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It was strange, Peter reflected, how in some ways it was easier to work with a convict than it was to cooperate with a fellow agent.
He and Eppes circled each other hawkishly, weirdly protective instincts coming to the fore. Neal was acting his usual charming and unflappable self, but someone who knew him as well as Peter fancied he did could detect some... flappability in the way he smiled his presumably disarming smile at Eppes - Don Eppes, that was.
Neal smiled a lot more honestly at the younger Eppes, the math guy the Bureau had seen fit to send in. He was thought to be the mandatory element in solving the case, but apparently the Eppes came as a bundled package.
Snatches of conversation drifted to him from where Professor Eppes was engaged in animated conversation with a piece of chalk, a blackboard, and Neal, in that precise order.
"Can numbers explain the beauty of a painting?"
"As a matter of fact, cognitive emergence theory..."
"... if beauty really is in the eye of the beholder... so many agree?"
"The eye... the brain... learned behaviors..."
He caught Jones' eye, trying to gauge whether he was as antsy as Peter felt, but Jones seemed to soak up that stuff.
(Later Jones would admit to being more interested in the dynamics of Neal and the Professor's communication, but this was too complex a message to be transmitted through the raise of an eyebrow.)
"I thought they'd be at each other's throats," he told Diana, when she brought him some of the documents they'd just received clearance to examine. "You try telling Caffrey that everything is numbers, including his precious artwork!"
"Hm, I guess Charlie got under his skin somehow," Diana said and winked.
This unsettled Peter for an unfathomable reason, and he glared at Don Eppes, for it was accustomed and almost expected of FBI agents of different jurisdictions to glare at each other, and therefore it was safe and familiar territory.
(The reason was only unfathomable to him. El had seen through the impenetrable veil in a heartbeat, and eventually solved the mystery to a very satisfying conclusion for all three of them. But that was much later.)
A little later, the case had been solved, and numbers had been, indeed, paramount to solving it. But so had Neal's unquantifiable knowledge of art lore, which made Peter inexplicably proud.
(Except, of course, El explained it in very small and easy words. Peter had really liked the explanation - or rather the conclusion which, the Professor might have noted happily, could be expressed by numbers, although Peter doubted they could have made him accept that sometimes 2 + 1 = 1.)