Title: Charlotte's Web (Chapter 43)
Rating: M for graphic violence and language
Fandom: The Mentalist
Summary: Patrick Jane has lived his life obsessed with the capture of Red John ever since finding his beloved wife and daughter slain by the maniac's hand. Now, 10 years to the day after that horrific night, a young woman appears in Patrick's life, someone who threatens to destroy everything his life has become in the interim… if not his sanity, itself.
Author's Note: It's been more than 2 years ago that I thought I'd write a short little Mentalist fic for my sister. This thing has taken on a life if its own and morphed into a story that is more real to me in some ways than my own life. I'll be lying in my living room in the July heat, trying to sleep, and hear the characters from this story talking to one another, see the expressions on their faces, even smell the fires of the explosion. A while ago I thought I was maybe 80% of the way done. Now I realize that there is a lot more to the story. For those of you who like this and write reviews- thank you so much! It is nice to know this story is being read and is creeping at least a few of you guys out. There are so many details to keep track of. If I mess something up, my apologies in advance. For the teen who asked me if I plan to finish this- yes, although sometimes there may be lags between chapters, just because of the way life can be sometimes…
Holding back the years /Thinking of the fear I've had so long/When somebody hears/Listen to the fear that's gone/Strangled by the wishes of pater/Hoping for the arms of mater/Get to me the sooner or later – "Holding Back the Years" by Simply Red
"I am standing up at the water's edge in my dream
I cannot make a single sound as you scream
it can't be that cold, the ground is still warm to touch
this place is so quiet, sensing that storm" – Red Rain by Peter Gabriel
Tuesday, November 14th, 2013 3:03 p.m. PST
Jane drove the rental and Lisbon watched him from the corner of her vision.
To someone who didn't know him intimately he seemed fine, even carefree. And that was part of the problem.
There was no way he could be carefree at this stage in the game, and he knew Lisbon well enough not to fake emotions to this degree with her, and yet, that was exactly what he was doing. She could sense he wanted to grin at her. His carnival barker grin, his Crest toothpaste commercial grin. Smiling at this point was almost scary to Lisbon, garish and unnatural, but his mouth was twitching, all-too-willing to continue the illusion. Everything was fine. He was fine.
He was always fine.
The voice coming out of the child on the locked ward continued to loop in Lisbon's mind.
That hadn't been a little Latino boy's voice up there in that interview room with the recycled air and the permanent smell imprints of pine sol and peanut butter. No, not a little kid at all.
It had sounded almost recorded, more real than real to Lisbon's startled ears. Middle-aged man with a smoker's cough, something taunting and horny in the voice, predatory and full of salacious need leaking out a little Mexican boy's mouth. Impossible. If she hadn't been there, she wouldn't have believed it. If anybody had told her about the interaction, she would have assumed they were exaggerating, over-worked and over-stressed, maybe in need of a psych assessment.
But she had been there, for crying out loud, and that impossible voice had been there. The cold spots, the shadow over Elian's washed-out features, the way her skin had prickled unnaturally. She had been there, and she had heard.
Lisbon forced herself to look away from Jane. Having that voice looping in her mind, the memory of it, while looking at the man she had come to think of as her partner almost felt like a betrayal of sorts. The sound of that voice had been gross, a voice that made you want to take a shower just from hearing it.
The words were chilling, in and of themselves. But the voice, the actual voice, so much was wrong with that oily smoker's-cough-voice. So much lust and unnatural need.
("On your belly, Tricky boy… on your… belly…you little trick…")
She couldn't prove it, of course, but on a cellular level, she knew Jane had heard those words before.
His face had changed when "Elian" had spoken those words to him- first confusion, then recognition and repulsion, a growing horror, a look she had come to associate with Jane when he was feeling squeamish and a bit lightheaded.
He'd gotten similar looks on his face when guns were pulled suddenly, when he suddenly came face to face with bloody injury (usually the type of gaping flesh wound that required surgical intervention), when someone threw up. Except… the look on his face earlier today had been worse, much more than mere squeamishness.
Under that squeamishness was something worse than Jane's aversion to blood and guns, something borne of shame and secrecy, something no amount of scrubbing under a hot shower spray could get rid of.
All of these emotions playing out over his Adonis features in the span of three seconds, a surreal kaleidoscope of emotions. An impossible interplay of emotions, if Jane's explanation of events was to be taken at face value.
Jane had heard those words before. She knew it.
She knew it the same way she'd known Tommy's split lip at the age of 12- the lip that had needed several stitches to keep closed- hadn't been caused by an innocent tumble down the stairs after tripping on his skateboard. She knew it the same way she'd known her father's headaches in the morning were caused by vodka, not "stress", the same way she could read between the lines when interviewing suspects, the same way she'd known, at age 7, that her goldfish had died and not really "gone on vacation".
Consciously, however, she could not prove that the personality that had manifested in the little boy up there on that damned locked ward was someone from Jane's childhood.
