A/N: This story kinda got away from me. Strange idea spawned by the quote below. It's written before the finale and therefore takes place somewhere before that, not quite sure where though, but I don't think it matters much for this particular story.
Spoilers: There's a few quotes and quote references from different epis, but you wouldn't notice unless you've seen them, so I guess they won't spoil anything major.
Disclaimer: No confusion here, I don't own The Mentalist.
"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house." - George Carlin
This was the man, Jane was 100% sure of it, 110% even. However there was just something there that wasn't right. He'd been easily caught, red handed as a matter of fact, trying to slit a man's throat with a kitchen knife over some stupid disagreement. Just another murderer by circumstance. But Jane was not convinced. There was something cold and cynical about the man's attitude, how he carried himself. His whole charisma seemed off somehow, like there was something clever and dangerous lurking just underneath the surface. He didn't seem to care, felt no remorse for what he'd done, or almost done. Like he himself was all dead inside. Soulless bones wrapped in flesh and skin. It had Jane on his guard. Men like that were not to be trusted. Not even behind bars.
The second the man had spoken, Jane had known. There could be no doubt anymore. This man was Red John..., but then somehow he wasn't. It was very odd. He claimed to be this other man, this Miles Carrigan. Like he'd woken up one day, and become a whole new person, but not quite mustered to get rid of the little trades that were uniquely his. Jane told Lisbon and the team about his suspicion which was more of a certainty to him. They couldn't seem to comprehend this fact with their view of who Red John was supposed to be, but over the years they'd learned to trust him and his hunches, so they left no stones unturned. A man can't just transform without leaving behind a trace of who he was before.
xXx
This man, Miles Carrigan was the beloved husband of one Kate Carrigan, they'd been married for one and a half year, but according to the woman they had known each other a long time before that, since their early teens. Now, Miles cooperated that story, but he wasn't as convincing as Kate, as if he knew the story by heart, knew it to be the truth, but didn't quite believe it himself. As if he was missing that final light bulb to brighten up the room enough to see the things he was looking for.
The team tried to find any evidence that indicated why they would be lying, but quite frankly it wasn't that easy. It seemed neither of them had any still living family members, and they'd only moved to town after they'd gotten married, so none of their friends knew them from before then. The town they claimed to have grown up in was outta state, all the way on the other side of the country in fact - and Bertram wasn't very well going to let them fly all the way out there on the CBIs dime, to interrogate people in a simple, open and shut attempted murder case, with the suspect already in custody. So they had to make do with phone calls, which didn't please Jane at all. People could be bribed, alibis could easily be bought, and everybody were a lot harder to read over the phone. Jane was disappointed, this was going nowhere. And it all felt very sinister.
The wife had gotten this really aggressive lawyer to represent her husband. They were going to claim the whole attempted murder thing was self-defense a case of momentary insanity. And it looked like they might get away with it. Jane couldn't let this man, Red John, his tormentor, Miles Carrigan, whatever you wanted to call him, slip under the radar and get away again. No, there had to be a way he could prove he was right, make the man reveal himself to the world.
This, what the man was doing, had to be just another way he was taunting Jane. Revealing himself like that, putting himself right under his nose. Just within his reach, but Jane still being unable to touch him. And he wanted to, he wanted to very badly. But being in a cop house surrounded by... well cops, and having Lisbon watching him like a hawk he didn't really have that much maneuverable space to do something he - according to Lisbon - very likely would regret later.
What he needed to do was be cunning and sly. He would make sure that this time he'd beat Red John at his own game. In the guise of wanting to help a wrongly accused man of being innocent, he got permission by Miles and his lawyer to hypnotize him, in fact Miles was very eager, once he suggested this, to actually try it, but it had to be when the wife was not there, since she for some reason was very much against it. For the occasion they'd been allowed to tow a couch into the holding cell, seeing as he was still a murder suspect and he was not allowed to go wander freely around the CBI.
