Disclaimer: I do not own CSI: Miami. It is the property of CBS, and no copyright infringement is intended.

“Morning, Miss Stinson.”

“Lieutenant.”

Managing the Miami-Dade Crime Laboratory would have been impossible without the benefit of an administrative assistant, and Horatio Caine had hand-picked Julia Stinson because of her impeccable people skills and her attention to detail. Knowing that Miss Stinson could and would manage the day-to-day affairs of the lab, Horatio was able to concentrate on what mattered the most: people. Every paper Horatio signed—every appointment he made—went through Miss Stinson first. Yet she handled things in such a way that remarkably few people, even those closest to Horatio, ever mentioned or even seemed to notice her…unless they had a complaint. Then they did notice. Loudly.

“You should know that Melinda Stockman’s mother is here. I saw her waiting by the reception desk when I came in.”

“Thank you.” Nine-year-old girl found dead in the family pool, shot execution-style while the babysitter had sex in the master bedroom. “Did you happen to speak with her?”

“Of course.” One of Julia’s most important duties, as Horatio saw it, was to see that the families of victims were recognized on sight and treated accordingly. “I told her I would see if you had come in yet.”

Horatio nodded, staring momentarily at the coffee he had poured but would now not have a chance to drink. Some days started better than others. He could have knocked it back in a few swallows—this was, in fact, the primary reason he only poured half a mug at a time; it was rare indeed when he had the time to drink more than that—but he decided, instead, to pass it along to someone who would sincerely appreciate it. “On your desk, then?”

She broke out a smile that lit the small corner of the break room near the staff refrigerator, where she had just opened the door to stash her lunch bag. “Thank you.” This happened on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis—often enough that it had become their own private joke. “And I’ll be in meetings most of the morning, so would you mind holding my calls?”

Horatio smiled back, appreciating the allusion to their frequent reversal of roles. In most jobs, apparently, the assistant brought coffee to the boss, while the boss attended meetings; in the case of Horatio and Julia, however, it usually ended up the other way around. Julia attended many more meetings than Horatio himself did, and he brought her coffee more mornings than not. “I’ll see what I can do.” He skipped a beat, then transitioned to a slightly more formal conversation. “Busy day?”

“I’m interviewing three new janitorial suppliers. Hopefully I’ll have quotes and recommendations on your desk by day’s end.”

“I’d say no rush, but the men’s bathroom is nearly out of toilet paper and I had to empty the trash myself last night before I went home.” Not that The Great Horatio Caine was above emptying trash cans. It was just that, in the case of an audit or an external investigation, it made the lab look bad when the head of the lab had to take out the trash himself. “We do need to find a better service, and quickly. I believe Rick Stetler gets back from his vacation this coming Monday, and I do not want him claiming that our facility’s cleanliness is substandard.”

“Understood.”

Horatio glanced into the refrigerator to see why the task of putting her lunch bag away was taking longer than usual. It only took a moment to spot the problem. While the top three shelves sat virtually empty, except for his own bag at the very top, the bottom shelf was cramped. Julia could reach the higher shelves, of course, but it was less convenient and, at any rate, he’d seen a few of the stares she received while retrieving items from upper shelves. The bottom shelf held the advantage of being both convenient and relatively inconspicuous. “I do have one extra project for you today, though—high priority.”

“Okay.”

Horatio pointed at the bottom shelf. “Clean out the experiments, please. I do not allow non-edibles in the break room refrigerator. Health-and-Safety hazard.”

She answered with a laugh. “Shall I wear gloves, or will you be around to take the heat from this?”

“If anyone raises an objection, refer them to me.” With that said, Horatio grabbed his—or rather, her—coffee mug and headed out of the break room with it, aiming for Julia’s desk in the reception area.

Mrs. Stockman converged on him the moment he rounded the corner out of the hallway. “Lieutenant.” She stood waiting with her arms wrapped around her middle and a tissue clutched in one fist. “The young woman who was at the desk yesterday when I came—the woman who just said that she would look to see if you’d come in yet—I didn’t notice yesterday. She has no arms?”

