Thought Police

Disclaimer: If you recognize it, it's not mine. This story is on an AU track.

Chapter 6: Follow the Evidence

"Charlie?"

The young man jumped a bit. "Hey, Lieutenant."

"Please, call me Alex. I didn't mean to startle you; I knocked, but you didn't answer."

He cringed slightly. "Sorry. I guess I can get a little...laser-focused."

She laughed, surprising him. "Don't apologize, it's all very familiar to me. I probably wouldn't know what to do without a laser-focused genius in the building. How's your network tree thing going?"

"Slow," he admitted. "There's a lot of little pieces, and it's not always obvious how they interconnect. Especially in this day and age of the Internet. People who have no apparent connection to each other could have met online over this very issue."

"Maybe this'll help." She handed him a folder, thumbing the cover back so he could see the sketch inside. "We think this man may be involved. Colby said you'd be able to match it up to a face."

"Well, most of the technology is yours anyway," he replied, eyes still fixed on the sketch. "Basic facial recognition software. What I can do is set up the program to run in such a way that it not only identifies matching characteristics, but also takes into account the most likely misses. It creates a wider set to run through, but also gives us a better probability of getting it right."

"Great. And you don't have to worry about getting it down to just one," she added. "If you can get it to a shortlist, I'm sure our witness would be willing to look through some photos. Oh, and the flash drive contains security video footage of McNeil the day he disappeared. Think your network analysis might be able to help us see if someone from the group might've been there, possibly following him?"

Charlie picked the flash drive up, holding it between his thumb and forefinger as he considered the question. "Network analysis may not be ideal for this problem. We don't know if the person following McNeil - assuming there is one - is in any of the files, and if he's not, all the network analysis in the world won't help us there. What may is crowd dynamics."

"Which is..."

"A basic measure of how people move through a space. See, the path that individuals take through a space isn't random. It's dictated by tasks, needs, convenience, obstacles...you get the idea. With something like a subway platform, it's fairly simple to analyze because everyone moving in a given direction presumably has the same objective: they want to get onto the train. Now, if I download the video and run it against my crowd dynamics program, I may be able to identify someone whose patterns don't conform to the overall crowd flow - someone whose path was dictated by a different objective."

"Following McNeil."

Charlie's eyes lit up. "Exactly! And if I can identify an individual, I can work that backwards into my network analysis - this could be a huge breakthrough in filling in the network diagram -"

Alex couldn't help laughing to herself. He really does remind me of someone. "Okay, then, I'll leave you to it."

"Mhm," Charlie said distractedly. "So now, if I just plug this in -"

She gently shut the door, still laughing.

xxxxxxxxx

"Charlie hard at work?" Don said with a smile.

"Oh, yeah. He was in the zone when I came in, and back in it before I left. Nothing new to me," Alex added with a chuckle. "My fiance can get the same way. So can Carolyn, for that matter."

Don nodded, his smile widening. "You know, I remember thinking that Carolyn's obsessiveness reminded me of Charlie. At first I thought it was just me - I've been around the kid for a good portion of my life, after all - but then Ian said the same thing."

"Sounds like you got to know her pretty well," Alex commented.

He shrugged, nodding slightly. "Yeah, that's probably accurate. I mean, for five months, I was working pretty much exclusively with three people. And there was more than a little...I suppose you could call it culture shock. I know that I'm technically in charge, I'm the one who has to make the decisions, but like I said before, I never was one to put up walls based on that. I want us to be a team, with all that entails. John was so young, I could never convince him to think of me as anything other than a superior. And Ian was a loner, he always has been. Carolyn, though...she was someone I could talk to, and someone who wasn't afraid to tell me when she thought I was stepping over a line. As much as she reminded me of Charlie, she also reminded me of my old second-in-command – another outspoken profiler who wasn't afraid to call me to task when she thought I deserved it. And I – I appreciated Carolyn's honesty. I appreciated her."

Alex smiled. "Y'know, it wasn't so different with her and me. Except in my case, it was the permanent team, not a special assignment. When I heard she'd been transferred to my team, I was ecstatic. I'd known Carolyn as an equal years before I got promoted; I thought 'finally, someone who won't walk on eggshells around me'. Of course, now you're telling me that that's just how it is with her. Which I can believe. But it was...refreshing, all the same."

"If you don't mind my asking," he began a little hesitantly, "when did you know her?"

"Um, 2005," she replied after a moment's thought. "She was in Major Case for a year when NYPD re-absorbed her from the FBI - which didn't last, as you know. A couple of months in, the two of us and our respective partners were teamed up to work a messy kidnapping-turned-murder. I knew her from around, enough to say hello, but that's when we really got to know each other. Why do you ask?"

