JAKE

The moment I stepped into the bullpen, I felt it—that charged stillness right before the sky cracks open.

Phones rang without pause. Agents moved like they were chasing a vanishing lead, their voices clipped and urgent. Monitors glowed with case files, Met security footage, and news headlines that made my gut knot.

Yeah. This was bad.

Luke caught sight of me before I even reached my desk. He stood planted in the middle of the chaos, one hand braced on the edge of his desk, the other pressed to his temple like the day was already carving a migraine into his skull.

He exhaled the second he saw me, the kind of relief that said, finally—someone to help carry this mess.

"You're late," he muttered, eyes narrowing.

"Late start," I said, brushing past without looking at him.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the flicker of a smirk. He had seen me and Emma at the party the other night. We looked happy. And he wasn't wrong. It was the best I had felt in weeks, the longest she and I had been together without the weight of something hanging between us.

But even then... there was something. Not quite wrong, just distant. She had smiled, laughed, leaned into me like nothing had changed—but there was a shadow in her eyes, like she was holding something heavy and pretending it didn't burn.

And yeah, maybe it stung a little that she hadn't told me what it was. I would've carried it for her. Hell, I would've carried her through any storm.

But I didn't ask. I gave her space and told myself she would open up when she was ready.

Still, I made a mental note to check in. After this. Especially after this morning.

I shook the thought away and turned to Luke. "Alright. What've we got?"

Luke sighed and jerked his chin toward the monitor.

The screen was paused on a grainy still—footage, clearly amateur, taken from inside the Met on the day of the heist. Guests in designer gowns and tuxes wandered through the galleries, some holding champagne flutes a little too close to brushstrokes older than the country itself.

Luke hit play.

I watched in silence as the footage rolled. Blurred faces, unsteady framing, but what it captured was undeniable. Guests slipping into restricted wings without being challenged. A security guard laughing as someone leaned in, too close, too casual, to a priceless sculpture. A man nearly face-planting into a motion sensor, smiling like he owned the place.

Then came the voiceover—distorted, anonymous, and far too slick to be some bored conspiracy nut playing journalist in his mom's basement.

"They say justice is blind. But maybe she just turns a blind eye... when her palms are greased with the right kind of gold."

The screen cut to black. Then a new title appeared in crisp white font—THE MET JOB: ONE YEAR OF LIES AND FAILURE.

The voice continued, "The FBI says they recovered the painting. What they won't tell you is that they never caught the real thieves. That somewhere out there, the people who pulled off the most daring heist in modern American history... are still walking free."

My jaw tightened. My hands curled into fists at my sides. "Who the hell is this guy?" I snapped, louder than I intended.

Luke clicked through the page, pulling up the podcast's bio. No name, no photo. Just a tagline—"Truth, art, power. All things that belong to the people."

"Anonymous, of course," Luke said. "Claims he's some underground journalist. Says he exposes what the mainstream won't—corruption, black market deals, elite coverups. Usually fringe stuff. But this time, people are paying attention."

I shook my head, pressure building behind my eyes. "And now he's painting us like a bunch of clowns who never had a grip on the case."

"Yup," Luke muttered. "And here's the part that'll really piss you off—this isn't his first episode. He dropped one three days after the heist. Same voice. Same style. But it didn't go viral. Barely hit a few hundred views."

I frowned. "Why didn't we catch that?"

Luke shrugged. "Back then, every major outlet was covering the heist. He got buried under the noise. But he was ranting about how the event was a cover for something shady. He implied it wasn't just theft, but corruption. High-level."

"But he didn't reveal the footage back then," I said slowly, piecing it together. "Just speculation."

"Exactly."

"He waited... waited for the headlines to die, for us to call the case cold—then dropped the smoking gun."

Luke scrolled further, his expression darkening. "That's not the worst part. The new episode dropped last night. It's already been picked up by three major outlets and is trending on Twitter. People are eating it up like gospel."

My eyes stayed locked on the looped footage, playing again like a slow-motion car crash—twisted, slickly edited, designed to stir outrage.

But the worst part? Some of it wasn't wrong.

There were blind spots that night. Corners were cut under pressure, and protocol slipped the moment the socialites started treating the Met like their personal playground.

Sure, we recovered the painting. But only because someone dumped a goldmine of intel on Vitale into our laps.

We never figured out who sent those files. But my gut still said it was them—the thieves. The ones who walked in and out of that museum like they owned the place. Smooth, precise. One of the cleanest jobs I had ever seen. And they were still out there.