Jane had been certain that this was it, his way to revealing the truth. But he was somewhat unsettled by the man's willingness to go along with his plan. He was more than a little nervous, as he looked through the one-way mirror at his calmly strolling suspect, trying to decipher what the man was thinking while considering the best way to try and break him. Jane could practically feel his heart beating in his throat, how his hands were getting clammy and had started to tremble slightly. That was when he felt her presence, he hadn't even noticed the door opening and closing, she was just there. She took his hand in hers and squeezed it. He took his eyes of Miles and looked down at their hands, then he looked up and into her eyes, squeezing her hand lightly in return.
"Are you ready?" She looked worried.
He nodded. Looking once again at the man behind the glass he reluctantly let go of her hand and walked out the door looking back at her as he did. She smiled reassuringly, wishing her good luck with her kind eyes. As he entered the other room he had his game face on. Besides Jane and Miles, there were two guards in the room, nobody really trusted him to be alone with the man, not that he blamed them. He made Miles lie down, but before he started he glanced at the mirror, straight at Lisbon without knowing where she stood, he could just somehow feel her in there, observing his every move, ready to jump at the slightest indication of danger. He felt uplifted and relaxed a bit, glad she was on that side and not in here with the man currently lying on the couch concentrating on his breathing. Being near him had already tainted her, he wouldn't want her to change her colors altogether.
He turned his concentration back to the man. And got started on the journey to find out the truth. Three hours passed in the course of minutes. And though Lisbon had been there the whole time and heard the same words as Jane come out of the man's mouth, she wasn't as uplifted as Jane seemed to be when he came back. They relocated to her office and left the trance groggy man to the guards' care. From the fragments of information Jane had obtained the conclusion he drew seemed believable but also very hard to prove, especially in court. His theory went as follows:
Almost two years ago the Red John killings suddenly stopped. The reason was not that Red John had died, gotten caught or just decided to call it quits. No he had had some sort of accident, very likely a car accident. Now, the woman that claimed to be Miles' wife could have either met him before the accident or after. She had been a lonely and desperate soul. Maybe he had pitied her, bought her a drink at a bar, held the door for her in a store or offered her his taxi on a rainy day, probably hoping to gain a new follower. Whatever the scenario she had felt either drawn to or wanted by this man and if she had had anything to do with the actual accident or just benefited from it remains in the realm of uncertainties.
He had been in a coma, lost his memory, and she had gotten access to him at some point. Taken care of him, nursed him back to health and fooled him into being someone he wasn't, the one she wanted him to be. He hadn't regained his memory and she had continued the charade or maybe she'd helped the memory loss along, afraid he might remember some day so she had occasionally drugged him. She had made him a respectable man in their society, someone she could take to garden parties, and introduce to the type of women who had mocked her for being who she was all her life. But she hadn't been able to extinguish all of his murdering impulses. She would probably be as surprised as anybody that this man was California's most notorious and coldblooded murderer. For all intents and purposes this man was innocent, well except for trying to murder his neighbor of course.
And that was how Jane's theory went.
xXx
Now Miles still couldn't remember a thing and the court date was fast approaching. The team tried hard to find any evidence that could support any of this. They drug tested Miles, and there was a slight almost unnoticeable discrepancy that made them think they were on the right path. They arranged it so that Miles was being held in isolation, that way his wife couldn't come in and dope him again. Jane visited him every day to try and break the surface, scratch a hole in his shield hoping that bringing him back to "normal" or at least his old self - even though being Miles was probably best for everyone concerned - would be a possibility now that he was clean. But all Jane got was depressed. He did get some interesting childhood memories though that didn't really fit the Miles character. But they by themselves didn't prove anything and hypnosis wasn't recognized by the courts as a legitimate means of extracting information anyway, so why bother?
