Ressler dropped Lizzie off at her apartment, keeping the engine rolling while she crabbed off this time. "Let's have dinner tonight," he proposed. "You can share what you've found with me, and my brain will be working again."

"Sure."

"Pick you up at seven?"

Lizzie caressed the Harley's gleaming gas tank. "With your big fat masculine overcompensating machine?"

Ressler barked a laugh. "Yes," he smirked, with a look at her over the tops of his sunglasses, "with my big fat masculine machine. Wouldn't call it overcompensating, though. It's just comfortable."

"You are pretty confident about your manhood, aren't you?"

"You were the one who used the words 'hard pole', if I recall correctly." Ressler shot back. "You don't say that when you actually mean 'gherkin', or something."

Lizzie sighed. "You're not supposed to repeat dirty talk afterwards. It doesn't work that way."

"It doesn't work at all," Ressler said stubbornly. He pushed his Raybans up on his nose and made the bike's engine growl. "See you tonight."

He drove off, and Lizzie entered the flat and took the elevator up to her floor. The wedges were pretty elegant, but they'd given her blisters on both heels and one toe, so she was happy to take them off. Ressler got hit by a girl. I got maimed by my undercover shoes, she thought, applying band aids. While she was de-undercovering, she also took off the hotpants and the push-up bra and dressed in her own, far more sensible clothes.

Booting up her laptop, she accessed the Quantico server and logged in. Aram had configured the thing to save her work every twenty seconds on the Quantico server. If she turned the laptop off, or put it on standby, or removed the power source, it automatically closed her documents and wiped all internet history. Logging in again required a long and complicated password, which she could only remember because she could sing it to the tune of Love Come Home. It was as safe as it was going to get while still giving her the opportunity to work without joining Cooper in the temp Post Office down at the PD, and Lizzie wondered if these safety measures were truly necessary.

She called Cooper on her own cell phone to tell him that Ressler had given her the names of Boscoe's Chosen, and that she wanted to find out who they were and what connections they could possibly have to Blofeld. "Also," she added, "Boscoe has James Rainfield, also known as Skinny. Getting him was one of the main objectives of yesterday's…test. Rainfield had kidnapped Boscoe's three year old son."

"And the child?"

"Safely recovered. I'm just wondering who of the two was the added bonus: the child, or Rainfield."

"What do you mean?" Cooper asked.

"Well," Lizzie said, ordering her thoughts, "When Ressler told me about this, we both concluded that Boscoe's child being kidnapped right before the shipment comes in, couldn't be coincidental. But the question is, what does he want with Rainfield? Revenge for his son? Then why put the retrieval of the boy as optional?"

"The kind of men he's gathering around him might not feel inclined to rescue a child," Cooper proposed.

"Yes, but what if it's Blofeld who wants Skinny, and not Boscoe?"

"I see what you mean," Cooper said. "Find him."

"Yes sir. I'm planning to have a good long look at Boscoe and his associates as well. Oh, and sir? Were any of the victims of the East slum attack raped? Sacher sported scratch marks on his person, and he's a convicted rapist."

"I'll forward the police report," her boss promised. "Ressler wasn't injured during the assault?"

"No, sir." She wished she could spare him the embarrassment of the vacuum cleaner hose attack, but leaving it out of her report might harm him later, so she only said, "He did get hit on the arm by a girl—she got a good look at him, if I'm correct, but he didn't hurt her. She may be able to describe him to the police, though." May have to take that out. We don't want Ressler to get arrested before we've caught Blofeld. She didn't say it, and neither did Cooper, but she could almost hear him nod through the telephone.

"Noted. Did he kill anyone?"

"No sir. Not directly, in any case, but he did fire his pistol and used it to defend himself."

Cooper grunted. "You laid eyes on the other men?"

"Yes sir. On all but one, who was injured during the attack. No, wait, Xian Shuo wasn't there, either. I picked Ressler up at the Lion's Den this morning. The men seemed comfortable with him, so I'd say that so far, infiltration has been successful."

"Where is he now?"

"Back at the motel, sleeping. I'll show him my report and see if he has anything to add to it this evening."

