Title: Charlotte's Web (Chapter 45)
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: Thanks for the reviews, guys. Hope to get this out in a timely manner. Yeah, our Charlie is really lost in uncertainty, but can you blame her? Wheels within wheels of deception, betrayal and violence… who wouldn't crack up a little?
"Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness."
― Philip K. Dick
"Spent your life collecting so you can never forget
Treasured moments become lost treasures when you can't recollect
Everyone keeps asking are we okay
The truth is we're not but I don't know what to say" – "All the things lost" by "MS MR"
"How can I say this without breaking/ How can I say this without taking over /How can I put it down into words/ When it's almost too much for my soul alone/I loved and I loved and I lost you/ I loved and I loved and I lost you/ I loved and I loved and I lost you/ And it hurts like hell/ Yeah it hurts like hell" – "Hurts Like Hell" by Fleurie
Tuesday, November 14th, 2013 6:20 p.m. PST
Lisbon caught the look in Jane's eye, could see the strain in his features. She opened her office door, closed it almost silently behind her. Walked slowly to the bullpen.
She told herself it was to give him and Charlotte privacy, for whatever horrors were no doubt coming. But maybe that wasn't the complete truth.
Maybe she didn't want to witness any more pain or darkness.
She didn't want to know anymore about the demonic entity that had been Red John.
She didn't want to hear about his authorship of (endless) …still more murders, all published under different pseudonyms. But it made sense, didn't it? Simply being a "single" serial killer would have seemed too easy to Red John. Too prosaic, sick as it was.
(Call us Legion, for we are many)
He would have to be the best. The best ever. He had been a narcissist of the highest order, and no other career (or set of careers) would have satisfied his insatiable need to be better than all the measly little human riff-raff running around. It fit the bill…
How many other open cases were now (ultimately) closed cases in the wake of his death? How many other unknown monsters were now gone, at least from the concrete, physical realm?
(Did monsters ever just disappear, though?)
The thought occurred to her that Red John- if he was really as prolific as Charlotte suggested- might have the killing pattern of both a spree killer and a serial killer.
Lisbon tried to remember the definition of a spree killer. She knew it was a lot of kills, without a cooling off period. But what constituted a "cooling off" period? 24 hours? 48? A week of bloodless hours?
No doubt Jane would know the definition, but Jane was busy at present dealing with the emotional fall-out of his daughter's traumatic upbringing.
What if Red John was something that hadn't yet been defined and categorized? It would make sense that he would want to be something new, something unique in the annals of psychiatric medicine. It would appeal to his narcissism, his sense of inherent superiority…
(but what is he exactly?-)
Lisbon shook her head, blinked… looked around with weary, sleep-hungry eyes. She found herself standing still in the CBI bullpen. She blinked harder, attempted to orient herself. The large, communal space was mostly dark, filled with shadows and the possibilities that were inherent to shadows.
Mostly everyone had long gone home, and the thought of her nakedness in this dark, empty chamber (It's not a chamber, Teresa, just the place you work-) made gooseflesh prickle her arms.
It was nearing half past six and her team was still at work, though. She saw them a moment later, like a mirage slowly appearing.
Cho was looking at her concernedly.
Van Pelt was doing something on her computer but looked up inside a handful of seconds. Rigsby was dead to the world, asleep at his desk, face unlined in sleep and remarkably innocent. It looked like he'd put up a good fight, though.
"You guys can go home, if you want," Lisbon said, words saturated in fatigue. She stared around at the work space, as if not sure what to do. Where to sit. Too much had happened. Too much was continuing to happen. Life was off script, and even sitting down was something that now had to be planned out, step by step.
Something damned awful could happen if you were careless. Something damned awful would probably happen, anyway, but was almost certain to happen if you were careless…
She caught herself, then, the paranoia of those thoughts, how each thought was getting worse and bigger, feeding on the preceding one like a mental cancer. How much more paranoid and intrinsically fucked up was it inside Charlotte's head? She, Lisbon, had only been living in Red John's dream world for… what was it now? A few weeks? A month? Charlotte had been raised in the madness of Hell.
Raised, tormented, abused and tortured. She couldn't be sane. Any outer appearances of sanity were just that- appearances. Illusions. No way Charlie was sane. No way.
The fact that Charlotte could act as normal as she did was something Lisbon hadn't really considered impressive during the first few days of meeting the kid, but with time Charlie's defense mechanisms seemed all the more impressive.
Cho and Van Pelt were both watching her carefully, now. Oh yeah. Them. She wasn't alone in the dim, dark chamber. There were co-workers here, studying and analyzing and forming judgments about her mental health. It was time to get it together.
"Boss?" It was Van Pelt, with a bit of a creeping, lilting worry to her voice, compassionate and feminine and stressed. Lisbon shook herself, blinked again, more fatigued than she realized, eyes feeling hot and burning and imbedded with sand that wasn't even there, couldn't be there.
"What?" A floating and disconnected voice came from her cracked lips. It was her voice, but not her voice. Wonder if Van Pelt noticed that?
