Friday January 19

4:15 pm

FBI Headquarters

Nikki looked up from the casefile she was working and checked the time on her monitor and couldn’t believe the day was almost over. She had attended the autopsy of the PS victim and as usual, they found nothing useful. She had also tracked down Michael Barnes and found that Mr. Barnes was involved in a single vehicle fatality. A blood alcohol test was conducted on the corpse and found to have a BAC of .23, almost 3 times the legal limit. Barnes had a history of DUI arrests and the case was closed as a single vehicle DUI. There wasn’t much left of man or machine after the fire and they were lucky to have been able to even get the BAC which came from one of Barnes’ arms that they found several feet from the fire, blown off by the impact and explosion. Nikki was 0 for 2 and feeling a little defeated when her SAC stuck his head inside her door and he had a big grin on his face, highly unusual for him. Robert McShay was a little over 6 feet tall and in excellent shape for mid-40’s. He had a little gray over his temples and dark brown hair. He had piercing blue eyes and he had always had a soft spot for Nikki. Nikki looked up at Rob and did a double take when she saw his bright smile. She leaned back in her chair and motioned to the chair in front of her desk. Rob came the rest of the way into Nikki’s office and took a seat across from Nikki. He slid a piece of paper over to Nikki who saw it was a location within the FBI’s server to access a piece of video. She quickly brought up the video and hit play. It took her a minute to figure out what she was looking at. Soon enough she knew exactly what she was looking at, Philip Bernard was shooting a nail gun into a homeless man. Nikki looked over at Rob, who was still smiling,

“You have to be kidding me” she exclaimed, “how did we get this video?” She asked still not believing what she was looking at. Rob leaned forward and said,

“The farmer has been having a problem with feral hogs wrecking his crops so he had installed a motion sensing game camera across from the barn to see when the hogs were coming so he could set traps for them and he saw the footage and contacted us immediately.”

Nikki quickly accessed Philip Bernard’s driver’s license and compared the images, they were the same man.

“I already had the nationwide BOLO updated with Bernard’s info, we just need to find him now.” Rob said as he stood in front of Nikki’s desk.

Nikki smiled up at Rob and said, “I’m working on that right now, I’ve got something in the works.” Rob looked over at Nikki for several seconds and with a raised brow asked,

“Does it have anything to do with Simon?”

Nikki leaned back in her chair and smiled back and Rob and said,

“I can’t go giving all my secrets away Rob, why do you think I am so good at what I do?” Rob gave her a small smile and shook his head as he walked toward the door.

“Just be careful Nikki, you’re playing with fire.” Rob left Nikki’s office and she breathed under her breath, “You have no idea.”

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