OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE
Chapter One: The Cruelest Month
Very much like any ordinary day in the CBI office, Grace Van Pelt, Wayne Rigsby, and Kimball Cho worked on paperwork and desktop computers. They weren't bored but weren't entirely excited either. Paperwork was a necessary ingredient of their job—one that they accepted. Teresa Lisbon, their unit leader, sat behind her desk in her glassed-in office completing the next layer of forms supervisors are tasked with. Few words had been spoken among them the entire day.
But their consultant, Patrick Jane, found this part of their work mind-numbing. So, during this time, Jane would sit on the sofa, sip green tea in a porcelain cup and saucer, and read great works of literature. His actions today were no different than any other. Today, he had chosen Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot. At this present time, he had just completed The Waste Land.
Patrick Jane, the cultured and dignified man who never strayed from his three-piece suit attire (except for brief stints in jail), stood in stark contrast to Patrick the Wonder Boy who grew up in the crude existence of the mid-western circuit of the Carnie world. Patrick the Wonder Boy received no formal education. Being born into that world, Patrick was groomed by his father to be a flimflam, a charlatan, despite his father's realization that his son had been born with special gifts.
Patrick Jane had re-invented himself after his escape from that world. Initially, sipping tea with clients was his way of demonstrating to them his civility. He had little to prove to anyone anymore, but he had grown accustomed—and quite addicted—to his ritualistic drinking of tea.
The shrill of Lisbon's desk phone interrupted their concentration. They could hear her speaking but couldn't understand her words. A few minutes later, she emerged from her door and stated, "We caught one."
Those words, we caught one, made each of the agents guiltily excited. Adrenaline would quickly begin to fill each of them as they jumped up, ready to spring to action.
"Cho, you and Van Pelt take a separate vehicle," Lisbon ordered. She was self-assured and sharp. None of her underlings ever questioned her.
"Ah, April is the cruelest month," Jane mocked them, throwing down his book and following them to the parking lot.
Lisbon and Rigsby got in the front seats of the van as Jane climbed into the back. After they all had belted up, she got moving. They needed to hurry to the scene before additional bystanders in the state park trampled over the evidence.
As they sped through the streets taking each turn at speeds not comfortable to Jane, he would clench his teeth, hold his stomach, and close his eyes. Even though he had grown up as a Carnie, he had never learned to like the rides that jerked and jolted people into thinking they were having a good time.
The sun was blaring into the backseat causing Jane's eyes to burn. He felt as though he were recovering from a roaring night of over-consumption of alcohol. He rarely drank alcohol because he wanted to retain control of his faculties at all times. He needed water to hydrate his parched mouth, and his head began throbbing at his temples.
"You okay, Jane?" Rigsby called behind his shoulder after he had heard a low moan coming from the back seat.
"Ugh, I think I'm getting car sick," Jane placidly answered.
He put his head down onto his lap, breathing through the symptoms he believed were car-sickness.
"Boss, something's wrong with Jane," Rigsby said, directing his voice to the driver's side of the van.
Lisbon adjusted the rear-view mirror to locate Jane within its field of vision. "Jane?"
He lifted up one of his arms to wave her off to indicate that he was fine and to keep going to the crime scene. "Just a little car…wait…please pull over!"
"What?" Lisbon asked, still straining to view Jane in the mirror. Within seconds she understood his request and jerked the van over to the side of the street.
Jane flew from the van and fell on all fours, vomiting right there on the public street where anyone could see. He could hear Lisbon mocking him from her van window, but he had no intention of retorting. After his stomach was empty, he felt better. Getting up by grabbing the van frame of the open door, Jane dusted off his knees, wiped his mouth, and got back into the back seat of the van. "Can you slow it down just a little for my sake," he wittingly requested of Lisbon.
She shook it off and got the van back onto the road. It was strange. But Jane was like that. He was a complete enigma.
The murder in the state park was a fairly standard case for them. They noticed, though, that Jane offered little in the way of his usual perceptive assistance.
Throughout the week, every question they asked him was answered with a semi-blank stare or a riddle wrapped around a string of sentences that made no sense to the rest of them.
At the end of that week, they had, after all, solved this one with very little helpful assistance from their consultant. They celebrated their singular success with pitchers of beer at the local pub.
Nine days later they were back in the office replaying the same scene of forms and desktop computers and Jane on the couch. He hadn't been right since that car-sickness incident. He was jumpy and pale and unkempt, obvious signs that he was not eating and sleeping. Lisbon feared it was Red John so she made it a point to lay eyes on him routinely to continue to monitor the situation. This wasn't his usual antics. Something just wasn't right, and she couldn't put her finger on what it could possibly be.