"You want a coffee?" Van Pelt said from out of the gloom, her words catching the way people's words tended to catch when they were off-script with someone they'd thought they knew. Or talking to someone they were beginning to think might be a few bulbs short of a Christmas tree, a few cards short of a deck, a few cabbage leaves short of a cabbage patch kid…
"I don't know," Lisbon said simply. What did Van Pelt want? Coffee? To get her coffee? Something like that. Something normal, like getting her coffee, delivering it to her. Social chit chat. Something like that…
Lisbon's eyes tracked over to Jane's sofa in the corner of the room. It beckoned her. The need for sleep, for rest, escape from this madness. No wonder Jane had found such comfort in that old, ragged sofa for so many years. She had never really realized the darkness of Red John on this sort of cellular level. Being told was one thing.
Living it was another.
Was Jane this messed up, inside his head? He had to be at least partially this messed up.
It was amazing how off-balance someone could be, how much horror they could soak up, and still manage to walk around mostly up right and pretend things were more or less normal. They only really lost it when they were well past their ability to function, and even in the looney bins of the world they mostly acted normal, for most of the long day, aside from the cracks showing, the stress in the eyes, the darkness behind those damaged eyes… and those crooning, broken laughs.
The darkness of Red John was so utterly vampiric that simply living with the thought of him and his depravity in your mind for any length of time sucked the energy out of you. A mental vampire, he was, and thoughts of him were an ongoing spiritual sort of blood-letting. A spiritual exsanguinations.
God, she was so tired. Her cells hurt. Her hair felt tired, if that was possible.
But why now? She and Jane had been hunting Red John for years and she hadn't felt like this… not this off balance, not this crazed and unstable. Of course, she had never dealt with a Red John victim of Charlotte's severity, never looked quite so hard into the abyss.
She suddenly remembered the fear of being at Red John's will, of being in the shed with the madman dressed up like some magician from the late 1800s, the gleam in his eyes and the sure certainty in her mind that she was going to be killed. The pulsing, staggering, strange way time began to break up like a strobe like effect, and her emotions were there and not there, distanced from her logic. The breaking of a mind… into neat little cubes.
PTSD, it was. Almost certainly. And if he hadn't been so exhausted and distraught himself, Jane would have caught the signs in her…
The fatigue was overwhelming, the need for sleep, escape, recuperation, rebirth… All those years of Jane with his back to them, curled slightly fetal on his couch, asleep but never really so asleep that he couldn't immediately rouse himself, always processing, his sardonic voice rising over from his corner to inform them of their human limitations when they spoke too loudly and too long when he was "napping"... His behavior made more sense, now.
Always half mad with grief, his brain running like a computer, almost, running programs, but the true him, the true Jane, half-insane with guilt and grief and terror.
He'd been so damned exhausted. It made more sense now.
"You okay, Boss?" Rigsby was looking at her with concern now, god-damned puppy-eyed Rigsby was spooked. She nodded, realized she'd zoned out in the bullpen, lost in thoughts, and tried on a smile for him. It was awkward and fake feeling, like trying on some stupid fast food restaurant hat with a cartoon chicken on the brim. It felt ludicrous, that smile, larger than life. Dumb.
He scrubbed at his eyes and she smiled a little wider even though the initial smile had felt idiotic, momentarily reminded of her brother Tommy as a child. Rigsby was smart, but easily fooled. He was a trusting, kindly soul, the type of kindly, trusting soul sociopaths loved to toy with. How easy he would be to manipulate, on any given day…
The thought that Wayne Rigsby even still existed in this world of monsters and was capable of running around and playing cop with his gun and his badge suddenly struck Lisbon as nothing short of a miracle.
Lisbon blinked and looked at her team again. A short, small chuckle burst out of her lips and hung in the air, floating between them, utterly out of place. Their eyes were watching her carefully, three pairs of trained CBI eyes watching the looney toon.
They weren't budging.
3 pairs of intelligent, detective eyes were trained on her like focused lasers.
"Guys? Please go home. We've got it handled here." She sounded halfway normal there, but they weren't buying it. Which made sense. She wouldn't buy it either, if she was in their shoes. Not for a second. "Handled"? What a laugh…
"But…" Rigsby trailed, and looked over to Van Pelt for help with his words. His eyes spoke volumes, showed all the concern and love and worry they all felt, but he was stumbling on his words.
"I'm too tired to pull teeth," Lisbon said wearily before Van Pelt could speak her piece, and they could see that she meant it. God, how she loved these people, but more than that… she could not tolerate being processed and analyzed right now.
"What if you need one of us to watch the kid?" Rigsby tried again. "The kid" meaning Charlotte. "Watch" meaning… who knew at this point?
They couldn't very well sit on her.
Little Charlie had picked the locks to Jane's attic retreat with half her mangled, broken, nail-less fingers in splints.
Damned impressive little kiddo, she was. Baby-faced and spook-eyed and sanity rotted through by nightmares and pain.
She was sixteen chronologically and due to severe nutritional impairments and failure to thrive and chronic stress, about 11 or 12 (if that) physically. She was physically stunted, but had ancient, mad-as-a-hatter eyes.
Intellectually, the teenager knew more than a lot of adults three times her age, because Red John had drilled her and tortured her until she could recite facts and poems and statistics like a computer. Emotionally she operated like a "young" seven year old much of the time, and dipped down into a pre-school type age when highly stressed.
Overall she was a kid, but hard to define.
The lock picking thing was both amusing and worrying, though.
Jane had once tried to show Lisbon how to pick a lock with a professional tension wrench and something he called a "Peterson gem", and even after he had explained to her what was going on with the tumblers inside and the "plugs", it had taken nearly half an hour for her to pick a five dollar padlock, the type of thing Tommy had kept on a toolbox in his room as a teenager (the toolbox had been full of smut magazines and little bags of weed, if she'd had to guess).
