“No,” Laura said. “I mean, me. You’ve already gone against what we agreed by going ahead and arresting someone on your own instead of calling me first. You know I’m the senior agent. We should have discussed this beforehand.”
“Why?” Eric asked, his facing dropping. He looked like a kid getting told off himself. “I could tell it was him. I thought you’d want me to use my initiative.”
“There’s such a thing as strategy, Agent Won,” Laura said. “For example, the kind of strategy that doesn’t end up with our suspect getting injured in the case, leaving us open to criticism, if we can help it.”
Agent Won made a little movement with his mouth as if he was going to argue back, but then clamped it shut and led her over to the computer. There on the screen was everything he had: the juvenile arrest records, the school records, everything he had on Jonas Mendez.
Which, yes, was a little suspicious. He was known for starting small fires. But none of them had any connection to candles, there was no sign of violence in his past, and Laura couldn’t see that there was much in it besides a teenager acting out for attention.
She glanced at Eric, at how he stood with his hands on his hips, waiting for her to come around to his side. He looked supremely confident. And, yes, on the surface of it, there was a lot here to be suspicious of.
But like she’d told him before, he just didn’t have the experience. He wasn’t used to profiling, to understanding the difference between a petty criminal and a killer. To seeing the red flags in someone’s past, the same things that tended to come up time and time again. And while he might have found a number of coincidental overlaps in Mendez’s history, he’d forgotten something important: any real indication of motive.
On top of that, he simply couldn’t read people yet. Laura could. And she couldn’t read what he wanted her to in this kid.
Were there any more ways the universe could point out to her that working with Eric was nothing, nothing at all, like working with Nate? She wished he was there right now. They might have argued, gone in separate directions – but he never would have made a stupid arrest like this and wasted time.
“Stay here,” she sighed, rubbing a hand across her forehead crossly. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Because, honestly, she couldn’t even see this needing to take that long.