The team, being brilliant as they were, managed after much digging to track down who Kate really was, and the town she was from. It turned out she was an underpaid nurse, and a California native, never even left the state from the looks of it. When those pieces of the puzzle was uncovered, the rest of them followed like beads on a string. Some of her former colleagues remembered her vaguely, she hadn't really been someone you noticed, a little like a mouse, not knowing it is there until the cheese is gone. Nothing except her very sudden resignation had attracted any attention to her, and that was only because they needed to fill her position asap, already being understaffed as it was. Someone did actually remember seeing her pay an awful lot of attention to one of the car crash coma patients. A man who was discharged just before Kate left, but they had just taken it as empathy, seeing the man was a John Doe who had no visitors. They hadn't really taken notice of it before now.
The team got the staff to pull the John Doe's file. He had come in with severe injuries, head trauma, massive internal bleeding, a broken leg and collarbone, plus some minor cuts and bruises. All from having been hit head on by a truck. He had had extensive surgery and had been put in a coma for four weeks. When he came out of it he had lost his memory completely, he couldn't remember his name, who he was, what he'd been doing, or even his accident. He hadn't had any form of ID or other identification on him when he was found, so he was now a totally blank slate. But other than his memory he was fine, or was going to be fine. His injuries had needed a lot of recuperating time, and they'd hoped his memory would heal during this time also, but sadly that hadn't been the case. They'd given him phone numbers and places to contact once he was released, but it sounded like no one had really cared what had happened to him after he had been discharged. And why should they? He had just been another occupied bed, taking up space. Getting him through the system was all they cared about and once he was out of sight, he was out of mind.
Working their way backwards the team then interviewed the ambulance personal that had picked the man up. They had seen nothing unusual, it had just been a normal accident as they called it. So no information to be gained there. Next stop was the police station and the officers that had been at the scene. It had been very straightforward, the truck driver was drunk and had run a red light ploughing straight into the other car, smashing it up pretty good, they had been surprised to find the driver of the car alive in there, and they'd needed the help of the firefighters to cut him lose. The remains of the car had been towed, nothing of it was really worth saving so it had been taking to a car dump and been scrapped, any personal belongings was still at the police impound, it had never been picked up, which wasn't uncommon.
Cho and Rigsby, who had been the ones doing most of the running around town, got the incident report to go and went to retrieve the man's personal belonging from the impound offices, with a warrant of course, there had been enough shady details about this whole thing that they'd got a judge to sign off on it no problem. The actual loot turned out to be in and off itself not much, but still it was some rather interesting stuff he'd been hauling. Namely robe, and a lot of it, duct tape, a set of assorted knives, a bottle with some kind of clear but unidentified liquid in it (it would have to be tested later, although Jane had a pretty good sense of what it might be), then there was the syringe and the gloves. All of this painted a not so pretty picture, but Lisbon still insisted they had no case, it was circumstantial evidence at best. The defense could easily argue he was a craftsman of some sort, hard to deny when he had no memory of it, and there were no rules against driving around with any of these things in a car, if there had the police would have been all over it already. A confession would be the winning point, or proof of intend would be the next best thing, but they had zilch.
Jane had listened intently to what his team had discovered, and it all seemed to fit with his little tale, but when he read the police report from the accident blood drained from his face, and he paled visibly, shuddering involuntarily. It was a minor detail actually and it wasn't really something any of the others had taken notice of. But the place of the accident was only ten blocks away from Lisbon's apartment. And sure there was a lot of places he could have gone from there, none of which had anything to do with Lisbon. But given the way he initially had been driving which was heading straight to her and not in the opposite direction, and taken into account the things that had been found in the car, which out of context seemed like no big deal unless you knew the bastard and his intentions. Jane could do nothing but thank his lucky stars that fate for once had intervened and done something good on his behalf.
xXx
So here they were, the day of the trial. The lawyer argued a good point, and it looked like Miles was going to walk away from intended manslaughter with a self-defense assault charge. And with him Red John would disappear into the woodwork once again. Just the thought made Jane's skin crawl. They were sitting in the left row behind the defendant a few benches down right out to the aisle. Jane had a clear view of the back of Miles' head, his combed hair and iron pressed suit was doing nothing for Jane's piece of mind. To quell his thoughts and ease his mind, Jane kept clenching and unclenching his hands into small fists, digging his nails deep into his palms, which turned his knuckles white as he did so. Lisbon who was sitting right next to him kept glancing at him worriedly.