Cooper made a confirmative noise. "Good work. Get Ressler up to date this evening, and let me know what you decide. The Baltimore Police isn't all that happy to have us around, and this calls for some delicacy."

Lizzie smiled. No police force was ever happy to have the FBI stick their noses into their business. "Yes sir."

"Keep in touch," Cooper ended the conversation, and hung up.

After he'd dropped Lizzie off at her flat, Ressler drove back linea recta to his motel, undressed, and crawled beneath the covers. He'd drunk enough coffee to toss and turn for half an hour, and the daylight outside and the fact that he'd been active and awake for a while made it harder to fall asleep, but he was so tired he was willing to make the effort, and in the end he slept for about six hours before his body decided it had done enough resting while the sun was shining. That left him with another five hours of daylight, and because he had no idea how he could find out about possible places Boscoe could be holding Skinny, not without acting horribly suspicious or accessing the database, he called Lizzie again and asked her if she had found anything.

"As a matter of fact," Lizzie said, "I have." He waited while she called up her files. "Ok, here it is. David Boscoe's current address is in Jonestown, which by the looks of it has plenty of space to hide someone, but he also owns a garage on Federal street. And that would be a workplace, fix-your-motorcycle kind of garage, not just a place to store things. That's only three blocks away from where you picked up Rainfield yesterday. And apart from that, he pays rent for a small flat on Monument street. That's a stone's throw away from the Lion's Den."

"Does he have a wife? If I remember correctly he was divorced."

"As far as the law is concerned, he is," Lizzie confirmed. "What's more, Jamie Boscoe isn't Jamie Boscoe, but Jamie Yevgenieva."

That was a surprise indeed. "He hasn't recognized the child? Who's the mother?"

Lizzie typed something on her laptop. "Anasenko Yevgenieva. Apparently the boy's name should become his dad's and not his mother's, or get a different suffix because it's a boy, but that's not the way our registry works, so the boy's officially James Gregor Yevgenieva."

"How'd you find her, if she hasn't registered the boy as Boscoe's?" He truly was impressed. With everything that had happened, it was sometimes easy to forget that Liz Keen actually was a pretty good agent. And that is horribly sexist of me, Ressler thought. She's earned her salt. The fact that she makes a truly convincing tart shouldn't distract from the fact that she's a very good profiler.

Lizzie, blissfully unaware of his antifeminist thoughts, spoke her next words with audible satisfaction. "I did some digging into Rainfield, Skinny's, contacts. Anasenko Yevgenieva used to be one of his. She's been arrested twice. For prostitution. Skinny was a pimp, Ressler. He climbed up from prostitution to drug dealing."

"Boscoe mentioned Skinny used to be an associate of his."
"Then my guess is that Boscoe fell in love with Anasenko, or got her pregnant, and helped Skinny into the drug trafficking business in return for Anasenko's freedom." She paused. "Unless the boy was fathered by Rainfield…"

"No," Ressler said. "Skinny is coloured. The boy was as white as can be. Is the woman blonde?"

"Almost albino. Typical Slavic girl: white-blonde hair, pale skin, big blue eyes." She typed something, then sucked in air between her teeth. "And Rainfield beat her. Or her customers did. There's a picture of her here…It's in the police files but she never pressed charges."

"When did that happen?"

"Five years ago." She paused. "She was only seventeen at the time. She must just have got here, then; the file mentions she needed a translator."

"Probably Skinny, then," Ressler thought. "You don't press charges against your sole source of income." He rubbed the bridge of his nose. Despite the rest, he still felt slow and heavy, but that might be after effects of alcohol as well.

"What," Lizzie said, "if she's Blofeld?"

"Why would she be Blofeld?" Ressler asked in return. "I thought Reddington said Blofeld was a man."

"They never met. And wasn't Blofeld Russian?"

"Polish."

"Polish? Are you sure? Didn't James Bond always fight against the Russians?"

Ressler shook his head. "Blofeld was definitely Polish, or half-Polish, half something else. I grew up with these books and movies; I know. But even if he was Russian, it seems a bit far fetched to see someone as a suspect simply because the nationality fits the name."