Charlotte had picked Jane's locked, forensic fortress with splinted, swollen sausage fingers that were so banged up they were dark purple in bands, the bones broken inside almost to powder, screaming (do bones even scream?)- Charlotte had picked that locked fortress of Jane's, and done it with fingers that would have left most people unable to tap sentences on a keyboard without trouble.
(And her fingers were broken, had been broken, because… why are they broken, Teresa?)
Lisbon forced her brain to play nice, get away of the sudden image of Charlotte trapped in a coffin, begging in the dark, rerouted back to the amazing lock-picking abilities.
That little kid had picked the locks with no tools other than what she'd found in their relatively prosaic CBI office, and maybe her hands had been shaking from running away and from the adrenaline dumps that came with running away from a floor of government agents.
Damned impressive, Charlotte. You get a gold star, kid. You're a winner, kiddo.
Van Pelt nodded, and the movement pulled Lisbon out of her thoughts.
"Yeah. I mean, Jane can't watch her all the time. And neither can you." Van Pelt sounded softer now, more in charge, more confident.
Lisbon was going crazy, but it was the spacey, shell-shock kind of crazy people got when stress blew their internal fuses, not the screaming and crying crazy that made it hard to know what to do or say and made the shrinkers run for hypodermics full of liquid sedative.
Lisbon was going the internal tumbleweed, vacant eyed shock crazy. That was when you used your soft, indoor voice, smiled and grounded the person. That was the best type of crazy to deal with.
Lisbon tried on a smile for Van Pelt.
She wanted them to leave, now, so she could crash on Jane's sofa in peace.
Her arms and legs ached and burned with building lactic acid.
Jane had told her before to drink baking soda in water to help with muscles aches caused by lactic acid dumps. Rigsby and Van Pelt were still speaking to her from what felt like a long way away, but she didn't have the energy or the desire to follow along well enough to make sense of their words, so their words remained nothing but senseless noises, bobbing alone in the gloom.
Their words were less important than her need for sleep.
Too much stress these days. Her ear suddenly began to ring, tinnitus, just the right ear.
She was the lead agent in charge. She was the boss.
She couldn't go loopy on these people, couldn't lose her job. Had to at least try to play the game that was called BEING A CBI AGENT.
"We can handle Charlotte," Lisbon offered up in as sturdy a voice as was possible.
"No, you can't," Cho said immediately, eyes dark and probing. "That kid's a ninja."
Lisbon almost burst out laughing at that. Bit the inside of her cheek instead. Cartoon ninjas swam in front of her, almost hallucinatory in quality. More gravy on the crazy train.
"Is that so?" She asked sardonically.
Crossed over to the sofa and sat down.
Her muscles screamed for rest. Her brain screamed for sleep.
The sofa felt so good under her, the faint smell of Jane, too.
Jane smelled somehow of peppermint and sweat (very subtle sweat, not body odor but musky masculinity mixed with the faintest hint of soap) and shaving lotion and very, very distantly something like strawberries that came through his pores, something else that had a leather smell to it, a shoe polish smell. All good smells alone, and together, they were subtle and comforting, calming.
She hadn't consciously noticed it before, but the sofa had soaked up Jane's smell over the years, a smell of his body and soul that was hard to define and more than the sum total of its parts, but warm and masculine and intelligent and safe. She could sleep wrapped in that smell, like it was a shock blanket, protecting her from all the bad things.
She leaned over and closed her eyes and concentrated on Jane and how safe she felt when she was near him. Felt her heart- which she hadn't realized was thudding- begin to slow just a little.
"We're going to stay, boss," Rigsby said doggedly from over near his desk, smacking his lips a little as he tried to clear his sleepy brain of cobwebs. Lisbon nodded.
"You can have a nap if you want," Van Pelt tried, obviously uncomfortable with the possibility of sounding condescending. "Or… just rest? We'll stay. You and Jane can't do this all alone. And even if you can, you shouldn't have to."
"Okay," Lisbon slurred, too tired to argue anymore. "Charlotte doesn't know you guys though. She won't listen to you. You might as well go home. No need for all of us to be exhausted."
"Does she listen to you or Jane?" Cho answered back from somewhere in the fog, stern as always. His eyes, though, were surprisingly soft.
"I don't know," Lisbon said, tiredly.
She leaned over, then, leaned her head into the plush of the arm rest. Shut her eyes.
Her heart pulsed red and black behind her closed lids. It thudded in her chest, something small and scared trying to burst out and escape. Her legs burned from stress.
Jane had told her once that magnesium supplementation was good for dealing with lactic acid dumps and the "restless leg syndrome" which often resulted. Magnesium supplements and Epsom salt sitz baths, both of those. Baking soda in water. At the time she had chalked up his knowledge to being yet another example of his amazing memory and prolific trivia stores.
He was showing off, of course.
Now, it occurred to her he was speaking from personal experience. How much of what he'd said over the years- especially when it came with how to deal with chronic stress- was less about showing off and more a veiled admission of his own hellish journey and ways of coping? His own way of reaching out for comfort and help?
