Disclaimer: the characters and concepts in this story are the property of NBC and its related affiliates. This is an amateur writing effort meant for entertainment purposes only.

Summary: Liz's already terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad night gets worse even after Red comes to the rescue. Character death. Three-shot…potentially in five parts. Only time will tell.

Warnings: mentions of violence and brutality. Some spoilery-ish things.

Author's Notes: This installment took a lot longer than anticipated, and I'm still not sure I handled all the action-y parts well. Still, there's one part left. Thank you to all the readers! See you soon! Enjoy :)

Chapter Three

The space in the bed next to her was still warm when Liz woke up. Sunlight was peeking through the closed blinds, but there wasn't a beam that could reach the spot on the bed where she'd dreamed about Dad. Red's voice rumbled outside the door like distant thunder, signalling to Liz exactly who had been in her room that night.

She emerged to find him seated with Dembe, fresh coffee on the table, the two looking immaculate. Liz was acutely aware of how little she measured up to not only the finery of the hotel but Red in general. He was always so well-manicured, and she looked as if she'd just seen a ghost. In fact, she felt like a ghost, like she was fading along with the memory of Tom when he was alive.

Dead-Tom? That she remembered all too vividly. "A knife," Liz informed Red and Dembe, catching them both by surprise. "Tom was killed with a knife."
"Good morning, Lizzie," Red said pleasantly. He gave nothing away: not in his tone, in his face, in his posture. Dembe gave her a small wave. "Coffee?"

"You were in my room," Liz said.

Red, as usual, didn't lie to her. "You were distressed."

"You were in my bed," she clarified. There were boundaries she expected Red to cross, but he had entered her dream last night. He had taken the role of her father. He had violated a boundary too close to Liz for her to forgive him. She intended to make him pay for it.

"Lizzie, you were crying out in your sleep, and you wouldn't wake. I was trying to comfort you."

"You had no right."

"You were traumatized."

"You had NO RIGHT."

Red nodded. "The next time your husband is brutally murdered and you happen to walk in on the body, I promise that I will allow you to continue crying out in the night without interference."

"You didn't just comfort me," she snapped. "You took the words right out of my father's mouth. You knew exactly what he'd say."

Stung, Red's tone dropped, "You were dreaming, Lizzie."

She hadn't been dreaming that. Dad sounded like Red last night. Liz didn't just make that up. She glared at him. "Are you my father?"
"No," Red declared, faster this time than he had over the phone.

"You are a murderer though," she reminded him. "You don't hire the Keres because you don't need them. You're cruel enough all on your own."

As usual, the words had no effect on Red. He was too comfortable in his own skin. But he was always interested in setting her record straight, in reminding her who the real enemy was. "I would never be cruel to you, Lizzie. Now, come, tell me about the knife."

She let him change the subject, conceding temporarily that in his own twisted ways, Red was not cruel towards her. "Something large and sharp," she dropped onto the settee and accepted the cup of coffee that Dembe offered her.

"How?"

"How what?"

"How did they attack him? What happened first?"

The coffee splashed onto the back of her palm. Liz had to put the mug down before she spilled it: her hands were shaking again. "The attack wasn't to kill. Whoever attacked Tom was more concerned with…with cutting him."

"To cause pain."

Liz shook her head. "Just to cut. Pain was incidental."

"Precision cuts?"

"No," she recalled the body. Tom's body had been a mess. "I don't know. He was just sort of…hacked at."

"Well, he would have been fighting back," Red noted.

"Not well. Tom took one martial arts class ever, and he wasn't very good."

"One that he told you about."

"My husband was not…"

"Lizzie," Red leaned towards her, all the conviviality gone from his voice. "I have been content to shield your husband's duplicity from you in the hopes that you would discover it for yourself. However, in lieu of recent events, I suggest you start accepting that Tom was a trained operative."

Liz balled her hands into fists. She wouldn't stand for this argument much longer, but Red was a dog with a bone. He didn't stop chewing till he reached the marrow. "Fine. I believe you."