"We've seen stranger things," Lizzie said.

Ressler frowned a little, irritation at her hare-brained ideas seeping into his voice. "True," he said patiently. "But somehow I don't see a Russian whore who got beat up by trash like Skinny being the leading force behind one of the biggest hidden crime cartels in America."

Liz sighed. "No. Still, I might look her up. See if I can bump into her. She may not be a crime lord, but if Boscoe loves her, she might keep Rainfield in her basement to cut off bits and pieces of him in revenge. Which, by the way, is the basement of the flat on Boscoe's name."

"Ok. I'll check the garage. Can you give me the address again?"

She did. "Be careful," she added. "We can't have Boscoe get suspicious of you."

I'll don my fake moustache and Yankee baseball cap, Ressler thought, but did not say; instead he just grunted and hung up.

When he typed in the address and name of the garage—4Drives Motor Repairs—into his phone's GPS, he saw that it was only a couple of blocks away, which surprised him, because he'd thought they'd been driving the trucks for ages to get there, or at least to the East side, yesterday. Then again, the Lion's Den was about twenty minutes in the opposite direction, and thirty to forty minutes could seem to last a long time. Before he drove off, he got a screwdriver from the storage compartment of his Harley, murmured an apology to the beautiful bike and smashed the screwdriver against its headlight. The glass chipped, and an opaque spot appeared around a tiny hole, hair-thin cracks running out like cobweb.

Ressler tucked the screwdriver away, got onto the bike and headed for the 4Drives Motor Repairs.

At first sight, he didn't see anyone he knew at the garage. It consisted of an in-door workshop, with a number of work benches and several pallet racks stocked with spare parts of all kinds of motorcycle brands; and next to it a space almost as large that could be covered with tarpaulin, but which was now in the open air, where a couple of men were tinkering with a number of bikes. Only one of the men looked like he might be an employee of the garage; the others appeared to be just disassembling and cleaning their bike for the hell of it, some of them drinking beer as they were doing so.

Ressler greeted them as he parked the Dyna next to a brutal Yamaha Stryker, and was greeted in return. Instant bonding among bike owners, he reflected with an inner smile. He should get one of his own and broaden his non-existence social circles.

"That is one nice bike," Ressler said to the man with the Stryker, and he didn't need to lie. Its bright colours: red and dark blue, with a smattering of slightly lighter stars on the front fender were a bit garish to his taste, but the whole of it still painted a beautiful picture. "Sprayed her yourself?"

The owner, a man in his late twenties, nodded proudly. His coveralls were covered in smears of paint and a fine spray of blue coated half of his face. In his hand he held an airbrush. "Yeah. Cost me a month, but it's worth it. I used to have these flames, y'know, and they were pretty awesome, but everybody has flames, so I figured, let's go with the flag for a change." He gestured to Ressler's bike. "That a Dyna Glide? My brother used to have one. I'm a Yamaha man now, but I still love that sound."

Ressler acknowledged that yes, he had a Dyna, and explained that his baby was injured.

"Ouch," the Yamaha man said, with a look at the light. "That's a nasty little scrape. But I'm sure they can fix it, maybe even without replacing the entire glass—or the light and cover; some places do that. Just go inside; I'm sure one of the boys can help you." He went back to his spray job, and Ressler sauntered into the workshop.

Two motorcycles stood on raised platforms, one upside down, the other one stripped down to the frame. Both had employees attending to them; a third man lounged behind a desk in the far corner, feet on the desk, going through the closing sentences of a conversation on the phone.

Excellent.

Ressler made a slow tour of the facility, taking note of a closed door at the back of the building—but he didn't think this workshop a likely place to store a severely wounded criminal. It was far too public. Unless he was bound and gagged, there was no way Skinny could be kept here.

Even as he was contemplating the door, another man opened it and came into the workshop. He took no particular care to the door's swing, and in the room behind him, Ressler could only see a table littered with foam coffee cups and a couple of chairs. The moment he saw Ressler, his handsome face split in a welcoming smile.

"Stone! What brings you here?"

