Amelia Washburne rented a small office near the end of a long hallway on the second floor of a fairly out-of-the-way building, which would not have been her first choice. You had to make do with what was available, and, more to the point, with what your limited finances could cover. Her rates were adjusted for plausibility: people had enough trouble trusting a detective her age, and the kinds of fees Laera used to charge wouldn't have helped.
The door was marked by a small plaque at about average human eye level, and behind it was a cramped room containing a desk and two filing cabinets and little else. The top edge of a window peeked out from behind one of the cabinets, the little of it that was visible further obscured by a set of blinds that were probably completely ruined. The desk was organized—impersonal, Laera would say with disdain, but one had to project the right appearance—and the only hints that it belonged to a person with a life beyond it were a small framed photograph, turned so the only way to see it was to stand on Amelia's side of the desk, and one of those drinking bird desk toys. The computer was very new and looked slightly out of place, being that everything else in the office was dented or scuffed at least a little. If one looked under the desk, which one almost certainly would not, one might see a large cat bed which was also in pretty good condition.On this particular morning Amelia had a newspaper spread out across the desk and was leafing through it with a pen clamped in her jaws, looking for mentions of a particular name on behalf of a client who had spent a lot of time telling her how important he was without giving her a very good idea of what his case was all about. It was her hope that she might find something here to explain things a little better. The client had said that she wouldn't understand it anyway, which she decided to take as a challenge rather than an insult. As expected, Laera was standing on the newspaper.
"Do you have to embrace your feline nature quite this much?" Amelia said.
"No," said Laera, and sat down in the middle of the page she'd been reading. "You have a computer right there, you know. It would be a lot faster."
'It's much easier to see the connections when you have it all laid out in front of you, I think," Amelia said. Not that there appeared to be any so far, but she'd paid for the newspaper and she might as well make the most of it. It wasn't as if she had anything else pressing.
