It felt like every eye was on Seo-ah as she walked into the CIU office in One City, six months after her prior dismissal.

Transfer, she thought. Not a dismissal.

In reality, barely any of them would take notice of her. People came and went all the time, and it wasn’t as though she’d made many friends while working there previously. There was Jamieson, and she was close enough with Colleen now to call her an acquaintance, but the rest of her cohort was, unsurprisingly, absent.

Served them right for doing nothing all day.

She took a breath. This time around, she was going to be pleasant, cooperative and patient, no matter what level of incompetence she was faced with. If an intern asked how to use the printer, she’d take them right through it from start to end. When the lunch-crowd left, heading to the nearest food court, she’d tag along with them, smiling sweetly and making small talk about the weather and other dreadful things like weekends and people’s pets.

Calm, Seo-ah. Calm.

Her desk was right where she left it, but not how she left it. What had once been a perfectly arranged wooden countertop of sticky notes, stationary, binders and folders, was now a flat, unadorned wasteland. There was chewing gum stuck underneath, and crumbs on the top.

No problem. Happy days. She would probably have her own office soon, and then she could turn it into her own private domain.

“Settling in?”

Seo-ah was shocked by Jamieson’s loud voice behind her. She jumped, turning and facing him with a frown. “Not yet, as you can see. Did you put all my stuff in the bin when I left? There were a hundred Credits worth of pens in that pen cup I had.”

Jamieson shrugged. He could be infuriating like that. “Buy new ones and expense it all under my name. I’ll approve it.”

“Fine. I’ll hold you to that, you know.”

The older detective sniffed, looked unfazed. “So you wanna keep badgering me about your crayons and paperclips, or you gonna do some work?”

Seo-ah balked. She was keen to put her time at the GRA behind her, as well as the events that preceded it. Jamieson was offering her an opportunity to do just that.

“Let’s get to it. I’m on your cases, right?”

“Right on,” he answered. “Come to my office. Ren’s there too — you and him will run point on this one. Bit of healthy competition; steel sharpening steel and all that.”

She couldn’t help but smile as she dropped off her few belongings and paced down the hall after him. They hadn’t even reinstated her security pass yet, but she was already being put on the hunt.

Jamieson’s office was a sombre affair, complete with basically nothing of interest except piles of case files and a cot in the corner which she’d occasionally found him napping, usually not long after lunch. Ren was already inside, sitting on a stiff wooden stool that looked to be procured from the staff kitchen. He was reading a subpoena.

“Who are we serving that to?” she asked.

“Not serving, being served,” Ren corrected. “Sarge’s been called as an expert witness in Rowenthal’s case. I didn’t know the bar for an ‘expert’ was so low.”

“Very classy, Ren,” Jamieson said. For a detective with more collars than most of the people in the building combined, his history spoke for itself. There weren’t many people more deserving of the ‘expert witness’ title, as least in his line of business. “That’s all old news, though, and boring at that. Rowenthal’s got about as much chance at getting out of it as I’ve got at winning a women’s beauty pageant. We’re here to go after his mate, Gerald Harbin.”

Seo-ah was stunned. “The dead guy? Isn’t he a little outside the scope? You know, spiritual realm and all that?”

Jamieson shoved a stack of unorganised papers in her direction. They were slipping around all over the place — photos, newspaper snippets, printouts — all things that would’ve been far easier to organise with a System if it weren’t for Jamieson’s analogue antics.

“Not so much interested in him as I am in why he was best buds — at least for a short time — with Rowenthal. My gut tells me this wasn’t his first rodeo, and I usually trust it. It tells me when I’m hungry and it hasn’t lied thus far.”

Ren shrugged, and Seo-ah mimicked him. If Jamieson felt like it was a road worth exploring, she’d go down it. Even if it turned out to go nowhere, it was worthwhile due diligence. After all, the guy had been murdered with a pool cue — if the why behind that event wasn’t worth investigating, what was?

“I’ll start today,” Seo-ah said. “What kind of resources have we got on this?”

Jamieson drew a circle in the air with one finger. “Just us. Well, technically there’s a massive team working on Gerald and the rest of the Disaster, but Chief wants us to do our own thing alongside it. See if we both don’t come to the same conclusions.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“We allowed piggy-backing?” Ren asked. Piggy-backing, in this context, meant that Ren wanted to have access to anything the other teams had already found out, but he didn’t want to give them anything in return. It saved time, though it was less thorough when they didn’t gather evidence or draw conclusions firsthand.

“Nope,” Jamieson answered. “As far as we’re concerned, you two and I are the only people working on this. You hear anything out in the pigpen, you act as if it’s civilian-talk and hearsay, alright? Cause it probably is.”

Ren nodded, slightly crestfallen, but Seo-ah’s mind was elsewhere. Something about Gerald Harbin was sticking in her head.

“You already solved the case there, Kim?”

She came back to reality, shaking her head. Whatever it was had gone. “No, I…How often do we have to report back to you?”

Jamieson arched an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”

“I’ve got a pretty weird trail I want to walk down, and if it leads to nothing you’ll probably think I’m stupid for chasing it. So, I don’t want to have to tell you what it is.”

Her boss only laughed. “Look, I trust you two. As long as you don’t break the law, go for your life. Also, leave my office. I gotta lay down.”

