Several days later, Lisbon was in the bullpen staring at her map again, her right hand absently resting on her stomach.
Jane studied her from his position on the couch.
"You okay?" he asked.
She looked at him. "Yeah. Why?"
He gestured to the way she was standing. "You're resting your hand on your stomach. You only do that when you've had too much to eat or you're feeling queasy. You haven't had lunch yet today, so I assume it's the latter."
"It's nothing," she said dismissively. "Probably had some bad cream cheese on my bagel this morning or something."
He frowned. "You sure?"
"I'm fine, Jane," she assured him.
He looked unconvinced. "Okay."
She changed the subject. "What have you been doing with yourself?"
"Since you banished me, you mean?" he said with a slight scowl. Lisbon had effectively thrown him out of the office two days earlier, claiming he was hovering again, and he'd had to entertain himself. He might have been sulking a little.
"It doesn't seem like it was a very effective banishment," Lisbon said dryly. "Here you are."
Jane ignored this. "I've been working on a theory about how Red John chooses his victims. Revenge killings and hapless minions aside, that is."
She looked interested. "Yeah? What have you come up with?"
"Duck ponds," he announced.
"Duck ponds?" Lisbon repeated.
"Duck ponds," he confirmed. "Most of his early victims were concentrated in the Sacramento area. I took a leaf from your book and decided to map them out, but on a smaller scale. I looked at some detailed maps of the city and noticed a lot of the victims lived or worked near some of the larger parks in the area. I went to visit them and realized those parks all had something in common."
"And the thing they have in common is duck ponds?"
"Exactly. So now we know one of Red John's hobbies. He likes to feed ducks."
Lisbon shook her head. "And he managed to combine that hobby with his other hobby of destroying people's lives."
"The multi-tasking serial killer."
She snorted. "Right."
"Anything new here?"
"Not really. Van Pelt is helping me with that list of employees from the iron properties companies but it's slow going. There are just so many of them."
"Nothing stands out?"
"There doesn't seem to be any overlap between the lists. Not that we've found so far, anyway."
"What about the Tanners?"
"I did find out one thing about the Tanners. Remember how I told you Adelaide had died?"
"Yes."
"There was an obituary for her all right, but no death certificate."
"Interesting. Think she faked her death?"
"I'm not sure, but I'm going to look into it a little more," she said, heading back into her office.
Lisbon was true to her word. It was only the next day when she stalked out to the bullpen with a file in her hand and a light in her eye.
"What's up, boss?" Cho asked.
"I found something about the Tanners," Lisbon announced to the team.
"Orville or Adelaide?" Rigsby asked.
"Both. I found out how their parents died."
Jane cracked an eyelid open from his position on the couch. "And?"
"They were murdered. Caleb and Magdalena Tanner, both shot point blank in the chest with Caleb's own shotgun in the family home at Sparrow's Peak. Police suspected a robbery gone bad but they never found who did it. Adelaide and Orville were asleep upstairs when it happened but they didn't see anything. Adelaide was four at the time; Orville was nine."
"My God. What happened to them afterwards?" Van Pelt asked.
"Their cousin told me they'd been placed with some cousins on the other side of the family, but it turns out that wasn't the case. Two guesses where they ended up."
Jane had both eyes open now. "Foster care."
Lisbon nodded. "Got it in one. They were bounced around different homes, and in between families, they were placed in a group home in Clarksburg."
"Clarksburg," Jane repeated. "That's a little town between Sacramento and Stockton, isn't it?"
"That's right," Lisbon confirmed.
Van Pelt frowned. "I don't get it. Wouldn't Orville have been way too old to have been recruited as one of Red John's disciples by Irene Gregson?"
"I don't think that's what Lisbon is suggesting," Jane said.
"Come on, it can't be a coincidence that those two were in foster care, too," Rigsby said.
"No, it seems unlikely," Jane agreed. "You must have a theory, though, Lisbon, or you wouldn't have bothered to share this with us."
"I don't think Irene Gregson recruited Orville from the foster care system to be one of Red John's allies," she said. "I think Red John recruited him from the foster care system himself."
"As a social worker?" Rigsby said, confused.
"No. I think he was in the system himself."
"You think that's how he and Orville met?" Van Pelt asked.
"It makes sense, doesn't it?" Lisbon said. "Serial killers aren't just born, they're made. They're usually forged from some trauma in their pasts. Why would Red John be an exception? The emotional isolation he probably experienced if he was shuffled around from foster home to foster home could have cemented his anti-social behavioral patterns at a very early age. He was smart, so he might have already learned how to manipulate people into doing his bidding. Hell, if he met Orville when they were both young, he might have been the person who he practiced his techniques on."
