Title: Charlotte's Web (Chapter 44)
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: Sorry for the long delay between chapter 43 and this one, guys. Life has been busy and hectic… the usual time-sucking shenanigans. It's November which means it is NaNoWriMo, and while I will not be writing a novel, I will try and get this story mostly done. Please review. This is a huge monster of a story now, but it is what it is… I let it grow and it is time to bring it in for a timely resolution. Your patience is very much appreciated! – Lex
Tuesday, November 14th, 2013 4:06 p.m. PST
Lisbon spoke first, even though her mouth seemed to have dried itself out.
"Maybe those are Charlotte's?" Hopeful. And even if they weren't… even if these little tiny milk teeth weren't Charlotte's, there could still be some not-awful explanation for why they had been sealed inside the head of a customized corpse baby doll. …Right?
Jane was counting the teeth. He blinked hard, almost a tic. The smile that had been itching to burst onto his lips all day had burned itself out. He looked like a dried out husk of his former self. Lisbon was reminded of T.S. Eliot poetry for a moment, the hollow men…
"How many teeth do children have?" Jane said. He sounded distracted, and no doubt he was.
Lisbon shrugged and shook her head.
"There's twenty here," Jane said, motioning the neat little pile lined up on the floor. "I think they have twenty."
"I think that sounds about right," Lisbon said sullenly. Her dentist had had a poster showing common tooth ailments in both kids and adults tacked to the wall for over a decade. She had spent many long moments -while waiting for novocaine to set in- counting teeth on that yellowing poster.
Twenty little teeth were now in five lines of 4 in front of them. Apparently when Jane was on his last emotional legs he got a little OCD.
"Hair and teeth," Jane said coldly, as if he found the idea of this doll containing both utterly distasteful. One or the other? Surrrrre. But both? Don't make me vomit…
Jane picked the little corpse-baby (now headless) back up and peered down the vacant neck hole into the empty cavity of the rubber body. The doll was eerily life-like, and Jane ran through his memories, trying to remember the name of such dolls- "reborn babies". Something like that. Having the head off the thing almost felt like a violation, a crime in its own right.
He made a noise that Lisbon knew was a sharp inhalation and pulled out a yellowed piece of newsprint.
"What do we have here?" He said to the empty air and Lisbon's racing heart beat.
Jane unfolded the newspaper gently and stared down at the small, elfin face suggested by the various dots of black on the paper. It was a story about a five year old girl who had gone missing from a park in upstate New York back when Charlotte would have been nine or so. A parent's worst nightmare reproduced for all the world to see. Did you read about our personal tragedy this morning? No? Pick up a copy of the New York Semi-Literate and take a stroll through our little nightmare…
"Is this the little girl from the CCTV footage, Lisbon? The one Charlotte was seen with?" Jane asked as he handed her the clipping. Lisbon took it carefully, peered at the small, blurred face.
"Jane, I don't ."
Jane looked at Lisbon with pleading eyes. "What is this?" He said, and she wasn't quite sure what he meant by that, so she shook her head. She wasn't in the mood for any more surprises today. She looked to find Jane pulling a small bundle of herbs out of the doll. Looked like the bag was made out of brown jute held together with a red string. Jane busied himself untying the knot in the string, then screwed his eyes up. Made a little hiss of noise. Lisbon caught his eyes and for a second they were wild with shock. He got himself under control very quickly.
"Herbs and… looks like dried organ meat… heart?" He offered the bag to her to inspect. His skin tone was a little too pale now. Dried heart? Neither one said it, and then Jane did.
"What are the chances that organ belonged to… whoever had those teeth?" His voice was hollowed out. Lisbon had a mental image of herself as a child, scraping pumpkin meat of a pumpkin, ready to carve a jack o lantern. She shook her head. Focused on her partner.
"Jane… let's put it back, okay? We can have the CSI guys go over it."
"I need to know… first… "
"Jane…"
'We… I… there… there might be more…" Jane said, and for the first time that day he sounded truly dazed. He began gently sorting through the stuffed animals and dolls, careful now, handling them like they might actually be small corpses instead of childhood objects.
"Jane, there isn't that much here. Why don't we just take it all back up to my car? Charlotte might want some of this back?" Lisbon offered, voice far away, down a long, long tunnel.
Jane blinked hard, finally nodded. Oxygen hit his brain and little specks of white light danced in front of Lisbon's pretty face.
"Yeah. Yeah… we'll take it all." Oh boy, he was off balance.
"One of us should stay down here to keep the security door from locking. You want to stay or should I?" Lisbon prodded gently. Jane tottered a bit. Finally smiled at her. It was a smile that had been shot multiple times and was losing blood quickly but still determined to go out with flair. Lisbon couldn't find the energy to smile back at that. It was unnerving her, that smile. It was almost as if he clung to that grin as an anchor to normalcy, but the expression seemed garish to her, clownish. Ronald McDonald popped into her head in technicolour. Grimace. The Hamburglar.
"I… I can take the stuff to the car," Jane said after a long moment of blinking and thinking. The dying smile had given up the fight and his face was grim again. Lisbon wasn't sure which was worse, now; that hopeless smile or the hollowed out look.