On a conscious level, she did not want to believe, because believing opened up a sickening and perverted Pandora's box that could never again be closed. Believing the boy's words opened up an abusive childhood for Jane that made her want to vomit.
His smile and his showmanship and skill at manipulation and misdirection and- to be crass- fucking with people's heads- it all took on much more sinister tones if those words were true.
Jane wasn't merely a mentalist anymore, he was a survivor and part of his mentalist act was a response to abuse… If those words were true.
The grin. The showmanship. The crafty dodging of personal information. All of it... Jane… he was so damned good at getting close to others, unraveling the onion layers of strangers' lives, but when it came to his own life? You only ever saw exactly what he wanted you to see.
Lisbon shut her eyes, now, and ran through what she knew of Jane, what she could remember of his responses to various scenarios, and she came up against a neatly bricked wall of obfuscation.
Abused children learned early to bottle up their emotions, to avoid awkward questions and present a façade of normalcy. If they had been threatened? They could become very skilled at giving people what they wanted, at playing others' emotions like fiddles.
The brighter the child, the better they were at inventing cover stories, cover lives, and sticking to the little details that people swallowed hook, line and sinker. And because most people were just fine with denial and pretending things were fine when they really, really weren't, well… was it any wonder so much abuse and neglect, degradation and buggery went unnoticed, unreported and untreated?
There were clues things were "off", though, always. If someone was trained and knew where to look, they could sometimes see what was going on. The smiles of survivors were usually a little too bright, a little too put-on. They were always a little too eager for the pat on the back, for acceptance and for approval.
They tended to either be people-pleasers or push buttons and elicit others' annoyance and anger, anything to refocus attention away from those pesky uncomfortable questions, anything to distract away from those awful truths… Jane was a button-pusher and people-pleaser rolled into one, a showman who could alter his routine to suit his needs for the moment.
Lisbon had seen these personality traits pop up over and over again in some of the worst cases she had worked on, some of the most heart-breaking cases, the ones that made her question if she was in the right line of work…
(My God, Jane, what happened to you?)
She'd known almost from the beginning that Jane had faced severe childhood neglect and possible abuse. She wasn't a mentalist like he was, but she wasn't stupid, either. As a boy, Jane had been shuffled around, in and out of the California child protective service agencies after hitting puberty, popping up in the system over and over like a blonde little whack-a-mole with an infuriatingly contagious grin. Truancy. Pick-pocketing. Loitering. Disturbing the Peace (that entry made her smile, wryly). Shoplifting. Shoplifting. Notes on the second shoplifting charge that the young Jane had claimed to be "hungry".
She'd done some digging into Jane's past a few months into working with him, when some of the comments he had made, off-handedly, had piqued her curiosity. She'd put in some calls to some people in child protective services who owed her, gotten the yellowed files mailed to her home address, old type-written paperwork, back before computers had digitized everything.
She hadn't wanted to take a chance on having the files delivered to the CBI. Jane was too canny. Even a few months into working with him, she knew he had almost supernatural skills at figuring things out, and she didn't want him to know she was digging into his childhood.
He'd spent some time in foster care at the age of 12, in a boys' detention facility for shoplifting and truancy a few weeks into his thirteenth year. The files were missing a lot of pertinent information, but Lisbon had been able to read between the lines.
Her own father had been an abusive alcoholic and neighbors had phoned the police on him several times when his demons were unleashed by liquor. Her younger brother, Tommy, had engaged in underage drinking and gone on a joyride when he was 14, earning himself a few months in juvie. Lisbon was no stranger to dysfunctional families, to the "system" in California, as it pertained to children at risk.
And she'd interviewed abused kids. Not often, but enough to get a feel for the language, the facial expressions, the way adult survivors behaved, the body language.
With Jane it was easy to explain a lot of his behavior away as being a part of his act, part of what he was paid for. He was good at grinning and reading people and playing their fears against them when they got too close to him, too personal.
Jane could hide more than the average person, that was for certain, and some of it… Lisbon's mind whirled. What exactly had Jane gone through as a little boy? Had it been mere neglect and truancy from school? Smoking with midgets, riding elephants and pick-pocketing Southern tourists who had come up to California on summer break to go to Disney and stopped by the travelling freak show on the way? Or had there been a lot more darkness there?
("On your belly, Tricky boy… on your… belly…you little trick…")
"What are you thinking about?" Jane said, then, and Lisbon shuddered and shook her head, trying to clear the visions that were coming to her. She opened her eyes and found Jane's piercing blue orbs focused on her.
She still felt cold from that room, chilled through to the bone.
Lisbon shuddered, and remembered.
Elian's eyes towards the end hadn't really looked like a child's eyes any longer. Then Jane had counted him back to conscious awareness and the kid had opened his eyes only for one to be full of blood and the other one fully bloodshot, if not ready to leak.
Subconjuctival hemorrhage.
