Tweetie

24

Hazel was laying on the carpeted ground of her apartment when Roderick turned up. There was a persistent ache behind her eyes, a daze that lingered in her mind every time she so much as looked towards her work. But she was at least comfortable, wrapped in blankets with a mug of coffee and a file in front of her as the radio buzzed every so often and played classical music she mostly forgot about until the radio buzzed again.

Files upon files, dust and too many coffee mugs. That was the essential description of her home, any other way felt wrong, to say it was homely wasn't right, to say it eased a wary mind was just downright fallacious.

"You got punched in the nose," Roderick said, a coffee cup in one hand and a box full of files in his other, tucked under his arm and swiftly taken by Archie who stood from where he sat on the couch. "How bad is it?"

"Possibly broken. I have a black eye." Hazel said, pushing herself up only to flop down onto the couch instead, abandoning her coffee and blanket. "It's fine though."

"You can't just say something is fine and expect that to be it, Hazel. It's not fine."

"It is. I can hardly feel it."

"That's not the point."

She took long breaths of air in, taking in the smell of old paper and coffee, smells she had gotten so used to while she was there every moment of every day, she was so used to them that she barely acknowledged them anymore. There was a moment, as she stared at a stain on her ceiling when she wondered whether she had gotten too comfortable in the home. She worried that maybe the place would be torn from her one day, like most of the homes she had were.

"So," Hazel began to talk in the hopes of moving the conversation on. She felt Archie sit at her feet and saw Roderick sit across from them in the corner of her eye while between them all on the coffee table was the box of files. "Is that stuff all to do with drugs?"

"It's everything I could gather. There's a lot in there."

"I'll get started on it right away... eventually." She nodded and looked to the ceiling. "I think I'm finally getting somewhere with this case."

"In the direction of drug related crime?" Archie asked, subconsciously tapping his fingers against his knees as he met Roderick's gaze and they both shared raised eyebrows and a similar level of uncertainty. "How exactly did you get to this point? Because of that conversation with Ryan?"

She nodded and turned to the ground she had been moments before, twisted herself and reached for her notebook, keeping herself up on the couch with just her legs, then with Archie's hand on her legs to keep her from falling when he realised she was definitely about to fall in this lazy manoeuvre. But she successfully got her notebook without having to stand up.

"It makes some sense. That destroyed phone looked too old to have been Jason's phone, but it could have been a burner phone. And if it was a burner phone, then that aligns with what Amelia Karr said during an interview when she said that her calls were going through until the 4th, two days after he went missing and two days after the destroyed phone was found. She wasn't calling the destroyed phone in the picture, she was calling his actual phone that was somewhere else entirely. She also mentioned that he couldn't walk her home after school because he had to go home to pick something up, then he went out somewhere. He could have gone home to pick up drugs- I want to see if I can find anything about a party that night. If there was a party, then I can confirm that he was likely going to hand out drugs there."

The silence that followed her words lingered so long it forced her to sit up and glance between the two men, finding one with a gaze distant and latched to the far wall in thought, the other looking directly at her with raised eyebrows and a slight smile, happy to see how she was progressing with the case.