He gently scooped the little teeth back up and deposited them back in the baby doll's cracked, overly-realistic head, put the doll back in the cardboard wine box Milo had stored it in. Lisbon handed him two more boxes and he backed out of the room as she held the heavy security door open for him.
"Whatever this is, I am sure there is a logical explanation for it," Lisbon said, meeting Jane's eyes. He nodded, but didn't reply to that. Logical explanations weren't always happy explanations. No. Not at all.
Lisbon watched Jane as he lurched his way down the hall back toward the ancient elevator. Slowly the steel fire door yawned shut with a hiss.
The silence and the humming tube lights above her head and the musty smell of old cardboard and dust now turned her thoughts to tombs, catacombs, dried and hollowed out mummies. Garish, emaciated and desiccated flesh pulled tightly over eyeless orbits of bone. Yellowed teeth without gums, screaming their silent screams for thousands of years… death within death, a mockery of life. Skin as hard as leather, hard as a drum and brown as the dirt in a freshly-dug grave…
Lisbon said a silent prayer and gazed up dully at the tube lights and thought in a slow and stuttering way that maybe this was what the beginning of post traumatic stress disorder felt like. Maybe the beginning of madness. Maybe seeing too much crazy really did make people crazy, and the shrinks were wrong… maybe madness was catching.
It was beginning to feel that way. Was she going mad? She didn't know. Did people question their sanity if they were actually going crazy? The overall consensus was no, they didn't… but maybe they actually did. And people just clung to the idea that crazy people couldn't question their sanity because it offered a small measure of comfort.
"Charlotte…" Lisbon breathed out in a whisper to the empty room, something between a prayer and plea. "Please… please."
Tuesday, November 14th, 2013 4:12 p.m. PST
Jane placed the boxes down on the curb beside Lisbon's car, pulled the keys from his pocket, unlocked the trunk and put the boxes (he refused to think of it as evidence, they really knew nothing about what this was, did they?) inside. His mind was oddly quiet. He had already worked out three likely scenarios for the doll and the teeth.
The first was that Red John had killed a child they had never discovered and Charlotte had harvested some hair and the teeth for some reason. Maybe for "proof" later on, maybe as a sort of impromptu shrine for the dead child, maybe because Charlotte feared Red John might capture the dead girl's soul, or something childishly superstitious, something along those lines… and without the teeth, maybe she had thought the spell wouldn't work. She's grown up with the likes of the Chicken Man and his ilk, after all. It wasn't really that crazy to expect a traumatized kid to get into black magic, was it? Who wouldn't want a little bit of power in that hell hole life?
Charlotte's earlier words came back to Jane, when he'd brought up the CCTV footage. Talk of how the kids were dead, or they'd wish they were dead… so many off-handed comments buzzing around in his head like wasps. Any one of those wasp-thoughts had the potential to sting, and sting badly. His head was swimming with words, looks, pulses of pain.
The second likely possibility was that Red John himself had staged some event to earn Charlotte's loyalty.
Perhaps he had killed the child and made Charlotte feel responsible, or perhaps Charlotte herself had delivered a fatal wound under duress and felt responsible. If that was the case, Red John could have given Charlie the teeth himself and cast himself in the protective role. He had really loved fucking over peoples' perceptions of reality. Jane closed his eyes for a moment and ran a scenario through his head.
Red John providing a pale, shell-shocked nine-year-old Charlotte with the teeth in a blood stained bag, telling her that without the teeth they police wouldn't be able to run dental records, telling her he'd done it for her, to protect her, and now they were in the killing game together, and they had to have each other's backs… how about a kiss for Uncle Petey? Had the beast also presented its niece with the little, quivering heart? The colour of a plum, veins a pale yellow, a sheath of membrane still oozing blood the colour of poppies?
He pushed that thought from his mind, but it returned. Had Charlotte seen that little heart beat? Jane felt a tightness in his chest. Counted down from ten in his mind. Reminded himself that he had faced equally trying times before and had never allowed himself to get emotional, before. Not like this.
Jane opened his eyes and stared down at the boxes in the trunk of the car. How many more dolls with real-hair and heads full of teeth and dried little organy-things and missing child news clippings would they find in those boxes?
The third… and most distressing… "likely" possibility was that Charlotte wasn't what she appeared to be at all.
The long years of abuse, mental torture, social deprivation and trauma had warped her mind and she had become a killer and had taken the hair, teeth and clipped the news story as a… souvenir of sorts, a reminder of her kill… or kills. Each tooth a tiny off-white trophy. Jane felt a salty taste in his mouth then, felt his stomach twist and convulse. For a moment he thought he might vomit. He sucked in a deep breath, waited until his vision cleared. The white specks of light were back and the bile in his mouth was spat on the ground.
Jane stared at the cardboard boxes in the trunk wearily, slammed the trunk lid shut and walked back to the apartment complex to carry out another load of Charlotte's things.
