'This is going to be hard.'

'Who ever said doing the right thing was easy?'

'Smartass,' Ryan grumbled good-naturedly as Esposito parked the car and they headed inside the Seventy-Second; like the Twelfth because it was one of the larger precincts that acted almost as a hub for the smaller ones in the area, it had its own record library to which external detectives had access.

They badged the receiving officer at the desk and he pointed them towards the Records room in the lower level. It struck Ryan as slightly ironic they would put Records in the basement where the archived documents were most vulnerable to water damage and other water-related damage like steam-rot or the like.

Of course, it also made it quite obvious to the officer on duty in Records someone was coming for them, as the corridor to the secured entrance was the only door at the end aside from a few mechanical or janitorial access doors so it didn't surprise them that even with the officer on duty half-asleep as he read the latest Belle Roarke novel. The placard beside the locked entrance told him and his partner this near-narcoleptic man was Detective-Sergeant George Elliott.

'DS Elliott?' Esposito demanded as he held up his badge.

'Yeah, what can I help you boys with?'

'I'm Detective Esposito, this is Detective Ryan, we're part of the team investigating the death of John Raglan.'

'Why would you need into our Records for that?'

'We believe his death is linked to the death of Mike Doran,' Ryan supplied, not like the shifty look of this officer obviously gone to seed. 'We think it could be motivated by something to do with a case they worked together.'

Elliott heaved a sigh, as if marking his place in his novel and passing them the sign-in-out book was some greatly inconvenient task that he was doing as a big favour to them. 'Search all you want. I was really sorry to hear about poor ol' Mikey.'

'Poor ol' Mikey?' Esposito repeated; the way the man said it had his instincts humming.

'Yeah, Mikey and me went to the Academy together, worked a little bit in our beat-days here in the seven-two.' Elliott eased his considerable bulk out of his ratty office chair to open the door, and the Ry-Sposito monster saw the man had a severe limp in his right knee. 'Then we was working together on a small-time drug-bust, trying to make a name for ourselves, right? I get shot in the knee cap and my career's done before I barely started. Meanwhile Mikey got a medal for saving my sorry ass and he's suddenly the up-and-coming hotshot, him and Cowlan together.'

'How interesting,' Esposito murmured under his breath to his partner as they were ushered back, and let his hand drift under his overcoat to check his weapon in his holster.

'Anyways, who are you after, again?'

'Any cases where Mike Doran and John Raglan worked together and got a solid arrest to close the case,' Ryan said.

'Huh. That'd be Interdepartmental Task Force. Row three, shelves four, five and six. Copier's back there, dime a page Machine makes change if you need it.'

They nodded and once Elliott had gone back to his chair and they went through the second steel door - this one uncoded - nearly groaned at the site of the shelves once the row was found. Stacks and stacks of boxes, all of them dated. Knowing there was no time for bullshit, Ryan got out his cell and texted Beckett discreetly as Esposito made a show of taking down the boxes and sifting through them.

'Think it'd be worth our while to look up that guy?' Esposito mumbled as Ryan typed date for Raglan motive file and sent the message.

'Could be.'

Neither of them added aloud that the wheels were probably greased with the blood these dirty cops had spilled; if they were right and their radar was now picking up Elliott too, the last thing they needed was to have their cover blown.

Instead, Ryan looked at his cellphone when it chirped at him with a message back from Beckett - M. Montrose, 8-7-97 go to Fuqua's chambers when done she'll point you in the wright direction

'Our fearless leader is spending entirely too much time with Brennan,' Ryan decided as Esposito climbed up the ladder to check the dates on the boxes. 'Now she's sending coded messages too. As if we don't know to go and see Wright at the courthouse where Fuqua works.'

'His pops was murdered because of what he knows, and Adam got his eggs scrambled when his house was invaded,' Esposito reminded him as he searched for the appropriate box. 'Can you blame him for being paranoid?'

'Fair point. You see anything yet?'

'Are we looking for July eighth or August seventh?'

'Let's look for both.'

Esposito nodded, and passed down the July-97 box to Ryan, who put it over on one of the work stations and took August for himself.

'You think...' Ryan trailed off as his partner climbed down the ladder.

'Do I think what?'

'You think Beckett already knows what we're looking for and this is just to get us out of the way while she does something incredibly dangerous and foolhardy with Adam as her backup?'

'No, I think she wants us to prove she's right, so that it's once removed and not her chasing geese,' Esposito replied as he sat down at one of the work-tables and lifted the lid off the box. He frowned at what he saw. 'Kev, how are the files usually organized?'

'By case-code and then alphabetized by victim names, why?'

'Because this box is all one code. The same code.'

'What?'

Esposito pulled file after file out of the box, stacked them neatly on the table. 'These all have the same code on them, it's the same code as the bank account from that transcript of the call between Mike and Raglan.'

'Seriously?'

'Take a look.'

He handed over the last file he pulled from the box, and Ryan reached into his own file bag to pull a copy of the transcript out. It took him a few seconds to decode the Nato alphabet but when he had he saw the case file numbers and the Swiss bank account were identical.

'What the fuck is this?' he asked, half to himself and half to his partner.

'Whatever it is, it's big.'

'How the hell are we supposed to get all this information out of here without arousing suspicion?' Ryan hissed. 'There's like twenty pounds of case file here. Each!'

'I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking about it.' Esposito looked around and his eyes landed on the photocopier, and wondered. 'What if we took the whole damn box, and bluffed our way out?'

'Are you fucking nuts, Javi?'

'What other option do we have? We need the files and if we go through channels, that will tie us up in bureaucratic tape and two we already said this is pertinent to our case, so if the Records officer tries to stop us, we can turn it around and ask him why he's interrupting us in a homicide investigation.'

'Or we can call Kate down and tell her we need her to help us look at the stuff.'

'No. We'll take it with us. Come on.'

Esposito restuffed his file box with the dossiers and picked them up, leaving a scrambling Ryan catching up. They moved briskly, keeping their pace fast enough to say they were on a timeline but not so fast they looked like they were absconding with stolen goods. They gave Elliott a passing nod and the man barely glanced up as they passed him, signing the log and walking out to the elevator; they stopped a floor short of the main level and using the side service access to leave the building to avoid any other nasty complications.

With their loot stowed in the back seat of the Crown Vic, Esposito turned the engine over and looked at his partner, began to laugh until they were howling like loons all the way back until they had tears streaming down their cheeks from the effort.

'Danny Ocean, eat your heart out,' Ryan gasped, scrubbing the heel of his hand over his eyes. 'Can't believe we actually did that.'

'Wonder what Beckett will look like when we show up with this unholy mess.'

Back in the Records room, Detective Sergeant George Elliott took out his burner cellphone and dialed one of four numbers he called from there.

'Frank, it's George.'

'You're alone, I hope.'

'Yeah. Just had two guys from the Twelfth waltz outta here with boxes. Saying they're looking at an old case being the link between Mike and Raglan's deaths.'

'We'll just let them play with their crayons awhile, George. Nothing to worry about.'

'I don't know, Frank-'

'Just trust me George.'