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Lt. Jones waited for precisely thirty more minutes after Maurice unknowingly left the office. The thought that the Mr. Blue fellow bore a faint resemblance to the man in the videos, at least from behind, grew on him. The secretary’s eyes were bloodshot as well, he noticed. When he arrived, they were large, and glossy, and green, and eyed him with a great deal of sincerity or boredom.

‘Twenty-eight days to find Mr. Perez and bring him before the Velkladdeur,’ he thought. ‘And still no Maurice Perez insight.’

This disturbed him and felt illogical. To compensate he played an old mind puzzle. He put one and one together and got two. He put one and one together again and got eleven. ‘Ah, now we’re getting somewhere,’ he told himself. Another rearrangement of one and one gave him a stick and he was holding the short end of it. He scratched the RFID chip in his arm and felt his biological clock produce extraordinarily loud tick-tocking sounds with his internal sub-woofer.

“Miss Skipper?”

“Yes, Mr. Jones.”

“The Blue fellow that was just here?”

“Mr. Blue, yes?”

“That wasn’t Mr. Perez was it?

Candy tried very hard not to blink as she replied, “No sir, that was Mr. Blue.”

“Is Mr. Perez coming to work today? I really haven’t much time to spare.” As he said this he slipped a hidden microphone disguised as a paperclip onto Candy’s cluttered desk. It would be safe there as Candy apparently never used paperclips.

In her effort not to blink, she began blinking at twice her normal blink rate. Lt. Jones took this as a good sign…as a complement…and was under the impression she was flirting with him. He unconsciously stuck his chest out.

“You’ll be the first to know,” she said, now blinking at approximately 1 blink/second.

Lt. Jones, in turn, increased his own blink rate from 1 blink/minute to 1.1 blinks/minute. He was stressed and made a mental note to add to his daily list.