She forced herself to breathe slowly. The smell of Jane leaked out of the leather of the sofa, like his warm, reassuring words, steadying her. She could see his blue gaze behind her closed lids, watching her with kindness, telling her to slow down, be calm. It's going to be okay, Lisbon. You can do this, Lisbon.
Jane had taught her breathing exercises years ago, too, while she stared at him (mildly annoyed). Who needed breathing exercises to calm down?
Wasn't that just bullshit pop psychology designed to fill gaps on talk shows? No, she was a seasoned law officer. She had dealt with chaos and stress all her life.
She certainly didn't need one Patrick Jane to teach her how to do something as fundamental as *breathe* for crying out loud. She wasn't that weak or needy!
But Jane's voice had soothed her and she had followed his instructions, in to a count of four, hold for four, out for four until the urge to glare at him dissipated a little bit. It had helped then, and now, she found, it still did.
She let her breathing carry her away. The red behind her eyes faded to deep purple velvet, than to a fuzzy almost-black grey, and the sound evaporated, muffled over… and she drifted… the smell of Jane and the smell of the sofa's leather, the sound of the CBI air conditioner doing its thing somewhere close, very faintly, under it all, the smell of floor cleaner…
Tuesday, November 14th, 2013 7:15 p.m. PST
"Boss?" Rigsby shook her gently. Lisbon startled a little. Rubbed at her eyes. She'd been asleep, in a place of deep rest, no dreams.
He was holding a cup of coffee out to her. She took a sip, sighed. Took a few chugs. It was very hot and very strong with lots of sugar and what tasted like honest to God whipping cream. Bless him.
Bless Wayne Rigsby, the human puppy dog.
"What time is it?" She looked around after a few more chugs. She felt clearer already, less drifty, less shock-y.
"You've been asleep for about an hour," Rigsby said softly. He looked like he wanted to say more, then didn't.
"Van Pelt and Cho?"
"Cho's in the break room. Van Pelt is sort of…standing guard by your office door," Rigsby announced.
"Jane?"
"Yeah, he came out of your office about ten minutes ago and went to the men's room."
"He left Charlotte alone?"
"Well, Van Pelt is watching your door, so… "Rigsby turned his hands, palms up and out, shrugged. A "that's all, folks" kind of gesture.
"Jesus," Lisbon said, suddenly flustered. She chugged down the rest of the coffee in a few quick gulps, handed the coffee back to Rigsby and speed-walked to the men's room. She knocked on the door, a staccato burst. Felt silly as Hell knocking on the thick wood door and tried to push it open.
It was locked, and her breath caught in her throat.
Fear leaped into her, shot electric through her bloodstream, through the neural clot of her brain in a pulse of acid. Fear smelled and tasted like ammonia and salt and something a little bit lemony, and it almost burned when it came in a charge. She wasn't sure why exactly, but she was suddenly dizzy with fear.
That damned locked door. Why had he locked the door?
"Jane? You okay?"
There was no answer. Lisbon put her head to the door and tried to hear what was going on. She could hear what sounded like the rush of water from the sink, but nothing else. No crying, no gagging, no retching, no movement. No breaking of mirror glass, no gun shots, no screaming, no begging of God, no nothing. Shit.
Nothing could mean almost anything.
"Jane? Open the door, please."
She had a sudden image of Jane in a locked ward, a bloody smiley face painted on the wall and his forearm in need of suturing. She shook the image away, waited a beat. Knocked again, louder this time.
"Where's the janitor? Does he have a key?" Lisbon said to Rigsby, eyes still locked on the locked bathroom door.
"I guess so. You don't think Jane would…" the question was left unasked.
"No," Lisbon said, thinking of Charlotte and how much they had already been through. "But I don't like this. Stress does things to people."
She was about to knock on the door again, when she felt it give a little. She pushed the door open. The water had been turned off.
"Jane?" She called, walking around the corner where the urinals were, walking down the row of toilets.
Jane was sitting on the ground near the toilet in the last stall. He had removed his suit jacket and looked like he might be sick. His face was white as a sheet, shocking to look at. The fine lines that would one day become wrinkles were much more pronounced.
"Lisbon," Jane murmured by way of acknowledgement and a small smile teetered on his lips at her presence. Lisbon wasn't sure what to call his emotional state at the moment. His eyes were glistening, lambent. He was present, but also drifting, lost in the past and his own pain.
He seemed lost in a very dark place, but with just enough energy to try and present himself as he always did. That had to be a good thing.
"What did Charlotte say?" Lisbon started.
"She went into an auto-hypnotic state," Jane said simply. He sighed loudly. "I mean, I may have helped with my tone and the general wording, but she is well aware of induction techniques. I think she wanted to go inward."
"Did she tell you about the dolls and… things?"
"Yes," Jane said sullenly.
"Did she do it?" Lisbon said after a pregnant pause. Jane's eyes closed and he licked his lips.
"Yes. But not… not of her own free will."
"Red John made her." It wasn't a question.
"Yes," Jane said, nodding fervently. "Of course he did."
It was at that moment that Lisbon caught the smell of vomit in the air.
Had Jane been sick? There was definitely a fug hanging around him.
She looked him over again, the blanched features, the cracked lips that spoke of dehydration and the glassy eyes, pupils blown with adrenaline.
"Did you throw up, Jane?" She asked concernedly, sitting down next to him on the cold, tile floor. She knew he had, but it was conversation and conversation was important during times like these. It was grounding. It kept shock at bay.