Many ordinary things could cause the blood vessels in the eyes to break- violent sneezing, vitamin C deficiencies, a blow to the head, high blood pressure. So why was she so certain the blood in the kid's eye was a result of something spooky, something weird and supernatural?
"Lisbon?" Jane prodded gently and Lisbon turned to her partner, smiled a tight little smile at him that didn't fool him for a second.
"Yeah?"
"You okay?" Jane asked, protectively. The words repeated in her mind and she forced herself to swallow. It felt like swallowing through a pinhole. ("on your… belly…you little trick…") She felt a bit headachy now, a bit nauseated, a bit too hot in the air-conditioned rental car.
"I'm okay," Lisbon said automatically. It was a standard stop-gap response, practically meaningless as a form of communication and Jane's eyebrows rose a little. What else could she say? Here she was, swimming in worry for Jane, and he was doing the protective shrink thing again. God, she had to get it together.
There was silence, then, as Jane went inward, blue eyes scanning the road in front of him as if maybe the sea of Audis and Suzukis and Hyundais held the answers he sought. The air conditioning was on in the little rental car- and it needed to be on- but to Lisbon it was a reminder of the temperature drop in the room and the way her skin had burst into goose pimples when that voice had come through the boy, the voice that couldn't possibly have been his...
"You think we could go through drive thru, maybe get some coffee?" Lisbon mumbled. A nice, safe, mundane request. Jane nodded immediately. Mundane sounded good right about now.
"Tired?"
"Headachy. I'm thinking possible caffeine withdrawal or something."
"Or something…" Jane repeated, and something about his echo needled her. Lisbon remained silent. Pushed at her temples. Jane waited while she got herself together, blue eyes scanning over the road, features too relaxed.
"Elian… his voice…" Lisbon said slowly, wading through words and ideas as if through mud. Jane nodded sadly.
"I am thinking some sort of dissociative disorder. Kid with a history of abuse, and then long-term exposure to Red John's particular variety of crazy? More than enough to explain dissociative identity disorder, or something related, anyway."
"You mean the way he switched voices?" Lisbon queried. She didn't buy that explanation for a second but knew it was the explanation that sounded the best, made the most sense on paper. It was the "sane" explanation, the safe explanation.
She also knew it was bullshit and that Jane didn't really believe it himself. He wanted to believe it, but he couldn't believe it… he couldn't.
Her voice sounded too high to her own ears and she hated the whining quality to it. Jane must have noticed, but he let the sound of her voice slide without even a protective glance. Good old Jane. He played nice when it counted…
"Yeah. Whatever drove this little kid to the Chicken Man in the first place couldn't have been kosher. He might have started out in desperate need of psychiatric assistance. And then… being exposed to Red John's antics would have only augmented whatever latent psychiatric problems the boy was developing. More than enough to explain multiple personalities."
"But those voices. They sounded so…" She didn't finish her sentence.
"Real?" Jane prodded, smiling darkly. There was no innocence in the smile, only steadfast resolve. Lisbon nodded dolefully.
"The human mind is capable of incredible things, Lisbon. Apply enough trauma to a developing mind, and the mind is capable of becoming, essentially, different people." Jane sounded like his regular self, confident and a little too smooth, a little too pedantic.
Lisbon had been in that room.
"Hell, the US military counts on it," Jane added, some sort of dark little jab at the government that Lisbon didn't know what to make of.
"Huh?"
"You know, MK-ultra and experiments on housewives and soldiers in the 60s? Mega-doses of LSD and electroshock? All to create the ideal killing machine? You should read up on history, Lisbon…"
"Yeah," Lisbon murmured, not sure now if Jane was goading her or not. She settled back into silence, shut her eyes and did some relaxation exercises. Imagined the developing pain in her brain dimming and fading away.
Those exercises had never really helped her, not really, but Jane claimed they'd work wonders if "done right". …
She wanted to accept his interpretation, but it felt wrong. It felt too easy and too simplistic- it was the type of response that looked good on paper and made the skeptics happy, but in her bones she wasn't buying it. It was the type of response Jane, himself, usually scoffed at and ignored. The fact that he was pushing it now made her even more worried for him.
She was silent, pushing down her rising annoyance, her desire to argue and push Jane's buttons. There was a lot of darkness in this topic, a lot of potential for hurt, and feeling irritable and annoyed didn't bode well for a productive conversation.
She kept imagining, instead, the headache dimming away, the bright scarlet and crimson streaks of pain dulling to a soft pink, leaking away into black, into nothing…
But the words came back to her, almost immediately. Lisbon's mind rewound through the interview, analyzing weirdness, looking for anything to use as a red flag.
Jane was stubborn as Hell, but so was she…
"The temperature in the room, though… you must have felt how cold it got, suddenly?" She knew he wasn't going to budge. Jane had a way to make this make sense, and he was going to stick with it. She could see that.
He was as rattled as she was, and he wasn't going to admit to that, so he was going with the safe version of events.
