Park merely looked as amused as he always did when someone was attempting to establish a hierarchy with him. “On the contrary, I’m as timid as a mouse,” he murmured.

Neil’s eyes narrowed.

“Oliver, I told you I was assigned undercover for a bit with the FBI,” Cooper said hastily. “I worked most of my cases under Neil.” He immediately wished he’d picked a different way of saying that, and added, “He was my supervisory agent.”

“Now it seems like we might get the chance to work together again. Assuming, that is, you’re in here investigating the murder of James Finnigan and not to put a mint on his pillow.”

Neil took them to a very well lit and touristy bar because he claimed no one on his current undercover case would be caught dead in a place like this. “Though maybe that’s not the reassurance it once was, after poor Jamesy boy,” he’d added, toasting the victim and sipping on his cider.

They sat in a booth, with Park and Cooper on one side, Neil on the other. It was difficult to say whether he’d changed in the five or so years since Cooper had last seen him. The trouble was, Neil was always changing, even back then. The darling of undercover, his ability to completely lose himself in any identity, to shift his mannerisms, personality, and core appearance so fundamentally it was unnerving, had been used as a gold standard to rookies like Cooper. To be partnered with him, fresh out of grad school, was an honor and a test. Or so he’d been told by everyone over and over. A test of what, Cooper had never asked.

Neil’s hair was blond now. Dyed, though Cooper only knew because he remembered the natural gray of his chest hair, the way it had felt springy and tough under Cooper’s hands, his cheek, his lips. Neil had been almost twenty years older than Cooper then, so had to be in his mid-to-late fifties now. Looked it too, though Cooper would attribute that more to whatever role he was currently playing than the natural aging process. He had seen Neil look both decades younger and decades older than he did right now at various points in the four years they’d known one another. There had been a joke in the agency then, that there was no real Neil. That he was just a computer-programmed series of walking, talking skin suits the FBI trotted out for their most unethical work. The closer Cooper had gotten, the less he saw the humor in it.

“So, let me guess,” Neil said. “You’re working the death.”