Chapter Two

He found her in front of her toilet and sink, the pair standing over her prostrate form. She was naked and still and for a moment he thought she was gone from him for good, and the dizziness he felt nearly knocked him down beside her. But Lisbon was so thin that when he managed to steady himself, it really wasn't hard to see the breaths that were lifting her ribs in rhythmic confirmation of life. Her life. Thank God.

He grabbed a large coral-colored bath towel from where it hung on the wall rack above her and draped it over her body. Carefully stepping between Lisbon and her comical guards, he slid his arms underneath her, one at her shoulders and the other under her knees. She didn't stir. Jesus, what happened? Awkwardly, he lifted her up, and relief washed over him again when he felt her weight against his chest. Warm. Alive. She was okay. Now he needed to figure out how to get her out of there. Her bathroom was small, no wider than the tub that lined its far wall, and with her limbs and head hanging slack he could foresee trouble maneuvering them out into the even narrower hallway.

He eventually made it to her bedroom, wincing at the way her ankle had cracked against the bathroom doorframe, and lay her down on the queen-sized bed he found there, still covered with the towel. He didn't like how small she looked, how fragile. How when he'd held her she felt like silk canvas spread taut over bone. Sitting beside her on the bed, he brushed her dark hair back from her face. Like the eggplant-colored duvet she lay on, it contrasted harshly against her unnervingly pale skin. He squeezed his eyes shut against the sting of tears.

He knew where she was. He knew well. Nearly a third of his life had been spent right where she was.

The reason he'd even survived, the person he credited with being the anchor that ultimately saw him through the storm, was Lisbon.

She had a strength he had been drawn to immediately. She was tenacious as hell, walking around with her chin stuck out in defiance of anyone who would dare get in her way. But she was also... just decent. He had seen it in her the moment he'd first spoken with her, when she'd tried to send him home with nothing more than platitudes. She didn't want him to leave in those early days simply to get him off her back, she wanted him gone so she could focus, do her job. Because as tough an air as she wore, she cared deeply. She genuinely cared—about Angela, about Charlotte, about every other victim's name that passed across her desk. That the CBI might want to avoid a lawsuit, thus giving him leverage to stay, wasn't the only reason he'd badgered a punch out of Agent Hannigan all those years ago. The way to get near Teresa Lisbon, the agent heading the Red John investigation, would be to garner her sympathies. And, sure enough...

In the intervening years that they'd worked together, she had become almost like a drug to him. He felt wonderful being near her. She was a challenge. Stubborn, a bit restrained, but with a playfulness he had enjoyed discovering under that tough exterior. And once he'd earned her friendship, she still never went easy on him, steadfastly refusing to relinquish him to the darkness that threatened to consume him. In exchange, Jane hadn't always been fair to her, he knew, leaving her to agonize over his whereabouts and safety more than once as he pursued his demons, but she had always welcomed him back. With a well-deserved tongue-lashing, but still. And he did always come back, unable, unwilling, to free her completely from his own curse.

Jane had been trying for months now to reach her as she'd reached him. He vacillated between cajoling her into spending time with him, and thinking she might need space to come to terms with what she was feeling in the aftermath of Grace, Wayne, and baby Maddy's murders. But he couldn't bring himself to leave her to her own thoughts for long. Even on out of state assignments, he called her, interrupted her self-imposed solitude with deliveries of her favorite candy, or ridiculous little gifts he found on the internet that he thought might make her smile.

But she was hard on herself, as hard as he'd ever been on himself for Angela and Charlotte's deaths. From what little she would confide in him, he knew she felt culpable because she hadn't kept Ardiles in Houston longer to dig deeper into his concerns, blamed herself for brushing the man off instead of doing what she felt it was her job to do: investigate and find answers. Lisbon had convinced herself that any number of actions but the one she ultimately took—sending Ardiles straight to Wayne Rigsby and Grace van Pelt's surveillance company—would have spared the man and young family.

And Jane had to admit—though not ever to Lisbon—that he harbored his own gnawing guilt over their spilled blood and everything else that had happened those few short months ago. He should have focused more on Ardiles' motives, explored his curiosities about why the man would have flown all the way down to Houston over a bugged phone.

Instead, he had been grappling with how unbalanced he felt not just by the thought of Lisbon going out to dinner with another man, but by the way she made light of it, the way she talked to him about the date with Fischer right there as though she were in the company of two girlfriends. He'd watched her closely to see if she was flirting with him, teasing him when she'd called her dinner with Ardiles a date. Jane couldn't see anything in her but playfulness. The more he'd dwelled on that fact, the more it bothered him.

