Feeling inspired by all your kind reviews! Also I am gearing up for a couple weekends away so I'm not sure how much time I'll have for writing in the interim. Boourns. BUT this is a longer-than-usual installment so yay?
Lisbon, unprepared for Jane's tug on her hand, sat down more suddenly than she'd anticipated and nearly pitched into him in the process. He had the good sense to arrange his features into a passable semblance of contrition, though her fleeting annoyance and their presence in the FBI's main briefing room didn't stop him from lightly stroking his fingertips along the side of her thigh under the table.
Now that he had given himself permission to see her in this way, as the person he loved more than any other thing, it was like part of the world had tip-tilted away from him and he was looking at things from a previously undiscovered angle. Jane (being Jane) would never truly allow for everything to be out of his control, even his short-lived drug experimentation was done with purpose and direction. That was one thing he and Lisbon had in common, though they both expressed that need for control in very different ways.
Instead of looking daggers at him, as expected, she stilled his hand by laying two fingers on it. It was then that he noticed how carefully she was avoiding looking at him. He leaned forward in his seat for a better view of her face. A beat to admire the gorgeous constellations of freckles printed there (particularly the one that hovered tantalizingly over the top right corner of her lips; he'd have to come back to that one later for further study), a second beat to recognize and puzzle over the half-conspiratorial glances she was darting toward Abbott and the projector screen at the end of the conference table.
"Let me guess: you're worried this will somehow end up like the end of that movie about the girl down the well."
A touch of a smile. Lisbon closed her eyes briefly and exhaled through her nose. It was a sound half amused and half despondent.
"Since when do you watch anything released in the past 50 years, Jane?"
"There's a lot you don't know about me."
She turned to face him fully then, her eyes very clear and very serious, which was so much of what he loved about her in just a look. "I know there is."
Abbott's voice cut across the moment and it scurried away. "I know a lot of you were pulled off other projects for this, so thank you for coming together so quickly." One press of a button dimmed the lights and engaged the automatic shades on the plate glass walls, another brought up a bright jumble of shapes on the projector screen. It took Jane a moment to understand exactly what he was seeing: pictures side-by-side of a living room and two bedrooms. A bit cramped looking, maybe, a bit worn around the edges; beige carpeting meant to be inoffensive that ultimately served as a universal signifier for "temporary housing." Jane had been inside enough interchangeably nondescript motel rooms to recognize the breed. Rental he guessed.
On some level he realized that he was intellectualizing to hold himself back just a half step from the rest of the pictures. Someone had torn these rooms apart, indiscriminate and final. He swallowed hard. Most people thought of blood, when they thought of it at all, as being a uniform shade; these people hadn't seen it in any sizable amount. Coloration varied from the lightest ruby with almost bluish undertones to rich garnet to nearly black. Lisbon crooked her hand back in a way that couldn't have been awfully comfortable just so she could hook his fingertips gently with hers and squeeze. Maybe that was what had eased her into his heart over the years. Her thereness was undeniable.
"Early this morning, MPs at Fort Hood responded to an emergency call at on-base housing," Abbott began. He spared a single glance directly at Jane before skimming from person to person, making sure everyone was visibly with him. "This was the scene when they arrived. Residents were Captain Adam Donaldson, his wife, Madison, and his two daughters Jenny and Bernadette. Captain Donaldson was injured but survived. His wife and daughters were dead when the MPs arrived."
"Who called it in?" Cho asked. Jane figured he would have to have a chat with Cho sooner or later. Never had such an incisively observant man been so oblivious to the undercurrents around him. Then again, Jane figured ruefully, the same might be said about himself.
"Captain Donaldson, though the army is checking their call records. There were several noise complaint calls in the same general area late the previous night. MPs responded but by the time they arrived they couldn't find anything."
"Probably unrelated," Jane murmured.
"Thoughts, Jane?"
"Oh, I was just agreeing with you." He swallowed hard and forced himself to really look at the photographs. "Take a look at this picture of the living room. We're meant to register it as chaotic."
"Looks pretty chaotic to me," Abbott said. Jane could tell he was doing that whole Socratic method thing he used where he walked you through your deductive steps by asking basic questions. He was a man who liked to see the work firsthand.
Jane tapped the side of his nose and smiled. "You're a smart cookie, Dennis."
"Jane's right," Lisbon said. Oh, how he wanted that phrase on a long-playing album to turn over and over again. She stood and moved so she could point to the living room photograph. "Here. Look. There are greeting cards on this bookcase still upright. The side-table right next to the bookcase…"
"Credenza," Jane corrected with an exaggerated sweetness that was intended in part to maintain that wary distance between himself and the photographs and in part to reassure Lisbon that he wasn't about to fall into a useless pile of extremely small pieces.
Lisbon rolled her eyes. "Whatever. The credenza - that looks pretty solid - it could have been knocked over without disturbing the cards at all, but it doesn't seem likely."
Cho, arms crossed in typical Cho fashion, tipped his chin up by way of pointing. "Those magazines on the floor don't look right either. Spread out too neat. No torn pages or creases. Looks like someone just turned over the storage basket."