Despite an ugly scrape on his forehead, shadowed eyes and an edge of bandage showing beneath the sleeve of his T-shirt, Clean biker, or Pretty Jack, looked relatively fresh and sincerely pleased to see Ressler. His hair was pulled back in a short pony tail and he had grease on the left side of his nose.

"Jack. Didn't know you worked here." Now he thought about it, Jack might have mentioned he worked at a motor service. He just hadn't realised it was this place.

"Yup. Four days a week. Are you here to see Boscoe? I don't think he's in, today."

"Boscoe works here as well?"

"Yeah, man! This place is his! Didn't you know?"

Not me. I'm oblivious. Look at my face, I know nothing. He shook his head, smiling. "Hell, no. I just damaged my front light and this was the closest repair shop I could find."

"Ah," said Jack. "Well, let's have a look at it, then, shall we?" He grinned. "If it ain't too much work, I'll put it on the house. As far as I get it, the little guy's safe return's mainly thanks to you, so…"

"Is that where he is?" Ressler asked. "Boscoe? With Jamie? I was feeling so sorry for that poor kid. You got any children yourself?"

Jack shook his head. They had already cleared the building, and Ressler didn't want to ask too many questions in front of other people. "Nah. Nadine's still in high school." He laughed. "Technically, I'm not even allowed to bang her, if you know what I mean."

No, Ressler thought sternly. You're not, and yes I do know what you mean. Still, Jack couldn't be much older than twenty or twenty-one, and the girl had been lovely.

"I'm not sure we're children material," Jack happily chatted on. "Not now, in any case. And Nadine was thinking about studying law—law! But Jamie's cool; he's a cute little guy."

"Does he live with Boscoe?"

"Nah, with his mom. But she sometimes drops him off here, if she has to go to…if she has to work." He cleared his throat. "He loves the spare tyres."

"They're not together?"

Jack's smile dimmed just a tiny bit, telling Ressler that he'd about reached the line between 'comfortable facts' and 'private gossip'. "No."

"I sometimes wonder," Ressler said smoothly—as far as he was capable of smooth, "if I have any kids."

Jack's face relaxed again. "They are kinda hard to misplace, man."

"Not if you leave before they start showing." He cleared his throat, too, suddenly uncomfortable even pretending to be that kind of man, and halted in front of his Harley. The man with the Yamaha was busily painting stars on his charging system. Jack gave him a silent thumbs up before kneeling down in front of Ressler's headlight.

"Ah. Yeah, I see what you mean. Was it a pebble or something? I hate it when that happens." He gently tapped the glass. "I can fix this, though. The cracks haven't spread very far, so I can just cut a little circle out of the glass and put a new bit in. You'll see it, but only if you look at it up close, and it saves you fifty bucks."

Ressler told him to do his worst, and took another stroll around, pretending to look at the motorcycles but checking out the garage instead. He wished he could just get a warrant and turn the place upside-down. This whole subterfuge thing went against everything he stood for. Things would be so much easier if he could just arrest all the bad guys and interrogate them until they spilled the beans…but that was not the way this mission worked. However, when Jack had finished his repairs, Ressler was reasonably sure that Skinny could not be hidden away on the premises. He hung around for another half hour, chatting amiably, but all that gained him was thirty minutes of pleasant but useless conversation. Finally, he climbed back onto his Harley and drove off.

While Ressler was doing his male bonding, Lizzie drove her rental car over to Monument street and parked in view of the flat Anasenko Yevgenieva lived in. It was situated in a nice neighbourhood; not exactly chic, but well-maintained and clean. She watched the front door for a quarter of an hour. Quite a few people went in and out, and after some hesitation, Lizzie twisted her hair into a pony tail, pulled it over her scalp and tugged a Yankee baseball cap she had found in Nicky's apartment onto her head, hiding her hair and most of her face. Then, she simply left her car and casually walked up to the door. It didn't take long before a few kids came out, and she slipped in after them. From the common entrance hall, it was easy to access the basement. All flats had their own cellar, conveniently marked with numbers corresponding with the house numbers. It only took her a couple of minutes to find Yevgenieva's storage room, but even before she started picking the lock, she knew she wasn't going to find any drug lords here. This place was too easily accessible to keep prisoners.