Before McCallister, before living two years in absence of her, he had never really lent much credence to the idea of Lisbon having a social life. On top of her being fairly aloof when it came to her appeal, and single-minded when it came to her career, she was nervous about letting people in. Getting close to her was a one-sided excursion in which one had to slowly wheedle their way past her resolve to never risk someone like her father, or the criminals she spent her days pursuing, have access to her heart. That suddenly she wasn't the least bit demure about the subject of dating had Jane worrying about how she would have responded if Ardiles had been pursuing her, and what that would mean when another man eventually did.

Was she hoping to date? Jane felt a painful twinge in his chest. He had no claim on her, but somehow he had gotten the idea that—

He slumped over, bracing his elbows on his knees. It had been a long time since they were free to think about futures, a long time since guilt, an old friend of his, hadn't been stronger than the incredible resolve he knew her to possess.

Guilt is such a potent thing. He gently touched the red marks on her shoulder where they peaked out from beneath the bath towel. More potent than even your own wounds.

Lisbon had been missing for five days. Rigsby and van Pelt were dead, along with so many others from their CBI days, and the last time he'd seen Lisbon was when she was escorted out of the FBI building by a fellow agent immediately following their meeting with Agent Saliba. The agent was supposed to keep lookout for her while she grabbed an overnight bag from her home and then both were to promptly return to the Austin field office. Jane, Lisbon, and Cho were to be under twenty-four hour guard until the situation was understood and contained. Two hours and a few dozen inquiries from Jane about her whereabouts later, and he had overheard that a body was found at Lisbon's Georgetown, TX address.

Following a small scuffle with an agent from Illinois who continued to give Jane the runaround to his now panicked questions about Lisbon, Fischer and Abbott pulled him into an interrogation room. The agent who had accompanied Lisbon was dead. Lisbon was nowhere to be found, but from the looks of her home, she had put up one hell of a fight. Blood discovered in her bedroom was already in the forensics lab awaiting DNA testing.

The FBI building was a flurry of activity straight through that first night she was gone. Cho had worked inexorably alongside Agent Jason Wylie, despite his own grief, to figure out the implications of what Grace van Pelt had discovered on her computer the evening she was killed. Jane poured over countless crime scene photos, pausing only once, briefly, to digest the fact that he had spent so much time staring at them, the sight of his old colleagues bloodied and lifeless was no longer making him cringe.

Everyone else... he didn't know what exactly everyone else was doing, but he felt vaguely comforted by the chaos around him. They weren't sparing any effort in the search for Lisbon, and the camaraderie of thirty or so people working relentlessly toward the same goal made it easier to disguise the elephant in the room: considering every other victim had been found slain within 24 hours of the last time they were seen alive, Teresa Lisbon was, in all likelihood, already deceased.

The second night passed into the third with no sign of Lisbon, and no concrete leads. The list of who would target a law enforcement team was not small, even whittled down to those with known skills in technology, a move Jane had argued was nonsensical and a waste of precious time, anyway.

He insisted that they need look only at the wealthy, and those with widespread influence. Distance had proven no obstacle for their perpetrator. Whoever he was—and he was a 'he'—crossed the country several times in a matter of days to hunt down ex-CBI agents. This was no pissed off geek they were pursuing, but someone pissed off and financially capable of hiring a geek to have bugged numerous cellphones and computers.

Ninety-eight hours after he had watched Lisbon walk out of the FBI building for the last time, a small envelope was received in the mailroom addressed to Patrick Jane.

Ninety-nine, and the forensics team finally let him read it for himself.

One hundred, and DNA testing from blood samples taken at Lisbon's residence came back with an impossible match.

One hundred and one, and security cameras confirmed that the FBI consultant had himself disappeared. Two hours before.

Jane had been on the edge of Lisbon's bed for at least an hour, reflecting on the last several months, cursing what had been done to her and the rest of their CBI family, before she began to move beside him. He turned his head away to give her privacy, unsure of how much the bath towel would continue to conceal during her fitful return to consciousness.

"Man down, huh?" He attempted to joke when he heard her groan.

"Son of a bitch," she croaked. "Jane—how did you get in here? No, nevermind. I can guess. What time is-" He tensed as the energy in the room changed, and he knew awareness must have finally hit her. Awareness for her state of undress, and realization that there would be only one explanation for how she could have ended up here, on her bed.

"Teresa, it's okay. Whatever happened, you have nothing to be ashamed of."

No answer.

"How did you manage to convince anyone you were ready to do this?" He said more sharply than he intended, the tight rein on his frustrations—at her blocking him out, at the world, at the way they never seemed to catch a break—slipping away into yet another one of her increasingly typical silences.

"Please go." Her voice wavered.

He shook his head, still not facing her. "No."

"Jane, I want you to get out."

"Okay. Okay, but I'm just going to your kitchen. It's only 10:00 am. I brought breakfast. We can have it late when you decide to join me." Fighting the urge to turn around and look at her, to try and gauge her state of mind, he got up and left her alone. He'd have to wait until she put herself together.

Not that he would hold his breath.