"Well, whatever happened, the army has requested our assistance on this one for one very specific reason." Abbott flicked to the next slide.
Perhaps the last time Jane's mind had been well and truly blank was hearing Red John on Lisbon's phone. Perhaps. But even then the wheels skidded a bit, found purchase, and moved forward. Right in the current moment, he honestly couldn't think of anything. Some part of him registered that this was vaguely embarrassing. He'd dealt with Red John imposters without batting an eyelash and he knew that Red John was dead. Locked in an upper room in his memory palace, secured with a secretly held key, was the feeling of the man's throat under his palms: soft, aging skin, the vague bumps in the trachea, and what seemed like a crispness that was the structure of the throat inside the skin. More pressure and it would snap. Just so. It wasn't as if Red John was the only killer to use blood as his own, sick fingerpaint.
"The invisible worm?" Wiley asked.
"It's Blake," Abbott replied. "O Rose thou art sick./The invisible worm,/That flies in the night/In the howling storm:/Has found out thy bed/Of crimson joy:/And his dark secret love/Does thy life destroy."
"Didn't strike me as one for poetry, Abbott," Jane observed idly. Lisbon shot him a warning look. He was overcompensating for the ways he felt off-balance: a classic dodge. Only someone who'd known him as long as Lisbon had, knew him in the way that Lisbon did, would ever suspect. Not just suspect, he realized, she knew; knew for certain what he was doing and was telling him to cut it out. He had once told Erica Flynn about longing to be known that way.
"I'm a quick study," Abbott deadpanned. "When we were working the Blake Association case Fischer and I got what you might call 'an education' from some of the more dedicated analysts."
Wiley chose that moment to very studiously examine the fingernails on his right hand. "Had a bunch of red stuff in it so it seemed relevant," he half-mumbled to no one in particular.
Fischer smoothly picked up the thread of Abbott's briefing. "Based on what our contact at Fort Hood has told me, Captain Donaldson is claiming that the Blake Association killed his family."
"Claiming?" Cho frowned.
"You and Lisbon obviously weren't here when the Blake Association case was active."
"We got a pretty good view from the other side of it though." Jane was surprised at the hint of bitterness in Lisbon's voice, but then he supposed that whole period in her life was shut off from him. The thought was more troubling than he expected; he was used to hearing, seeing, or ferreting out all of the little details of her life. He'd never realized how comforting that had become until he was confronted by this gaping hole. What sort of mess had he left them to clean up? He wanted to ask her immediately, felt the words bubble up behind his closed lips, but then hadn't he told her he wanted to be better? Didn't part of that betterness include picking time and place?
While he'd been mulling this over, Lisbon had retaken her seat. The faint smell of mint shampoo wafting from her hair brought him back to attention. He wondered how long it would be until they felt comfortable enough to shower together. She might never agree to use the Airstream's amenities for that but he was prepared to be thoroughly accommodating when it came to location, just so long as he could have her in his arms, air clouded, the sharp scent of mint. He wanted so much to kneel in the shower and wash her legs, to kiss her stomach and show her that he was capable of softness without artifice.
"It was a high priority investigation," Fischer said. "If it is the Blake Association then the organization is more covert than we even imagined two years ago. It could also be a new group cashing in on the notoriety."
"We can't avoid the possibility that Captain Donaldson is lying," Jane said. As if on cue, all the agents in the briefing room turned to look at him. "Please. I'm just saying what you're all thinking."
"Jane is right, of course," Abbott said. "In cases like this, the nearest relative should always be a consideration. Due to shared jurisdiction we will have to proceed very carefully on this front. Cho, I want you to run point with Fischer. I think the military investigators will be more comfortable talking to you given your army background. We've secured a block of rooms in Killeen and your contact on base is Special Agent Quentin Jenkins. He's expecting you at 4pm for an additional briefing. The rest of you: hotel information is in your email. There's a conference room set aside for our use and I'll see you all there at 6:30 this evening when Fischer and Cho will bring the rest of us up to speed."
Lisbon was first out of the briefing room. Jane was momentarily puzzled, then dismayed by his own puzzlement (the last thing he needed was to transform into a human limpet just because Teresa Lisbon said she loved him, just because he'd finally decided to stop being the gray specter of a man who spent most of his time haunting his own life). She stood outside and to the right of the briefing room door, cell phone gripped tightly and pressed so hard against her face that he wondered if it would leave marks.
"Hi, Marcus," he heard her say, weakly.
The fleeting spike of rage Donaldson felt while the nurse dispassionately took his cheek swab was enough to give him pause. He prided himself on grace under pressure; it was one of the reasons he'd joined the army in the first place. He could have gone into private practice or cancer research like so many of his classmates at the Feinberg School of Medicine. Big pharma was always looking for new blood. And they paid well for it, naturally.
Instead he had done the honorable thing, just as he had when he was at Princeton and Madison had gotten pregnant.
The swab brushed dryly against the soft skin inside his mouth and he recoiled faintly at the sensation.
"How's your incision feeling, Captain?" the nurse asked.
Scrapes on his hands, a mild concussion, and a stab wound barely worth the name.
The litany in his head was becoming a distraction: I don't deserve this.
