The desk in the temporary field office didn’t have a mahogany trim or an inset leather blotter; it was a five-foot slab of gray particleboard resting on two yellow steel sawhorses. The edge of the wood was unsealed, and every time Elias shifted his weight, the rough fiber caught on the loose threads of his cuff.
Elias sat with his sleeves rolled to his elbows, his fingers hovering half an inch above the grease-smeared plastic keys of Rafe’s backup laptop.
The silver dress shirt from the penthouse gala was sitting in a wet, heavy heap under the sink in the corner, smelling of the harbor canal and old sulfur mud.
In its place, he wore a scratchy, oversized wool flannel shirt Rafe had pulled from a plastic storage box behind the utility truck’s seat. It smelled intensely of winter mothba
