FOUR

Jane was certainly more talkative today. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, and so far he had managed to offend one supervisory agent, one special agent, a mourning mother, father, uncle, and grandfather, two house maids, and one FBI agent from the Ohio field office who was serving as the team's escort, shuttling them around town in another over-sized SUV. Lisbon, for her part, had been mostly quiet, concentrating on every detail she could remember. What had the rest of them missed that Jane saw? Several interviews in and having learned absolutely nothing new, she thought about a time past when she'd have had serious misgivings about whether they were scratching at raw wounds for no reason.

Trust me. Professionally, she genuinely had come to trust him. Mostly. She trusted implicitly his ability to connect the dots of human behavior, they'd never have lasted as partners otherwise. But his methods, the games he played which frequently left her to the point of exasperation-hell, mortification-would lead her to an early grave. The skillset of a master charlatan in the hands of someone seeking redemption, someone pompous and prone to artifice yet good at heart and well-intentioned, proved to be both a blessing and a curse to her professionally. As much as she admired him, there were times Lisbon struggled to remember that closing as many cases as they did together was indeed worth the countless beaureaucratic messes she'd had to clean up over the years.

On a personal level... Oh, God, the personal with Patrick Jane. This was not the place to go down that rabbit hole, she chided herself. Personally, even long before he'd wriggled his way into her heart, even longer before she'd ever pictured him in her bed-in those first years with him when he was still so broken she could hardly relate to him as anything other than the grieving husband and father he was-even then having him as a part of her life was a ride on the world's most undulating roller coaster. Jane was not an easy man to invest one's emotions in. He was difficult, unpredictable. His expectations of her? Unreasonable. How many times had he pushed her past her own boundaries of conduct? How many times did he draw her out only to leave her scrambling to recover her delicately-crafted poise? To have fallen for him all the same... she was a masochist. Had to be.

"What happened to enjoying the ride, Lisbon? You stare straight ahead at the road too hard and you miss all the important scenery around you." Jane leaned down from behind Lisbon to whisper in her ear as the team waited on yet another porch that day. Fischer, standing in front of Lisbon, glanced back past her petite colleague and shared some sort of look with Jane. What was that about? Lisbon looked over her shoulder and raised an eyebrow at him. "Oh, I must be talking when I'm not supposed to." He offered dismissively.

"I see," she said, not believing him. Lisbon had yet to learn just what had transpired between Fischer and Jane during the two's apparent island encounter that led to his return, but Jane had always seemed intrigued by the woman, not unhappy with his memories of her there. Today, it was as if a switch had been flipped. Where his offenses toward people tended to be born of a playful cockiness, starting this morning he had been quite clipped with Kim. Kim, on the other hand, seemed to slowly degenerate from a palpable unease around Jane to just as irritated with him as he was with her.

Lisbon was completely baffled. Cho, to her left, shrugged one shoulder in apathy when she turned to him with a look that said, 'When the hell could anything have even happened to cause this development?'

Her thoughts were interrupted when the door Abbott had knocked on moments ago opened with a flourish to reveal a short man in his 50's, graying hair as unkempt as his blue jeans and black sweatshirt.

"I was expecting you lot quite a bit earlier. Come in," he led the way into a room that, aside from appearing free of dust and cobwebs, was strikingly similar to the environment where William Cagley's body was found. Hoards of figurines covered every square inch around them, the color of the walls a mystery with the miscellany of shelves squeezed together across every one. "There certainly are more of you this time. Wow. Excuse the mess, Marjory doesn't have a whole lot of self control when it comes to her passions." Evan Browder and his wife lived in a modest cottage that was stationed half an acre behind Senator Cagley's mansion, the last and smallest home on the property. The couple both worked for the Cagley family, he being in charge of landscaping and pool care, while Marjory was among five maids who kept the family's estate clean and running smoothly.

"Oh, my," Jane murmured as they all took in the thousands of tiny creatures, stunned, "I actually thought this connection was gonna be more subtle. Lisbon, if you don't get it now you should probably sign up for a few detecting 101 classes."

"Mr. Browder, where -is- your wife?" Lisbon asked, barely recovered from the shock of being surrounded once again by the countless creepy little faces of kittens, rabbits, puppies, and cherubim children. She really hated these kinds of knickknacks.