He never went with the safe version of events. It was further confirmation of how off-script they were in all this.
"Those hospitals tend to have wonky air-conditioning units. They can come on suddenly. Most of the time we don't notice them. It was just a coincidence, Lisbon. A blast of the AC combined with a disturbed child doing voices and, presto change-o, you have some supernatural event on par with the scariest scenes in The Exorcist. Nothing that can't be explained by Penn and Teller on a bad day."
Lisbon shuddered at his comparison, because it was a little too on the money to be cute.
Also… that explanation felt wrong too. The air had suddenly gone cold in a hurry, like someone opening the door to a walk in freezer. Lisbon had been in enough hospitals and jails to get a feel for wonky air conditioning units. This had been something else.
"What he said to you, though…" Lisbon started and then trailed off. She wasn't sure she wanted to get into this with Jane, not now, not without knowing more about what those words might mean. But how could she ever figure out what those words might mean? If Jane had been abused in that way, it hadn't been in his file.
("On your belly, Tricky boy… on your… belly…you little trick…")
"What did he say to me?" Jane asked calmly, as if he was a psychiatrist and Lisbon was a patient he was seeing, a patient on the edge of a breakdown. His voice irritated her and she wondered if that wasn't an intentional tactic on his part.
Lisbon sighed and stilled herself. Ran Elian's words through her head. Tried to see Jane's face in her mind again, as he had looked the moment Elian had told him to get on his belly. But the memory was already beginning to fade and she couldn't be absolutely certain what she had seen anymore. She had never cultivated a memory palace like Jane had, and she didn't have his confidence in her own abilities when it came to memory.
"He called you a little trick… and said something about getting on your belly…"
And there it was, again.
Just for a moment, a flash on Jane's face, a sudden flash of fear and panic. It was gone in a second. Like a flashbulb going off when a photo is taken, the briefest explosion of fear, half a second of reality and then it was gone and Jane was in control again and his emotions and memories (if that was what was even going on) were pushed back down.
"Probably telling us about his own traumatic past, Lisbon. And being exposed to Red John for so long, I wouldn't be surprised if he picked up some stuff about my past, like my childhood nicknames, enough to mix into his own traumatic memories, enough to sound real, to get a reaction. Like you've said a few times now, that voice was really something."
Lisbon nodded at that. Jane was too smooth and too good at explaining things away and she was too tired, too on edge, too headachy to go up against him.
"You want Starbucks or is Mickey Dee's okay?" Jane asked, seeing various fast food outlets in the distance, remembering her earlier request for coffee.
"Anything with caffeine," Lisbon said with considerable fatigue and Jane nodded, pulled into a drive-thru for Burger King and patted his suit jacket for his debit card. Lisbon let him pay.
Tuesday, November 14th, 2013 3:23 p.m. PST
They were almost at the little apartment complex Charlotte had been living in when Lisbon's cell went off. She pulled it from her breast pocket, said her name into the receiver.
"So… just so you don't hear it from Rigsby first…" It was Van Pelt, and she sounded a little rattled. Lisbon grinned at the sound of her colleague's voice. It was nice to know she wasn't the only rattled female around.
"Van Pelt. What's up?"
"Um… so yeah. Rigsby was watching Charlotte, went to pay for some pizzas because apparently pizza is how you make silent teenage girls like you, comes back and Charlotte has decided to… well, she took off, Boss."
"Where is she now?!" Lisbon blurted, voice ratcheting up into anxiety. Jane shot her a look, concerned not only by her tone of voice but by her question. Lisbon held up a hand to him, to silence him.
"Yeah, it's okay, we found her. It was Cho's idea, really… we went up to the attic and there she was, in Jane's… in the attic."
Lisbon exhaled noisily.
"Did something happen?"
"Not that I can tell. She got a chance to run, and she took it. Cho said she was looking through Jane's Red John files. We're still not sure how she actually got into the attic. The working theory is she picked the lock but… who knows. She's certainly Jane's kid." A touch of affection in those last words.
"Okay," Lisbon said slowly, taking all of this is in. "Where was Cho at the time?"
"I'm not sure. Maybe the bathroom? I was on lunch break."
"And how is she now?" Lisbon questioned, eyeing Jane who looked genuinely concerned, only hearing her half of the conversation.
"Good, I guess? This kid is hard to get a read on, Boss. Didn't really offer much of an explanation and didn't say what she wanted with Jane's files. She's back in the bullpen, now, playing Farmville on her facebook account as we speak like nothing happened."
"Okay. Listen… somebody has to stay with her every second if she is going to pull that kind of crap." Lisbon's voice was saturated in fatigue. She'd said something nearly identical to Cho once, after Jane had decided to go AWOL and trespass onto government property.
Part of her wanted to throttle Charlotte, the same way she got the occasional urge to strangle Jane when they were on a high-stakes case and he did something that caused her blood pressure to skyrocket. But Jane was watching her with his concerned blue eyes, and she forced herself to calm down.