Then it was time for Miles Carrigan to take the stand. His no-good thug of an attorney was probably making this move to try and humanize him, get the jury to sympathize or even empathize with this monster, if they only knew. The persecutor didn't even want to present any of what they'd found out about the man, seeing as his case was already hanging by a tread, and adding obscure theories wasn't going to help him much, that was his opinion, and it was definitely not one shared by Jane or the team. But arguing and protesting was going to do them no good and get them nowhere. It was the lawyer's case and therefore it was his choice how he wanted to play it. 'Court is theater and those that have the best liars win,' as Jane would say, he was quite sure he could do a better job than this clown was doing right now though. He hadn't even said 'objection' once to the ridiculous story the defense was spinning.
Now was the moment of truth. Miles walked calmly to the stand, pledged on the bible to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as if that would do anyone any good, Jane thought. Miles looked out at the little crowd, besides the legal people (the judge, lawyers, jury, notary, and court marshal) there were the witnesses, a few law students, and a few other nosy people. It wasn't like it was a big case, not like the drama of having Red John on trial would have been. And if he had known who he was, a showman, he'd have preferred a big show to this little charade of a court hearing.
For a short moment Jane's eyes met Miles', other than them having met and fraternized in holding there was no glimmer of recognition in them from earlier encounters. Jane was disappointed that he hadn't been able to get through to the real man, if he'd only had more time he could have found some sort of trigger. But then something happened... A worried Lisbon reached out and placed her warm hand on top of his clenched fist, making him relax considerably. His hand unclenched and wrapped itself around her delicate one. A calming warmth cursed through his body and for a moment he allowed himself to close his eyes.
Miles being in the middle of giving his testimony suddenly stopped right in the middle of a sentence. A silence fell on the courtroom and Jane opened his eyes to find Miles staring at him. Well not him exactly but his and Lisbon's interlaced hands. Jane looked at Lisbon and their hands, she in turn looked at him and was soon followed by the rest of the courtroom who had started to turn to see what had interrupted the man on the stand. Both the judge and the lawyer had tried to talk to him to get his attention back on track, but he had remained suspended in some kind of trance-like state staring intently at two people's hands. After a minute or so Lisbon got self-conscious, so she loosened her grip, and removed her hand. A little pang of sadness and loss washed over him, but he was more concerned with what was going on with Miles. He looked like he was remembering, it was as if his face was cracking into pieces, crumbling right in font of them like the façade of an old building. He should have known the trigger was love, not hate or wrath or loss or anger or any of all the other negative triggers he had tried on him. Love, it was the strongest of motivators, he should know, having spend the better part of the last ten years avenging the lost loves of his life.
Jane had after all been told that Red John was on a quest of love and enlightenment. He'd probably grown up without it - love that was - observed it but never experienced it firsthand. The love of family, the love between a mother and child, the love of friends, the love between a man and a woman. He'd somehow gotten a distorted image of this, turned the most beautiful human emotion into a tool to ensnare and entrap the weak of mind, creating a birthplace for and nesting a coalition of manipulative and merciless killers. It was also with love that this Kate woman had managed to keep him subdued for this long. She had wrapped him in a blanket, hidden him from plain sight, shielded him by veiling his eyes, and in effect made them both blind. Love was Red John's curse, as much as it is anybody's, because no matter how tired and worn out it sounds 'you can't live with it and you can't live without it'.