"I was wondering -" he began before cutting himself off. "If I can ask one more question...this guy she's with now, the one you mentioned in the briefing, did she know him then?"

"I should hope so," Alex replied with a laugh, "they were partners. Why?"

He hesitated a moment, glancing around as if to make sure they wouldn't be overheard. "Something she told me once," he said finally. "I'm not entirely sure I should be telling you this, but while we were working together, she and Ian, they, um, they were...involved."

"Involved," she repeated, biting down on the laugh that bubbled up. "And you intervened?"

"Not professionally," he said immediately. "That would be the definition of hypocrisy...which, judging by your expression, you already know on some level. No, I approached Carolyn as a friend, and it wasn't to suggest she end it. I only wanted to make sure she realized...Ian's not the committing type. I didn't want to see her getting her hopes up only to get her heart broken."

"What did she say when you approached her?" Alex asked curiously.

"She laughed," he admitted. "Said thanks for the warning, but she wasn't naive, she knew exactly what she was getting into, and that she didn't want anything more than he did."

"Classic Carolyn." But Alex's smile gave way to an expression of confusion. "But what does this have to do with -"

"It's what she said after that," he interrupted gently. "She told me that she didn't think she could fall in love even if she wanted to, because she'd left her heart behind with a man she knew in New York. She said she hadn't seen him in years, but she couldn't get him out of her head. I told her that if she felt that way, maybe she ought to give it another shot."

Alex's brow furrowed slightly. "I'm not sure it fits. As far as I know, she and Mike only started dating earlier this year."

Don laughed slightly. "Actually, that fits like a glove. When I made the suggestion, she admitted that there hadn't actually been a first shot. She said she thought she'd wrecked her chances with him pretty much right off the bat."

She let out something halfway between a laugh and a snort. "Not according to the way he looked at her when they first saw each other again."

"You were there?"

"Oh, yeah. Not that he seemed to remember anyone else was in the room once she came in. No question, whatever she was afraid of, to him it was in the past."

"I believe it. We talked for a good hour, and she gave me a sense of what had happened. She said that they'd barely known each other a week when she broke a major confidence. She wouldn't tell me what it was, of course, given that her revealing it in the first place seemed to be the root of her problem, but I gathered from the way she talked that it had to be significant. But she did admit that they'd formed a platonic friendship after the incident - which makes sense, if they were partners. At which point I told her that I didn't think she'd screwed things up nearly as much as she thought she had." He smiled at the memory. "I told her, from personal experience, that when it's the right person, there are very few mistakes you can make that would disqualify you from a second chance, and that if they were able to become friends, I doubted that whatever she'd done would rise to that level." He shrugged. "Guess she listened."

"She didn't have much of a choice," Alex replied wryly, "not with the proof staring her right in the face. That first meeting I was talking about was essentially a coincidence - I was in the hospital after I took a bullet during an incident, and they showed up to visit me at the same time. One look at each other and you could practically see the sparks flying off them. I think he had her on the brain just as much as she did for him."

Don chuckled again. "Sounds a lot like me and my wife," he admitted, absently running his finger over the ring on his left hand, much as Alex had caught herself doing many times when she thought of Bobby. "Dated for six months, broke up for a little over a year, and when we saw each other again..." He shook his head, looking for the right words. "Of course, in our case, there were still some hard feelings over the breakup, so it wasn't exactly a joyful reunion at first, but the feelings...they were still there. Even after all the hurt I'd felt, I still loved her."

"Apparently it worked out," she commented wryly.

Don smiled, but Alex couldn't help but think that it looked just a bit forced. "Yeah. I suppose it did."

xxxxxxxxx

"You said you had something?" Nikki called out to the tech as soon as she was within earshot, not even bothering with a greeting.

"I do," he replied as Nikki and Liz walked close enough that he didn't have to shout. "An unusual something, at that." He beckoned them around to the rear of the car. "Take a look at this bumper."

"It looks loose," Liz commented.

"It is loose," the tech confirmed. "And not from an impact. It wasn't attached properly to the frame. It looks like whoever put this on either didn't know what they were doing or was in one hell of a hurry. And there's another piece to it," he added. "Something looked a little off, so I took paint from the bumper and from the body for comparison. See, to the naked eye, they appear to be the same. But when I tested them, the compositions came back different. This bumper was painted with a different paint than the rest of the car. I'm running tests on the metal to confirm, but I don't think this is the bumper the car came with."