"Yeah, got it. She won't be left alone again." Van Pelt sounded appropriately apologetic. That was good.
"Okay. Make sure Rigsby understands," Lisbon emphasized.
"Yeah, I think he understands now," Van Pelt said wryly. Lisbon sighed.
"You guys okay?" Van Pelt asked after a moment of silence. Lisbon nodded, remembered Van Pelt couldn't actually see her, and spoke.
"Yeah, just a long day. We shouldn't be out much past five. If you can get her to open up…"
"Oh, we tried," Van Pelt said, and Lisbon heard the same wry tone. "Well, I should say, Rigsby tried. Kid has her Dad's penchant for taking off at the drop of a hat and picking locks- or whatever- but seems to be lacking his extroversion and all-around social skills."
"Yeah," Lisbon mumbled, eyes shifting from the road and back to Jane, then back to the road. Jane was hanging on her every word. "Okay. Just… when I say watch her, I mean… you're going to have to escort her to the washroom."
"Yeah, that'll go over well," Van Pelt muttered dryly. Lisbon made a face Van Pelt couldn't see.
"Actions have consequences," Lisbon muttered, meeting Jane's eyes, nodding at him to let him know nothing disastrous had happened.
"We'll call you when we're done here," Lisbon added, waited for Van Pelt to say okay, and disconnected the phone. Jane was waiting patiently to be filled in.
"Charlotte decided to ditch Rigsby when he went to pay the Dominoes guy and ransacked your Red John files. Nobody can figure out how she actually got into the attic. Any theories?"
Jane shrugged at that, as if it didn't really matter.
"It's easy enough to make lock-picking tools out of regular tools available at most hardware stores. For the extra-lazy lock-pick enthusiast, there are various kits available online for reasonable prices," Jane elaborated. Lisbon nodded, smiled a little bit at Jane's banter. Her heart was still going a little too fast for her to really enjoy his cavalier playfulness.
"She really took off?" Jane said after a minute, a smile starting up on his lips.
"Yup," Lisbon acknowledged.
"Who was supposed to be watching her?" Jane persisted, grinning wider now. At times like these, he almost reminded her of the Joker from the old Batman TV show.
"Rigsby," Lisbon said, forcing herself not to smile a little bit with that admission.
"Can you imagine the look of his little puppy face when he came back and found her missing?" Jane announced, eyes twinkling. Lisbon could, actually, and the mental image was pretty funny. She covered her mouth with one hand, scrubbed at her lips as if her smile could be so easily rubbed off.
"Ahhh, it's good to smile at the routine craziness of life," Jane philosophized grandly, as if he were some great sage. Lisbon nodded at him. Sure, Jane. Sure.
They drove for a while longer then, neither speaking, lost in thoughts, fatigued and overwhelmed and in desperate need of long, sunny vacations.
There was silence, but it wasn't awkward. They were driving along tree-lined streets, winding their way back to the apartment Charlotte had called home not long ago. The shadows of old oaks fell across the rental car and sunlight flickered over Jane's face as he drove, creating an unsettling strobe-like effect.
"I wonder what she thought she'd find in my Red John files that she didn't already know about the fiend?" Jane asked the inside of the car. Lisbon said nothing to this.
Five minutes later Jane had parked the car and was gazing up at the outside of Charlotte's previous rental apartment.
"Maybe they packed up some of her stuff," Jane started, and clicked his way out of the car. "One can hope," he said, huffing out a deep exhalation and tapping on the roof of the rental before slamming the door. Lisbon followed him, walking alongside him up the path to the manager's office.
Tuesday, November 14th, 2013 3:38 p.m. PST
The manager was a portly man who eyed Jane and Lisbon with a bored expression on his face, as if visits from the CBI were something he dealt with on a near-daily basis and had long since grown tired of. Lisbon always found this sort of response a little amusing, herself, even if aspects of it seemed disrespectful. How incredibly jaded did a person have to be to be approached by a detective of some alphabet suit agency and not give a shit?
"The police went over everything right after this whole mess happened, of course, but then left me with the costs for repainting and repair. The damage deposit didn't cover what I had to shell out, not by half. It's not in my work description to have to deal with poisonous animals, you know. I had to hire a professional to come in and deal with all those things. The rental agreement stipulates only 1 pet. Normal type pets, that is. Like hamsters. Costs for wrangling those snakes and spiders was through the roof! Not many people want to risk being bit by some poisonous snake!"
"Venomous snake," Jane corrected, shooting Lisbon a glance. Lisbon ignored him.
"Huh?"
"Poison is ingested, venom is injected by living things. Snakes that bite you and make you sick? They're venomous, not poisonous. As are those nasty spiders you were complaining about. But don't worry, it's a common error."
"Yeah… well… whatever they were… I don't get paid to deal with deadly animals. What sort of whacko kid keeps poisonous animals stacked up to the ceiling?"
