The Shadow Prospect {ONC}

7

"Alright here's what they found-"

"A lead?"

"Not quite," Lennie gave a hard frown as she sifted through all the papers on her lap. The back seat of the cruiser gave another hard jerk without warning and the girl shot a glare to the oblivious driver, Cato's own knee giving a sharp throb as they rolled on-

"Anyway."

His hands were itching to grab the papers and take a look himself with how slow she was getting the information out, "Yeah?" He pushed, tone impatient.

"Hold on a sec, let me look."

"You know you could just wait till we get there," Methias spoke up from behind the wheel, voice monotone and eyes on the road, "it'd be less of a mess in the backseat if you did."

"Yeah, but every second wasted is more time we could use to search the place." She shot back, waving the papers in the air as if proving her point.

The detective didn't seem to have an immediate answer to return besides growing silent again and Lennie gave a triumphant huff before turning back to the flare of papers spread out between them. "Alright so Palmer was able to get a team to run a test on the drive overnight and they found some pretty interesting facts about the samples."

"What?"

"Neither of the blood found matches Cato's, there are two completely different sets of DNA on that thing." She turned to Methias. "Before we left I pulled up the files from the documentation of the scene, very little of Cato's blood was found on the clothing but a decent amount of it was found on the knife and alleyway."

The detective nodded as if that were a good thing.

Cato hiked a brow, "Is that good?" He felt so lost trying to understand what she was trying to get at.

"Of course it's good, it means there weren't just two people at the scene like we'd originally thought, minus you and Goodman there's a third person alive and walking around the city right now."

"Were you able to identify the samples?" Methias questioned, eyeing them through the rearview.

"Yeah, I think so-" more papers shuffled in front of him as Lennie flipped over a few before finding what she was looking for. "They were able to pair up one of the samples with the body, it matches the same found on the knife and Goodman's autopsy."

Methias nodded at the information, "And the other?"

Lennie made an uncertain noise in the back of her throat, "Still not sure."

"What? What do you mean?" Cato spoke, reaching out an arm to readjust his crutches from sliding over as the cruiser took another turn.

"It means that whoever the third person is, they have no criminal record in our database. The guy's a freaking ghost as far as we're concerned."

Well then.

That's just great.

"Do we have any other leads?" Methias spoke up from the front.

The girl perked at the mention, "Actually yes. Some of the other officers figured in order for someone to expose Goodman, they'd have to be one of his higher-ups. Someone he trusted to stick by his side and from that-" she up a stapled collection of papers onto the seat before slapping them back down again, "they did some digging around and made a list of the possible candidates."

"So if we have a list of candidates why aren't we back at the station interrogating?" Methias questioned.

"Because this list is about as rough draft as we can get, nothing's for sure about these names, and given the less-than-twenty-four-hour time crunch it took to get these in the first place- I'm honestly surprised we have this list at all." Lennie spoke, shrugging, "I mean because of this we did get a change of plans about where we're headed."