dontcallme_that | at the office.

at the office.

Exhaling, he glanced through the papers again. They were missing something. He'd been at it for hours though and he could tell it was wearing on the office. Leaning back in his chair, he laced his fingers together, supporting his head as he glanced around.

"We're missing something," he stated out loud, as if repeating it somewhere other than his head was going to make a difference. Shifting forward, he leaned forward and sifted through the receipts. "Where'd the one go from the storage locker?"

It wasn't really important, but there was something odd about it. It was cash, not helpful, but honestly something didn't seem right. Filtering through the stack he found it. "What was the rate of the storage space?" He wasn't sure if he was asking the room or just saying it out loud.

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Neal wasn't entirely paying attention.

They had been going over this information for hours, trying to find what exactly it was that they were missing, and Neal's mind was starting to wander. Not that that was Peter's fault, but sorting through the information in his mind at his own pace was easier than trying to force the answers.

"It was low. One of those set your own rate places."

"Right, right..." Peter shuffled through the other records and found it. Tapping the page, he slid it across the table.

"So he sets the rate at this and he pays cash, but there's twice as much - each month, so he's got two units." Two units or someone was taking a bit of a pay-off.

His hand reached for the layout of the storage units. "He's got C-Fourteen, which is here."

Turning the map around he tried to pull Jones' attention at the very least, but it seemed a lost cause. "Right here, so we need to figure out which of the other units aren't on file, but haven't been rented out during the same time."

It wasn't that he and Jones didn't very much want to solve the case. They did. They were just stumped with ideas as to how. Though at the moment, Neal's priority was getting himself out of this office, and what Peter was proposing felt like a means to do that.

"I could go in under cover as a prospective renter? Feel out if the guy is dirty or not?"

Peter shot Neal a look.

"Not everything requires you going undercover, Neal." In fact, he was pretty sure they could just have someone in Tech get into their systems and check the database. It wasn't something that required a sting operation.

Seeing the weary on the faces of everyone around him, though, he could see where Neal was going with his line of thinking. "Let's take ten; stretch our legs, get some air - maybe we come back to this with that final missing link."

Mostly, Peter wanted to clear the room to make sure that Neal still had his head in the game, not on the streets below.

The agents did their best to make it seem like they weren't far too happy about this suggestion, but they still cleared the room pretty quickly. Neal watched as they all drifted out of the room, before getting to his feet himself, starting to lean back into a stretch before nodding to the door.

"I'm going to go grab some coffee. Want some?"

"Wait," Peter replied, putting his hand out. "I wanna know, do you see something I'm missing, because you're pacing these floors like a caged lion and if you've got your mind elsewhere --"

Exhaling, Peter frowned. He knew he shouldn't rely on Neal the way that he does, but when it comes down to the wire, he knows that having this extra set of eyes, the eyes that look behind the rules and regulations helps him. He needs Neal to be on task.

"I know this isn't some high class case with million dollar art collections being tracked down, but it's just as important to me."

"No, it is just as important." Neal would have been a lot worse if he didn't think so -- not that he was going to tell Peter that. "My mind is on the case. I promise. We just keep going in circles."

He was restless. He preferred the action to the strategics and right now, there wasn't even enough information to start doing the latter. They were stumped, as much as he hated to admit it, and stumped never really left him feeling anything but restless.

"Alright, so let's look outside the circle."

Peter moved, standing over the table with all of the pieces of paperwork that had been spread out. His hands rested to the surface, pushing a few of the pieces around and shuffling the ones they'd been staring at for hours aside.

"What aren't we looking at?"

Neal paused for a moment, looking over the papers and running a hand through his hair. "Do we know that he actually planned to store the merchandise in the storage locker? Maybe it was a red herring to throw us off his trail."

"We only have record of him paying, the odd amount and then the few appearances on the surveillance. His face doesn't show though."

Peter started to flip through the stack of papers, "Where else could he have put it? Does he have any other holdings, anything that might even work for this?"

Neal's hand moved to the back of his neck as he considered the options. There weren't many, but there had to have been something that they were missing.

"If it were me, I would hide it in plain sight," he sighed softly. "But the question is where is that for him."

Peter glanced to Neal, trying to think about what he said about being in plain sight.

"The summer house."

Peter stated it plainly as he started to shuffle through the stacks of photos. He pulled up the summer house, putting it in the center of the table and tapping it. "He put it up on the market three years ago. Before the timeline, but he's had access this whole time. People have been in and out of that house so much with tours and open houses - he could've come by at any point and put it in there."

That set off a lightbulb over Neal's head, and he moved closer to Peter to get a better look at the paperwork. "He could have easily stuck it in a desk drawer, or even in a safe somewhere on the property, and we would have never thought to look there. It's the perfect place to hide a score."

"Jones, Diana," Peter called them back into the office as they were headed up the stairs.

"I need a list of all the Realtors that have been in and out of that property and I need to get people on the ground and at that location as soon as possible. If it's not in that house anymore, then someone took it out and we're gonna find out who it was."

Neal watched as Peter barked out directions for the rest of the agents, and once the had dissipated to do as they were told, he looked over at Peter with a small head tip to the side.

"What do you need me to do?"

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at the office.

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