"A whacko one?" Jane asked playfully. Lisbon shot him a look. The manager stared at him, not sure if he was being mocked or not. Finally nodded.
"Yeah, that's right," the manager agreed. "Real little whack job. Cost me a fortune altogether to clean up and deal with the animals."
"That's unfortunate," Jane said diplomatically. The manager unlocked the front door of what had been Charlotte's apartment and showed them around. It had been freshly painted, the carpets had been cleaned. The apartment smelled of latex paint. There were no venomous creatures in sight.
"We waited a week for the police to come and get her stuff, but they weren't interested in it, so we sent the furniture to the dump," the manager said, shrugging his shoulders. "Not our policy to hold onto stuff for more than a week. And it costs to store things."
"You kept nothing?" Jane said, gazing around, wandering into the little kitchen, opening oak cabinet doors and peering inside as if he might find something of interest.
"I didn't clear the stuff out. There is a kid who lives here, unit 12 B, named Milo? He does scut work for me sometimes. In return, I pay him a small fee. He cleaned out most of the stuff. If there is anything left, he'll know where it is. My guess is he junked it all, though. But you never know, he might have kept something for himself."
"Okay," Jane said, wandering around the unit, knocking on walls, looking in the small walk in closet in the bedroom, eyes scanning methodically over the drywall and linoleum, the faux-wood paneling and the baseboards.
"The police have already been through here," the manager informed Jane bluntly. Jane just smiled at that, clearly not satisfied.
"The police tend to miss what is right in front of them," Jane said, and Lisbon could hear the taunt in his words. She smiled at the manager and strove to think of something she could ask this man that might be pertinent.
"In fact," Jane continued, clearly not done with his venting, "there could be a dead body right in front of the police, and they might miss it. Mistake it for a pile of laundry, or something."
The manager tittered a little at this, nodding his head at Jane. Jane grinned at Lisbon, thrilled with his new fan.
"This Milo? Could we talk to him?"
"If he's in," the manager said slowly, eying Jane as if Jane might decide to swipe the glass light shade in the bedroom ceiling. Apparently just making the guy chuckle a bit didn't earn his trust. Jane knocked a few times more on the walls, eyes scanning for… what? Was he looking for secret compartments?
The manager must have had the same thought as Lisbon at the same time because he grinned at Jane and said: "There are no loose floor boards or anything. No secret rooms."
"Huh," Jane said back, non-committal, flashing his winning smile. The manager looked back to Lisbon, unsure of how to process Jane's response.
"Milo, is it? Where would he have stored anything, if he decided to store it?" Lisbon said, ignoring Jane as he wandered around in seemingly aimless circles, tapping away.
"Anything he didn't keep for himself and didn't throw out, I guess…. He might have stored in the downstairs storage. He's done that before. Sometimes a kid gets here, has nothing, and he can help them out with old furniture and dishes, that sort of thing. We had a bedbug infestation a few years ago, so we generally junk everything now, but Milo knows what to look for. So… you never know."
"Did Milo know Charlotte?" Jane said from down the hall, from what Lisbon thought might be the bathroom.
"I guess so," the nameless manager called back to Jane. "Milo was sort of a live-in handiman so he tended to know everyone to greater and lesser degrees. There ain't no secret panic room in the bathroom, either."
Jane came back out of the bathroom, stride full of determination. Lisbon knew he was done here.
"To what degree did he know Charlotte?" Jane prodded. The manager shrugged.
"Honestly, I don't know. I manage twelve different buildings for at-risk youth. I'm only on site when something big comes up. As a general rule."
"Something big come up today?"
"One of the kids accidentally lit his living room couch on fire," the manager said, sounding almost as exhausted as Lisbon felt. Jane nodded.
"You have keys for the downstairs storage?" Jane asked, walking back into the main living room. The manager trailed after Jane, nodding.
"Yeah, but if there is anything down there, there is probably a padlock on it and I wouldn't have keys for that, necessarily."
"But if Milo isn't in, just means we have to come back another day," Jane explained, stepping out into the dimly lit hallway, waiting for Lisbon to join him. "And there are several different alphabet soup agencies at work on this case, so it could be that they decide in two weeks or a month they have to check out the downstairs storage or whatever, then they get a warrant, make a big mess like they always have to do when somebody else is footing the clean up bill… maybe even destroy the unit looking for secret cubby holes because they don't have the common sense to knock like I did…"
"I have a key you can use," the manager said, sighing, pulling a key ring out of his pocket and fishing a key off the ring.
"This key will get you downstairs and into the storage unit itself. Again, when it comes to individual locked units, I don't have the keys. Check with Milo." He handed Jane the key and Jane pocketed it.
"I'll be in the manager's office until about 6 tonight. I'd appreciate that back" the man said, darting Jane a skeptical look and wandering away down the hallway. Jane watched him go, looked down at Lisbon.