Jane considered this. It was an interesting theory, and it would explain a lot. "If he grew up in foster care, that could explain in part why he was so drawn to Rosalind Harker. If she told him the story of how she lost her vision, he might have identified with her as someone who could relate to his own negative experience with the system."
"And if he grew up in the system himself, he also would have known it was a good hunting ground for new young recruits when he decided to form his little band of sociopaths," Lisbon added.
"You really think Red John and Orville Tanner were buddies from the time they were kids?" Rigsby asked Lisbon.
Lisbon shrugged. "Why not? It's as good of a theory as any other, at this point."
"What does it say in the file about Caleb and Magdalena's histories?" Jane asked.
She dropped the file on Jane's chest. "Take a look for yourself."
Jane opened the file.
"Like I said, they never found out what happened to the parents," Lisbon said. "Just one more unsolved mystery associated with this case. Though only tangentially related to Red John, of course."
"No," Jane said. "The mystery of Caleb and Magdalena's deaths is not unsolved."
Lisbon frowned. "What do you mean? It says right there in the file the police never caught the guy."
"Oh, the police didn't solve it," Jane said. "I meant that I solved it, just now."
The others stared at him. "You solved a cold case from forty years ago just by looking at the file for five seconds?" Rigsby said disbelievingly.
"Well, to be fair, if this crime had been committed today, the forensic guys with their fancy CSI tricks probably would have figured it out. But back then, they just took a few photographs and called it a day. In this case, however, the photographs of the scene are key."
"Show me," Lisbon demanded.
Jane stood up and placed the file on the table in the middle of the bullpen where they could all see it. "The police never found the man who killed Caleb and Magdalena Tanner because a man didn't kill them."
Rigsby frowned. "A woman, then?"
"No. Take a look at the trajectory of the gunshots. Based on the blood spatter pattern on the wall behind where the Tanners bodies were found, they originate from a point about four feet off the ground and were aimed upwards." Jane held his hand up about four feet from the ground to illustrate his point. "I'd say the average nine year old is about that tall, wouldn't you?"
"Orville killed his parents?" Lisbon said, shocked.
"So it would seem."
"Why would he do that?" Rigsby asked with a frown.
"The answer to that question, I believe, resides in little Adelaide here." Jane showed them a picture of the Tanners as a family, from before any of them had been killed. "In this photo, you can see the pattern of a fading bruise on Adelaide's arm, about the size and shape that a grown man's hand would leave if he grabbed her roughly. Everyone else in the family is looking at the camera, but Adelaide isn't smiling at the camera. She's afraid, and she's looking at her father. He abused her, and she was terrified of him."
He pointed at the other photograph again. "Now look here. Let's say Orville is the one who pulled the trigger. It's fairly easy to imagine what might have happened. Caleb grabs Adelaide out of bed late one night and brings her downstairs after the rest of the family has gone to sleep. This isn't the first time this has happened. Orville wakes up and knows what has happened. He wants to protect his sister, but he's never been able to figure out how to fight his father, a grown man. This time, though, he has a plan. He knows his father keeps his shot gun by the back door, so he creeps downstairs and gets it. He goes into the living room and confronts his father. His father is surprised, and lets go of Adelaide. Adelaide runs and hides behind her brother, but she's crying. By this time, Magdalena has woken up too. She comes downstairs and demands to know what's happening. Orville tells her Caleb has been hurting Adelaide—hurting her in a way no man should ever hurt his daughter. But to his surprise, his mother doesn't take Adelaide's side. She starts yelling at Adelaide, blaming her, and Caleb moves to take the gun away from Orville. Orville panics and fires, and Magdalena is now furious with Orville, too. She steps towards him, and he shoots her, too. He throws down the gun and wipes it for prints, and then he goes to the telephone and calls the police, crying that his parents are dead. They show up and figure it's a robbery gone bad, and no one is ever the wiser."
"Jesus," Rigsby breathed. "What do you think happened after that?"