"So a new bumper that was probably not attached by a professional..."

"It's possible, of course, that your victim was just a do-it-yourselfer, but I doubt it. There are almost no wear marks from the bumper rubbing back and forth; if she'd been driving it around like that, there would be. If I had to guess, I'd say that whoever dumped the car replaced the bumper for some reason. I'm having it pulled, I'll look for anything we can use to track it."

xxxxxxxxx

"So they took off the existing bumper," Cho effectively paraphrased the report the team had just been given. "Why?"

It wasn't really a question meant for the room, but Alex answered anyway. "There has to have been a good reason - good for them, anyway. Replacing a bumper is no easy task, it would've taken quite a bit of time and effort." Several people shot glances at her, and she blushed slightly. "Hey, everyone needs a hobby."

"So, they probably assumed someone would find the car eventually," Lisbon said after a moment. "At the very least, they knew it was a possibility. So there was something about the bumper that they wanted to make sure we didn't see, to the point of going to all that trouble."

"Something they couldn't wash off," Colby added. "The tech at the scene said the car looked like it had been scrubbed clean, inside and out. So that would exclude fingerprints, blood -"

"Paint," Don said suddenly, drawing everyone's attention. "Specifically, paint transfer from another car."

"You're thinking she was hit from behind?" Lisbon asked.

"Sure. We've seen it before, it's probably the easiest way to catch someone with their guard down and at a place of the suspect's choosing. Victim gets rear-ended, pulls over to do the whole insurance thing, doesn't realize anything's amiss until it's too late."

Alex's attention was drawn away from Don by the sound of fingers tapping rhythmically on the table behind her. Zach's fingers, she realized after a moment, moving back and forth across the surface as he sat with an expression of such deep contemplation that she was sure he didn't even realize what his hand was doing. "Something you want to share with the class, Detective?"

"I'm just thinking," Zach began slowly. "Don makes a good point about being able to choose the place along Carolyn's route. Even in New York, there are streets that wouldn't have much traffic. But there weren't any areas like that on John' trip. Anywhere they tried to take him, there would have been a witness to any kind of struggle, and I can't imagine an FBI agent going down without one."

"He's right." That was Don. "McNeil's specialty was tech, but he was no slouch on the range or in hand-to-hand. I can't imagine anyone taking him down quickly and quietly enough for no one to notice."

"If someone had a weapon on him -" Jane began.

"Spoken like a true civilian," Lisbon interrupted teasingly. "Agents are trained to get out of that exact situation. A gun to the head might be an exception, but that's much too visible for this scenario."

"Unless he couldn't fight back," Alex suggested. "What if he was drugged?"

Zach turned towards her. "What are you thinking?"

"My partner and I worked a case about ten years ago. Guy was murdered in a subway in full view of at least a dozen people, and no one saw anything - for real, not the intentional blind eye. Turned out, his killer had 'bumped' into him and used that moment to inject him with a fatal drug. What if someone 'bumped' McNeil with some kind of tranquilizer?"

Liz was nodding slowly. "I see where you're going. Not something that would knock him out - too likely someone would remember a guy passing out in the middle of the sidewalk - but there are drugs out there that would make someone pliable, compliant. His abductor could have dosed him and then walked him right into his own kidnapping."

"No struggle, so nothing to catch anyone's attention," Nikki finished. "We'd never prove it in court, but it's a place to start."

"We need to two-track this," Alex said authoritatively, though she was working a few silent calculations of her own. "Wylie, you keep working on what you're working on - same'll go for Charlie, those are the exceptions. Cho, from here on out you're lead on McNeil's kidnapping; Jane, Lisbon, Liz, Nikki, you'll be with Cho. The rest of you are with me, we'll focus on Barek. Full information sharing, but I don't want any details being missed because everyone's looking at too big a picture. Let's get to work."

In case anyone's wondering about the two groups and why Alex split them the way she did, the idea that she's calculating in the last paragraph is how to keep the groups roughly equal in ability. So, for example, she puts Jane in one group and Zach in the other so that each group would have someone with people-reading skills.

I'm aware that it's a little odd that I've been primarily referring to the LA team by first names and the Texas team by last names (except once in a while when Alex is giving orders), but I'm just following the lead of the shows; in Numb3rs, the agents use first names to refer to each other, while in The Mentalist, they all go by last names, even off duty for the most part.

Crowd dynamic is another tool that Charlie uses in Brutus. The subway murder that Alex mentions occurs in the CI episode Great Barrier, and is committed by an accomplice of drug aficionado Nicole Wallace.

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