Tuesday, November 14th, 2013 6:08 p.m. PST
Charlotte sat at Rigsby's desk, playing video games on facebook while Cho's eyes burned into the back of her head. Sure, running had been stupid, but she'd had to know… to really know about Jane. Maybe there was some clue. Maybe he was like Red John? Maybe there would be correspondence between them, letters spanning years... Maybe Jane was not what he seemed to be. Red John seemed nice enough most of the time, too. Seeming nice meant absolutely nothing. Most of the killers Red John had introduced little Charlie to over the years also seemed nice. The unhinged ones lost their cool, but the truly scary ones, you couldn't tell the difference between them and normal people. If normal people even existed… What if everybody was really a monster behind the masks they wore out in public? It was a thought that chilled Charlotte often. It made her feel a sinking feeling of dread, a feeling that meaning and time and space were disconnected. She batted the thought away.
No. There were good people. There had to be good people. If everyone was monsters, the system would have caved in. Right?
One thing Charlotte had learned the hard way in life was that things were not often what they seemed to be on the surface. But what was real? It was so hard to know. Most of the time she felt alone and scared and cold, swimming endlessly in a black ocean. Creatures and monsters swam in the ocean. The small ones took nibbles, the big ones took full bites and the great whites ate others whole. Red John had been a Jaws type.
And the thoughts… they wouldn't shut off. And the fear that Jane- her father- might be like Red John, might be almost as bad, as bad, worse maybe… those thoughts wouldn't quit.
And her heart said no, but her brain was running her around in circles and the air in the bullpen felt too hot and too stuffy. Who were these people Patrick had left her with, anyway? Were they even really CBI agents? Who could know anything for sure?
Rigsby had been falling all over himself to get her to like him, and she didn't dislike him, she just didn't know him, and because she didn't know him, she couldn't trust him.
Hell, even if she had known him (whatever that meant, Charlie was becoming increasingly convinced that it was impossible to truly ever know anybody, even oneself)… even then, she might not have trusted him. Trust, more and more, was something Charlotte Ruskin-Jane looked on with scorn and pity.
Stupid and naïve people "trusted". People that had been around the block a few times and had seen the dark underbelly of the world? They knew better than to trust. They knew that the heart of a human, when you really got right down to it, was a heart of darkness. Wasn't it?
They knew that trusting was a way to end up screaming alone in a coffin, tearing your nails out at the quick and praying desperately to a God that never seemed to respond, but who you still couldn't stop believing in. Trust was the currency of fools…
And so she had left, slipped away, when the Rigsby guy was paying for pizza. It had been easy enough to dodge them. They were no match for a kid raised by the infamous Red John. Not even Patrick was.
She knew they would eventually find her, sure, but she had to take chances when they presented themselves to her. She had to know.
All three of them had come to find her, as she guessed they would. Cho, Rigsby, even Van Pelt and they had all looked completely out of sorts and freaked (except for Cho who- Charlotte was becoming increasingly certain- always had that dead-pan bored thing going on unless his life was directly threatened).
Rigsby had spoken first: "Oh, you're here."
As if it was reasonable she'd run off when he went to pay for the pizza she had asked for in the first place, as if picking the lock to her father's CBI attic abode with splinted sausage fingers was all well and good and completely normal. All teenage girls did such things. Boooooorrrring. Nothing to see here, folks.
"How'd you get in here?" Cho had asked, then, staring at her with his steely brown eyes. Red John called Asian people "China men", often sneering when he said it. It didn't matter if they were from China or not, anybody with Asiatic features had been lumped in the same category. Charlotte had never learned why, but the phrase repeated through her mind when Cho stared at her, chinaman, chinaman, chinaman. One word and rasped out in Red John's cat-playing-with-a-wounded-mouse voice.
Chinamaaaaaaan.
China Man wasn't pleased with her, that much was obvious. Charlotte shrugged, as if the door, maybe, had just magically opened. She stared at her splinted fingers, unable to meet Cho's Chinaman gaze. It burned. Could he read her thoughts? Red John seemed to have had that ability. Maybe others did? His dark gaze. What could he see in her? What was he learning about her with that stare? She shifted under his gaze, uncomfortable.
"You certainly are your father's kid, aren't you?" Cho finally said under his breath and Charlotte glanced to Van Pelt, who looked somewhere between angry and worried.
Van Pelt with her siren red hair and her worried, wet eyes. She looked like something ripped off the cover of a Harlequin romance novel. Charlotte bit the inside of her cheek and stared at the pen graffiti on her converse all star sneakers. Somewhere in the attic, a fan whirled and pushed recycled air and dust mites around. The smell of endless hours of obsessive research, boxed tea and sweat. Jane was certainly living the high life up here, that was for certain.
"What are you looking for?" Van Pelt said, scanning the mattress-on-pallets Jane used as a bed, on which Charlotte had laid out information pertaining to Red John murders that Jane had collected over the years. She walked over to the "bed" and gently touched the papers with her fingers. Charlotte watched her fingers.
Charlotte didn't say anything to that. What could she say? She didn't know these people. She didn't know them, so she couldn't trust them.
