I nodded. "Obviously. What excuse did he give for not being at the meeting?" As a business owner myself, anybody that wasn't going to be in a board meeting I called for without an emergency involving life or death was not fit to be a member in my board.

Danielle shrugged. She was focused on their profile. "He's usually not a frequent face, so his absence doesn't really mean a lot."

I hummed. Perhaps Mr. Houston was very lax about his business and the people he had around him. That may explain why he had become an easy target.

I put an asterisk near his name. "We still have to find out who he was trying to protect." Something occurred to me and I started searching the table. "Is there any other CCTV footage apart from the one you saw for the businessman? Maybe the car's dashcam?"

Danielle shook her head. "That was the only one in the clue box we were given. What do you need?"

I started tapping the table, I was getting somewhere in my mind. "Where does he live? Was he heading home or somewhere else? If anyone had done anything to him, it would have been on the way, since there's no record of anyone else going to his office."

Danielle nodded and picked up the voice recorder. "Was this conversation cut to make things harder?"

We both didn't need the answer, as it was very obvious. "Most likely. We can ask for clues, right? We've spent a while here already." I refused to check the time we had left.

Danielle sighed. "What are you thinking now? We're working together here, right?"

I looked at her, realizing I was thinking on my own. Was this what was meant by team effort? Even in my business, I mostly did everything on my own, so this was new. "I'm sorry." I apologized. Now that she had mentioned it, she had been the only one asking for my opinion, I hadn't even asked for hers apart from when she was answering my questions from the profiles. But that counted for something, right? "We need to find out where exactly he was headed to. It will be nice if we can find out who his brother was holding or what their cryptic call had meant, but if he was murdered, and it wasn't done in his company. The next bet is his car."

Danielle nodded. "But this is all we have here. Let's ask for a clue. If not, we'll keep on wasting time here and not find anything else."

I sighed. "Sure."

"Great choice. Your mission will be quite simple. What do you need to know?" Our announcer interrupted.

I nodded at Danielle, who cleared her throat. "Where was he going to and how far is it from his office?"

The voice (Scott) laughed. "Don't you think that answer will make it too easy for you? Alright, let's do this. I'll play the whole conversation they had. The coordinates for his office are in that room. You can use it to find the distance. Your mission will be related to what you want. In the room, the clues you need are hidden. Find it in five minutes, and I'll play the remaining voice recording, although you may no longer need it. Your original time will not change regardless. You have just over ten minutes to succeed in this room. Good luck."

I glanced at Danielle. "I'll start with the shelf. You should go through the drawers on that side." I said, already moving.

She also rushed to the drawer. "What exactly are we looking for? A box? A picture?"

"I don't know. Just keep your eyes open. Anything you see that is out of the ordinary, keep it. It may be useful."

Danielle laughed. "Do you think there will be anything that isn't out of the ordinary here?"

I smiled. "True." And we went to work.

After the five minutes were over, we came back together with what we had found.

"Did you find much?" Danielle asked, her face dusty. I handed her a handkerchief from my pocket and she collected it.

"Thanks. It felt like they left the drawer outside for weeks." She cleaned her face gently, probably not to wipe her entire makeup off.

I bit my lips so I won't laugh. I hadn't realized it would be dusty, if not I'll have changed position with her, but she looked a little adorable with dust still on her face.

"You should have told me it was dusty."

She shrugged. "It wasn't necessary. Yours didn't exactly look like a walk in the park, either."

She was right. I had chosen the shelf because it was small but packed full of items, most of them useless. It had also been dirty. It was a miracle the fact my shirt was still clean. I'd dumped my outer coat a while ago.

"I found a picture of Mr. Houston with a young child. It's a few years old when the child was still a toddler." I said, handing her the picture.

She frowned, studying the picture. "Why does the child look more like the brother rather than Mr. Houston?" She felt the paper and, realizing it had been folded, expanded it. "Is he his father?" She asked, handing the picture back to me.

I shrugged. "Maybe. It could be that Mr. Houston is protecting the child from his father."

She scrunched her nose. "But why? It doesn't make much sense."

"How about you? Did you find anything?" I asked her, ignoring her question. Not every sperm donor or women that delivered a child could be referred to as parents.

