A/N: It's been awhile, but I'm still around. If you haven't heard of "Critical Role," do yourself a favor and go see what's absolutely commanded my attention for the last several months now.
I'm eagerly waiting for the return of "Blindspot" - is it January 4th yet?
Thanks to everyone and anyone who hasn't given up on me yet!
Jane blinks and squints up at the lights overhead. Her head hurts and there's a funny taste in her mouth. She rolls her head to one side and finds she's looking at a pair of sensible shoes. This doesn't mean much to her. The fact that she recognizes the shoes gives her a tiny bit of hope.
"Patterson?" she groans out.
In a split second Patterson drops to her knees. "Jane. I'm so glad…"
She looks close to tears. Jane sits up and puts her arms around Patterson. "C'mere. I'm just fine."
Patterson buries her face into Jane's neck. "I'm so sorry."
"About what?"
"I don't even know."
Jane looks over at Weller, who's standing next to Patterson. He shrugs. "You did shoot her two days ago. What happened?"
"Well, I met Gruff, and he's about as nice as his name. He's also some sort of ninja - I mean, he looked so innocuous in that video we saw." Jane rubs her forehead. "Managed to flip me like I was a rag doll."
She sighs and touches the side of her head. As her sleeve rides up she sees Weller lean in. "What is it?"
"Your tattoo there," he answers, pointing to the intricate honeycomb pattern on her right hand. "Looks like our boy Gruff is more than a ninja - it seems he's an amateur artist as well."
Jane pulls her hand back, looking down at the tattoo. Several of the spots are now colored in, while others have numbers in them.
"I think he left us a message," Weller says. "Patterson, you all right?"
Patterson sniffles. "I think so."
"Then can we get up and go solve this?"
"Yeah," Patterson says, sounding more sure of herself. "Yeah, let's do this."
"We've catalogued everything in this place," Zapata says, looking around Erik Tidemore's spotless apartment. "Nothing. What am I missing?"
Reade looks up from the bookshelf, where he's photographing some of the thousands of action figures contained in the living room. "Other than where a guy with no work history on record managed to buy all of this stuff?"
"And why he has it all," Zapata says.
"Technically he doesn't have anything anymore," Reade says. "You know, since he's technically dead."
"I think our next best bet is his sister," Zapata opines. "I mean, he's been dead for awhile and she's still paying his rent… and obviously paying someone to come in here and clean."
"Unless she does it herself."
Zapata turns to look at the bulletin board above the desk. Unlike everything else in the apartment, which is an oasis of calm and neatness, everything arranged at right angles and in very specific patterns, the bulletin board is a hodgepodge of receipts, photos, pins, lists, and scribbled doodles. Nothing matches, nothing's the same size, and none of it fits together in any category. "What do we think of this?"
"I think it's just a bulletin board."
"You don't think that a guy who sunk as much time into arranging his action figures in floor-to-ceiling glass cases with temperature control and vacuum sealing as he did wouldn't have some sort of… system for things like this?"
"Do you want to take the board with us? Just take the board back with us. Patterson'll find some pattern on it," Reade says. He stands up. "There's some large evidence bags in the kit."
In the end they take Erik Tidemore's bulletin board, two boxes of files, and a small safe discovered under his bed. They also take his sister Leslie's contact information. Reade takes a phone number from Melanie, the downstairs neighbor, and her schedule, written on a pink Post-It in swirly handwriting. I'm free for coffee on Thursday.
Zapata takes great delight in this.
The on-call medic at the FBI offices offers Jane an ice pack for the back of her head before waving her out of his cubicle, clearing her to return to the chaos of the ongoing investigation. She heads immediately back to Patterson's lab.
Patterson has Moira in the sling against her chest as she talks animatedly to the baby. "... and this is where things get interesting. He has a mint-in-box Captain Huckleberry - which, I know you don't know this but I do - was part of an extremely limited run of two hundred action figures ever made of that character. And fifty of those were destroyed in an unfortunate delivery truck fire back in 1985! We're going to check eBay to see if we can find any collectors who might have helped Mr. Tidemore with his extreme action figure hoarding, aren't we?"
"Who's Captain Huckleberry?" Jane asks, stepping up next to Patterson to look at the pictures on the big monitor. One of them shows a bright yellow-and-purple box containing a superhero action figure dressed in a purple bodysuit and mask and a yellow cape and boots. A giant yellow "H" adorns his torso.