As he stood there Miles was flooded by memories. Memories of the past year, the backyard barbeques, the late nights spend with his wife on the couch watching one mediocre TV show or another. Memories of him sinking a knife into a warm body, feeling the skin rip beneath it and the blood splatter back unto his clothing. Memories of watching Jane squirm under his influence time and time again, the agony and the pain so well-deserved. And now Jane had this woman who had the power to relieve his heartache with one single touch of her hand on his. Red John had seen it coming. Been fascinated by it. Puzzled even. Why? Why was this man entitled to be loved like that, and not him? What made him so special? What had he done differently? Why did he deserve a second chance? It was all so unfair, it was too much, but he remembered now, now he could make a difference, he could balance things out again, make them as they should be. An eerie smile - not unlike his famous calling card - crept unto his face at the thought. But then another thought hit him, Kate, his "wife" (was it even legal if he hadn't been himself at the time of the 'I do'?), she had done this, she had made this all messed up and wrong. He scanned the room, sought her out, she was sitting right behind his lawyer, giving him an insecure smile as their eyes met. That did it, who did she think she was? Sitting there and smiling at him, when she'd lied to him, screwed him over.
He leapt over the counter with an agility quite unfathomable for a man his age. Grabbed the nearest weapon he could find, (and there aren't a lot of those lying around in courtrooms) in this case the judge's puny hammer and raced towards the pews. Everything went very fast, nobody had time to react. Jane braced himself, leaning forward half shielding Lisbon with his body, ready for the onslaught. But the man never even looked at Jane, he went right for his wife. Banging her over the head with the hammer, which of course broke, then he proceeded to try and choke the life out of her. At this point the marshal and several other men had gotten a hold of him, trying to wring him away from the horrified, half choked to death woman. Jane had unconsciously grabbed a hold on Lisbon's hand again, clenching it so hard it must have been painful for her.
"I'll get you for this! You're going to pay for what you've done to me!" He screamed at her, while the rest of the court looked on in stunned silence.
"Remove this man from my courtroom immediately!" The judge seemed pissed, and not just because of the lack of a hammer to underline her authoritarian stance.
Just before he was dragged out the door he managed to lock eyes with Jane, there was a silent promise in them saying 'I'm not done with you yet, just you wait, I have more in store for you." A chill ran down Jane's back, but he shrugged it off.
So much for the defense trying to display their happy marriage, Jane thought. He leaned over to Lisbon and whispered "Do you think we have enough evidence now?"
She shook her head "No, but we do have grounds for a new investigation." She could see Jane was disappointed, but she wasn't going to lie to him. "It would've been better with a confession, but at least he'll be behind bars for a little while longer, we will have time to dig out some substantial and undeniable links that proves that he's Red John." Jane gave her a little smile. She had meant for it to sound comforting, he knew, but he had been through this too many times with this madman. And now that Red John knew who he was again, he was going to be dangerous. Even sitting in prison, he was bound to have a trick or two more up his sleeve, some sleeper agents in his vast network that had been patiently awaiting his commands for the last two years. Now was the time to test if Lisbon's beloved legal system could actually make a difference. He had his doubts, but he was willing to give it a try for her sake. They were going to prove he was Red John, unravel his network, flush out the spies, and send them all to jail for the rest of their miserable lives. By a twist of fate and a 5000 pound truck the forces of evil had been stirred awry. It could only be a sign that this time good was going to prevail!
A/N: I'm sorry but that's it, I know the ending kinda suck, but what can you do? I blame my ending-muse (yes I have a separate one for this purpose, not that it seems to help a lot).
Is it just me, or does the name Miles not just beg to be followed by Thorsen? Anyway that was what I was thinking every time I wrote it. Or Matheson, but that's because I've been watching 'Revolution', so never mind, different fandom, sorry.
I realize that the holding cells don't have one-way mirrors, it's the interrogation rooms that have those. But the holding cells seem more secure so I put him down there and hired a contractor to make a one-way mirror, don't sue me for illegal restructuring of the CBI building.