BEFORE

Juliet O'Hara, Carlton Lassiter and Chief Vick were sitting at the table in a conference room, addressing their recent progress on the several cases they were working on. Chief Vick was observing the two detectives closely, having depicted some light annoyance between the two.

"Chief, we are really getting on with this case," O'Hara said, leaning forward slightly to seem more convincing. "We've got some information from our informant and -"

"We are currently checking the fingerprints I found." Lassiter smiled, sending a superior glance at his partner who rolled her eyes. "They are sure to get a hit."

Chief Vick barely kept herself from pinching her nose in annoyance. These informations were too vague to be of much meaning - but she shouldn't worry. Right? She could still call in Spencer, after all, if the case wouldn't move soon.

As if he had heard her thoughts, Shawn Spencer entered the room with no sign of being discreet. Chief Vick took a double turn at his sudden appearance. The psychic detective smiled around the room.

"Oh, good. You're all here," Shawn nodded, probably expecting them to be there just for him. She was going to have a really bad headache tonight. "I'm having a psychic vision about Jan," the consultant started. "And I have a theory about who may have killed him."

Just what she needed now, Chief Vick relented. Two cases her detectives couldn't solve being solved by the person that aggravated both of them the most. Couldn't he see that his timing was bad? The psychic was unnaturally oblivious to the atmosphere in the room.

"Let's just take a step back here, Mr. Spencer," the chief said, trying to converse with him over the eyes. She would talk to him later, but right now she needed to solve this problem with her detectives. They clearly had had an argument about something and she was going to find out what it had been about.

Once again, the psychic detective left her stunned then he took her words too literally and took a step back from the table. "What -" she started, but was interrupted by a knock on the closed door of the room.

She looked around quickly, not happy with being interrupted all the time at all. Officer McNabb was oblivious to that fact. He was holding a case file in his hands, an amused smile dancing over his lips as he leaned over the table to offer the file to the detectives.

"I just got the fingerprint results from the refrigerator truck case," McNabb told them and Chief Vick watched the detectives spike up at the news. "Do you wanna take turns with this?"

The chief frowned at that, but was more concerned with Lassiter, who grabbed the file and started flipping through it, intentionally preventing his partner from looking at it. O'Hara gave an annoyed huff.

"Take turns?" Spencer sounded confused. "What's going on here?"

O'Hara grabbed the file from her partner to look at it.

"O'Hara and I have a little competition." Lassiter took the file back, determined to be the first to find the right suspect.

Chief Vick couldn't believe her ears. This was some sort of rivalry - presumably about the detective exam, seeing as Lassiter asked about it just earlier today. If she'd knew that, she would have just taken another example for a higher scoring! She'd thought they were talking about people still on the force!

"Competition?" She asked incredulously.

"It is not a competition," O'Hara rushed to explain. "Lassiter is just being a child about his detective exam score." Chief Vick was, once again, hardly keeping herself from shouting out a reprimand. Those people, who were literally making faces at each other, were her two best detectives?

"Oh yeah," Spencer spoke again, seeming amused. "The D.E.T.? I took that when I was fifteen."

Four heads turned to the psychic detectives, disbelieving and shocked. The detectives looked at him as if he was an alien. The test was for trained officers only. How was a kid supposed to take the test - and, least of all, Spencer? After a second, Chief Vick remembered and she hardly could keep the smug grin of her face as she watched the faces of her detectives morph into pure shock.

Spencer seemed to see the question form on their faces and grinned, a little bit proud of himself. "I got a 100." Chief Vick tried to bite down the laugh when three mouths dropped open comically. Her predecessor, John Fenich, had been telling the unbelievable truth after all. And she'd thought he had been kidding when she first met this mysterious Shawn Spencer.

"I'm sorry," Lassiter clarified and seemed to try to decipher any lies forming in Spencer. He wouldn't find any. "You said you got a perfect score?"

"Yeah," Shawn confirmed, seeming confused why he would need to ask again. Lassiter was speechless - he had always suspected that Spencer was downplaying his intelligence (after all, psychic powers were not real), but this was more than he'd ever imagined.

"When you were fifteen?" O'Hara, too, asked. Guilt over their ridiculous argument showed on her face and Chief Vick noted how she leaned away from the psychic detective, in awe.

"Yeah." Shawn frowned. "Why? What did you guys get?" Then he realized that they thought a 100 was impossible to achieve - especially for him. After all, he hadn't become a detective.

Chief Vick turned to look at her detectives, amused at their faces. Officer McNabb seemed to enjoy this just as much. The detectives looked at each other, not knowing what to say. Shawn was looking at all of them expectantly but the chief wouldn't be the one to tell. It didn't seem like McNabb would either.

Lassiter opened his mouth, still rattled by this new discovery. "You know, it probably changed a lot since then. You really can't compare it."

Shawn raised an eyebrow but didn't say anything when O'Hara nodded in agreement to her partner. "Oh, apples and oranges," she said dismissively.

"Riiiiight," Shawn said, shaking his head before getting back on track.