"When we get back home," Caspian told Methos, "I'm going to kill you."
"Promises, promises," Methos replied.
"We've just spent the last five hours searching every square foot of a two mile radius," Caspian recounted, "Searched through 50 garbage dumpsters, 200 cans, 20 burn barrels, every backyard, alleyway and empty lot between here and the county line."
Methos pointed to the rusted trash cans lined up on either side of the alley they walked through and responded, "There's only these left to check and then we'll head back home."
"I don't know what the hell you think this is even going to accomplish," Caspian said as he rolled up his sleeve and stuck his arm down into the first trash barrel he found.
"I don't know," Methos was starting to feel the gravity of the hopelessness of this situation, "It's just something that doesn't seem right, I can't put my finger on it."
"Try putting your…" Caspian stopped in mid-response and pulled his arm out of the trashcan and revealed a torn shirt with dried stains on it that someone with a few thousand years' of experience on them could easily identify as being blood.
"That's the shirt she was wearing when she went out," Methos realized, "What else is in there?"
Caspian practically had to stand on his head to reach down into it, but he managed to retrieve a pair of shredded and bloody underwear, a pair of blue jeans covered in the same dry blood stains as the shirt, a pair of brown boots, also covered in blood though those looked more like transference stains, and wrapped up under all of them was a black trench coat that had also seen better days.
"Is that it?" Methos asked.
Caspian looked again and he told him, "That's everything."
Methos searched through the pockets on the coat, and the jeans, all he found in it was Rita's wallet with her current ID and enough money to get through the night on.
"They get rid of the clothes, but keep the needle, and her weapons," Methos said, "What was it she usually kept on her, what, about five different blades and knives? At least a couple of surgical knives, though where the hell she got them is…"
Caspian saw something change over in Methos' eyes as he talked, something had just occurred to him. "What is it?"
Methos looked at Caspian and told him, "We have to get back to the house, now."
Methos didn't know where the hell Kronos was choosing to spend the day but he was very thankful to learn that they had beaten him back to the house. Caspian didn't have any idea what they were looking for but he followed Methos up the stairs and down the hall to the master bedroom, and Caspian stayed in the doorway and watched as Methos ransacked everything in the room from the dressers to the closet to the old steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.
"What the hell are you even looking for?" he asked.
Methos had taken about half the contents out of the trunk when he apparently found what he was looking for, he reached in and Caspian heard a familiar clinking of metal and saw Methos take out several knives of varying sizes, from medical scalpels to hunting knives, and placed them alongside one another on the floor, and last but not least Methos took out a sword that was no more than 24 inches long, Rita's preferred weapon of choice, she never got in a fight without it.
"This," Methos held it up for Caspian to see, "This is what Rita's been so terrified about, not of the men who raped her, not of Kronos, but of Kronos discovering this. When she stormed out of here that night she was so mad she didn't even realize she was unarmed."
Methos went back to the closet and grabbed hangers off the rack and tossed two similar trench coats to the one they'd found in the trashcan, onto the trunk. "She always switches them between coats, she grabbed the wrong coat, she must've been switching them out the day we first came here and when we all arrived, she simply forgot, and thought the one in the closet downstairs was the right one…then the first time she was alone in this room, she hid them because she knows Kronos never looks for anything in the trunk. If he'd found them laying around the room, he would've known that she went out with no protection." Methos looked like he was going to be sick, and he told Caspian, "I hate to say it, but with this to consider, Rita's lucky they were only out to rape her. If they'd wanted her head she would've been dead in a heartbeat, three of them, one of her, MacLeod apparently carrying around paralytic agents to dispense whenever the need arises, she wouldn't have stood a chance."
Methos handed the sword to Caspian and told him, "I have to go talk to her, do something with all this before Kronos gets back."
Methos went to the other end of the hall and paused before the door, put his ear to it, didn't hear anything, and lightly rapped on it and called out, "Rita, it's me, can I come in?"
He didn't hear anything at first. Then he heard the lock being undone on the door, Rita only opened it a couple inches to see him, then when she saw he was alone, she held the door open for him. She was dressed in a white and blue nightgown that looked like an older woman's housecoat, she hadn't changed out of it in almost a week, and she was starting to look it.
"What is it?" she asked.
He stepped in, closed the door, looked at her, and told her, "I know."
"Know what?" she asked.
"We found what you put in the trunk," he told her.
If there was any question that she knew, the look on Rita's face when she heard that removed any trace of doubt.
Methos wasn't even sure where to go from there, he looked at her and told you, "You are so lucky just to be alive right now."
"Yeah? Sure don't seem like it from where I stand," Rita told him.
Now more than ever, Methos felt a need to know, "What was the fight about that night?" What could've been so bad that an Immortal would storm out into the night without even thinking to make sure they were armed incase they met with another Immortal?
She went over to the bed, sat down on the edge of it, looked away from him and answered, "It was just a stupid fight."
"Rita, I've been married 67 times, I've had my share of stupid fights," he told her as he sat down beside her, "None of them ended like that. Now come on, what's really going on around here?"
She looked to him this time and repeated, this time a bit more convincingly, "It was just a stupid fight."
"What about?" he asked.
She shook her head and for a minute Methos didn't think he was going to get an answer out of her. Then she said, "It started before you came. I told him I didn't want you guys here."
Okay, he hadn't been expecting that one, but he didn't say anything and let her continue.
"I guess I'm just disillusioned about this marriage," Rita explained, and looked at him, "You know, when I first found out I'd just married a man who was 5000 years old…"
"4,790 actually," Methos corrected her.