But they continued this way, and now it was a good two weeks since his unusual behavior had started—and Jane set the bar pretty high for that classification. The team watched as Jane continued to make his way several times a day to the men's room to vomit what they believed could only be his beloved hot tea. They had not witnessed him eat anything for the past two weeks.
"I can't take this anymore," Van Pelt announced to Cho and Rigsby. Cho stared at her while Rigsby answered back immediately.
"I know what you mean," Rigsby said.
"Go tell the Boss," Cho suggested.
"I will. Something's not right, and we can't keep pretending like it is," Van Pelt justified.
Jane was staying unusually longer in the bathroom. Van Pelt got up to go to Lisbon's office. She saw him appear from the men's room, and his appearance made her all the more motivated to prompt her supervisor into taking action.
She knocked on Lisbon's door with three confident taps. Lisbon looked up.
"Yes?" Lisbon asked.
"I'm worried about Jane. He isn't right. He's been sick, unsteady, and confused for the past two weeks, and it seems to be getting worse each day," Van Pelt stated, showing her personal concern for their quirky consultant whom they had come to love over the past four years of working together. It was more than just closing cases. They loved him like family, and now something was wrong and needed fixing.
"I know," Lisbon answered, "I'm worried, too." She had asked him on numerous occasions if he were okay. Each time he responded back with an affirmative, brushing her off as usual when it came to his health—both physical and mental. "He always tells me only what he wants me to know, which I might add, is not a lot. I know something's wrong, but I don't know exactly what to do."
Van Pelt began to answer but was interrupted by Lisbon's phone. They both slightly jumped by the shrill that tore through the intensity of their conversation, which obviously was ending prematurely so they could attend to the caller on the other end of Lisbon's desk phone.
"Got it," Lisbon spoke into the receiver. After she hung up, she looked at Van Pelt. "We will finish this conversation, okay? But for now, we caught another one."
Van Pelt knew what that meant. She went back to her colleagues and announced to them to get geared up.
Lisbon came into the room. "Van Pelt, you hold down the fort. Rigsby and Cho, you take a separate vehicle. Jane, you're with me."
Jane stood up unsteadily from the sofa. He placed his empty cup and saucer on the end of the table.
"Are you going to be able to do this?" Lisbon asked him.
"Oh, yes, of course. Why wouldn't I?" he answered.
"Come on, we can talk about it in the van," she said.
"Don't worry about me. I think it's just a touch of a stomach virus that simply refuses to be passed on to any of you," he directed to her backside as she hurriedly approached the doors to the parking lot. He followed behind her as quickly as possible.
The truth was, he felt absolutely terrible. He had never been this sick for this long. Whatever it was, he hadn't been able to eat or sleep in two weeks. Tea, which was the only thing he felt like putting into his stomach, was usually rejected by his stomach within an hour. He noticed how increasingly sensitive his eyes were becoming to light, and his left arm had developed a slight, but noticeable, tremor. Often the things within his line of sight were blurred, and everyone seemed to be speaking in slow motion. His mind was dulled. He couldn't think, couldn't concentrate, and couldn't keep the objects in his peripheral vision from jumping around.
They came upon the mansion that the yellow crime tape had clearly identified as the place where mayhem had happened. "What ya got for me?" Lisbon shouted out to Cho. Jane was still in the van. He appeared to his colleagues to not have even made one move to open the door handle. Inside the van, Jane was struggling with the handle to get his hands to pop open the door. The rest of the unit was almost through the front door of the well-groomed mansion belonging to the family connected to the upper echelon of their society.
"Ya coming?" Lisbon yelled back to Jane.
Jane didn't answer with words. He concentrated hard on the door handle. Once open, he walked to them as normally as possible. They entered the mansion and were greeted by local police who escorted them to the library in the back. Jane kept his hands by his side to try and balance himself as he walked.
The crime scene was disturbing. A mother in her mid-30's lay sprawled across the library floor. Her little girl lay perpendicular to the mother's body. They were both bloody from their necks down. There was too much blood at first glimpse to determine the exact causes of their deaths. Both lay angelically on the Persian rug spread across the dark walnut floors of their library. Their faces could have easily deluded the bystanders into thinking that mother and daughter were in a peaceful sleep. Their bodies, on the other hand, looked as though the killer left no part of their small frames unharmed.