Never taking his eyes off the grieving mother, Horatio stepped behind Julia’s desk to set the coffee mug aside. “Mhm. That’s my assistant, Julia.” The truth was, many of the people who came into the lab didn’t stop at the reception area long enough to notice that she wrote memos with her feet or dialed phone numbers by pressing the buttons with her toes. “What can I do for you this morning?”

“You said to contact you if I thought of anything.”

“That’s right, I did.” With the coffee mug passed off, Horatio escorted Mrs. Stockman away from the reception area and, instead, motioned her toward the upstairs observation lounge, where it was quiet and they could talk without interruption. “You thought of something?”

And that was how Horatio’s day began.

Trouble began, predictably, around lunchtime—which translated to around two o’clock, when Horatio arrived back at the lab from the scene of a B-&-E. He had left Natalia to process the store herself, with a police cruiser on hand for protection.

“I’m warning you, Lieutenant—the natives are restless,” Julia said the moment he exited the elevator. This was the primary motivation for placing her work station at one end of the wraparound counter that doubled as the reception desk: so she could catch her boss the moment he returned. “I guess my prints are distinctive. How was your B-&-E?”

“Blessedly uneventful. And your interviews?”

“One came and left a quote, one never showed, and the third isn’t due for another fifty minutes.”

“Good. Keep me informed.” Horatio was hungry—starved, actually; breakfast had consisted of a single toaster pastry, unheated and eaten on his way to the lab seven hours ago—but he was also looking to avoid being hassled while he ate. “So the natives are restless, are they? Anyone in particular I should be alert to?”

“So far? Let’s see—Calleigh, who apparently had a full clip of rounds stored in last week’s lunch bag; Eric, who has apparently been helping his niece track the growth of mold spores on his PB&J for a school project; Sam, who was keeping some kind of electronics component from overheating in her car—”

Horatio stopped her prematurely by arching his eyebrows. “That bad?”

“I’d eat out, if I were you.”

“I wish I could. Thank you, Miss Stinson.” Horatio glanced past her desk into the break room. It appeared to be empty—at least for the moment—so perhaps the thing to do was to grab his lunch from the fridge and eat it someplace where even his team wouldn’t think to look for him. “Where are they now?”

“The usual—Calleigh in ballistics, Eric in trace, Sam in the AV lab—but due for a break any time.”

Horatio nodded and turned away from the desk. “I’ll be someplace safe. You know where to find me in an emergency.”

“I’ll never tell.”

“And the Three Bs rule applies, all right?” Horatio didn’t often invoke that one, but occasionally he needed its protection and this was one of those afternoons.

“Don’t interrupt you for anything less than bullets, bombs, or break-outs? You got it.” This was another reason that her desk sat near the elevator: so she could snag and deter anyone heading for the elevator who might be looking for Horatio.

Horatio grabbed his lunch bag from the refrigerator, then ducked into the back stairwell and jogged down to the basement. Alexx had her own break room—of sorts—downstairs, in the form of a small supply closet backing the morgue itself, which she had outfitted with a small table and two chairs. The first time she had invited him to join her there for lunch, Horatio had thought it slightly morbid—to be eating at the feet of the city’s dead—but the longer he had sat there, the more he had realized how peaceful it was. Now, he stuck his head into the autopsy room to ask, “Alexx, would you mind if I borrowed your break room?”

Alexx looked up from her latest exam and smiled at him. “Trying to escape the natives? Go ahead, Horatio. Believe me, I’ve heard all about Miss Stinson cleaning out the fridge upstairs.”

And so Horatio managed to finish his lunch in peace, fortified by the quiet, before thanking Alexx and heading back upstairs to deal with the consequences of his earlier decision. He made it as far as Julia’s desk before Eric spotted him.

“H, there you are. Did you really tell Julia to throw out all the old stuff in the break room fridge, or is that her making up stories again?” Eric shot a glare past Horatio’s shoulder at Miss Stinson even as he spoke.

Horatio kept walking, forcing Eric to keep pace with him and thus preserving Julia from any further glares. “I did. Eric, as I understand it the sandwich was full of mold.”

“Yeah, it was my niece’s science project. I was helping her with it.”

