I felt marginally better after coffee, which restored a small measure of my faith in the universe. If coffee had failed me, I’d have been sorely tempted to go right back to bed and never get up again. But two cups of coffee and a toasted bagel later, I felt almost ready to face the world. Bury myself in work was part of my plan for the day. The other part was to try and forget about summonings and relationships and anything else that was stress inducing. I had a feeling I was going to have more success with the first portion. My first stop of the day was the crime lab to drop off the laptop we’d seized at Adam Taylor’s house and to beg, plead, and whine to have it bumped to the top of the queue for forensic examination. As much as I itched to fire it up and see what files were on it, I knew that was a perfect way to destroy evidence. I wasn’t a whiz at computers by any stretch, but I’d attended plenty of training sessions where it had been drilled into our thick little heads that doing anything to a computer—even turning it on—altered the data on it and could jeopardize the integrity of evidence.
