It had been several days since the sheriff had made the decision to visit the Morgan's and he had been working very diligently to weasel his way into their lives in what seemed to be a very natural way...but natural it was not. The sheriff had spent the last 48 hours watching their every move and establishing their daily routine. He had learned everything about the Morgans that could be learned by an outside observer. But that was not good enough. He needed a connection. The sheriff returned to his home office and pulled an external hard drive out of a lock box hidden in the floor. He grabbed his laptop and made his way to the couch. In short order he had the hard drive pulled up on the laptop and was typing in his encrypted password. As it ran through it's start up and verification programs the sheriff sat back and thought that it was a good thing that he was really bad at taking orders. The head of the Company himself Hynrich Herman had given him specific orders to personally remove all traces of the background checks and interviews of all the scientist. The sheriff chuckled to himself as he clicked on the file named BACKGROUNDS. It seems that somehow those deleted files had just popped up on his laptop. He would need to take a serious look at this security issue at a later date.
As the files opened the sheriff crossed the room to the fridge and returned with an ice cold Ale Eight. With drink in hand he plopped down in the recliner and began to dissect the files before him. He was not sure what he was looking for but knew that when he saw it it would be waving like Old Glory on the 4th of July. It was just a matter of sorting it all out.
Most of the information was stuff he already knew. They both were younger than he was...just about his sister Emily's age. They had met at Oxford University. Married while still in college and the both went to graduate school to study...to study...there it was....behavioral genetics? Whatever that was....He found their grades, comments from teachers, reviews from their internships, published papers that he had no idea what they were talking about....the sheriff was just about sure that there was no connection when suddenly Old Glory herself started to wave...it was just a scanned picture from their Oxford annuals with the different clubs they had belonged to....medical this club, research that club...but there in the bottom corner was what he was looking for....Dr. Morgan and his wife holding fly rods as they posed for the fly fishing club picture! Who knew!? But this was the connection that the sheriff needed!
The next morning....quite on accident...he bumped into Mrs. Morgan as she was coming out of the grocery store. He happened to be parked right next to her with his trunk open. It seemed that he was in the middle of changing his tire and had his trunk emptied out with the contents spread out directly behind her car.
"Oh, sorry Mrs. Morgan....I am trying to get this dag gone tire changed. I did not mean to get in your way!"
"Oh that's okay sheriff.", replied Mrs Morgan.
The sheriff stopped working on the tire and opened his back door to start moving his stuff out of her way. In order to put his belongings which were once in his trunk from into the back seat of his car he had to place his fly rod on the roof of the car. With his rod out of harms way he began to chuck the belongings of his trunk in the back seat.
"Sheriff..do you fly fish?" inquired Mrs. Morgan at the sight of the rod.
"Not as often as I used to or as often as I would like too..." came a light hearted reply from the sheriff followed by an equally light "It's not the way people fish around here and I don't enjoy going alone that much..."
"Well" replied Mrs. Morgan "I had no idea there was any place around here to even wet a line, let alone actually fish! Would it be to personal for me to ask you where you fly fish?"
The sheriff turned to Mrs. Morgan with the look of a man who had just hooked the first trout of the season. "Do you fly fish Mrs. Morgan?"
"Not in a long while sheriff but Alexus and I used to love to spend our spring days throwing flies..why Alexus still uses tying flies as a way to unwind from our work for the Company! You really must come over and see his work...It is quite good!"
The sheriff began to real in the fish. " You just name the time and place and I will be there!"
Mrs. Morgan was as giddy as a school girl. "How about tomorrow night. You can come out to the house for dinner with Alexus and I and after dinner we will discuss when we all can go fishing!"
The sheriff humbly accepted the invitation and helped Mrs. Morgan place her groceries in her car and waved as she drove off. With a smile on his face the sheriff turned and started to place all of his stuff back in the trunk. With a smile and a half chuckle he picked up his father's old fly rod and thought to himself that it was high time he learned how to fish.
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