But it might tell me something about Anasenko, Lizzie figured.

The lock was a simple one; she jiggled it open in little more than a minute. Inside, the cellar was disappointingly bare. It was only a small space, just eight by ten or something, and contained nothing but a couple of boxes, a battered suitcase and a step-ladder.

Lizzie closed the door behind her and started with the suitcase. It held an interesting combination of old winter clothes and bondage gear. Fascinating, but not terribly useful.

The first box was filled with folders holding letters from Immigration and other documents sent to prove that Miss Yevgenieva was well on her way becoming a United States citizen. Lizzie also found two certificates for English Language courses.

The second box contained toys and carefully stacked drawings— toys discarded by the boy, Jamie, Lizzie assumed, or perhaps a keepsake from Anasenko herself. She couldn't have been more than fifteen when she arrived in the States. The drawings were definitely a boy's: all cars and houses and footballs. The crude doodles made Lizzie swallow something bitter. A year ago she'd almost been a mom. The oldest of these paintings could have been her daughter's…Yeah. Imagine what hold Tom would've had over me if we had adopted.

Resolutely, she put everything back and opened the last box.

What do we have here? Rainfield's severed head? A birthday card with a return address from Blofeld?

None of these things. More clothes, carefully folded; pants and dresses and a jacket or two. The box was only half full. Things to send home, perhaps.

She sighed in frustration. Apart from the bondage gear, which she obviously didn't use anymore, or not often, in any case, Anasenko's basement was pretty boring. I'd like to nose around in her apartment. Breaking and entering someone's house, however, was something different than snooping around in their basement. Liz Keen hadn't become an FBI agent so she could go around trespassing. Besides, what if she was home?

We can always issue a warrant later, she thought, as she left the cellar and made her way back to her car. Doing so right away and kick down the door with three policemen in her wake might not be the best idea right now; not if they wanted to see the deal completed and find Blofeld. Maybe Ressler had better luck.

Next up was Boscoe's home address.

No apartment building for Davey Boscoe. He had a real house, with a garden and a garage and everything. In the garden, a blonde-haired woman was pushing a small blonde boy on a swing. There was no question about their relationship: the child resembled the woman so much she could be no one but his mother.

Anasenko was beautiful. Even from a distance her sweet, fine-boned face and delicate figure were striking, and her sheet of long, straight, white-blonde hair shone like silver in the sun. Lizzie could well imagine a man taking certain risks to win that kind of woman.

And she is here. Not at home. Lizzie hesitated, torn between going back to Anasenko's place and investigating her flat and staying here to see if the woman would do anything. Finally, she turned her car around and drove back to Monument Street. She sincerely doubted Boscoe would keep Rainfield in the same house as his woman and child, who had obviously taken refuge here; and while it was nice to watch a young mom playing with her kid, she didn't think it would actually help her investigation.

She called Cooper to tell him she was going to try and break into Anasenko Yevgenieva's apartment and see if she could find anything, and all he said was to be careful. It made her smile, be it a little sourly. Reddington was turning all of them into criminals.

Should I call Ressler? She wondered briefly. For backup? But he was far more conspicuous than she was on her own, and besides, he might be in the middle of a B&E action of his own. She went alone.

This time, she had to wait a bit longer before she could slip into the building, but once she was in she managed to share the elevator with an enormously fat man and his equally obese spouse, and hide behind them while she rode up to the fifth floor. Thankfully, Anasenko didn't have a gallery flat, like Nicky, which would make it almost impossible to break in without being seen. She lived at the end of the hallway, and Lizzie was left undisturbed long enough to pick the lock and sneak inside.

She'd figured Anasenko would not have an alarm installed. If she had, she probably would have felt safe enough to stay home. As she entered the flat, Lizzie was relieved to find out her assumptions were correct. No alarm.