"What do you say we go find this Milo?" Jane asked her in a soft voice, jingling the key at her. Lisbon nodded at him.
Tuesday, November 14th, 2013 4:03 p.m. PST
Milo was a 19-year-old stoner with a beard that could barely be called a beard, wearing a stained old Ramones t-shirt and surfer shorts and flip flops. He finally answered Jane's knocking on the tenth knock, opening the door with squinty eyes, rubbing at his not-a-beard. Eyes about as glassy as Jane had ever seen eyes.
"Milo?" Jane said brightly.
"Yeah?" the young man said and scratched at the side of his not-a-beard again. Jane nodded.
"I'm Patrick Jane and this is my partner Teresa Lisbon. We're here with the CBI, tying up some loose ends on a case. We were wondering if you kept anything from the suite you recently cleaned out?"
Milo stared at Jane for a long moment, as if Jane were a Martian. He rubbed his chin again.
"What's the CTI?"
"Cee-Bee-Eye," Jane said slowly, stretching out each letter like he was teaching a baby to speak for the first time. "California Bureau of Investigation. We're sort of like the FBI, but we only operate in California."
"You got… ID or something like that?" Milo said slowly. Jane grinned at him and pulled out his laminated CBI badge. Handed it to the kid. Milo took the badge and squinted at it, scratched the surface with the nail of right pointer finger, squinted some more.
"I've never seen one of these before," Milo said, trying to act like a concerned citizen. "How am I supposed to know if this is real? You could be men in black for all I know…"
"Don't they usually wear black and sunglasses?" Jane countered. Milo squinted again.
"Man, I don't know, this could be anything," Milo said, flapping Jane's ID at him. Jane took the ID back.
"Yeah, sure. But all ID could be anything, right? For all any of us know, we live in a giant hologram, right? A giant digital matrix?"
"Yeah," Milo agreed, nodding again, a smile on his lips now. "Yeah."
"But you strike me as a discerning type of individual, able to get a good read on people. Negative entities, they give off a certain sensation you can pick up on, right?"
Milo stared at Jane, as if coming to a sudden epiphany about himself. He finally nodded, smile growing wider.
"Yeah! That's right!"
"Right. And it takes one good guy to recognize another good guy, am I right?" Jane said, smiling over at Lisbon, eyes glittering. He was having fun.
"Yeah, man," Milo said, nodding his head.
"Nice to meet you, friend of the people," Jane said, extending his hand for a shake. Milo took it, shook Jane's hand a little too forcefully for someone so stoned and stared back at Jane.
"Okay, man, you convinced me. What was it you wanted?"
"The apartment you cleaned out recently? Did you save anything from it?" Lisbon interjected before Jane could play with the kid anymore. Milo screwed up his face as he ran back through the long, time-altered days.
"Charlotte's apartment?" He said in a slow drawl. Jane nodded immediately, grinning at the young man.
"Yes, that's right. Charlotte's apartment. The building manager said you might have stored some of her stuff downstairs?" Jane was grinning almost from ear to ear.
"I thought maybe she might come back, might want it," Milo said, shuffling into the hallway, locking his apartment door with the key hanging from the psychedelic rainbow lanyard around his neck. Jane nodded his understanding.
"That's a reasonable hypothesis. People often want their things back."
"I know, right?" Milo said, slumping his way down the hall as Jane and Lisbon followed after him. "You want to take the stairs or the elevator? Elevator is really slow. But the stairs are…" He didn't finish his sentence.
"Whichever you prefer," Jane said diplomatically. Milo scratched his chin again.
"Elevator, maybe," he muttered, and punched the down button in the wall. There was silence as the old machine car came up to greet them and Milo shuffled on, then Jane, then Lisbon.
"How well did you know Charlotte?" Jane asked, as the elevator doors slid closed and they began their descent. The young man shrugged noncommittally.
"You know, not well. She mostly kept to herself. Nice little kid."
"Yeah," Jane said, a paternal smile softening the edges of his lips. "She ever come to you for help with anything? Any repairs?"
"Nah, nothing like that," Milo slurred, shaking his head in the negative.
"You store everybody's things for them when they take off?" Jane fished. The kid considered the question, nodded.
"Yeah, for a little while. Sometimes they come back. You never know. If there is space, I store it, mostly. Unless I find chiggers, and then I burn it out back. I hate those things."
"That's very philanthropic of you," Jane said and Lisbon shot him an amused grin. Milo didn't respond, or didn't hear that last comment. Then, he did.
"Yeah, I guess so," he allowed. Finally they were in the basement. The kid unlocked several doors. It smelled like an old parking lot down here, like wet stone and stale cigarette odor. A large steel door was unlocked and a room full of wooden storage units came into view, sputtering under a series of fluorescent tube lights.