They scurried out, and Seo-ah returned to her desk. The office was bustling in comparison to the GRA office in Four City. She felt a bit bad for not saying goodbye to Hal before she left, but he’d understand. Their whole relationship had revolved around her dissatisfaction with that place and his acceptance of a steady paycheck and an easy career. It wasn’t a hard line to follow.

She settled in, taking a moment to organise her thoughts. A blank notepad sat in front of her, at the top of which she scrawled Gerald Harbin’s name. It irked her to have missed the flash of inspiration she’d had before, but she knew it would come back. Even if she had to chase it out of her mind like sweeping a rat out of the house, she’d do it.

Gerald Harbin. Harbin, Harbin, Harbin. Where do I know you from?

Her time at the GRA was out of the picture. Unless the dead politician was part of the Scotch-A-Day guild, she probably hadn’t come across him there.

That left her relatively short tenure at the CIU and an even shorter period of time at the Academy. Her case files would be around here somewhere, probably buried in the depths of the file room or somewhere in the zettabytes of data in the CIU systems, but she should remember a guy like this. The Prime Minister himself had connections to this man — he wasn’t the kind of guy to disappear from one’s mind particularly quickly.

In the end, all she could do was start at the beginning.

She made a timeline of all the cases she’d worked on. The little ones got left out — a small-time robbery, a couple restraining order breaches — basically anything that was open and shut, in and out day jobs. That left behind the series of cases that had instilled in her a passion for her job at the CIU. The first title on the list belonged to one Benjamin Benthold, a property developer who was conning his tenants into leaving their homes so he could tear them down and replace them with high-rises. Jamieson had brought her onto the case because she was a new hire and he had no choice, but she had surprised him after successfully pulling together interviews on twelve people who Benthold had conned. It was grunt work, and usually taken for granted, but Jamieson had appreciated her determination.

Benthold was immediately crossed out. She remembered the details of her first big catch down to the addresses of the people she’d interviewed, and Gerald Harbin definitely wasn’t one of them.

Next on the chopping block was Nathaniel Beltong, a fourteen-year-old child who had been forced into drug smuggling by his parents in return for buying him video games. The kid, who was far from the sharpest tool in the shed, believed his parents ran a ‘flour delivery business’ and denied knowing anything else, which Seo-ah genuinely believed.

Nope.

The list went on, getting shorter and shorter until she began to think that she’d never experience that elusive moment of clarity again.

It wasn’t until she reached the final case on her list that it flashed by once more, like a shooting star viewed through a crack in the curtains.

Brent Mining Co.

This case was half-finished when she was transferred, and a quick look at the case files confirmed it remained so. She rummaged through the CIU server, reminiscing over her past work. She still remembered the access password for all the evidence.

And she thought maybe, just maybe, Gerald Harbin was in here somewhere.

She considered alerting Ren and Jamieson to her discovery, then decided it wasn’t really a discovery at all. Just an inkling.

But as she waltzed through her perfectly organised (and labelled) case files, she felt like she was coming closer and closer to striking gold. It would take a bit of work, but with Harbin’s death and the suspicious circumstances in which it happened, she was confident they’d get some leeway in reopening the dead case.

In the end, she was headed back to Jamieson’s office sooner than they all expected.

Jamieson started them off. “You realise I won’t fire you even if you take a couple days to work this out, right? I tell you; you work like it’s your neck on the line.”

Seo-ah looked down at the carpet. She didn’t usually like praise, especially when it was unfounded thus far. “You’ll see I had a head start. I think I’ve worked on a case where Harbin showed up. The last one before I left, in fact.”

Jamieson grinned, and Ren looked uncomfortable. Needless to say, they both noticed her word choice. ‘Left’ rather than ‘was transferred.’

“You remember Brent Mining Co?” she continued. “Big joint couple hundred K’s north of Eight Town? We were investigating a report of suspicious activities out there. Lots of money coming out of the joint, but not much ore.”

Jamieson nodded, then turned to Ren to fill him in. “As the name suggests, they mine coal and iron and whatnot. CEO’s a real dickweed, and he’s just about connected at the hip with the Editor at The New Melbourne Herald. The CIU ended up in the news for some bullshit about abusing our power and overstepping jurisdiction and whatnot — we didn’t, of course — but Chief told me to drop it about five milliseconds after Kim…left.”

Ren nodded uneasily, looking between the two of them and raising his hands. “So it’s been dropped once, and that order was handed down from our God on the Top Floor, but you two want to poke the bear?”

Jamieson shrugged and looked at Seo-ah. “Do we? I haven’t heard your reasoning, yet.”

Kim kept quiet for a moment, thinking it through. She thought she’d have to fight harder to get Jamieson to even think about looking further into the cold case, but he seemed to respect her intuition as much as his own. Maybe he was just being nice to her because it was her first day back.

But she felt good about this one. It could dead-end, but Ren hadn’t come up with anything, and they needed to earn their keep somehow. And who knows, sometimes investigating one angle helped her to see the case from another. They could get in, do a little prospecting, then get out if there was nothing to be found.

“I went through my old files, and Harbin’s name came up. He was on Brent Mining’s Board as a Non-Executive Director, and I had one note against his name before it all went kaput.”

Jamieson leaned over his desk, evidently interested. “Go on.”

“I had him down as The Facilitator.”