Nightfall

D A Y B R E A K

Agent Gallagher was a man of patience.

What he was not, was a man of niceties. He sat on a flimsy chair, lips set in a straight, thin line as he waited on Sergeant Randall.

That quarter of the station was mostly empty, except for the exceptionally tall woman that sat on a desk a few feet away from him, Sergeant Randall by her side as they discussed something. Detective Hernandez, he recalled her name. A pretty face.

Gallagher glanced at his watch again, about to voice a snarky comment out loud when Randall finally began making his way over to him.

Biting back the tart jibe that was at the tip of his tongue, "Sergeant." He extended a hand out, "All good? You seem.. rather preoccupied."

"Agent Gallagher." He acknowledged, shaking his hand. "Well, truth be told, we caught a weird one today."

Instantly knowing that 'a weird one' referred to a case, his interest was piqued, as he raised a brow, "Really, how weird?"

Randall hesitated, never having particularly liked Feds. But then he remembered the talk their captain had had with the officers about welcoming and cooperating with the agents.
"There's been a string of grave robberies. A couple, we suspected. We caught them in the act last night."

"Is that what the Westfield P.D. considers weird?" Gallagher snickered.

He sighed, "The grave they were in the process of digging, turns out had two corpses. Someone put a second body in there."

Gallagher pursed his lips, leaning back in the chair, "Hiding a body in the one place no one would think to look. Damn, that's smart."

Randall could only give him a cursory nod, "Yeah, we're waiting on the lab results. They should have been here ten minutes ago." Waving a hand in the air, "Enough about that. Tell me Agent, how can the department help you?"

"Well, as you know we have a team flying in from D.C. for the Logan Hunt case and I was hoping to go over the de—"

"What in the actual fuck?" A sharp voice sounded from beside them.

"All okay Hernandez?" The sergeant called out.

The woman, Hernandez, stared at her computer screen in what can only be described as unadulterated shock. 

"The lab just sent their test results in. The body, they found a match in the criminal database."
She looked up, meeting both Randall's and Gallagher's eyes.

"It belongs to Jace Montgomery."

"Jace Montgomery?" Randall scrunched up his brows in perplexity, "Isn't it that blonde airhead we interviewed initially last year?"

"He's a friend of Tahlia Meyers." It was Agent Gallagher who chimed in.

"The body is three years old. The boy died when he was about sixteen; dead by blunt force trauma to the head." She read from the report.

Silence fell all over the station.

"How is that possible?" Gallagher spoke, a look of befuddlement now on his own face. "We've interviewed him in person, talked to his family. Besides, he was on campus today. The lab must have made a mistake."

Sergeant Randall practically sprinted over to Hernandez's desk. "You said he was in the criminal database?"
She nodded, "Yeah, for a vandalism charge three years ago. Got community service, it says."

"Can you pull up a photo?" 

She nodded, clicking away on the keyboard. Soon enough, on her incandescent screen, there was the photo of a blue-eyed, blonde boy.

Perhaps, had the Sergeant not looked too closely, he would have never noticed it was a different person than the one they'd come to know as Jace Montgomery. With eerily similar facial features, the boy was almost a spitting image of the latter.

"Agent," He turned to Gallagher, "You said you talked to his family?"

"Yeah, his father, some asshole millionaire in New Hampshire. Told me he pays for his son's education but they have not seen or spoken to each other since the vandalism thing."

And like that, it all fell into place

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