"No, you don't."

"No, I don't, but you're not going to let me not believe you."

"The person who attacked Tom had a very specific pathology. He was either butchered because of that pathology or because he interfered with his killer's method. Was the blood spatter caused from him fighting back or from him being fought upon?"

Liz didn't say no. She wanted to: Tom was incapable of fighting. She had once tried to teach him some self-defence and he ended up causing himself more damage. There was no way of distinguishing the blood spatter on the walls from the killer's ruthless swings and Tom's supposed grasp of unarmed combat. "I don't know. There was so much blood."

"Were there pieces left behind?"

Her blood ran cold. "Excuse me?"

"The killer: did they leave the pieces behind, or did they take them?"

She gagged. "Who the hell are these people?"

"They are the most deranged minds in the underworld, Lizzie. I told you: psychotics and psychopaths. If the pieces of Tom were taken, we're looking for a butcher and trophy collector named Richard Morrow, currently a patient at St. Elizabeth's Hospital. His handler is a wretched little weasel, Joseph Darvel, an operative I wouldn't mind paying a visit to even recreationally."

Liz didn't ask him to elaborate. She knew Red's definition of recreation wasn't moral. "The parts were left behind."

"So we're looking for a butcher who doesn't keep trophies," Red nodded thoughtfully. "I'm glad we didn't order breakfast."

"Why?"

"Because we're going out. There's a fantastic diner Wisconsin Avenue: best Hollandaise sauce in the city. Their eggs benedict is to die for."

"I don't want breakfast, Red." I want the man who murdered my husband.

He was already rising. "I also have it on good authority that the killer we're looking for has breakfast there whenever she's in the city."

Liz nearly choked on her coffee. "She?"

"She," Red corrected. "Virginia Collins or Coll, for short. Fascinating psychological profile: one of those rare, terrifyingly well-adjusted psychopaths who just likes to cut. I would never had guessed she'd sell her allegiances to the CIA, but I suppose it was a convenient way to avoid jail time after all the incidents in the military."

She didn't ask him to elaborate. "I'll get dressed," Liz said, downing the rest of her coffee in a hurry. She rose and headed towards the pile of clothes someone had folded and left out for her. Red, obviously. She turned away to not have to look at them. "Have you put in a call to someone at the Post Office?"

Red laughed, "Why would I do something like that?"

"This woman killed my husband, Red."

"And you expect Harold to lay his hands on her without evidence?"

"I want her behind bars," Liz demanded. The bitter unfairness that her husband's killer was breakfasting freely and Tom was being scraped off the walls and floors of their house hit her all at once. Liz resisted the urge to scream. "I'm getting dressed. Then you're taking me to her. And we're calling the FBI."

The fact that Red didn't answer only irritated her more. Sometimes, she really wished he would lie to her.

The restaurant was not the upscale establishment Liz anticipated based on Red's description. It was a holdover from the 50s with white tiled walls and navy blue benches. The booths were all equipped with jukeboxes, and Liz could hear several artists competing that morning from various patrons' tables. Red, resplendent as always, still managed to fit in: he scanned the room without stopping, and then made his way over to a booth in the centre where a woman was seated alone.

Coll was not what Liz had expected, even after Red told her Tom's killer was a woman. This psychopath had all the trappings of a hipster librarian: she wore an argyle sweater vest and a hand-knit scarf and sipped on a milkshake as she perused the menu. She belied none of the nature Liz knew had to lying under the surface for her to have murdered Tom so brutally. She didn't even look up when Red gestured for Liz to take a seat on the opposite side of the booth.

The waitress brought them two more menus. Red made a show of opening his. Liz did not. She stared freely at the woman across from her, trying to visualize her gripping a knife. Trying to find the blood stains on the cuffs of her dress shirt.

"What do you want?"

Coll spoke with a flat affect. Liz recognized the tone from her classes on criminology, and all of a sudden understood. The sweater vest, the scarf: this was a cover, a front, the most minimalist of disguises. Just enough to blend in. Well-adjusted psychopath indeed.