"Anyway," she said, "I just figured that this would be so exciting, I figured we'd always be on the move traveling the globe, I figured he'd take me halfway across the world and show me 'This is where I was raised', 'This is where my family lived', 'This is where I fought in battles', 'This is where I met my first wife, my tenth wife, my hundredth wife' and I'd get a sense of what I married into, some insight into what his life's been like, what makes him tick. And instead, all I get is the three of you coming out here every month during which time we have no privacy, it's impossible to have an intimate night in with the three of you eavesdropping up and down the hall."
Methos raised one hand in a swearing gesture and told her, "I never heard a thing."
"And I told him that I didn't want you here for once," Rita continued, "Or I told him 'Let them come here and let's us go away to a hotel for the night so we can be alone', but he said no, he said you were his family and we were staying right here. And finally I told him he could stay here with you three if he wanted but I was leaving. I'd planned to spend the night knocking back drinks in a bar until I couldn't even remember my own name. All I wanted was to get out for a night. Ironic, isn't it?" She turned away from him and added under her breath, "Very ironic."
"Why didn't you say so before?" Methos asked her.
"What good would it have done?" she asked, "Would you have listened?"
"Yes," he told her.
"Would they?" Rita pointed towards the door, "Anyway, when did it ever do any good to try coming between a man and his family?"
"Rita," Methos said to her, "I've been married 67 times, believe me I understand." He reached over and subtly slipped an arm around Rita and pulled her towards him, she sighed and rested her head on his shoulder and stared blankly ahead at the wall.
"I'm sorry, Rita," he told her.
"Caspian and I scoured every possible place Rita's clothes could've been tossed within two miles of here," Methos told Kronos once he finally came home, and tried to catch his brother up on what they'd found out, "We finally found them in a trash barrel at the end of the two miles, in the alley between West 5th and West 6th Streets, half of the houses out there are abandoned or condemned, nobody lives at the house the trash cans were at. That house is on the corner to a side street which leads to a shortcut to the airport, and we found out that on the night of Rita's attack there was a departing flight heading to Vancouver, flight left two hours after we found her, that's plenty of time for MacLeod to attack Rita, ditch the clothes, dump her body, and catch the plane. But it still leaves a lot of unanswered questions."
"We don't even know where she was attacked," Kronos told him.
"No," Methos admitted, "But there is something new to consider. Rita said she left and was heading to a bar, closest bar from here is the one on 5th Street, about five blocks away from where her clothes were tossed. I think MacLeod intercepted her somewhere between points A and B, and after the attack, he decided to toss the clothes one place, toss Rita another, he couldn't possibly have planned to dump her body one block from her own home, even he can't be that stupid."
"Or suicidal," Caspian offered.
Kronos took this new information in and after a minute he said to Methos, "I want to see the clothes."
Methos' eyes widened and he started to protest that idea, "I don't think that…."
"I want to see them," Kronos told him, leaving little room for argument.
Methos took a step back and paused for a second before responding, "Alright."
Methos and Caspian stepped out of the room as Methos went to collect the bloody clothes they'd brought home, Caspian stayed close to him and asked, "What now?"
"You might do well to make yourself scarce," Methos told him, "It's not going to be pretty," he had a second thought and added, "But don't go too far, I might need you to help scrape me off the walls when he's done."
Caspian merely nodded his head and replied, "Got it."
Methos reentered the room carrying the clothes wrapped in the coat and set them on the table and slowly moved away, but stayed in the doorway. Especially given everything that had transpired over the last couple weeks, there existed few secrets among them anymore.
Kronos went over to the table and reached to grab the pile but he stopped short of actually touching anything. He grabbed the top of the folded coat and threw it back, revealing the pile of bloody clothes underneath. The first thing he seemed to dare touch was one of the boots, bloody, ruined, size 9, he remembered, he couldn't actually remember Rita wearing them, but he did remember her having them. It was the damnedest thing out of all the things he remembered about her to actually have it stick out in his mind, but there it was, even after 12 years of marriage he still wasn't sure what to make of a wife who had 50 changes of clothes and only 10 pairs of shoes, half those ridiculous sandals she always wore, and half boots, all of them alike, practical boots, not those idiotic things most women wore these days, these could easily be mistaken for a man's work boots if they were larger. He felt along every inch of the now ruined boot, then picked up the other and touched it in like. He set it down, then picked up the shirt Rita had worn the night of her attack.
Two weeks ago this had been a not new yellow shirt with red floral designs on it, almost all of which by now was drowned out by the dried bloodstains and dirt, the congealed blood made the cotton all but stiff as a board now. The fabric frayed in several parts where it had been ripped and torn, but he was also able to identify several distinctive cuts in the material from a blade, something he made an educated guess, from the switchblade family based on the width of the cuts in the fabric. An expert himself in the art of maiming a human body, Kronos could very easily envision what had happened to Rita, which injuries had been inflicted first, in what order, he'd done it himself and far worse 2000 years ago. He raised the mutilated garment to his nose and inhaled, amidst the grease and grime and mold that had since set in, he could still smell her on it, her scent, her sweat, her blood, her fear; likely she was paralyzed before the actual attack, which would give plenty of time for the fear to kick in, knowing she couldn't even move, let alone fight back against three Immortals who jumped her.
He came very close to losing it when he saw her underwear in the pile, also covered in blood and grime, also mutilated like the shirt, they looked like they'd been ripped right off of her. By now, Kronos was very close to seeing red, and the only thing keeping him from going off the deep end was the exact same thing that had kept him from losing his mind over the past couple weeks: as soon as they got their hands on MacLeod, he was going to kill him, slowly, painfully, MacLeod would be begging him to take his head long before Kronos was finished with him.