There was a non insignificant fire in the town she had just moved to. Was she already using the word 'move'? She would be there less than a month. She couldn't use that word.

The

fire

initially seemed like it wouldn't pertain to her case. But she decided to look more into it. Maybe she was bored. It definitely wasn't because she was feeling diligent at work. That day 

Georgie Wilcox

had happened to call off their lunch. So she had an extra two hours to spare.

Within 45 minutes she was able to uncover that the fire involved somebody connected to her boss. Victoria Gardner. This was the first time Sammy had ever heard of her boss Richard Gardner having any siblings.

She wrote up the document and sent it via post to the 

Westcity

office.

One stipulation of this case was that everything was done on paper. No digital trail left behind. It made for slower communication, but apparently it was safer. It meant the only people who could snoop on your communications were people who were in the know and physically near you. Also the paper trail could be destroyed much easily. Digital copies had a way of reproducing itself and lingering. If there was ever an investigation, it was feasible for people seeking information to find at least one location where the information was still accessible.

But with paper, so long as you shred them and stuck them into garbage and it'd been more than a month, there was little hope for such accessibility.

Another dynamic that made paper communication different was that it made waiting for a reply feel different. It made each message feel more weighted and you would await the response with less anxiety staring at your device and instead it would kind of be integrated into the rest of your life.

In this case she thought about going for a run, but she took a 

drive

instead. And while on that drive she noticed she was already halfway to Westcity. She decided to just go there. Maybe Gardner would be there and she would be able to speak with him in person about what she had discovered even before the post would arrive.

But more than that, maybe in person he would reveal more to her than he would through documents. If paper documents were less accessible to investigations than digital ones... verbal documents were the most secure so long as you were in a space that lacked recording devices. The words uttered in such contexts would vanish like 

whispers

spoken into the wind.

It wasn't such a big deal that Gardner's sister was living at the apartment with the fire. Fires happen. So what?

What was interesting was the fact that the apartment wasn't just an insignificant location. There was something happening there. On the report compiled by Gardner's staff about the whereabouts of that black 

Subaru

Forrester she had recognized that this apartment was, although not the most popular destination, one of the destinations that obviously didn't look like a fluke.

Be in this game long enough and you knew how to spot the beginnings of a

pattern

. The thing that wasn't considered a pattern yet because there wasn't enough data... but was bound to become a pattern with more data. Sammy could spot that before without having to wait. And thus she made it a pattern for herself.

This woman J. Bashir or someone driving the Subaru belonging to her -- paid for by J. Timberlake -- was visiting that apartment. However Sammy did not know who she was visiting. Based on a rudimentary search of Bashir's associations there was nobody of obviously family or close friends who lived there.

She was thinking about this as the sign for the exit that led to the Westcity office appeared up ahead. Just 1 mile away. Sammy wished that this drive was a little longer so she could work this out more in her head. There were times like this when she thought if her drives were just a little longer she'd be able to figure it all out.

As she took the exit she stopped thinking about the case and wondered who would be at the office.