Red hummed, still reading the menu, "I'm thinking the eggs benedict. Lizzie, for you?"

She stared at him in disbelief. "We're not here to order breakfast, Red."

"The eggs benedict is good here," Coll agreed, ignoring Liz.

Red ignored Liz, too, for the moment, continuing the front of ordering breakfast. "What are you having?"

"Thinking the blueberry pancakes – a la mode."

"Rough night?"

"Roughest," she shut the menu and looked at Liz. There were wrinkles developing along her lips from keeping them pursed so much. Coll didn't smile, even when she had to: "What are you here for?"

Liz drew a shuddering breath. "You killed my husband."

Not so much as a blink. Coll was frighteningly still. "Yes," she agreed.

"You're under arrest."

"No, I'm not," she replied, sighing.

"The FBI is on their way," Liz threatened, bluffing.

Still no reaction. They might as well have been talking about the weather from how little Coll was invested. She took another sip from her milkshake: bored, detached, apathetic. "I take it you confiscated the evidence," Coll glanced towards Red. Unnervingly, she still hadn't blinked.

"Things go missing so easily in the MPD evidence lock-up," Red commented, closing his own menu. "I'm surprised at you, Coll. From what I understand, you're not one for cover-ups. You like to let your work speak for itself."

"I just killed him. My handler was responsible for the cover-up."

"No one is going to believe that I butchered him," Liz asserted.

"You ready to order?"

The server was giving Liz an odd look. She resisted the urge to ask him to call the police. Coll ordered first, and Red chimed in pleasantly after her. Liz dismissed him, insisting she wasn't hungry.

Coll continued where they left off: "Nobody had to believe you: they just had to believe the evidence. Which, if you've confiscated, is irrelevant. So why are you really here?"

"I'm here to take you in," Liz stared Coll straight in her vacant, inhuman eyes. "Virginia Collins, you're under arrest for the murder of Tom Keen."

Coll's gaze darted to Red. "You didn't tell her."

Liz's heart sank. She glared at Red too. "You didn't tell me what?"

Something passed between Red and Coll, something silent and eerie, something that made Coll blink at long last and look back at Lizzie. Whatever it was, Coll wasn't happy. She was obliging out of unspoken duty. "I'm very sorry, Elizabeth, for my role in framing you for the murder of your husband and that you had to see the mess I made of his body. Had I the capacity for empathy, I'm sure that I would be deeply moved by your current plight and imbue this apology with more feeling."

Red sounded amused, "That was word for word what I told you on the telephone."

"She knows I'm not capable of a genuine apology. You know that, right?"

Liz was too busy glaring at Red. She didn't think she could get any angrier until now. "You brought me here so that my husband's killer would apologize?"

"And to negotiate a different cover-up," Coll added.

Red finally spoke to Liz, "And to confirm his true allegiances. No doubt he put up a fight, Coll, when you tried so valiantly to chop him up."

"He got his hands on me a little."

"Tom didn't stand a chance," Liz growled at Red. She resisted the urge to shove a fork into his neck.

When Liz looked back, Coll was unwrapping her scarf from around her neck. Her skin was rubbed raw all the way to her collarbones, and there were two distinct impressions left from where Tom had tried to strangle her. Liz gulped, centred herself, and replied, "You were attacking him with a knife."

Coll gave her best approximation of an eye roll. She didn't care enough about Liz or her beliefs to have any real stake in the conversation. Still, after covering her injuries again, she rose and inched her shirt up at the waist. A square of bandages cupped her waist just below the ribs. She pried those open to reveal a freshly stitched gash, still oozing. "He knew exactly what he was doing," Coll stated.

The blood stains on the wall took on a more menacing expression. Liz watched the fight play out in her head once more, but this time Tom was a more active participant. He wrestled the knife away from a practiced psychopath. He landed multiple blows before she subdued him again. "You were attacking him with a knife," she said, sharper this time, but the words rang hollow. Tom had to know some martial arts to accomplish that if Coll was as good as her reputation suggested.