How could she tell this woman- or any of them- that she was checking out Jane because for all she knew he, too, was a psychopath and maybe a killer, or maybe had given her to Red John like Red John had always claimed, or had sold her to Red John, or maybe the CBI was a den of CIA controlled operatives and they murdered people all over the planet for moderate paychecks and Starbucks gift cards, and then forgot about it afterwards like Manchurian candidates? They'd use that careful psychiatrist voice people in the mental health industry used with patients they thought were rat shit crazy. No thanks.
All three of them were staring at her now, and Rigsby tried on an uncomfortable little smile, as if this whole mess might be his fault for paying for Pizza. Sometimes Charlotte wondered if reincarnation was real, and if it was, how it worked. Could animals reincarnate as humans if they were good? If so… Rigsby had been a puppy in his past life, she was certain of it. Probably died running in front of a car, chasing a squirrel, probably had given his crying little boy owner that same sappy look as he lay in the street in front of the car that had hit him, bleeding to death. I'm sorry for everything… but I still like you… now you smile at me!
Van Pelt and Cho the China Man though, they hadn't reincarnated from puppies. These two had always been humans.
"Jane sleeps up here all the time?" Charlotte dodged, walking towards the dusty plate glass windows Jane's sunlight was filtered through.
"If you tell us what you're looking for, maybe we can help?" Helpful Rigsby puppy said. Charlotte turned her back to them, smiled at the plate glass. It would be so nice to trust.
But she wasn't even sure herself what she was looking for.
She was digging for anything… anything. Because trust didn't exist in her world. How could she tell Van Pelt what she was looking for when she, herself, didn't know what she was looking for? How could she tell the human puppy dog that was Wayne Rigsby or the steely eyed Chinaman (stop it brain!) named Kimball (rhymes with cymbal, haha!) Cho?
And because trust did not exist in her world, how could she ever explain her motivations? So she shrugged. If it came off as a surly teenage move, so be it. Her reflection in the little square of frosted glass in front of her smiled back at her, cynical, sad, confused, half-mad.
"Red John, huh?" Cho said eventually, coming over to Jane's not-a-bed, flipping through some of the photocopies and stapled autopsy reports, glossy crime scene photos (many of the bloody smiley face, that damned bloody smiley face seemed to be a favorite of the crime scene photographers, even more than the dead body they were actually investigating), furrowing his eyebrows like one would expect of an adult flipping through autopsy reports who wasn't morally impaired.
Charlotte watched him carefully, studied his microfacial expressions the way Red John had taught her to study the movements of faces. Cho made a noise that was almost- but not quite- a sigh and turned back to her.
"You didn't get enough of Red John when you were living with him?" Somewhere between sarcasm and genuine curiosity, but delivered in a dry dead pan tone.
These people still couldn't seem to grasp that it wasn't "Red John" Jane's long-lost daughter was investigating, but Jane himself. Emotional blinders were such a bitch. Or maybe they knew and were playing stupid, trying to see how much of herself she'd give away.
"I wanted to see how much Jane knew," Charlotte said, to fill the empty air, and immediately regretted it. There was power in silence. You could hide more, in silence.
When you opened your mouth, that was when problems started. That was when people could gain key insights into your personality and motivations- even your soul- and figure you out, read you, plan against you, hurt you. Staying silent was the way to go. Stay private, stay quiet, stay hidden and don't cry. Don't ever cry.
"Why?" Cho asked then, like she knew he would. So much of human interaction was a dance, and you could sometimes figure out the other person's "dance moves", their likely responses, five or even six moves ahead… if you were good. Red John had been so good at it he had been able to jump in twenty moves ahead, move a little to the left, to the right, swing the person around in a spin and change the course of their entire life.
"No reason," Charlotte muttered, because in her mind it seemed almost as good as a shrug but not as sulky, but Cho was watching her carefully, too, and she didn't know how much he could actually see with those bright, dark eyes of his.
"There's always a reason. You want to know if your father is all he seems to be, is that it?" Cho said and Van Pelt looked at the ground and hissed out a surly "Jesus" and Rigsby looked away, too, the shamed puppy who had been caught ripping open the garbage bags...
"Maybe." Her voice was a squeak. Her heart was beating fast and light, a scared animal in its own right.
"He's not," Cho affirmed, eyes still steely. "He can read people like books, give them what they want, fuck with them until they spill whatever information he is after. He has that in common with Red John, probably genetic. But he isn't doing that with you. That tells me he wants you to trust him." Cho was picking up the Red John papers now and organizing them into a "stack" again.
He walked over to Jane's desk and placed the stack on top of it gently.
Charlotte stared at the papers, then back at Cho. Her face felt too hot and her skin prickled. Her fingers throbbed and hurt. Somewhere behind the mask she was wearing, the tough and indifferent cocky teenage thing, was a scared shitless little kid who was straddling the line between crying and sobbing. Did Chinaman know that?
"Your father genuinely messes with people all the time; but he's not messing with you. He's being respectful of your boundaries and he doesn't usually do that. You can read into that whatever you want," Cho finished.
