AN: One or two people correctly noted that a minor would have had a lawyer present during questioning. I did have a segment in my original draft about how the little girl had been held originally by local police and was transferred from their custody to CBI's, so there were jurisdictional issues in getting a guardian ad litem, but it was dry and did nothing for the story. As far as this story is concerned, the above is what "happened." In real life, they would still wait for the GAL to show up, or at least call in the parent, but since this is the Mentalist and not Law & Order I opted for the more streamlined version. If it offends anyone I'll edit the previous chapter.

Where we last left our heroes:

The girl turned her attention to Cho, a little light leaving her face, clearly less enamored of the shorter man.

"Can I have my water now?"

Outside, Cho sent Rigsby to fetch her a paper cup full of water. A few minutes later he came back, uncomfortable.

"She says she has to go to the bathroom, what should I do?"

Lisbon, mid-debrief with the other boys, stared at him like he'd had a stroke.

"Take her to the bathroom, Rigsby."

"Yeah but- I mean, I'm a…and she's a…"

"She's seven, you don't have to go in, just walk her there so she doesn't get lost."

Rigsby was still frozen awkwardly to the floor.

"For goodness' sakes, I'll take her," Van Pelt stood, and relief washed over the tall agent's face.

"You better hope you don't have a daughter anytime soon," she remarked sarcastically as she passed him, and relief changed to the look of a deer in the headlights.

"Jane," he hissed when she was out of earshot, "When I was hypnotized all I did was kiss her, right?"

Jane smiled beatifically. "Don't worry, you'd remember that."

"I hope you'd remember that," Cho added, a rare smirk on his face, because he loved making Rigsby uncomfortable.

Lisbon couldn't pretend she didn't see Jane's eyes follow the girl every step between the door to the interrogation room and the corner she turned as Van Pelt showed her the way to the ladies' room.

"Jane, are you okay with this case?" she asked, iron in her voice because there had to be, but softness too, because he was part of her team after all, and she'd remove this from his plate if it hurt him needlessly.

He smiled gently. "I am capable of accepting that other people have children, daughters even. I can be around little girls without becoming unhinged, I can do my job, Lisbon." It had the typical Janian drama to it, his careful diction like a man reading a script inside his own head because he still had a taste for the theatrical, whatever his current position.

"Good." The dark-haired agent wouldn't offend his dignity or her own authority by pressing further in front of the others; if something was stuck in Jane's proverbial craw he always turned up in her office doorway later.

"What else, Cho?"

"She seems to have a pretty juvenile idea of murder. Told me if you kill people you go to Hell. But she also seemed pretty damn smug when she told me I couldn't put kids in jail."

"She seemed normal to me," Rigsby objected. The other three just looked at him.

"Did you notice how she tapped her fingers but didn't swing her legs?" Jane put in. Cho hadn't.

"So?"

"So humans use legs are for locomotion, we use our hands for expression. A human being feeling anxiety will jiggle his leg long before he'll tap his hand, it's a subconscious desire to move away from whatever is causing him the anxiety. She wanted to look uncomfortable, but she wasn't really."

"A sociopath does always feel in control of their surroundings," Cho admitted, although Rigsby grimaced, unconvinced.

"And the way she said 'that baby got killed' – she knows a specific person is responsible for his death, but she's reluctant to say any random person did it. If she is a sociopath, her ego wouldn't let her give anyone else credit for her accomplishment." Jane had remained silent throughout the interview not because Cho had ordered him to, but because he was totally absorbed in study of the intriguing personality before him.

Lisbon looked impressed, or at least more open to the idea that the child might really be their killer. Not that she doubted children committed crimes, just that she wanted to be damn sure this one had before it got splashed all over the papers that a team under the direction of Senior Agent Teresa Lisbon had put a seven year old girl in jail for double murder and arson.

"Alright, anything else?"

"Yes." Of course there was.

"She said 'may I' the first time she asked Cho for a drink, but 'can I' the second time. If she was trying to remember her manners she'd have done it the other way around. She was trying to impress us at first, and when Cho and I didn't fall for it, she dropped the act a little.

"There's something focussed about her, I'll admit, but I don't know if she did it…I'd like to watch her a little longer."

Lisbon shrugged; the girl was here until she had satisfactorily answered their questions, which that included Jane's, so he'd get another chance if he wanted it.

"Cho, what do you think?"

"She's definitely got Bad Seed vibe, she said all the right things but there's just something about the way she looked at me."

Lisbon sighed. "Unfortunately the heebie-jeebies are not an acceptable means of detecting crime, so could you please find some hard evidence, or better yet, get her to confess?"

Van Pelt suddenly appeared, looking alarmed.

"She's gone!"

"What?!"

"She's gone, I was waiting outside the bathroom door for her, she was in there a while so I went in to look and she's gone!"

Lisbon looked exasperated. "Seriously? Can't you guys go a single week without losing a suspect or getting beat up?"

Rigsby, the most frequent culprit of both those accusations, ducked his head and jumped out of his chair. Cho hadn't been beaten up recently – he wasn't as big as Rigsby but he was stocky enough to be solid and had that shark-eyed stare besides. Still, he had been the one convinced for the better part of a week that he was cursed by a young Wicca follower, so he too headed for the ladies' room without comment.

Jane, of course, though he had a gun aimed at him in anger several times a month and had recently only narrowly avoided getting hurled headlong off the roof by the significantly larger Agent Rigsby, seemed not to process the rebuke. He did like to be where the party was, though, so with his three playmates gone he was forced to follow. Lisbon forced herself not to roll her eyes and shifted herself from the edge of Rigsby's desk – she made sure to give them time to formulate all their excuses before she arrived.

They found, of course, that there was a window – several in fact – in the ladies' room. Jane had walked in without qualm, probably hoping to discomfit some elderly secretary washing her hands but no such luck. The other men knocked before entering but managed to contain whatever awkwardness they felt.

As in most industrial-administrative environments, little money had been spent on aesthetics for something as inelegant as a public bathroom, but along the top of one wall ran a strip of windows about twelve inches high. They probably fulfilled some fire code requirement for escape routes, as well as saved on lighting when the sun shone in, but were really not meant to see any kind of service as far as opening and closing.

One window, in the corner beside a sink, was unlatched, and had presumably been swung out to allow Jeannie to wriggle through. They were on the first floor, so it wasn't far to drop, though surely it must have seemed so to someone less than four feet tall.

How she had gotten to the window was another thing entirely. Rigsby was the only one of the five who could reach it comfortably. Jane, several inches shorter, could get his hands on it but couldn't see clearly over the sill, Cho and Van Pelt could touch it with their fingertips, and Lisbon couldn't even do that.

A little fingerprint powder confirmed the most logical explanation: the girl had climbed onto the sink and hoisted herself through the window, but it would have taken a moment of analysis on her part to coordinate opening the pane and hauling herself through it. Unfortunately, with a child, as all too often with adults, flight didn't necessarily equal guilt, only fear.

Jeannie had looked composed in interrogation, but there was that moment when she'd looked up at Jane and asked about going home, the childish touch of a pout when she'd repeated her previous assertion that the murdered child had simply left of his own volition. Composure didn't mean she hadn't been frightened or intimidated, just that she might have been too polite to tell the men questioning her that they were frightening her.

But there was that matter of that other room with high windows, from which another child had disappeared, a room which Jeannie had also occupied.

AN2: My thanks to all the reviewers! Hope this one piques your interest as well.