belong in a fridge, it wasn't something rotten or moldy, it was just not supposed to be there. It smelled like… she searched her memory to place that smell, and after a few seconds she found it. It smelled like iron.

She started to search through the fridge, moving cartons and boxes of food, to find the source of the smell. In the back of the fridge, she found it, a large clear plastic box containing a jet black substance. She called out to Goren.
"Hey! The Vic wasn't much of a cook, but I may have something."
He appeared from behind a corner and took the three steps up from the living room to the kitchen in one leap. Soon he was beside her, also looking into the fridge at what she had found. He reached out a hand and grabbed the box, pulling it out of the fridge. Straightening up he examined the content, carefully opening the lid.
"Iron…?" He said, wonderingly, and she nodded.
"Ink. Judging by the texture it's not the kind used for writing."

He surveyed her, and in his eyes she thought she saw a look of approval. He nodded in agreement.
"No, you're right. This is a paste, not a liquid, meaning that this is probably the kind used for printing newspaper and the likes."
Now it was her turn to nod, and then something struck her.
"The marks used on the victim didn't bleed… If someone had used liquid ink to write them, the ink would have dripped and smeared before it dried."
"So, we can rather safely assume that this is the same ink used to paint the markings on the victim, and if not, it's in all likelihood the same type."
He caught her glance, and now there was something competitive in his features, not towards her, but towards whomever it was that had taken Damien Huntley's life. Finally it seemed like the investigation was going somewhere other than in circles.
"Let's keep looking," he said eagerly, and she nodded in silent agreement.

They spread out again, and Miriam found herself being drawn by her curiosity through the living room area and towards the bedroom door that had been left ajar when they left the apartment earlier that day. Inside it was dark as a tomb, and she fumbled about the wall near the doorframe on both sides of the entrance to find the light switch. She found it, on the doorframe's right hand side, and discovered that the lighting consisted, like the living room, of several spotlights in the ceiling. Probably just the standard light fixtures that came with the place, she thought. She didn't imagine Damien Huntley to be one to care about the light fixtures of his apartment.

Adjusting the spotlights just so that she could see well enough to find her way around, she walked a few more steps into the room. Not surprisingly it was dominated by a king size bed, simple in its design, and yet it had probably cost a small fortune. The headboard was black, rectangular and covered with leather. The rest of the bed continued on the well known color scheme of black and white, the linens being just as simple as the bed's design. No decorative pillows or bedspreads, everything about the bed was plain, but without loosing the ability to give an impression of how much it must have cost to purchase. Everything in this place is about money, Miriam though to herself as she stood looking around the bedroom. It was one of the best reasons she could think of why she wouldn't want to live in a place like this, even if she should have the money, and she couldn't help but wonder if Damien Huntley had liked it, or if the constant display of money in secret had made him sick, just as it now did her. The display cases in the living room told her that he did, in fact, enjoy it, but apart from that there was little in his apartment that indicated that he liked showing off his family's money, and it was these two things that caused her to ask herself the question.

The rest of the bedroom seemed almost unnaturally uninteresting at first glance. Here, even more than the living room, it was as if no one really lived and slept there and the whole thing was just there for display. The same smooth surfaces and hard edges that filled the rest of the place also made its presence known there, and just glancing around Miriam saw nothing worth noticing in hopes of helping solve the puzzle laid out in front of her.

As she started a more thorough search after more that could point them in the right direction, she realized that, even though it looked like a showcase at first glance, a real person had once lived here. There were clothes in the wardrobe, and all kinds of things in the various drawers. In a nightstand on the right side of the bed she found what she assumed to be various medications used to treat cancer, along with some bits and pieces not uncommon to find in a nightstand drawer. On the top surface of the same nightstand lay a book about much the same subjects as the books in the living room bookshelf, open on a page a little more than halfway through.

"This guy does not read anything that's not scientific. I haven't seen a piece of fictional literature since I came in here… How do you live like that?!?"
"Like what?"
The voice came from the doorway behind her, but this time she had heard the steps, and knew that he had entered the room after her.
"Without reading anything that's made up, anything fictional... I mean, how did he dream, what was his way of escape from everyday life?"
His steps came closer, and soon he was there, crouching beside her by the nightstand, and their eyes met.
"Not all people read for recreation…some go and see a movie, a play, musical… others spend time with their family, have a hobby, do sports, or a combination of the above."
"But you read."
He didn't answer, but looked at her and smiled, like he knew that a statement like that could, indeed only come from a fellow book lover.

Rising to his feet again he looked around, and his eyes seemed to scan the room for anything that might be connected to what had happened to Damien Huntley. He started to wander around, step by step, not having a reason to go in a specific direction. She found it fascinating to watch how he let the room itself lead him around, guiding him slowly to all its secrets. He stopped at the other side of the king size bed and stood for a moment as if he was listening to something that only he could hear, then he knelt down again and inspected the bed itself in more detail. Miriam couldn't quite fathom the point of doing that, but decided not to remark anything and instead only gently shrugged to herself.

She stood up, her knees beginning to ache from being crouched down beside the nightstand. Suddenly, before she had the chance to move one step, she heard a clicking sound, like you hear when a lock is being opened, and spun around on her heel to see where it came from. Beside the bed stood Goren, now a triumphant gleam in his eyes, looking at what proved to be a secret compartment inside the headboard of the bed. Producing a flash light apparently from thin air, he leant closer to see what it contained. Quickly she took three steps across the room to join him.

What he had discovered was a black, leather bound book, maybe an inch thick. Its only decoration was a pentagram, a five pointed star with a circle around it, that in a silver color. Besides its own pages, the book was filled with notes, post-its and pictures fastened to the pages with paper clips.
"It's a Book of Shadows," Miriam explained. "Usually they're used for practicing witchcraft, for rituals, spells… that kind of thing. But Damien Huntley seems to have used it almost like a journal…"
"Whatever it is, it meant a lot to him. Why else would he hide it so well?"
She nodded in agreement, and felt as if they had discovered a piece of Damien Huntley's true life. She could only assume, but what people wrote in their journals tended to be personal, to tell the story about them, and the people who surrounded them. She smiled at Goren, and he smiled back. It seemed like the same thought had struck them both, that being that this could very well be their most important found yet.