Charlotte didn't say anything. Where was this sadness coming from? She had shut down, emotionally, years before but every so often emotions bubbled up and right now there was that painful, insistent, gnawing urge to tear up and cry. She tried to image corpses in her mind, horrible things, to shock the need to cry out of her head. Scenes from horror movies, scenes from real life murder scenes, images of sobbing, snot-nosed Red John victims and decaying bodies, the smell of blood (hot copper, smells like hot salty copper) and the echo of a scream. DO NOT CRY.
She couldn't cry in front of these people and she would not. It was not going to happen.
(Be still, Charlotte. Deep breath. If you cry they will think you are weak, and they will tell Patrick-)
"Let's go back downstairs, okay, guys?" Van Pelt had said then. For some reason, Charlotte's mind supplied her with an image of She-ra.
And then they had cleared out of the attic and come back downstairs and had eaten the pizza (one meat lovers, one veggie lovers, one Hawaiian) and played around on the computers and Van Pelt and Rigsby had gone to get coffee while Cho sat at his desk and watched his charge without blinking much.
And the day wore on… luckily, facebook was a great time-waster and easy enough to maneuver even with messed-up splinted fingers. Charlotte played games and posted posts from horror movie websites and debated shit that didn't matter while they took turns guarding her. By five p.m. she was developing an understanding of why zoos were not good for great apes.
And then, suddenly, Jane was back. Lisbon smiled a neat little smile at Charlotte that looked almost planned and Jane came back from the lounge with two coffees. He handed one to Lisbon.
"Took off, eh?" Jane said, cutting straight to the point. Charlotte shrugged and looked at Lisbon drinking her coffee. She wanted a coffee, too. Why hadn't Patrick gotten her a coffee?
"Well, I guess it was a stupid question to ask. I know you took off. Picked the lock, too? Even with your mangled fingers? You're full to the brim with unexpected talents, Charlie," Jane said, and it sounded almost sarcastic to Charlotte. She stared at her father with her feral green eyes and he stared back at her, warm and guarded.
Jane must have realized how he sounded because his features softened a little and some of the bite went out of his tone. His daughter was watching him with the eyes of a scared deer and Jane realized, too late, that in her mind she was the odd one out again.
He slowed down, gazed at her pinched features, and saw the tears she had shoved back inside. She was upset, wasn't she? He thought maybe she was. Not just embarrassed or annoyed, but deep-down-in-the-gutter sad.
Shit. He needed to calm down. Be softer. Charlie was tough, but not as tough as she acted. Under the thick fabric of that damned AC/DC sweater, he could almost see her heart beating like a frenzied little animal, a squirrel or hare maybe. Some field mouse.
"Did you find what you were looking for?" Jane asked, leaning over to eye Charlotte's facebook account and her posts. She let him. She was motionless under his gaze. Horror movie images and pictures of crows. Morbid jokes that lacked taste and depth but were typical teenage shock-fare.
"What was I looking for?" Charlotte responded, eventually, and her voice sounded weary.
"You tell me," Jane mumbled, but he sounded resigned to the fact that he wasn't going to get an answer, at least not any time soon. He began walking around the bullpen aimlessly.
"Looking for something?" Cho asked.
"Any more pizza?" Jane said. Then he found the boxes, grabbed a cold piece of Hawaiian and took a bite with gusto. He watched his daughter while he chewed and she did her best to ignore him.
Nobody spoke.
Jane spoke finally, direct and to the point: "Charlie, you want to come see something? Lisbon and I want to talk to you, okay?"
Charlotte looked over at Lisbon. Back at her father. Got up, resigned, and followed the adults to Lisbon's office, head lowered, feeling ashamed and not sure why, but used to this feeling.
She had been bad, and would be chewed out or punished or something. Way it always went.
Tuesday, November 14th, 2013 6:15 p.m. PST
Lisbon had already turned the venetian blinds down for privacy. Charlotte entered after Jane and saw immediately her eerily realistic baby dolls assembled on Lisbon's desk like a criminal line up. One of the dolls had had its head removed and the teeth inside were laid out in front of the rubber head, like evidence.
Charlotte looked over at Jane with huge eyes.
"We need to know what these are," Jane started. Charlotte could feel the room constrict. They were far away from her, immediately, Lisbon and Jane. They had seemed to be on her side, but she could see now it had been a trap. Maybe? She wasn't sure. It was so hard to know who to trust. It was so hard to know what reality was, when it had turned itself inside out so many times like a kaleidoscope being turned, turned, turned… always shifting, always changing. A sour taste came to her mouth, and hot needles prickled the back of her eyes.
"My dolls," Charlotte said simply, shuffling over the desk, patting them with her damaged hands. They had no right to be digging through her personal stuff, anyway. No damned right.
"Charlotte, this blond hair, here? It looks a lot like this, here, from your music box?" Jane said, and showed her the little jewelry box with the spinning ballerina inside Red John had given her for her seventh birthday.
A ringing had started in her left ear, high pitched and ceaseless tinnitus. That white blond hair, so pretty. Shining. Even in the dim light of Lisbon's office it was like spun white gold. So pretty.
Jane was staring at her with his big blue eyes that saw everything, the same way Red John's eyes had seen everything, too. Could he read her mind, even now? She didn't know. It seemed reasonable to believe that he could.