Now, someone was making damn sure the world didn't forget that.

Luke stood silent for a beat, then asked quietly, "You okay?"

I tore my eyes from the screen. "No. Not even close."

He didn't push. He didn't need to. He knew the case still lived under my skin. Still kept its claws in me.

Across the bullpen, I spotted Ashford storming out of the conference room. He looked like he was two seconds away from erupting.

His voice cut through the chaos like a blade. "Parker. Hoffman. In here. Now."

Luke shot me a glance, grabbed a notepad, and we followed.

Ashford didn't wait for us to sit. The second we stepped inside, he slammed the blinds shut and locked the door with a snap that cracked like a gunshot.

His eyes were already lit with fire. "This is a disaster," he said, tossing a file onto the table. A transcript of the podcast fanned open—like a printed indictment. "The New York Times ran a headline this morning quoting that bastard. 'Maybe the FBI already knows who did it. Maybe they're protecting someone.'"

Luke scoffed. "That's bullshit."

"Of course it's bullshit," Ashford snapped. "But you know what spreads faster than the truth? A good lie." He stabbed a finger at the transcript. "And this? This is the kind of lie that doesn't need to be bought. It's theatrical. It's got rich villains, government coverups, a stolen Van Gogh—and it's got us holding the damn bag."

Luke sank into a chair. "We're tracing the footage. It's amateur, but definitely from inside the Met. Whoever filmed it had access. That narrows it."

"Not fast enough," Ashford growled, his jaw clenched. "Hoover's crawling up my ass. Deputy Directors are breathing down my neck. And the narrative's already out—rich people get to play in secret while the Bureau looks the other way."

I didn't sit. My mind felt like a grenade with the pin halfway out—seconds from going off.

I kept thinking about her. The woman on the roof that night—the thief. All we ever had on her was the name she used—Amanda Wilson. A fake waitress with flawless credentials. The ID had been so clean, it slipped through Met security without so much as a blink. And according to the witnesses, she had played her part flawlessly, slipping through the event like she belonged.

But now, I couldn't stop wondering—was she the only one who slipped through the cracks that night?

What if someone else had been embedded that night? Not to steal—but to film. Someone walking through the museum unseen, catching every lapse, every smile, every crack in our defenses.

"Parker."

Ashford's voice cut through my thoughts. I looked up to find him staring at me, eyebrow raised.

I straightened. "We need to pull the original guest list. Staff roster too. Full cross-check against post-event interviews and security logs. If he was inside, he left a trace. We just didn't know what to look for before. We do now."

Ashford didn't look thrilled. "Find it faster," he said coldly. "The higher-ups want a name. They want it yesterday. This podcast's gone viral, and every goddamn op-ed from New York to Sacramento is dragging us through the mud. I've got reporters downstairs and the Director calling every hour."

I was about to respond when the door creaked open. Elliot, one of our tech analysts, froze on the threshold, clearly reading the temperature of the room. His hand hovered awkwardly near his laptop bag, like he was considering whether to turn around.

Ashford waved him in. "Tell me you've got something."

Elliot hurried to the table and set the laptop down, fingers already flying across the keyboard. The wall monitor blinked to life. The same podcast clip reappeared—same distorted voice, same shaky visuals.

"We're running a deep scan on the metadata," Elliot said. "Most of it's been scrubbed—whoever this guy is, he knows how to cover his tracks. But we got one thing."

He tapped a key. A new clip appeared—this one from the Met's internal CCTV. One of the few fragments we managed to salvage from that night.

Most of the security footage from that night had been wiped or corrupted. The thieves had hacked the museum's system so cleanly that it took our tech team weeks to recover anything. And even then, nothing had given us a lead.

Until now.

Elliot paused the feed on a grainy frame. A man mid-toast, caught between motion blur and glare.

"Nothing obvious," Luke muttered, squinting.

"Wait," Elliot said, fingers already tapping. He zoomed in.

The cufflinks.

That son of a bitch.

They were slightly bulkier than standard and squared at the edges. Easy to miss—unless you knew exactly what to look for.

"That's him," I said quietly. "Hidden camera."

Elliot nodded. "We're betting it was a micro-cam embedded in the cufflink or lapel. The angle lines up with the footage. It would've let him record the whole night without raising a single eyebrow."

The face was still blurred, useless. But the body language, the positioning, even the slight lean as he raised the glass—it all locked into place.