"Oh," Jane said as he entered the room and saw them on the floor. "This is not good. Not good."
Lisbon wanted to flippantly answer back with a No shit, Sherlock response, but she knew that right now wasn't the appropriate time. Jane was as pale as she had ever seen him, so she said nothing in reply.
Crime scene technicians went through the scene and evidence with the team while Jane stood motionless by the wall, unable to take his eyes off the mother and daughter lying serenely in the floor of the library filled with hundreds of old books.
"Charlotte?" Jane said. His voice interrupted the procedural conversation going on adjacent to him in the library.
"Charlotte, what are you doing here?" Jane said again. The tone of his voice revealed his unsteadiness.
Lisbon recognized that name. It was Jane's dead daughter's name. He rarely allowed her name to leave his lips. When needing to refer to her, Charlotte Anne Jane was always called my daughter or my child. Lisbon recognized what was happening. After all, she was the daughter of a binge-drinking alcoholic father.
"Jane," she quickly spoke into his ear as she abruptly approached him.
"Yes?" he answered her.
"Is your daughter here?" she asked in hushed tones so the rest of the unit and miscellaneous officers on the scene wouldn't hear.
He looked at her and smiled, "Come on, Lisbon."
"Okay," she said, patting him on the shoulder. "Just checkin' on ya."
Jane continued to stand by the wall, trying to balance and brace himself at the same time. "Lisbon," he called out a few minutes later.
She glanced up at him to acknowledge that he was addressing her.
"You've got to take me out of here," Jane said loudly. Everyone in the room paused for several moments in awkward silence. They then recognized what they were doing and went back to work.
"Okay, come on," Lisbon answered. She needed no explanation from him at that moment. She knew this one was hitting too close to home for him. She feared that if they didn't leave now, he might just go over that precarious edge of his. She took him by the arm to guide him out of the library and home and then into the driveway and van. She opened and closed the door for him, a practice she rarely took with anyone. In her world, it was each one for himself. But at that moment, she sensed that Patrick Jane, her colleague and friend, needed more from her.
"I'm taking you home," she said once they were on the road.
"I just need sleep and food," he answered. "That's all it is. It's quite a simple explanation. I just need rest and nourishment."
"We'll get your car later, okay? I'm taking you home and making sure you lie down. And that's an order Patrick Jane," Lisbon feistily barked at him.
"Yes, ma'am," Jane playfully answered. He leaned against the door and stared at the van's dashboard.
They drove in silence to his home in Malibu. Lisbon didn't know where else to take him—wasn't sure which extended stay motel he was camping in this week. She began processing his actions in her mind over the past two weeks and couldn't shake the gnawing gut feeling that his recent actions might be connected to the fact that he had spent time in a mental hospital after his wife and daughter were murdered.
When they arrived at his home, she escorted him up the concrete steps leading to his front door. She reached into his pockets and retrieved his keys. She recognized which key belonged to the desolate Jane residence in Malibu where Angela and Charlotte Jane were massacred by Red John. They entered the empty home where only a pink tricycle with silvery streamers jutting from the handlebars remained. She took him by his arm and guided him up the steps to his bedroom where she knew only a twin-sized mattress and pillow lay on the floor. All else had been stripped from the home. She never asked him why he had done that but reasoned it was his way of punishing himself for their deaths.
She inhaled a large breath as she entered that room. Placing her hand on his back, Lisbon directed Jane towards the mattress.
"My head's just jumbled. I just need sleep and food," Jane repeated as he lay down on the mattress in his bedroom floor underneath the blood-drawn Red John smiley face. He closed his eyes, knowing that Lisbon would be staring at him.
"Is there anything I can do for you," Lisbon asked, bringing the warmth of her voice into the coldness of the room.
"I'm okay. You go on back to work and get the wicked bastard who did that," Jane answered, his voice a slurred string of words.
"Okay, Jane. Call me if you need me. Ya hear me?" Lisbon commanded.
"Yes, ma'am," Jane answered in a low, quiet voice.
Hours later in the silence of the night, Lisbon's cell phone rang. She recognized the number. It was Jane. He never would have called her in the middle of the night unless he really was in trouble.
"Jane, ya okay?" Lisbon sleepily asked into her cell phone.
"No. I need you, Lisbon. I need your help." He clicked off the call. That was all he said.
Lisbon jumped up and hurriedly dressed and got into her car, pushing the limits of the speed as she made her way to Jane's house.
TBC