Lisbon was looking at her, too.
Lisbon didn't see nearly as much as Patrick did, but she saw enough. Her eyes were large and kind and soft and right now they looked almost wet. Charlotte blinked and shut her own eyes. She could imagine her own eyeballs locked inside her skull, electric green demon (demondemondemonyou'reademoncharlottedemondemondemoncharlotte)
eyes, electric green cat eyes.
Evil, like her.
Could Lisbon see into her filthy, evil soul? Could Patrick? Probably they could.
Maybe. It was so damned hard to know.
"These are my things," Charlotte said softly, and patted her now-headless doll. Who had dismembered the baby doll? Patrick probably. He was running the show most of the time, it seemed.
She opened her eyes and looked at her things, the doll and the teeth and the memories of the bad times. She could see some cardboard boxes with her name on them stacked neatly behind Lisbon's desk and felt a strong sense of possessiveness. They had no right to go through her things!
"Tell me about the teeth, Charlotte," Jane said in what was almost an hypnotic-induction voice. Charlotte stared down at the head on the desk. At the little white teeth in neat little lines.
Her mouth felt hot and dry. She hadn't looked at these teeth in so many years. Inside each tiny little tooth was an endless scream. Bloody sockets, the smell of hot metal, and a little girl scream. Each tooth was a scream. A scream trapped in a tooth. Red John and his wolf eyes, watching her, and blood on a knife… all too often that was how it ended, blood on a knife, a smiling face painted on a wall. Silence loud as a tribal drumming, chanting, bells… loud as a man wandering and screaming into the night: bring out your dead. BRING OUT YOUR DEAD-
"Charlotte? You know you want to tell me about this," Jane said calmly, and her daydreams were cut down, with the care and precision of a surgeon.
Only what Patrick Jane cut into were memories and emotions, not organs. His words cut like scalpels, swift and expertly. Something in Charlotte was bleeding, something deep inside. Maybe it had been bleeding for a long time. Maybe it wasn't Jane's scalpel words. Who could say for sure? Who could be sure of anything in this crazy world?
"These aren't your teeth, Charlotte. But they are baby teeth. Tell me about them," Jane said, trying again, angling again, dabbing at the bleeding in her soul. For her part Lisbon was still, watching, that sad look on her face she had when something was emotionally tough to deal with and there was no getting away from it.
Charlotte wondered for a moment, then, if Lisbon was for real. If when she looked sad she really felt it, subjectively, felt sad. Or maybe she was acting. Maybe it was an act. A trap? Like Red John?
Charlotte's own emotions were hard to process.
Sometimes she was pretty sure she was upset, but she had gone past a point, many years ago, when she stopped being able to tell if she was really sad or only pretending to be sad.
Her emotions had long stopped feeling genuine. Everything felt staged in her life, even when she broke down and cried, even when her stomach twisted and she puked.
She was disconnected from it, always. She had slipped away from her own sense of self many years ago, and had never been able to find her way back…
Alice down the rabbit hole… and Red John was the white rabbit, and he had hopped off with her sanity, hoppity hop hop little rabbit, hopped off with her thoughts and her emotions. Only he wasn't a white rabbit, at all. He was maybe the caterpillar. Or the mad hatter? Yes. The Mad Hatter, with his mad, crazy, rolling eyes, marbles and the smear of blood on his lips. His tea cups from London and his body parts laid out on the ground like puzzle pieces and his smiley faces dripping hot iron on the wall.
Those hadn't been Red John murders though. Those hadn't been smiley face murders. Not the deaths with the teeth and the kids. Those had been something else.
Not all of Red John's murders had gone down in history as Red John murders.
Many of them were still open. Body pieces cut into puzzle pieces. A hand here, a foot there, a tooth there. Red John cooing in her mind, that it was one thing to be a serial killer, it was quite another to be ten. Or twenty. Simply being *a* killer… far too simplistic for the beast that was Red John. He was legion, after all.
Legion.
Had Jane figured it out, even yet? Would he ever?
And now, in the present tense, the thoughts spin in her mind. Present-tense spin.
The teeth on the desk and the headless baby stare, and she has to get control of her thoughts and her memories and the way reality is pulling back from the edges of her eyes and rushing into the future.
Her head prickles, inside, the beginnings of what Red John had called her "drop away" headaches.
She'd dropped out of consciousness when she got them, down the rabbit hole, a looooong way down to fall, and never entirely sure she was herself when she finally hit the bottom. Something always seemed to be lost during the fall, another small, unnamable part of herself.
She can't do that now.
She sucks in breath.
She says her age in her mind. 16. Is that right?
Sixteen? It feels wrong.
She still feels six. But no, time has gone forward. Sixteen it is.
And she is in the CBI.
And Jane and Lisbon are looking at her.
Is Red John dead? Yes. He is apparently dead. And she… her fingers in splints below her. Her vision is off, like looking through a strange filter, a strange lens. The room is distorted. Can Patrick tell everything is distorting?
She looks at him through the mist and his eyes are sharp as an eagle's, alert, watching her, head ducking to analyze her face from a lower angle, features strained with what might be concern (if it's not an act)-
"Charlotte, can you hear me?" It is Jane.