"Oh! Hey. He was part of this weird cartoon series back in the eighties. The superheroes were all fruits," Patterson says.
Jane offers her finger to Moira to bat at. "And people watched it?"
"No. Definitely not in the numbers they needed to keep it going," Patterson answers. "They sure tried hard, though, with all kinds of marketing. It's become more of a cult hit now in the YouTube era… but the merchandise is super-rare."
"YouTube," Jane muses. "Do you think that's how Gruff got in touch with Trent Rosenzweig?"
Patterson nods thoughtfully. "Could be, although I haven't gotten deep enough into our gamer guy's channel to find out if he has other interests besides hearing himself talk."
Jane laughs.
"The odds are actually better that our Gruff was a fan of the original series when he was a kid, and started trying to reclaim his youth by snatching up memorabilia on eBay," Patterson says, "but I'm not going to rule anything out yet."
"What were Captain Huckleberry's powers?"
"I feel like he drove the getaway car."
"And he was the captain?"
Patterson shrugs. "None of it made sense. Super Banana was the trickster of the group... he'd put banana peels on the ground so the rest of the High Octane Fruits could get away from people. Orange Maiden seduced all sorts of bad guys. Grape and Grape were twins who played switcharoo a lot, even though one was a girl and one was a guy. Blueberry Swirl could turn into a tornado… or something like that."
Mo lets out a coo.
"You're right, it does sound like something someone on drugs would create," Patterson says in response.
She pulls up eBay and starts scrolling through sales records for any High Octane Fruits memorabilia. There aren't many results. Most of the items seem to be coming from a user named "lauradalton."
"That's weird," Patterson says.
"What?"
"Well, I was talking to the company that invented the gelatin pouch we found in your neck, and their head of R&D is named Laura Dalton."
"And what are the odds of it being the same person?"
"According to US Census data…" Patterson takes a few seconds to scroll through another website. "... Laura is the 57th most common first name in the US, and Dalton is the top thousand of common surnames. Odds are, there's less than 200 people named Laura Dalton in the entire country."
Jane can't follow that math, but she trusts Patterson.
"And it says on her eBay profile that she ships from New York, so…" Patterson shrugs. "We'll track her down."
She turns to Jane. "I need to get scans of your hand now that Gruff's altered it. New clues!"
Patterson sounds so delighted that Jane can't begrudge her, and she offers up her arm to Patterson's scanning equipment without any protest. She's been so comfortable with her hand's appearance for so long that to see it now, colored and inked with new information, is a little unsettling.
Weller comes in while Patterson's inputting the colors and numbers into the tattoo database. "Reade and Zapata are heading over to talk to Leslie Tidemore, but they brought some evidence back from the apartment."
He sets a bulletin board on one of the work tables. "Agents McCloud and Turner have the rest of the evidence - they should be right behind me."
His eye catches the photos up on the screen. "Is that Captain Huckleberry?"
Patterson turns towards the garishly-costumed superhero. "You watched High Octane Fruits?"
"I mean, it didn't have the appeal of the Justice League, but it was better than nothing," Weller replies. "You know what the weirdest thing about that show was?"
"The entire thing?"
"No," Weller says. "It was how Captain Huckleberry was the only one with a secret identity. He was really a doctor or something. The rest of the Fruits didn't have day jobs, they were just superheroes. But not Captain Huckleberry."
His phone rings and he heads out of the lab, leaving Jane and Patterson to contemplate his analysis of Captain Huckleberry's confusing history. Mo sticks her fingers in her mouth and blows a raspberry towards the superhero.
"What can I do to help?" Jane asks Patterson.
Patterson considers this. "At this point it's all a waiting game, honestly. Oh! Unless you wanted… no I bet you wouldn't want to..."
She hesitates.
"What?" Jane presses her.
"I need someone to go through some of Trent Rosenzweig's videos and compare them to the ones on the chip," Patterson says. "I have a program that'll line them up side-by-side, but it's still going to be boring."
"That's fine with me. I've had enough excitement for today," Jane says.
She gratefully accepts one of the monitors, a pair of headphones, and a table near the back of the room to run through GamerGuy75's videos. Patterson explains what she's looking for and shows Jane how to press certain keys to mark the similarities between the two videos, then lets Jane go at it.