"I can answer that part," Lisbon said. "Orville and Adelaide were placed in a foster home. They were moved around a fair amount, sometimes together, sometimes apart. Eventually, Adelaide was adopted by a family called the Mitchells out in Galt, and she and Orville were more or less separated for good, although they managed to see each other on holidays now and again. Orville continued getting shuffled from foster home to foster home. I talked to the Mitchells, and they told me once he turned eighteen, he got a job at a gas station in Stockton and petitioned the courts to let Adelaide come live with him, but she had been officially adopted by them by this point and the court ruled against him. About eight years later, he married a girl named Janice Wilkerson and she gave birth to their son, Dumar. Janice was killed by a drunk driver when Dumar was five, and Orville raised him on his own until he was arrested for the murder he helped Red John commit. Meanwhile, Adelaide stayed with the Mitchells until she turned eighteen, at which point she vanished without a trace. The Mitchells reported her missing to the police. Three months after she disappeared, the police find a car in a lake with the body of a young woman answering her general description. The police and the Mitchells believed the body belongs to Adelaide Tanner, but the body was too badly decomposed to make a definitive ID, so an official death certificate was never filed. Here's the thing, though. I ran down the autopsy report that was filed for the woman whose body was found in the lake, and the medical examiner noted that her skeleton indicated that she had experienced a compound fracture of the left leg two years before she died. Adelaide never experienced any broken bones after she moved in with the Mitchells."
"Wow. You really did dig deep on this one," Jane said, impressed.
"Personally, I'm inclined to believe that Adelaide was not the girl in the car," Lisbon continued. "Which means that in 1985, Adelaide Tanner just vanished without a trace, never to be seen or heard from again."
Rigsby did a double take. "Did you say 1985?"
Lisbon looked at him. "Yeah. March of '85. Why?"
Rigsby swallowed. "Because that's the same year Rebecca Anderson turned up working for a county record's office without a past."
Lisbon stared at him. "Are you serious?"
"Let me grab the file," he said, rummaging through his desk. He found the file and opened it, running his finger down a page of his notes. "Yeah. Here it is. The county records office hired her in the fall of 1985."
"You think Adelaide Tanner and Rebecca Anderson are the same person?" Cho asked.
"You have to admit, the timing fits pretty neatly."
"There's a way to check," Jane said. "Rigsby, give me that file."
Rigsby handed it over, and Jane turned to Cho. "Cho, do you have a magnifying glass?"
"No. Why would I have a magnifying glass?"
"All good detectives are supposed to have magnifying glasses," Jane said.
"Says who?"
"It's common knowledge. Don't you know anything?"
Cho folded his arms across his chest. "Where's your magnifying glass, then?"
"I'm not a detective, I'm a consultant," Jane said.
Van Pelt rolled her eyes. "I have a magnifying glass, Jane." She extracted one from her desk and handed it to Jane.
"Thank you, Grace," he said as he accepted it. "Glad to see someone around here has a proper appreciation for the classics."
They all crowded around him to see what he was doing as he opened Rebecca Anderson's file to the picture that had appeared on her CBI badge and the other file to the family photo of the Tanners in which Adelaide was only four years old. Jane pored over the two photographs with the magnifying glass for several minutes before announcing, "It's her."
"How can you tell?" Lisbon demanded, snatching the magnifying glass from him and elbowing him out of the way.
He pointed to the picture of Adelaide. "Facial markers. Look at the slight cleft in the chin, how the ears are ever so slightly pointed, how the left eyebrow is a little bit more arched then the other. Matching one or the other of these individual features wouldn't be conclusive, but taken as a package, there's really very little room for doubt."
"Oh, my God," Lisbon breathed. "It's really her. Rebecca Anderson is Adelaide Tanner."
Rigsby frowned. "If she went missing in March and didn't show up in Sacramento until fall, what was she doing with herself for those missing six months?"
"Shacking up with Red John would be my guess," Jane said.
"You think they were lovers?" Cho asked.
"It would make sense, don't you think? Adelaide was sexually abused by her father at a very young age. It's likely she would have been drawn to an older man with a dominant personality. If she and Orville met him when they were in foster care, she could easily have developed a crush on a charismatic friend of her older brother. You heard how she talked about him when we interviewed her after she killed Bosco and his team. She believed she was in love with him and that he was in love with her."
"You think Red John loved her back?" Rigsby said skeptically.
"Of course not. He would have encouraged her affection for him because he would have seen it as a means to manipulate her for his own ends. And it worked. All he had to do was spend a few months with her and he got a lifetime of devoted service out of her. He probably didn't even give her his full attention during that time- he probably knew he could satisfy her with only scraps of affection while he focused on building his network."
"So now we know Rebecca was Orville's sister," Lisbon said wonderingly. She patted Rigsby's shoulder. "Good work, Wayne."
"Excellent work, both of you," Jane said.
They'd connected one more thread in the spider web.