"She's in the main house. Weren't you just over there?"

"Just? No, we were checking in with some of your colleagues. But we were told she wasn't going to be working, today." Cho answered.

Abbott added, "What is she doing at the main house, knowing we were going to be showing up this afternoon?"

Evan began to look suspicious of them and their inquiry into his wife's whereabouts. "She likes her tea with the girls," he said, referring to the other maids. "You lot were late, the man who called said we'd be talking again around one. You didn't show," The man was nervous, as he had been the day before at the field office. His eyes flicked between Jane and Fischer, the only two familiar faces in the room, despite neither one having yet spoken to him today.

Jane had said "her" in reference to the murderer last night, so Lisbon decided to get right down to it and cross Evan Browder off everyone's sudden and very short list of suspects. He might be as skittish as a wild animal, but that, apparently, was nothing more than a personality flaw. "Does your wife have a collection of these... figures... that extends beyond the ones we're seeing here, Mr. Browder?"

"Oh, heavens, yes." He said, "There are more in the bedrooms, the bathroom, one or two in the crawl space, those ones are broken. She spends little money on anything but these." He picked up a pocket-sized beagle looking puppy that had it's nose in a yellow flower and it's ass in the air.

"And that's it?" Fischer asked.

"That's it? What do you mean, 'that's it'? My God, what else could there be?" Despite living in the thick of them, Evan appeared rather bewildered by his surroundings.

"Okay, okay," Jane soothed. "Now we know why you're such a Nervous Nellie, the slow onset of insanity from an army of cutesy bric-a-brac can do that to a guy."

Evan held up the beagle. "Why are you asking me about these things?"

"Mr. Browder," Lisbon again. "Does your wife have any problems that you know of with the Cagley's or their son?"

"No, she doesn't. Not until recently, at least. Right, Browder?" Jane answered before the increasingly agitated man could open his mouth. "Why is this space here empty? There are figures spread out onto the floor and balanced on your furniture, but right here on these shelves behind a single row of the ugliest little humanoids I've ever seen you could fit at least thirty, maybe forty more. Where did these figurines go?"

"I... I have no idea. I asked Marjie that a few days ago, and... and she just said she was making room for new additions. But... but you know what's funny?"

"I've been told I don't," Jane remarked absent-mindedly, having picked up two kitten statues meant to look like they were playfully batting at something in the air. He clashed them together while faintly mimicking the sound of cat screeching.

Evan didn't seem to know what to do with Jane, but when no one else appeared alarmed by the FBI man's behavior, he continued, indicating toward a little huddle of fuzzy plastic on the floor, "Uh, when I tried to pick up those ones there, she flipped. So the shelf has just been empty for a couple weeks now. But what does this have to do with anything? The Cagley's are good folks, don't care how we keep the house. So you're wrong, neither one of us had a problem with anybody, not even... not even recently."

Evan clearly had no idea just how disturbed his wife was, but it wasn't hard for Lisbon to begin fitting the pieces together. She had in her career encountered plenty of mental disorders where people became intensely attached to inanimate objects, unable to control their infatuations with them, and Marjory Browder certainly appeared to fall into that obsessive category. During her interview yesterday, Jane would have easily picked up in her behavior something that betrayed this side of her, perhaps some sort of insignificant tick. And with the sheer number of collectibles at the abandoned home where William's body was found the picture of compulsion? There was no else behind this vicious crime. Lisbon could only surmise that William had somehow managed to violate whichever of the precious possessions had disappeared, and Marjorie couldn't stand the loss. She'd needed her revenge.

Lisbon snapped her eyes up to Jane to find him already looking at her from across the room. Was the motive behind William's death really so worthless? She couldn't imagine how Jane could have known this yesterday and kept himself so contained. She had never been able to wrap her mind around someone-never mind a child-losing their life over that which was so invaluable to the rest of the world. Her own family had met with great loss at the hands of those who would trade everything for the meaningless potion contained in a glass bottle... twice.