"We'll need to cross-reference with the post-heist interviews," I said, my brain already spinning. "Match the outfit, posture, movements. We interviewed over thirty guests and staff that night—someone will remember him."

Luke leaned in, eyes narrowing. "The damn bastard got the whole night on tape... maybe even the heist itself."

Ashford exhaled—sharp, humorless. "This guy's been sitting on a goddamn time bomb for over a year... and just now decided to light the fuse."

"Because he thinks he's safe," I said. "The public thinks the case is closed. The painting's been recovered. No arrests. The Bureau's moved on. So he drops the match and watches it burn."

Luke didn't respond right away. He was still staring at the screen, squinting harder now. Then something shifted in his face—recognition.

"Wait," he said slowly. "I remember him. He said he was a journalist—covered art and culture for some big-name magazine. Kept grilling us about the security setup that night. At the time, I figured he was just digging for a story."

That unlocked it for me. I remembered the guy now, too—smug, persistent, asked too many questions. He had annoyed the hell out of me during the interview.

I grabbed the guest list from the file and scanned fast until my finger landed on the name. "Voss," I said. "Jasper Voss. He came as a plus-one with Lydia Merrow—one of the city's wealthiest art collectors."

Luke leaned over my shoulder, narrowing his eyes at the name. "Yeah. That's him. Dressed like GQ, talked like a trust fund kid who thinks quoting Orwell makes him edgy. Kept poking around, remember?"

I flipped through our notes. No red flags. No follow-up interviews. Voss hadn't even made the shortlist of potential witnesses worth a second look. He was vouched for by Lydia Merrow. His statement was short, bland, and even boring.

But now?

Now he was radioactive.

Ashford raised an eyebrow. "You think this Voss guy's our mystery podcaster?"

"He fits the profile," I said. "Blends in too well with the socialite crowd—and that's the point. He flatters them, writes glowing features, eats their overpriced oysters... and then stabs them in the back with a podcast mic."

Ashford gave a single nod. "Then pay him a visit."

Luke glanced at me. "You thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Yeah. If he had filmed the whole damn night... he might've caught our thieves on tape."

Before we could move, Ashford's assistant poked her head in. "Sir, DC's on line one. Says it's urgent."

Ashford let out a sigh and turned back to us. "Get whatever he's got. And don't spook him—we need what's in his vault more than we need him in cuffs."

"Understood," I said. But my blood was already burning, because deep down, I knew—whatever Voss had, it wasn't just going to reopen the case. It was going to tear it wide open.

After Ashford left, the room felt smaller. Like the air itself had thickened. Elliot, Luke, and I crowded around the laptop, digging deeper into the double life of Jasper Voss.

In the past year alone, he had published more than twenty polished culture pieces. Articles with titles like Billionaire Philanthropy or PR Masquerade? and What a Seventeenth-Century Painting Taught Me About Power. The writing was sharp, disarming, even likable.

He was photographed at fundraisers, private exhibitions, gallery openings, always with a glass in hand and a curated smirk. A chameleon. But behind the charm, he had been peeling back the shine, studying the elite, cataloging their sins, dismantling their illusion of civility.

"Here," Elliot said, turning his screen toward us. A grainy photo from a fashion benefit last spring. In the background—blurry, but unmistakable—stood Jasper Voss. Same jawline, same build, and the same cufflinks—just a bit too bulky.

I leaned closer. "He's been doing this for a while; recording things he shouldn't."

Luke let out a low whistle. "Guy's been collecting sins like souvenirs."

"Then it's settled," I said. "We talk to him. Today. No warrant. Just... interest."

Luke tapped a knuckle against the table. "What about voiceprint analysis? Can we match him to the podcast?"

Elliot hesitated. "We've got one audio clip from the original investigation—his witness statement. But it's short and has lots of background noise. I'll need to clean it up, run it through a few filters. We might get a match, but it won't be quick."

"Then we go old school," I said. "Face-to-face. Push where it hurts. Bluff if we have to."

I stood, grabbing my coat from the back of the chair.

Luke looked up. "You think he saw her? Maybe even got her on camera?"

I paused, gaze drifting to the monitor. Voss, mid-toast, half-turned. A frozen frame of someone who had no idea he was about to become the center of a storm.

"I don't know," I said. "But if he did..."

I let the weight of it land.

"...he just became the most important witness in this entire goddamn mess."