"We have to burn those hellish dolls," Jane said, not answering her question. Or maybe that was his answer.
"Jane? We can't burn the dolls. They're evidence."
"Those kids are long dead, Lisbon. All digging into it anymore will do is… quite possibly drive my very-much-alive daughter irrevocably over the edge. She's too close as it is, you know. You know it, I know you do. You can see it in her eyes, Lisbon. She's teetering right on the brink."
"She already knows what happened though, right?" Back to facts and the case. Away from the brink.
"She is dissociative with regards to the actual murders, I think," Jane said, licking his lips. "She suspects, I think, but doesn't appear to have conscious recall of the events. Which makes sense. Who would want to remember that?"
Lisbon caught another wave of vomit-smell then.
That was why he had locked the door and run the water.
Patrick Jane wasn't comfortable with people seeing him when he was vulnerable, not really vulnerable.
For as long as she'd known him, he'd always had to be the one in control, be the show-man, the ring leader, the master mind.
The idea that he was capable of getting so upset as to puke his guts out was an idea he didn't want other people entertaining, let alone witnessing in the real here-and-now.
If her voice hadn't come to him so full of worry, he'd probably have left the door locked, and let her stew.
"Do you want to tell me what happened?" Lisbon prodded gently, watching Jane closely, watching his microfacial expressions, those little indicators of truth he couldn't suppress.
He shut his eyes and leaned his head against the cool tile pattern on the wall. Lisbon got up, went to the paper towel dispenser, grabbed a handful of brown paper towels and ran them under cold water.
She wrung the towels out and came back to Jane. Gently handed them to him.
He wiped his face and his cracked, blanched lips. Stuck the corner of the damp towel in his mouth and sucked on it with his wide, shock-filled eyes like something small trying to nurse. She realized, then, that he must be horribly thirsty.
"What happened?" He asked eventually, rhetorically, voice somewhere between numbed and horrified.
"The same old shit that always happens when it comes to Red John and his victims. Psychological torture. Trauma-based mind control. In Charlotte's case, physical and sexual abuse, as well. The usual sort of buggery and abuse you'd expect from a sadist trying to break down a small girl's will and sanity and rewrite her consciousness with his own, horrific programming. Inflicted on... on my baby. My baby, Lisbon."
Lisbon waited for more, the real meat of the issue. Jane blinked heavily and continued...
"Her comments suggest she was drugged or in an altered state of consciousness during the actual murders. I… it was hard to pin down specifics for some of it, which suggest drugs to me, maybe some sort of head injury. His hand was on hers… when… when the knife went in. At that point in her recollection she seemed to regress and I let her."
Lisbon closed her eyes. She knew what he was going to say next.
Jane licked his lips and looked at her with his heavily dilated eyes. In the sickly fluorescent light of the bathroom, he looked eerily pale; corpse-like. The crypt-keeper telling a story to shock the spellbound kiddies.
"But…but her hand was on the knife," Jane continued, jumping forward in his thoughts, not entirely devoted to including Lisbon in his rundown of Charlotte's worst moments or in breaking down this nightmare sequentially.
She was hearing enough to follow along.
"And in her mind, that equates to guilt and a certain one-way ticket to the Christian destination we call Hell." He sucked in another breath, sucked a bit more on the brown paper towel she'd given him.
Lisbon watched him carefully, wanting more and not wanting any more at the same time.
"And Red John made certain there was a fair amount of overkill involved, of course," Jane added dully, and cracked out a tortured, self-deprecating laugh. He let those words speak for themselves, let Lisbon's own imagination fill in the blanks. Lisbon watched him with horror, unable to mask it.
"Red John loves his overkill," Jane finished.
Loves, not loved. Lisbon wondered if Jane had caught the wording. Decided not to bring it up. They had enough to deal with at the moment.
It was still and quiet in the bathroom.
Lisbon waited for Jane to continue, if, indeed, he was going to.
She could hear a persistent drip, drip, drip coming from the sink, and without trying the drip, drip, drip became the steady dripping of blood from the body of a suicide victim who decided to blood-let in the bathtub.
(is this how madness starts, Teresa?)
Evidently the tap needed to be fixed.
Jane began to speak again:
"In her mind, she is a killer, and she can't deal with it. She has split those memories off from her conscious awareness, Lisbon and… anyone suddenly jolting those memories to conscious awareness could cause irreparable harm, a psychotic break, a breakdown… a fugue state lasting a lot longer than the previous one, for instance, or a long-term, pronounced split from reality terminating in suicide. Ergo… we burn the dolls. It's a moral imperative, and you know it."
Overkill? Lisbon had sudden images of horror movies. She didn't watch them as a general rule anymore, but had as a kid, and Tommy still did. She had caught some trailers. Hostel came to mind. Elite torture clubs, Tommy said that was what it was about. Rich people torturing backpackers for fun.
Eyeballs hanging out of skulls and guts hanging out… people with fingers cut off, human slugs leaving blood instead of mucus all over the floor, slithering away right before the final cuts or the credits. God knew what else. Was that what Jane meant by overkill?
In real life, there were no credits. The horror went on and on, until it didn't. There were no credits, there were no commercials, no breaks to use the bathroom or get a refill of Coke.
The word bounced around in her consciousness like a super ball. Overkill.
What else could he possibly mean, but torture?