Not that there was much of interest here, either. Lizzie quickly went through the woman's stuff, feeling dirty and nervous, but she could find nothing. No incriminating letters—there were letters, all in Russian, and they all ended with Xs and hearts. More documents confirming that Anasenko's naturalization was getting along just fine. Boscoe seemed to be paying the legal fees. There was a photo of him holding little Jamie. In the photo, the boy seemed to be about two. Jamie featured in more photographs, all placed lovingly on side tables and shelves. Of Anasenko there was only one photo, one several years old as it showed her as a lanky teen, in which she posed with her arm wrapped around the neck of a girl perhaps a little younger who had to be a sister, or maybe a cousin. Both girls were heartbreakingly beautiful.

Anasenko's wardrobe resembled Nicky's, with lots of short, clingy tops and dresses, two pairs of jeans, a couple of fuzzy sweaters. She had three pairs of shoes, which was bafflingly few for any woman; two pairs of stiletto heels, one red and one black, and elegant black shoes with a lower heel. She had been wearing sensible boots in the garden, Lizzie recalled.

She pawed through a drawer filled with satiny bras, baby dolls and panties—apparently Anasenko spent her money on sexy underwear rather than shoes. And that was it, really.

She had a diary next to the phone, but the appointments written into it were clear, straightforward things like 'pick up Jamie 12.30', 'clients 17.00 – 23.00', 'David shop 14.00'. Nothing at all for the past three days. Lizzie took pictures of several of the pages, but at first glance she didn't think there had ever been a meeting with anyone important.

Half an hour after she'd entered, Lizzie left the apartment again, making sure nothing looked disturbed. Outside, it was slowly growing dark. Streetlights were popping on, still red before brightening to a yellowish-white. She sighed. Maybe Ressler had found anything.

"Well," Ressler grumbled, when they were sitting in a cosy little restaurant about 90 minutes later, "that was a waste of time and effort."

"Hey, I got to practice my lock picking skills."

He frowned; he was back to being angry all the time again.

Lizzie felt her own brow furrow in annoyance; she hated him when he was like this. She vaguely remembered severely disliking Ressler when they first met. In her mind, she'd referred to him as 'the cranky ginger'. And he'd been a dick, at first, really. Belligerent. Overly tense. Overbearing. And angry. She didn't think he'd ever stopped scowling, the first month she worked at the Post Office.

Of course, she hadn't really known him, then.

And he'd mellowed out, over the months. Especially when Audrey came back into his life—hell, maybe he'd just really needed to get laid. But no, that wasn't the sole reason he'd become a little more laid-back—no pun intended. Ressler basically was a decent guy: inherently kind if overly serious, honest, protective, driven. But because he never did anything by halves, that also meant that his honesty was brutal, his protectiveness was aggressive, and his dedication rigid and single-minded. Audrey had distracted him from his total devotion to his job, and so he had become softer and friendlier. And when she was gone, that softness stayed, like a partially melted glacier.

She hasn't really started to consider him her friend, more than just a colleague, until that faithful night at the pub—the drink till you drop part, when he'd shown just how badly Audrey's death had affected him, and the morning after, when he'd told her he had her back if she needed him to. Hearing that, exactly when she needed to have someone say it, had turned their relationship into friendship. Not the sex, although that had been surprisingly great. That, and the fact that by then, he and Lizzie had simply gotten used to one another, and learned to appreciate each other. She had no doubts at all that Ressler truly liked her. But because his face made it difficult to read his emotions and he never pretended to be anything he was not, he made no effort to be nice to her, just was when things were going according to plan, and was moody and sometimes downright rude when something was bothering him.

Ressler really was very bad at keeping up appearances.

"So," she asked, when he kept glowering at his French fries as if they had personally conspired to make his life difficult. "What's bothering you?"

"What do you mean?"

"Either your filet mignon is truly vile, or something else is bugging you."

He snorted. "We're getting nowhere. The man could be anywhere. I shouldn't have wasted my time trying to suck up to Boscoe's bikers and followed him instead."

Ah, so he was feeling responsible for losing Skinny. She shrugged. "Do you really think he'd have let you tail him?"

"No." He speared a fry on his fork. "But I could have tried."

