Barry Buffer and the Cold Boot Case

Barry Buffer does not usually take Bureau work.

This month, he did. A protected witness, Dana Reyes, went missing forty-eight hours before testimony. The suspect's laptop was seized; the suspect was not.

Barry profiled him, cracked his encrypted vault, and located the hold-site. The one timestamp anyone can find says so. Then he stopped checking in.

The suspect is the kind of man Barry quietly respects: an archivist who keeps and encrypts everything. Barry keeps nothing and explains less. Between the two of them, the entire case is sitting on this desk in plain sight, which is to say, completely hidden.

The goal is to rescue the protected witness.

"He wrote everything down. That was the mistake. I never do." — Barry Buffer