“Then I’m afraid your niece will have to explain to her teacher why her project was being housed in the break room at the Miami-Dade crime lab rather than in her home refrigerator. Intentionally keeping spent food in the staff fridge is not a wise idea, Eric—it poses a health and safety risk.”

“Ah, that’s a bunch of bunk and you know it, H. I mean, it was just a little mold. It’s penicillin.”

“Exactly, and I am allergic to penicillin. I take no chances. How are we coming on trace from the Stockman swimming pool?”

Reluctantly, shoulders rounding slightly, Eric shifted gears and motioned Horatio to follow him into the trace lab. “The fibers caught on the edge of the pool turned out to be from a wetsuit—not a match to the one I wore. I ran a comparison sample through the mass spec just to be sure. I’m still searching for a manufacturer.”

“Okay. So the question is, who wears a wetsuit into a swimming pool, Eric?”

“I don’t know, other than maybe a pool maintenance or repair company. Should I go back and talk to Mrs. Stockman, see if she has any thoughts?”

After his earlier conversation with Mrs. Stockman, Horatio had no inclination to disturb her again unless absolutely necessary. The poor woman was a mess. “Try the phone book first, please. See if anyone has worked on Mrs. Stockman’s pool in the last few days. And if you can’t find anyone, give me a heads-up before you do make contact with the mother, okay?”

“Yeah, all right. She that bad?”

“No, Eric, she’s worse. Thank you. Keep me posted.” Horatio looked forward to his next stop—the ballistics lab—even less, but he had promised Mrs. Stockman answers. “Calleigh, have we found a match on the bullet from Melinda Stockman yet? Her mother was here again this morning.”

“Again?” Calleigh looked up from her microscope and keyed in a command that shifted the view to a monitor for Horatio’s benefit. “Well, in that case I do have good news. The bullet came from a Smith & Wesson 22-caliber previously used in a B-&-E four years ago. The registered owner is a Michael Carlisle. I was just looking him up now.”

Horatio nodded, simultaneously grateful to have a lead on the Stockman case and dreading the part where Calleigh got to the part about her discarded bullets in the break room. The fact that she had yet to mention it boded very badly for the eventual conversation. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

“Here we are. Michael Carlisle, 45, owner of Michael’s Pool Repair & Supply. How interesting. Eric found wetsuit fibers on the edge of the pool. Calleigh, get this information to Eric immediately, please.”

“Will do.” She closed up her files and collected them under one arm. “By the way, Horatio—speaking of diving—do you know how I spent my lunch break?”

“Dumpster diving for a clip of bullets? I won’t even ask why they were in the staff refrigerator. I’ll simply suggest that you store them elsewhere from now on. Get that information to Eric, please, and let’s bring Mr. Carlisle in for questioning.”

Half an hour later, Horatio stood outside Carlisle’s interrogation room with Frank Tripp. “Boy, Horatio, you sure do know how to get your team riled up. Whatever possessed you to have Julia clean out the fridge, anyhow? And don’t give me that health and safety line, either.”

The police had a separate break room on their own floor of the building, so Frank’s question must have stemmed purely from curiosity. “Honestly, Frank? Because the bottom shelf was full.”

“So?” Seconds later, Frank huffed. “Oh, right, and she can’t reach the top shelves because she has to use her feet. Never mind.”

“She can reach the upper shelves, Frank.”

“She can? Then what’s the big deal?”

And that was what irritated Horatio the most: it wasn’t a big deal. He’d meant it as a small gesture to make her life just that little bit easier—not because he felt sorry for her, but because he knew exactly how much of the lab’s operational weight she carried and because he knew how important to morale those little gestures could be. He’d meant it as a token of appreciation, nothing more. “It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal, Frank.”

“Mm. Yeah, I know how that goes—things just sort of spiral out of control.” Frank shrugged, then gestured into the interrogation room. “Well, better luck next time, I guess. You ready to take this guy?”

“More than ready.”

It was late by the time Horatio finished with Mrs. Stockman and could turn his attention to administrative matters, like hiring a new janitorial company. Knowing Julia, the whole task would probably take him about five minutes and he would be able to leave the lab on schedule.