Patrick Jane.
Face like Red John's, but not so greedy in the eyes.
Softer eyes.
Human eyes.
This man, right here, in this room, in this year, with the soft, bright eyes was her Daddy a long time ago. Many lifetimes ago. She had never doubted his goodness then. Not until Red John.
Red John had never had human eyes.
Patrick is her father.
She must believe that.
It is one of the few things about this life that doesn't feel like claws ripping inside her mind.
It is a soft and strong thought, like a weight that ties her to sanity that is almost gone. Patrick is her father and she is his little girl.
He is looking at her with strength but also compassion.
"Did those teeth… were they her's?" Jane says and pulls a folded up piece of paper out of his pocket.
It is a colour print-out of a missing poster.
A little girl.
White blond hair, baby face, baby eyes, baby teeth, baby age. A walking, talking baby.
Long gone now. Real life baby doll, long gone. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and all that jazz… Red John had always reduced the people she most wanted to ashes and dust. It was his forte.
She had been so stupid to stare, so stupid-
Charlotte's eyes scanned over the name. Dodged the black and white letters, took in the smiling apple cheeks and glistening eyes, the upturned nose… looked away.
"Can you tell me what happened to her?" Jane says softly and the scalpel disconnects something in her throat.
The pain is both emotional and physical, sharp and sudden and the air stops going into her lungs, begins to bubble out.
The ringing is in the other ear, now, too.
"Charlotte? What happened with this little girl?" Jane says, shifting slightly. He was sitting in a chair and now has one ready for her, is watching her like she might faint.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing.
Jane's floating face watching, concerned and bright, eyes on fire, mind trying to assemble puzzle pieces of this nightmare puzzle. (Good luck, Daddy, you do your best and I will be cheering you on from over here, okay…. You keep trying, Dad, you will figure it out)
"Tell me about her," Jane says in his careful voice; and the bleeding inside is now a spurt.
Jane puts a hand on her arm and she jumps at that, she reaches forward and grabs at the doorknob.
He catches her arm and says "no," and she pulls harder.
The door came open.
Jane is faster. Grabs her.
She could struggle, but it would accomplish nothing, so she goes limp.
He is telling her to take a deep breath.
He is picking the dolls and teeth up off Lisbon's desk and putting them away.
The door opens.
Lisbon leaves.
It is only them now, together in the dim room with Jane's careful eyes and her wild ones, the dim light, the desk and all the bad memories...
She will not cry.
Tuesday, November 14th, 2013 6:20 p.m. PST
He is kneeling in front of her and watching her.
Her mind contracts.
The teeth, the doll, the girl.
In her mind is Red John's face grinning at her. A flash of silver light, a scream, teddy bears at the F.A.O Schwartz in Manhattan, a panda bear, jointed stuffed animals. 5th avenue and 58th street. General Motors Building. A giant K-Nex merry go round with a motor. Kids everywhere. Lego. Board Games. Disney Princesses.
Red John says she can have anything she likes. She has gotten better at witnessing horrible things and not crying.
She is learning to distance herself from her emotions much better these days, so Red John is going to buy her whatever she wants.
She can now watch him cut a man's head off with a very small knife without throwing up or even making a noise.
He is pleased.
And he says she can have whatever she wants. Anything. And her eyes see the flash of white gold hair.
The little girl with her parents. The child is rich. Looks rich anyway. Innocent, young and Charlotte's mind thinks of how great it would be to play with a real child, have a friend or a sister and Red John sees the longing in her eyes. He sees the longing in her eyes and he laughs. Because what Charlotte wants is this girl's life, not the girl but her life itself… her innocence, her parents, her sanity.
"I don't think she is for sale, Charlotte," he croons and Charlotte snaps her eyes away immediately because even having the thought that she wants a friend is dangerous, but it is too late now, because Red John has seen the look of longing on her face and he knows what is in her heart.
He always knows. You can not lie to him. It does no good.
He is more than human but maybe… maybe less than God. Maybe.
"You want a sister," Red John murmurs, and his eyes are lit up from the inside like his face is a sudden, impossible jack o lantern. Like his eyes are roman candles, maybe, but nobody can see the sparks but her.
The inside of his head is on fire, blazing, blazing so bright Charlotte at the age of nine is a little surprised the skin of his face isn't melting.
And Charlotte is both terrified and excited, because maybe, just maybe… maybe he won't kill her.
Red John appreciates objects of beauty and this child is beautiful. A little doll. Angelic, cherubic, a baroque era putto, if there was ever a female putto… one of those living paintings.
Red John loves fine art. He loves Blake and he loves Blake's paintings, he loves Da Vinci, he loves Perrault and Pozzo and de Cortona and Goya… surely he will not kill a living painting?
"I don't want a sister," Charlotte says dully and walks over to the bears the child is looking at, as if being pulled by a huge, invisible magnet. Her brain is screaming at her to walk away. Go look at the sea monkeys. Go look at those triops things that are supposed to be prehistoric freeze dried creatures.