She nodded. "Yeah. I found some pictures as well and this wrapper. I wanted to throw it away."

I stared at the wrapper in her hand. "Isn't this the wrapper of a candy or something?"

She looked at it. "Probably. I can't really recognize it. It doesn't look like it is old or was put here by accident."

I nodded. "Exactly. Wasn't he diabetic? This looks like the hint we were looking for." I said, collecting the wrapper from her.

The clock started ticking, and I saw we had about two minutes left. "Let me see the pictures you found." She dropped them on the table and we both bent to look at them. She had found about fifteen, where I had found just one.

"Do you still need the rest of that conversation?" Scott asked from the speaker. I was opening my mouth to respond when Danielle spoke.

"No. And it's not fair that the times you spoke is being counted as ours. It not for that, we'll still have a lot more time."

The speaker went silent, then he sputtered. "I barely spoke for up to a minute. I'd better leave you two alone."

She shrugged. "It was worth a trial." She gasped when she saw the picture I'd gotten to. "Is that picture meant to show us what his car looked like when he entered?"

I nodded and moved another one closer to her. That one was of his office. "The wrapper isn't in either the car or his office." She noted.

"If I were to take a wild guess, he was given the candy by someone that knows about his diabetes." She pulled the wrapper closer. "I know this candy, the sugar content is a lot. If the sugar had affected him, he would have used his insulin immediately."

"Please bring his insulin." I asked, since she was closer to the table. She nodded and pulled it closer, and I studied it.

Danielle frowned. "What else are we meant to look for?" She asked.

"The insulin. I've not seen one in real life before…"

She cut in. "… If the doctors found nothing wrong, it means they probably ignored something and the fact that he's diabetic would mean they left his pancreas since it already wasn't producing enough insulin. Perhaps our first assumption hadn't been wrong after all."

I nodded. "Exactly. The probability his insulin was switched is very high, and this is where his driver comes into play. He had to have taken the candy, probably without the wrapper, because his driver that has been with him for a while gave it to him, and he trusted him enough not to confirm and when he began to have an attack, most likely trusted his driver to give him his insulin and in that state, didn't notice the switch."

She nodded, her mouth in an O. "So the driver was involved after all." She replied, sounding disappointed.

"It's possible he was threatened." I said, trying to comfort her. Perhaps because of the things I'd seen and had happened to me, I believed things like this easily.

She nodded slowly. "That means we've found the answer. Does this prove that his brother did it, though? And why?"

I pushed the last picture to her and she sighed. "Wow. I know this whole thing is made up, but why am I feeling terrible for Mr. Houston. Was he aware the people he had around were people that wanted him gone?"

The picture was his brother with his driver. The driver looked scared, and his brother was smiling, but his fear didn't change the fact that he had allowed him to die without telling his boss about the plot.

I shrugged. "Far too many things like this happens daily. This is just one in a million cases being investigated in reality." I explained.

Danielle looked at me. "Is this why you have a warped view of the world? Have you seen these types of things happen? Have you experienced these types of things?" She asked softly.

I shook my head, uncomfortable with the way she was looking at me. "No. I'm just a realist that doesn't see the world in gray and pink."

She smiled. "True. But I'm not like that either. It's just a little difficult to relate to something you've never experienced."

I scoffed. "Then that's fortunate for you, right?" Simply experiencing couldn't have been used in my case. More like I'd been surrounded with it.

She nodded, looking at me in a way that showed she understood what I was trying to hide. "I guess you could say that. We've gotten the answer, right? We've already spent close to ten extra minutes."

I nodded for her to say the answer. "The cause of death was an exchange of Mr. Houston's insulin with a poison that went straight to the pancreas, which was why the autopsy missed it. The person responsible was his brother, and he used his driver to feed him the candy because he was jealous and wanted to have what his brother owned."

I watched as she balled her fingers into a fist as she talked. Even saying the words out was affecting her this much, then it was just a fictional situation. It made me wonder how her reaction to what had happened to my brother would be. I got rid of the thought immediately. I had no business thinking like that. A few months and we would be able to go on our merry ways.

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