She had plenty of home invasion nightmares about her parent’s estate (technically hers now. She was still getting used to the possessive.) but none of them began like this. Those always started off with a dark night and her being accosted by some killer that had been living on one of the floors or wings they never went to. Andy remembers not too long ago, how she’d walked home to find the front door ajar and the lights on. Her heart had seized with fear, not for herself, but for her roommate. The panic set almost instantaneously and though she’d spent spent plenty of years in a field that required a cool head in such situations, it didn’t mean she didn’t feel things like anxiety and fear. She went around New York picking too many fights for her to expect there there to be no repercussions. When it was just her, she could buckle down on the front porch with just a shotgun.
Life, Andrea decided, became so much more complicated when you had something to protect.
In the end, the front door fiasco was just former roommate forgetting to close the door behind him. He’d even passed out before he could charge his cellphone - thus missing her frantic phone calls-
Anyway, that was the reason he was her former roommate.
The new one, the one that had been here for a few months, certainly hadn’t done anything as stupid. One might even say Andy found his company pleasant… even if the whole model thing made her eyes want to roll right out of her head. She absolutely judged that career choice but the short frame of time during which she had to fill the empty spot in her house meant that it was either him or some college drop out that was going to do nothing short of make meth in bathroom if her deductions were correct (she was a U.S. marshal. Her deductions were usually correct.)
So here Andrea was, living with a model. There were days when the bitter, petty side of her soul hoped her ex-husband somehow heard about it.
She was in the living room that night, case files spread out, with her own mind and body pouring over them. Her phone, which had been playing early years Pat Benatar had lost its juice an hour ago and now sat on time out, plugged into the wall charging.
“Hey,” she said after snapping to attention and then remembering there was, indeed another person living in this house. Shoulders down, but guard still up - that never went down. “Yeah. Late night, I guess. You’re fine, I was just - ”
She waved her hands around towards the pile of work as if that was enough of an explanation.
Mr. Rodriguez was, apparently, night owl too. Andy’s insomnia kept her up, but she hadn’t expected him to share that with her. A short jab about beauty sleep sat on the back of her tongue but it died there too. The three to four months of camaraderie they’d struck up meant that Mr. Rodriguez was spared it. In many ways that was true friendship from Andy.
Scrubbing the sleep from her eyes the marshal took one last look at the photo that had held her attention for the better part of the last hour and sat up a little straighter. Fuck it.
“Hey…” She repeated, pulling his attention now. “Can I borrow you for a second? You’ve seen a true crime show before, right? Like… Law and Order. Buzzfeed’s true crime series. Anything…?”
Again, model. She kept it simple. She just wanted a second pair of eyes, here, in the dead of night. Andy flipped the photo in hand up towards him so that he could see it from her spot on the floor. This was against protocol of course, but fuck it. It was 3 in the morning. Some protocol could go out the window.
“Does that look like suicide to you, Mr. Rodriguez?”
Neither he, nor his housemate talked much. In fact, talking really wasn’t their thing. Marcelo couldn’t blame her, given that she was in some sort of law enforcement and he had gone for the most asanine, yet technically true excuse as a professional model. He had already accepted money to stand around and make the room ‘more appealing’ for some art show or another after all. That was basically modeling, wasn’t it? It was hardly his fault that she seemed to believe him outright.
Marcelo paused regardless as she addressed him, surrounded by piles of papers and photos of varying levels of violence displayed as clear as day before them. His eyes darted down to the case she seemed to be working on and nodded slowly. “Yeah. I, uh, I get it.“ It was like staying up at night long after his shift for the watch had ended, consumed by thoughts that something out there was waiting for him to shut his eyes in order to take him by surprise. The annoyance of realizing that it was nothing but a lizard scurrying under the dense forest growth, or a monkey tapping against the wood of a log to gather insects. The U.S. Marshall before him looked very much the same as those soldiers, staring out angrily, ready to pounce with no target in sight.
His brow furrowed at the mention of watching a true crime show, (Law and Order? What was that?) but nodded nonetheless, since it seemed to be the reaction she wanted out of him. “I know the ones. What about them?” The question had barely slipped past him before a photo was abruptly shoved into his face. A few unpleasant Portuguese curses nearly rose up, until the image itself caught his attention. “...A suicide, you say?”
He took the photo from her with care, sidestepping her sprawling mess to get closer to a source of light. Marcelo looked at it closely, studying the positioning of the body, the way the rope was tied around their neck, and the layout of the room. The longer he looked, the more he started to frown, perplexed. “...But that can’t be right. The ceiling’s too low...” The mercenary mumbled to himself, looking around him for other photos. He spotted the one he needed on the table, placing the photo side by side as he considered them together.
At last, he shook his head, looking up at Andrea. “It’s not. The bruising is wrong, and the broken neck? You can’t get that from the height of that room. Whoever they are, they didn’t die by hanging, but it does look professional. My guess? There was a hit on them.” Marcelo concluded, briefly realizing how out of the norm it would appear for someone like him to have such knowledge. “I get home late. Law and Order is usually the only thing on. I guess some things stuck.” He lied smoothly, shrugging his large shoulders. “Who is this anyway? Some case you’re working on?”