Coll returned to her seat. "Your husband was a trained operative."

"Who was he working for?" Red asked.

"You'll have to talk to my handler."

Liz felt her heart switch places with her guts. "This isn't about finding Tom's killer: it never was for you! This was about finding his employer! I should have known…I should have known! You weren't bringing me here to bring her to justice. You wanted to find out who Tom was working for."

"Lizzie-"

"Let me up."

"Lizzie."

"Let me up!"

Red finally moved. Liz stormed away from the booth. She marched over to the front counter where the server was standing. "I need to use a phone, please."

"She doesn't," Red insisted. "We'll go, Lizzie."

"Get the hell away from me," and then, to the server, "Give me your God damn phone."

She punched Ressler's number from memory. He answered on the second ring. "Ressler, it's Keen."

"Jesus, Keen!" he cursed. "Where the hell have you been?"

"Lizzie, don't do this," Red said lowly, his voice barely a whisper. All warning. It was her turn to ignore him.

"There's an APB out on you from the Metropolitan Police Department."

"Yeah, I bet. Look, I have my husband's killer. She's eating breakfast at this place on Windsor. You're running a trace right now, right?"

"Yeah, we can be there, but Cooper isn't going to just let you go."

"He can take me in, as long as he takes her too."

"We've got your location. You keep her there. Oh, and Keen?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm sorry. I really am."

Liz couldn't describe the feeling that overcame her. She wanted so badly to be treated as a normal, grieving widow, wanted for someone to apologize without an ulterior motive. But Ressler didn't acknowledge Tom's double-life when he apologized. He couldn't capture the complexity of the moment in two simple words. Only Red seemed to contend with the difficulty of Liz still loving Tom and confronting his duplicity.

She managed to thank Ressler before hanging up. Looking back at the restaurant, she found Coll seated pleasantly at her table, stabbing at pancakes. A plate of eggs benedict sat untouched on the table.

The first black vehicle showed up just as Coll finished her breakfast. She paid as much heed to that as she had to Liz's visit. She tucked some bills under her plate to cover the bill, picked up her messenger bag, and walked past Liz without so much as a glance.

"You're coming with me," Liz said, grabbing her arm.

Coll yanked herself from Liz's grasp and march through the front door with her head held high.

"HEY," Liz trailed after her onto the sunny sidewalk. FBI Agents were spilling out of the vehicles. Coll, however, showed no sign of stopping. Liz grabbed her gun. A chorus of shouts erupted from the vehicles behind her. "STOP RIGHT THERE!"

Ressler called to her over the din. Liz ignored him. "I will shoot you."

All the excitement made her forget basic psychology though. Psychopaths didn't respond to threats, and Coll, true to form, kept on walking.

Liz's hands shook. "That's her, Ressler!" she shouted, tossing a glance over her shoulder. There were no less than four agents behind her, and Ressler was the only one whose weapon was pointed down.

"We have her," he insisted. "Put the gun down, Liz, it's over."

She wanted to shoot. She should shoot. Tom was dead, his killer was getting away, and all Red cared about was his own interests. Liz felt her finger tightening against the trigger. Her whole being got wrapped up in the strain to actually shoot.

The thought that Tom was obviously keeping secrets, telling lies, and leading a secret life struck her alongside an explosion of fire in her shoulder. Liz's gun tumbled from her limp fingers. She staggered away from it, landing against the wall of the restaurant. Distantly, Ressler shouted at another agent to put her gun down.

Blood drained from the fresh wound on her arm. Liz saw stars.

"Keen," Ressler pressed a hand against the wound. "Just take it easy. You're okay. You're okay."

Liz blinked to clear her vision. Clouds were collecting in her eyes. She could see Coll less than half a block away, stopped at last by agents who had just arrived. They ushered her into a waiting car. "You got her," she breathed a sigh of relief.

Ressler's brow rose. "Those aren't our people," he noted sadly.

The car pulled away from the curb. Liz crumpled. The fog caught her; she let it carry her away.

Happy reading! One more chapter to go.