Walk away right now. Right now, Charlotte, or the blood will truly be on your hands…
Too late now. Red John's tongue flicks over his lips, reptilian, cold… hungry.
She looks at Charlotte with her bright, curious eyes and Charlotte stares at her, mesmerized by her beauty and her innocence and the total sanity in her features.
(I'm sorry)
This child has never seen a man with rags stuffed in his mouth scream into a gag, face go beet red in a dark room… before… before…
…but she will not continue that thought because the girl is smiling at her now and her face is flushed and she smells like some sort of berry shampoo made for kids and Charlotte has the fierce urge to hug her and bury her own face in the child's chest and breath in her innocence and her safety.
She is sure this girl will smell good, like a small mammal, she will smell warm and safe and babyish, she will smell like dreams and crayons and baby powder and Saturday morning cartoons and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and love that hasn't been corrupted, and Charlotte Ruskin-Jane needs that sanity and that innocence back.
Charlotte has a sudden urge to grab this tiny little girl by the hand and run out of the store with her with a shrieking, mad laugh.
On the outside, though, she is still and watchful and the girl with the white-gold hair is oblivious to the thoughts of the damaged serial killer protégée and the predator who hovers above her, chatting up her rich, impeccably dressed Daddy and smelling her innocence like some might smell wine before gulping it down...
"What's your name?" the tiny little girl-doll says in Charlotte's memory, and Charlotte was about to answer, was about to say "Charlotte" but Red John answered first.
"Her name is Lucy," Red John says above both their heads and Charlie wants to stab him repeatedly in his lying son of a bitch throat.
Because that is not how Charlotte wants to start this relationship. Not with a lie.
But Red John has spoken and so, for now, she is Lucy.
Lucy for Lucifer? Red John is cute like that. Little inside jokes, always… always.
"What is your name?" Charlotte says back.
The girl's name is Beatrice.
It's an impossible, antique name for an impossible child who looks something between a fairy and a porcelain doll. The name itself is a porcelain ballerina, and it twirls its way through Charlotte's brain, spinning, spinning, spinning away and bumping into the squishy, tender parts of her brain.
And Charlie has to struggle not to laugh hysterically in her sudden, manic happiness. Beatrice.
She wants to hug the child so badly, now, it is an ache.
She wants to hold her and own her, kiss her on the cheek, tell her it will be okay when she screams at the terrible things Red John does. She will let her suck her thumb and stare without blinking if she needs to.
She will call her pet names.
She will call her Bea, maybe, or bumble-bee.
Maybe just bumble.
If Red John got to make her his property, then why can't she have this little girl, the little bumblebee?
The thought comes to her in a rush and she can't take it back once it is in her mind. Charlotte turns her eyes towards Red John's and she knows instantly he saw that thought and that he loved that thought.
His tongue flicks out again, a serpent smelling the air.
It was the type of thought Red John seems to find delicious.
And Charlotte looks back at the child and sees such a vacant non-understanding of all the horrible things that exist in the world that hot tears spring to the back of her eyes. And she wants to be this child.
She wants to live inside her mind, locked away from blood and offal, and never have to hear another blood-curdling scream again in her whole damned life.
The living doll with the white blond hair is looking at the toys happily, and there is no hurry in her movements, no adrenaline dumps, no shaking... Her eyes are as serene and carefree as the ocean on a mild day.
Charlotte was once this child, a version of her, anyway. Her hair had been wavy instead of straight and not nearly as light, but she had been a version of this innocent little female with the shell pink ribbons in her hair.
Ages ago.
Several life times ago, if karma is real.
With a mommy and daddy and a life. She wants it all back.
She wants to be this child again. Needs it, like a person being slowly smothered to death needs to take a breath.
The little girl speaks first. Tells her she is getting a panda baby. It is a battery operated toy in a box.
There is a button which reads "try me" and when you press the button the panda baby opens its mouth and groans and yawns and makes a giggly nose. If you press its foot it moves in a different way. It comes with a plastic bottle. It comes with a birth certificate.
Red John is grinning.
Charlotte is nine and this child is much younger than nine, but Charlotte is a tiny 9. Above her head is a male voice. Not Red John's. Warmer and kinder. No sharp edges in that voice. It is the little girl's father. The bumblebee's daddy asks how old "Lucy" is and Red John says "six" and Charlotte has the urge to stab him again.
"Beatrice has wanted this for a long time now, haven't you, Bea?" The daddy bumblebee says and he pulls one of the pandas off the shelf.
Red John says "Oh? Lucy wanted the chimp." (because there are several different varieties of what is essentially the same toy- a chimp, a koala, a panda, a polar bear, a tiger cub, a grizzly bear cub… and Charlotte wants to argue that she doesn't want the fucking chimpanzee, thank you very much, but she realizes then… that out of the four available animals that are available that the chimp is the one she would have chosen if she had been given a choice and feels annoyed that Red John knows her so well…)
"Is that your favourite animal?" Beatrice says, looking at Charlotte and before Charlotte can either confirm or deny Red John croons out an answer.
"No, but they didn't make a wolf pup, did they, Lucy?"
And in her mind, Charlotte stabs Red John's eyes out with a sharpened pencil.