"We can't burn the dolls, Jane," Lisbon said again, when she found her voice.
"It's destruction of evidence." The company line felt good and right and sane in the midst of so much crazy. Maybe that was why some people became rule obsessed in this world. It made them feel safe. Rules. Order. Policemen and jails and procedure.
Too bad the likes of Red John didn't give a rat's ass about following rules, or about playing nice and being good and kind. It was a crying shame.
"If the FBI questions Charlotte about this, I don't know what will happen. She is in too fragile a place, mentally. You can see that, right? We need to protect her, Lisbon."
Lisbon nodded, began to think out loud.
"But, she couldn't be charged, of course… a child? Under Red John's control? Legally and morally, she can't be in trouble, and trying to pretend these things never happened won't help Charlotte in the long run, Jane, you know that better than anyone. What is buried always bubbles back up eventually. You told me that, remember?" Her voice had a shrill, begging quality to it she didn't particularly care for.
She wanted life to be like it was before… unpredictable sometimes and often maddening but not so damned terrifying all the time.
Jane smiled wanly at Lisbon. "I remember."
"If she wasn't your daughter, what would your next move be?"
"But she is my daughter," Jane said thickly, eyes fierce.
"Yes. But maybe that is dulling your objectivity, here. Charlotte saved those dolls all these years for a reason, right? Don't we owe it to her not to destroy objects she felt were important enough to save?"
"Charlotte has a pretty severe case of Stockholm Syndrome and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Lisbon," Jane said with a sigh. "I am not sure she kept those dolls for any even remotely sane reason. If she was to see a shrink, she might even get a tag of Dissociative Disorder, Not Otherwise Specified. So... her actions do not tell us what to do when it comes to caring for her and keeping her safe."
"But she did keep them, whatever the reason," Lisbon continued, tenacious as usual. Protocol itself was a shock blanket right now.
"Lisbon… her hand was on the blade when Red John eviscerated them."
Lisbon fell silent at once. She felt like she had been winded.
She could see Charlotte, pale and maybe drugged, still pre-pubescent. A little kid in a little kid body.
She could see the little platinum haired girl from the newspaper clipping. Had she been tied up? Had Red John been dressed up in the damned magician's suit? Had he been dressed up like Santa Claus? What had Charlotte thought?
How had she reacted?
Had she cracked up right then and there? It would make perfect sense. Or was that class act the final nail in the coffin of her sanity?
"We can't burn them. You know we can't, Jane," Lisbon said sadly, retreating back to safe and sane protocol.
"We can't give them to the FBI right now, though." Jane said, and this time he was resolute. "She is not ready for that sort of interrogation."
"Okay," Lisbon agreed, exhausted. She had no strength to argue, and what Jane was saying made good sense. Charlotte wasn't exactly Little Miss emotionally stable. Red John was physically dead. The murdered child wouldn't suddenly come back to life if Charlotte was pressed too hard by the FBI for details, but Charlotte herself might end up having a psychotic break. Maybe worse... dark thoughts swam in the dark recesses of Lisbon's mind. People kill themselves all the time, and for much, much less.
"You left her in my office?" Lisbon prodded.
"Yeah. She sort of went inward, went to sleep, and I suggested she sleep and not remember anything we talked about. I think that suggestion will take. She wants it to take. She doesn't want to remember. And who can blame her?"
Lisbon held out a hand to her partner, and Jane took it silently and she tugged him to his feet.
"Why don't we go and wake her up, now?" Lisbon said kindly. Jane thought about it, nodded.
"We're not going back to Malibu tonight," he said flatly. Lisbon wasn't sure if it was a question or a statement. She shook her head.
"No. We could go to my apartment?"
Jane thought about it a moment, finally nodded. "Yeah, that would probably be for the best. The attic is not exactly the sort of welcoming environment Charlie needs right now. And motels are just plain disgusting."
"Motels?"
"I saw a 20-20 segment on them, once," Jane said. "Of course, the information wasn't new to me, but the stuff that showed up under the black-lights really helped solidify what I already knew."
Lisbon nodded and grinned at this, delighted at Jane's attempt at levity.
Tuesday, November 14th, 2013 7:48 p.m. PST
She woke slowly to the movement of the car, the low susurrus of voices. Her head ached and she felt almost drunk and hung-over at the same time. Drugged and dazed. She blinked hard, attempted to orient herself. She was in a car. Two adults in the front. What year was it? How old was she? What… what was her name?
Jane turned in his passenger seat.
Smiled at her warmly, a paternal and concerned look.
"Welcome back, sleepy head," he said in a paternal voice which perfectly matched the expression. Charlotte stared at him. She had been playing on facebook and now was in the back of their rental car.
There was a hole in the space time continuum, a period of blackness, of missing time, and it made her uneasy to the core.
"What happened?" She asked, looking around, still feeling drugged as hell, not liking the sensation.
"You got tired after the pizza, I guess," Jane said with a small smile. "It's been a long day. Too many carbs can do that to the best of us."
She tried to remember if she had even eaten any of the pizza. Couldn't remember.
"How'd I get to the car?"
Jane's eyebrows rose. "You're not exactly heavy, kid."
"You carried me?" Charlotte scrutinized. She wasn't sure why, but the idea that Jane could carry her around while she slept niggled at her.
"Thought it was better than waking you unnecessarily."
"Okay," Charlotte said back, not wanting to make a big deal out of something that really wasn't.