"And blown the whole operation if he'd discovered you." She gave his knee a nudge with her own below the table. "Cheer up. You're Aaron Stone and you're out with your girlfriend. You're supposed to be having a good time. This is the first time I've been out for dinner in…months."

He glanced up from his plate, and apparently something in her expression made him feel guilty, because his mouth quirked into a rueful little smile, and he relaxed a little.

"I thought you ate out most evenings."

"No, I don't, and takeaway is not the same as going out for dinner." She took a sip of wine. "Do you have time to cook every evening?"

He shook his head. "You know I don't. I'm usually right behind you in line. Well, perhaps not as often, nowadays…" He trailed off and they sat eating in silence for a while.

Lizzie sighed. "I don't know why it changed so much. Sure, I don't stay at the same place for more than a month, but I never leave the city. You'd say I'd be able to meet friends, have dinner at their place, but it's all…it just stopped." She looked up at him. "You've been living at your place for ages. There's no reason you should be all by yourself every evening."

Your life wasn't destroyed by some word-renowned but oh so charming criminal. Except that it was. Only in a different way than hers.

Ressler was scowling again. "I don't have any friends. Do you have friends?"

"No. Everyone I knew…they were always Tom's friends." That wasn't it, really. She'd had friends, too. She was positive they were not involved with Tom or with Reddington. But how could she explain the fact that she was a widow, now? That Tom was gone? They'd ask questions, or be supportive, and all she wanted to do about the Tom topic was lock it in a box and never speak of it again. "But because of Tom…" she murmured.

Ressler saw right through her. "Bullshit."

Or maybe that was Aaron. "What?" she asked, rather sharply, and he repeated the word in the same flat tone of voice.

"Bullshit. It's not Tom. It's you. As in, you, the FBI profiler. You never met any people you liked in the gym? In the park? Never bumped into anyone you thought, well, let's go and have coffee just for the hell of it? Didn't you have a dog?"

"Tom walked her. I was never home on time." God, she missed that dog. She hoped the people who had adopted her were treating her well. "And…It's kind of hard to talk to people if you're not allowed to talk about what you do 8 to 10 hours a day, each day."

"Well, there you have it. Our job makes it impossible for us to make friends. I used to know a couple of guys I liked, and sometimes we hung out, drank beer, played darts, you know, that kind of thing. But whenever we decided to get together, I'd have to chase after Reddington's people. They kept inviting me, but if you never show up, they forget about you, and they were right." He pursed his lips, frowning. "My old team were my friends," he continued, softer. "Sam and Paul and Bobby, and Virgil and Jimmy before that. Jimmy was shot three years ago in Afghanistan. And the rest of my team are all dead, because of Bobby. They're all dead…but me."

"What about…Virgil?"

"He's in a sanatorium. He was captured. Tortured. They broke him. I used to visit him once every couple of months, but I haven't been there for…almost a year now."

"Why'd you stop visiting him?" she asked, curious. "Doesn't he recognize you?"

Ressler shrugged. "Yes, he does. He's…pretty much like himself. Most of the time. But the last time his wife and daughters were there, and he had some kind of backlash when I came in. Went completely apeshit. Started screaming, throwing things. They had to sedate him and when he finally calmed down he hunkered down in a corner and started rocking like a small child. He only stopped doing that when his youngest daughter brought out her pony toys." He sighed. "I can't deal with that kind of shit right now. I don't want to be responsible for his fragile psyche cracking and sending him into hell." He smiled humourlessly. "Those are my friends. Surely you can do better." He took a bite of haricots verts.

"I've got you," Lizzie said.

He sat very still for a couple of seconds, staring at her, before carefully chewing and swallowing his mouthful. "That…is not exactly all that much better."

"Huh. You're a riot at dinner." For a second she thought he'd get mad again—he was in a very strange mood, and she wasn't entirely sure how to coax him out of it—but then he smiled, a real smile, and inclined his head.

"I'm sorry. You're right. Let's forget about work until we're done."

"A sixty-minute break. Heaven."

Ressler smirked. "Sixty minutes? I'll be finished in about ten."

"You have no life," Lizzie said accusatively.

"Neither," said Ressler, and picked up another fry, "have you."