She wondered what it said about her that she had acquired preferred types of murder. She could stomach scandal and corruption. Conspiracies that twisted deeper than anyone could manage to unbury. Revenge, life for a life. But... a child? Because of cheap toys? She resisted the urge to crush the first of the hollow figures she could get her hands on. Jane kept her gaze as he held one of the cat pieces he'd been playing with out in front of him, low, and closed his fist around it. Then he uncurled his fingers, allowing the crumpled bundle of plastic and velvet peach-fuzz to tumble to the floor. Lisbon quickly looked around the room, but everyone was focused on Evan Browder, who was answering a few more questions from SA Abbott. She was grateful that no one else had seen Jane destroy something that would be considered evidence to match back to the crime scene, even if it's absence would be far from noticeable. Before looking away, she smirked and mouthed to him, "Thank you."

"Agents Hunan and Keith, I want you to stay here with Mr. Browder," Abbott ordered two of the field agents that had been accompanying their team. "The rest of us will be heading to the main house. Alert us immediately if Mrs. Browder makes an appearance here, instead."

That Marjory Browder was the only one with a connection to the crime scene had finally dawned on everyone, and if all went well, she would be ordering dinner from a holding cell.

"Wait, what?" her poor husband protested. "Excuse me, but what? What's happening? Could someone answer me, please?"

But the agents, aside from the two intent on peeking outside his front window curtains, had quickly filed out of his cluttered home, it would seem in pursuit of his dear, though admittedly a tad abnormal, wife.

The case of the murder of an Ohio senator's young son wrapped up quickly from there. Marjory Browder didn't bother to deny that she'd killed the boy once confronted directly with the matter. She was almost proud recounting how, after she'd found out William was breaking into her home using his parents' master key in order to collect her darling, irreplaceable "babies" to be used as target practice with his birthday BB gun, she had driven him to the abandoned house where he was ultimately found with the promise of an endless supply. Once there she used her husband's rifle to demonstrate to the child just what it was like to meet one's demise at the wrong end of a gun.

After seeing him lifeless on the floor, she'd pitied him. Marjory had known the youngster since his toddler years, had sometimes served as nanny to him, and hated knowing what a violent young man he had become. She tenderly used her apron to wipe the blood away from his face and curled him onto his side in mimic of the position he tended to sleep in. In the report put out by the profiler about an hour before Mrs. Browder was arrested, the murderer was, as Jane had said, indeed identified as female. It was the sentimental touches to the body that had suggested to any knowledgeable eye that William's killer had been a woman, and a woman who knew him, at that.

The horror of it aside, and also the disappointment that no one else knew Jane had actually solved it yesterday, Lisbon appreciated the ease with which this case was closed. After a late afternoon of going over notes, making reports, and speaking to the eager media, the FBI team was ready to call it in for the night. They would probably be here for a few more days to tie up different odds and ends before heading back to Texas, but it would be smooth sailing from here on out.

Lisbon was just opening the door to her rental car, dreaming of fast food and a warm bath in an ugly hotel room, when Jane loped over to her. "Come back to my place."

"Yeah. Later."

"No. Earlier. You can hear all sorts of life around you in a motel. I'm isolated out there and I get a bit lonely until you decide to turn up. Just come over."

"You're the one who wanted that stupid trailer. You're insane." She teased.

"Uh, no, actually, I said I'm lonely. I wish you'd pay attention." He waited for a response from her, but when she only looked at him with exaggerated pity, he persisted, "Come keep me company. We can grab something to eat, maybe watch static on the useless television."

"Well how can I turn that down?"

"You can't. Good company and creature comforts are impossible to resist for anyone."

"Alright. But you're covering dinner. You owe me money."

"Deal. Go change into something less overdressed for a campsite," he reached out to gently tug at the lapel of her navy blazer, "and meet me at the trailer, okay?"

He was up to something, that much was clear. Neither one of them went anywhere.

"Wipe that dubious look off your face. Trust me."

She pursed her lips. Then, after a few seconds' hesitation, "I'll see you in about half an hour, okay?"

He beamed at her. "That's perfect, looking forward to it. So are you, despite this outward facade of humoring me."

"Oh, go home already," Lisbon smiled back at him, as unable to resist as ever, and slipped behind the wheel of her rental. As she drove away, she noticed in her rear view mirror Jane had stayed where he was to watch her departure, then at last saw his pinpoint form go to his own vehicle, a tan pickup that had been rented for him with the trailer.

What are we doing, Jane? This wasn't going to be one of their typical evenings. Of that much, she was sure.