She sat up more fully, careful as she came back from dreamland to watch the splinted fingers in her lap. It was dark outside, lights from car headlights on the roads, darting through the night, going where they wanted. Like the cat-bus from Totoro. Living souls on the road, beams of light in the night, whisking in and out of reality.
"Where are we going?"
"Lisbon's house," Jane said simply. "You want the radio on?"
Charlotte nodded at her father. "Any requests?" Her father's voice.
"Any station with old stuff?"
Jane nodded, pressed the button that scanned digitally through the channels until 80s pop came on. "This okay?"
Charlotte nodded.
Tried to remember what year it was.
They were in Sacramento, weren't they? The Red John case? And Elian was in a looney bin because he had cracked up? Wasn't that right? Jane was still watching her, turned around in his passenger seat. People called the passenger seat "shotgun".
Shotgun.
"You look like you have questions."
"Still a bit sleepy, is all," Charlotte murmured. "Feel drugged." Jane nodded at that.
"I'm not drugged, am I?" There was a hint of fear in her voice. Jane shook his head fervently.
"No. Of course not. You're not drugged. Just tired. You didn't eat much. Want to stop for some food?"
Charlotte shook her head no. "I just want to sleep, if that's okay with you guys."
"Okay, well, we're almost at Lisbon's place," Jane said diplomatically. "Want me to wake you when we get there?"
Charlotte nodded and shut her eyes.
Jane was shaking her gently. She slit her eyes open.
"We're here," he said kindly. Lisbon was at the back of the rental car, pulling out luggage.
"Where am I going to sleep?"
"I was thinking you can have the couch and I can sleep on the floor," Jane said, slamming the back door closed after Charlotte was clear, grabbing his bag and his daughter's from Lisbon.
"Did you see Elian in the looney bin today?"
Lisbon opened her mouth to correct the kid, shut her mouth. It was important to pick your battles in life. Jane just nodded sadly.
"What did he say?" Charlotte prompted her father. Jane shrugged. No way in Hell was he going to relate that particular conversation to Charlie. Charlie had enough ghosts in her head to fill up a haunted hotel, she didn't need any more.
"Nothing much. But he is having trouble." It was truthful and fair and to the point. Nothing too upsetting, nothing dishonest or shifty.
"The FBI still want to talk to him?" They were climbing the stairs to Lisbon's apartment. Lisbon unlocked the front door, and Jane ushered his daughter inside.
"Probably." This said in the resigned tone of someone who has dealt with the FBI's unique brand of tenacity before and did not entirely appreciate the ordeal.
"And they still want to talk to me?" There was anxiety in that inquiry. Charlotte was kicking her shoes off now, looking around Lisbon's small apartment with wide, over-tired eyes.
"You don't have to talk to them for long," Jane said, carrying the luggage into Lisbon's living room, stacking it by the wall. "And I will be there. Lisbon will be there. They bug you at all, and I'll kick them to the curb." He grinned at her when he said this.
"What if they want to know why I didn't stop him?" Charlotte asked incredibly, looking around at Lisbon's hard wood bookcases, inspecting the framed pictures on the walls. She looked genuinely disturbed by the prospect of such a question. She was looking at the photo of Lisbon and her brothers in their youth, framed and on a small table by the front door.
"They won't ask that, Charlie," Jane said softly, in what he hoped was a soothing manner and took a seat on Lisbon's couch.
Lisbon returned from somewhere down the hall, dragging bedding and pillows stacked on an inflatable air mattress.
"This okay, guys?" She asked Jane. He smiled at her, his winning smile.
"More than okay. Thanks Lisbon."
"I am going to get a shower. Anybody need to use the toilet first?"
Jane shook his head, looked over to Charlotte who nodded.
"It's down the hall, first door on your left," Lisbon said and Charlotte shuffled off, rubbing at her eyes.
When she was out of earshot, Lisbon looked at Jane and said: "Did she just ask what to do if the FBI asks her why she didn't stop Red John?"
Jane nodded somberly. "Yes."
Lisbon glanced down the hall, features strained. "Poor kid."
Jane could only nod at that.
Tuesday, November 14th, 2013 9:30 p.m. PST
Lisbon is showering and Charlotte has arranged a sleeping bag on the couch, is curled up on top of it, watching Lisbon's TV with eerily vacant eyes. Jane has the inflatable air mattress inflated, is lying on it, watching his daughter tenderly.
She has been through so much. More than any human being should ever have to endure. Maybe more than any human is capable of enduring without going a little mad. Mad in the old-school vernacular, mad as a polite euphemism for trauma-induced psychosis.
Charlotte knows he is watching her, but he can't turn away. She has turned several pointed looks on him since Lisbon got in the shower about ten minutes ago and he knows he is pushing her patience, but where else can he look?
"Got a staring problem, Patrick?" Charlotte says in her annoyed, little girl voice and his face breaks into a magnificent smile. It is such a normal, surly teenage girl thing to say.
"When it comes to you, maybe I do," Jane says, deliberately taunting her and she shoots him an annoyed look, but the corners of her mouth are twitching a little bit. She looks away from the nonsense on the television, looks back at her father, wanting to believe the playful, concerned father act is not an act.
He can see that on her face, plain as day. She desperately wants him to be the man he appears to be, to be good and kind and safe. Under the longing is terror that he is not.