"Over here," Milo said, extending one sun-tanned arm and shuffling over to a unit. He pulled his lanyard off his neck, stared at a grouping of small copper little keys, squinted, finally selected one key from a series of identical looking keys. Stuck the key in the little padlock and turned. The lock spit open. He grinned at Jane.
"That's quite a talent you've got there," Jane said to the kid, and the kid basked in the admiration.
"I'm good with keys," Milo admitted, and began moving through the small storage unit. He handed Jane a cardboard box that had been sloppily taped.
"Mostly books and stuffed animals, that sort of thing," Milo said, nodding at the box. Jane nodded.
"I didn't see any bed bugs, but man… you should watch for them. Those things are a pain in the ass. Have been in their current state for, like, 300 million years and can go a year without sucking blood. Can live through extreme temperatures, even sometimes live through being frozen. Hard to kill."
"I'll watch out for bed bugs," Jane said with determination.
"You need me to stay?" Milo said politely, glancing over at Lisbon shyly. Lisbon shot him a tight smile. Jane grinned and shook his head no.
"Nope, thank you. As you were, soldier," Jane said, grinning. Milo seemed stunned by the words, then finally nodded his head and grinned back at Jane.
"Soldier… because I'm not a soldier!" He said, rubbing at his bloodshot eyes, and shuffled back towards the heavy storage door. It opened and yawned itself shut. Jane had already pulled a pocket knife from his suit pants' pocket and was working on the tape.
"Nice kid," Jane told Lisbon as he pulled the cardboard flaps apart and opened the box. His first find was a handful of Ty beanie babies. Nothing special. A few composition booklets, the fronts of which were covered in holographic stickers of laughing skulls and fighting dinosaurs. Jane handed these to Lisbon, who immediately opened them and began to read.
"Some sort of basic diary. Food consumption, what she watched on TV, chores, interactions with people in the building," Lisbon announced, flipping through the handwritten pages. Jane nodded. "Nothing earth shattering."
"We'll take them anyway," Jane murmured.
Jane was pulling out a bunch of small plastic toys which looked like they'd come out of Happy Meals over the years. Many of them looked as if they'd been burned under the beam of a magnifying glass or with a butane barbeque torch. Faces were charred and blackened, limbs soggy and far too loose.
Jane gently placed the burnt little toys down on the top of another box. Pulled out a small coin purse, a hair brush, a plastic doll that smelled of strawberries, a sticker album, a collection of Fangoria magazines, a few cut up National Geographics, a few old MAD magazines, a sticker-covered plastic pencil box full of pens and pencils, a chipped coffee mug with Garfield the cat on the front, a Count Chocula bobblehead, several souvenir snow globes from different American cities (Vegas, Chicago, New York), an old gameboy with the battery casing missing and the batteries duct-taped into place. Thrift store crap, stuff a kid living hand to mouth might buy to cheer herself up. Red John had been too cheap to take his niece on a trip to the local Ikea, for crying out loud.
Nothing but melted army men and hair ties on the bottom of the box, a used glow stick, some Chuck E Cheese tokens and a half-full pack of Hubba Bubba bubblegum. Jane sighed. Grabbed another box and slit the top open…
The first item was a handmade doll with what appeared to be cornsilk hair and cowry shell eyes.
Small white beads formed the teeth. A grotesque tongue lolled out of the leather face, made of dyed cotton. Porcupine quills had been carefully sewn to the back of the creature.
"What do you suppose this is supposed to be?" Jane said, rattling the poppet at Lisbon. Lisbon shuddered at the sight of it.
"I don't know. Some kind of monster?"
"Maybe a Chupacabra," Jane mused, staring at the toy. He put it on the ground near his crossed legs. Pulled something else from the box. This time it was a plastic baby doll, only Charlotte had obviously altered it to look like a deceased human being. The plastic "skin" of the doll had been painted a sickly mottled green colour and the glass eyes had been fogged over with milky white cataracts. The original plastic fiber hair had been removed and… Jane pulled his hand back from the doll as if he had just touched something scalding hot.
"Is that real hair?" Lisbon said, nodding her head at the doll. Jane gently touched the platinum hair again, petted it gently like a startled little animal.
"I think it is…" He said slowly, voice much softer than Lisbon would've expected. He moved the doll and there was a rattling noise, maraca-like.
"You hear that?" Jane said, glancing over at Lisbon, before shaking the doll a little harder. The faint, fine rattling again, like rice had been inserted into the head. No, not rice… something harder, heavier. Pebbles, maybe.
Jane sighed, as if he already knew what he would find and produced his pocket knife again. He opened the knife, careful with the liner lock, then carefully, like a skilled surgeon, cut a faint slip around the "neck" of the doll, severing the seal that had been created by copious amounts of acrylic paint and resin. With a grimace he tugged on the head and pulled it free of the neck, the shoulders.
Carefully, ever so carefully, Jane tilted the baby doll's head and poured the contents into his hand.
He blinked down at his hand.
He held in his hand a fair number of off-white baby teeth. Undeniably human.