Jane keeps her attention on the videos, but in between she looks up at Patterson, moving through the variety of clues, those twisty pathways and back alleys leading towards a solution. Though nothing in the past few days has made much sense, Jane knows there's no one else she wants on her side.
Leslie Tidemore's secretary is an incredibly handsome man who gives Reade and Zapata a polite smile when they approach. "How can I help you?"
"We're from the FBI," Zapata says.
"We called earlier," Reade adds.
"Oh. Um, let me check and see if Leslie's in."
"It's all right, Bernard." A tall woman in a sharply-tailored business suit comes out of an office just behind the secretary's immaculate desk. "I'm Leslie Tidemore. Please, come in."
She offers them seats in her spare steel-and-glass office. "You said you had questions about my brother's death."
"Your brother is a person-of-interest in an ongoing investigation," Reade says.
"My brother's been dead for eight years," Leslie says flatly. "I don't understand how he could be a suspect."
"We have preliminary evidence that suggests he's… not dead," Reade tells her. He holds out a photograph from the surveillance cameras at Weston College. "Is this your brother?"
Leslie takes the print-out. "This looks like it could be anybody. It's a guy with a beard in sunglasses and a hoodie."
"We visited your brother's apartment today," Reade goes on. "We were surprised to find it was so tidy and… lived-in."
"Erik was very proud of his collections," Leslie says. "It felt wrong to just sell everything he liked so much. I keep the place up partially as a shrine to him, which I know is selfish…"
"Everyone grieves in different ways," Zapata says.
"... and sometimes I'm able to let friends and family stay there when they visit, or I can rent it out," Leslie goes on. "I like knowing that someone's there. Makes Erik seem a little closer."
She hands the photograph back to Reade. "What kind of investigation do you think Erik's involved in?"
"Did he know a man by the name of Trent Rosenzweig?" Reade asks.
"Not that I know of."
"Was he a fan of online video games?"
"Erik had a lot of passions. If it was nerdy or geeky or strange or just plain out there, he'd probably looked into it," Leslie says. "He used to buy moon rocks off eBay until he read an article about how a lot of them were stolen from universities around the country. Then he mailed them back to their respective institutions. He was… invested in a lot of different things, I guess you could say."
"Did he hold stock in or have any connections to a company called Brilliant Horizons Medical?"
"I don't think so. I can look into some of his records, but… I've never heard of them."
"You said he used eBay," Zapata says. "Do you know what his username was?"
Leslie thinks about this. "He had a couple. Not just on eBay but for different websites… when he played World of Warcraft his character was called 'Kire' - that's Erik backwards. Maybe on eBay he was 'etidemore'... that sounds familiar. Other than that, I don't know. I'd have to check his records."
She shifts in her office chair. "This man in the photo you showed me… is he involved in something dangerous? Do I need to be worried?"
Reade shakes his head. "Right now we're just interested in finding this man to ask him some questions about an ongoing investigation. Your brother's name came up when we spoke to another person-of-interest."
"This is going to sound ridiculous, but have you received any strange letters, emails, packages… anything like that?" Zapata asks. "Anything anonymous you couldn't trace?"
"I'm a criminal defense lawyer," Leslie says, rolling her eyes. "I get a lot of strange letters and emails. And phone calls. And in-person harassments. Most of them anonymous."
Her face softens. "But nothing comes to mind that would make me think of Erik. Honestly, I feel the closest to him when I'm in his apartment."
Reade and Zapata share a glance. Zapata speaks first. "We're sorry for your loss. Thank you for your assistance with this."
"I'm not sure how much help I was," Leslie says. "I hope you find the man you're looking for."
Reade passes her a card. "If you think of anything else, or something shows up that makes you go 'huh,' will you give us a call?"
Leslie tucks the card into the corner of her desk blotter. "Sure."
In the car, heading back to the office, Zapata turns to Reade. "Did you buy any of that?"
"She seemed like a nice lady."
"What kind of lady keeps her brother's apartment the same way it's always been, eight years after his death?"
"She gave some pretty good reasons. Maybe they were the kind of siblings who were super-close. It looks like she's wealthy - if she wants to keep a toy-filled apartment as a guest house, who are we to judge?" Reade shrugs.
"I'd rather sleep in my Aunt Rosa's basement than that apartment," Zapata informs him, "and she has so many mice that she's named them all and given them personalities and voices."
"What's wrong with that apartment?"
"All those beady action-figure eyes watching you?"
"It's only spooky if they move."
Zapata shudders.