"Anyone ever tell you, you're really weird?" She says this instead of voicing any deeper, scarier truths.
"Everybody and all the time," Jane says back, delighted.
"No, they don't," Charlotte pushes back and Jane nods at her, face still split with his grin.
"Okay, they don't. Not with that word, anyway. But in their own ways, they do. With their own words, they let me know I am weird… and quite a bit more, sometimes." He uses that last line as a hook to open up dialogue.
Charlotte wants to trust him.
She wants to trust him desperately and is desperate for him not to be a monster, and terrified that he might be. Jane is 99.9% certain that her earlier Houdini act and ramshackle search of his attic was all about finding evidence that he might be more like Red John than he is otherwise letting on.
Intellectually, he knows this, but emotionally he can't get anywhere near the level of terror Charlie must be processing on a constant basis, the level of paranoia and instilled distrust.
Too bad Red John can't die more than once…
Jane wants to tell Charlotte he knows why she picked the locks and went through his stuff, he wants to read her like a book so he can allay her fears (terrors, really) in the process, but he knows if he goes down that road, she will shut him down almost immediately and erect walls around herself.
So he hopes simply being good-natured and patient will soothe her, in the small ways she might allow herself to be soothed.
"Was all you did at the CBI… before… was Red John cases?" She sounds like a little child, hesitant, unsure of herself. Jane tempers his grin a bit. Becomes pensive and runs through his memories of working at the CBI over the last ten years.
"Some Red John cases, and a lot of cases that had nothing at all to do with Red John."
"That you know of," Charlotte adds in true paranoid form.
"Right, that I know of," Jane agrees with a soft smile.
"Did you catch other killers? Like Red John?"
"I helped to catch some killers, but I don't think any of the others were like Red John," Jane said simply, watching his daughter's large, green eyes scanning his face for any signs of deception.
"Why not?"
"Most people aren't evil in the same ways as Red John. Most people are not so theatrical behind the mask. Ugly, but not so glamorous. Mostly greedy and scared and angry, but not cruel for the sake of cruel. Not most of them."
"I don't know what that means," Charlotte says with utter seriousness.
"Most of the people I helped catch who had killed other people usually had selfish motivations for why they killed. Say, they might want somebody else's money or their job, or to make someone they hated hurt by killing someone that person loved. They usually were operating from a place of greed or vengeance and hadn't developed emotionally, so they were essentially like big, angry infants with the resources and cunning of adults. Red John operates from a place of… well… you know better than I do, unfortunately. But from what I know of him, he seemed to delight in cruelty for cruelty's sake. He seemed to understand what made people tick and seemed to want to hurt them just to hurt them. Hurting them was his motive."
Charlotte nods at this, a fervent nod. "And most other people weren't cruel like him? Not sadistic?"
"Most weren't. We dealt with some people who were sadistic, but even they… most of them were sadistic in addition to being greedy, and the sadism was a personality trait which flared to life when they were already breaking the law."
"As opposed to a driving force?" Charlotte prods. Jane smiles at her, nodding.
"Right. As opposed to a sole, motivating factor."
"Do you think Red John is human?" Charlotte asks then, and Jane has a sudden, strong feeling of déjà vu. He can swear she has asked him this before, but nods just the same.
"I think Red John was human, yes. A very evil, cruel human being."
From down the hall, there is the sound of the shower turning off. Charlotte is looking down the hall like a spooked animal, maybe a cat or a chipmunk, something a little neurotic and easily alarmed by the slightest changes in sound or motion.
Jane waits for her to return to their conversation.
"We are here only to speak to Elian, right? I don't have to speak to the FBI if I don't want to?"
A day ago, Jane would have tried to get her to speak to the FBI, just to get the spooks to back down, but now he sees the matter differently.
"No, not if you don't feel comfortable talking to them."
"Red John has eyes in the FBI," Charlotte tells her father in a low, conspiratorial voice, eyes darting down the hall again when Lisbon moves around in the bathroom. Probably towel-drying herself. Jane considers his daughter's words and nods back at her.
"That doesn't surprise me," Jane says somberly. Charlotte seems relieved that he accepts her truth at face value.
"He has eyes everywhere," she adds.
"So I am coming to understand," Jane says.
"If he really is dead-"
"He is-"
"If he is, what will happen to all of his eyes now? Will they suicide themselves?"
Jane has the strong urge to tell Charlie that the word suicide can't be used as a verb, but decides to let it go.
"I don't know," he says truthfully. "What do you think will happen to them?"
"I don't know," Charlotte says back, with a shudder. Charlotte turns back to the TV and pretends to watch the reality show (some sort of ridiculous singing competition, and some nasty Briton named Simon is chewing people out for being "atrocious") when Lisbon comes into the living room towel drying her hair and dressed in pastel plaid lounge pants and a baseball jersey.
"There is enough hot water left if anybody else wants a shower," Lisbon says, sitting down on the couch, but far enough away from Charlotte that she doesn't feel crowded.
Jane looks at his daughter. She shows him her splinted fingers and makes a face. Showering these days involves wrapping her hands in plastic grocery store bags.
"If there is a chance of the water going cold if I don't hurry, then I'll pass."
Jane nods, moves towards the bathroom. "Guess I'll get rid of the day's cobwebs. Thanks, Lisbon." And he moves off down the hall, to wash away the day, to get clean again... if only for a little while.