“Julia?” He stopped at her desk just in time to see her pull a stack of papers off the printer and into a folder, close the folder, and slip the folder into the shoulder bag she used to transport files. “How goes it?”

“I think we have a winner.” She eased the bag over her shoulder using her left foot, then slid her foot back into her clog and stood, shrugging to adjust the bag further. “But first, congratulations on catching that girl’s killer.”

Horatio nodded. Thank you never seemed appropriate, and he had yet to find a spoken answer that did feel suitable, but she deserved an answer all the same. Some days—maybe even most—Julia’s acknowledgements were the only thanks he got for his troubles. Not that Horatio did his job for anyone’s approval. It was just nice to hear.

She nodded back, following Horatio down the hall to his office. “Did he say why he did it?”

Although by the end of the day Horatio often didn’t want to relive the horrible things he’d heard, he felt that Julia had as much of a right to know the outcome of the cases as he did. The hiring of janitorial companies and collection of timesheets was hardly her only duty, or even the most important, although those were the kinds of duties that kept the lab operating. If Horatio happened to be out of the building when a victim or the family of a victim came by looking for him, Julia handled them personally. She knew enough of the cases that she could listen and talk intelligently with them, offer appropriate reassurances, and ask meaningful questions. She could, in short, substitute herself in some small way, for Horatio himself. “Because she insulted him.”

“She was nine. Nine-year-olds mouth off.”

“Mhm.” Besides. Even if her only job had been administrative, she had a right to know the reason she spent so much effort keeping the lab operating, because no one—no one—would do the job for pay alone. “Fortunately for all of us, Mr. Carlisle will probably get life in prison, possibly even the death penalty.”

“Good. Oh, and you should know that about five minutes after you left her house, Mrs. Stockman called the front desk to ask us to thank you again.”

Unlocking his office door, Horatio smiled and gestured toward the guest chair near the side of his desk. “Have a seat. So—” He turned to clear off a spot on his desk for the new paperwork. “—tell me about the janitorial companies. You said earlier that one didn’t show up, so I guess he’s out of the running.”

“Actually, he came shortly after you went to lunch. His appointment was to have been at twelve o’clock, but he had written down two o’clock; he came at two-fifteen and apologized for running late. The first bid was the lowest, but they lost out when they started speaking Puerto Rican behind my back.”

Julia had the advantage of not looking like she would be fluent in anything other than English. Calleigh had a similar advantage, and hence Horatio had been aware of its power when he hired Miss Stinson. “I infer that they were discussing something other than cleaning?”

“Definitely.” She didn’t volunteer the details, and Horatio was too tired to ask. If it had been important, she would have said. “The third bid was higher, but it didn’t seem unreasonable and they were focused, they asked good questions, and they arrived on time.”

“Works for me. And their background checks and fingerprints cleared?”

“Yes. It’s all here.” She extracted the file from her bag, which now sat at her feet, and extended it past the end of the desk. “Coleman’s Cleaning Services. And if you want to go for it, the contract is printed and on the top, waiting for your signature.”

Horatio grabbed a pen, signed, and offered the folder back to her. “Let’s get this to HR in the morning. For now, let’s call it a night.”

She nodded and set to packing the file back in her bag. “Oh, and Horatio? One thing I almost forgot.” She zipped the bag closed, settled it on her shoulder, and stood. “I know why you really had me clean out the refrigerator this morning, and I just wanted you to know that I appreciate it. A lot.”

Horatio nodded, and although he was exhausted he offered her a smile. “And I appreciate all that you do. A lot. I figure that makes us even.”

“When you first interviewed me, I know I told you that I didn’t care how people looked at me—and that’s generally true—but…” She shrugged. “Some days I guess the stares do get to me.”

Rounding the corner of his desk, Horatio nodded. “Believe it or not, Julia? Physical difference is only one of the things that can cause those stares, and I remember very well how bad they can hurt.” He smiled at her again, sideways this time, and reached past her to push his office door open from the hinged side. “So you’re welcome. Now have a good evening, and I’ll see you in the morning.”