Fandom: The Mentalist (Chapter 70)
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:
Again, life has been super busy. Quite a few very stressful, very sad things have transpired since I posted the last chapter, so hopefully I can distill those emotions and inject them into this fic, make it rawer and more powerful. Tragedy in life should have some redeeming qualities, even if we have to force the goodness out of those tragedies. Enjoy. Don't worry, the next chapter will be up soon, too. - Lex
"Another day has gone
I'm still all alone
How could this be
You're not here with me
You never said goodbye
Someone tell me why"
- You are not alone by Michael Jackson
"I had a one-way ticket to a place where all the demons go
Where the wind don't change
And nothing in the ground can ever grow
No hope, just lies
And you're taught to cry into your pillow
But I survived" - I'm Alive by Sia
Monday, October 27th, 2014 5:12 am
She'd been up since 5:00 am, trying not to panic, curled up in a corner of the bathroom with the door locked.
She felt like she was going to die. She'd been having horrific nightmares, nightmares she couldn't get out of, couldn't awaken from. A pack of wolves hunting her, stalking her, through a dark forest, and when she got into an open space, a field, they ran and lunged, only they were a mutated pack of wolves, many connected to each other. Multiple heads and more than 4 legs, monstrosities, 3 heads like Cerberus, a wolf with one head and 7 eyes and what had to be 12 legs, all running in unison, in perfect harmony.
Horrors, all of them.
And then, after an eternity of nightmare purgatory, she was awake with an adrenaline-fueled kick to the heart.
She'd awoken with a start when the biggest and ugliest of the wolves leaped out of the woods, encouraging the others to do the same. The big one was on her, blood on his scarred snout almost immediately, digging and rooting and thrashing his yellow teeth at her belly.
Pulling and tearing until she could feel her entrails rip free from the rest of her innards, begin to spill out of her like long loops of sausage not yet tied off into links. There was the sensation of ripping, of loss and of flesh being pulled free from where it was supposed to be. No pain.
It was what an animal being eaten alive would experience, if shot full of novocaine. It was shock and horror and shut-down and crushing terror slipping away with each bloody inch of the yellow-brown intestine, out, out.. all of it was out on the ground now, on the grass that was not grass, steaming and the wolves were eating, and her insides were full of feces.
And the fucking things were eating the shit inside of her, too. Hungry. So hungry. Never sated.
The wolves, snarling and pulling on her insides. The hot, choking smell of blood mixing with the dewy, almost watermelon fragrance of late winter. The smell of snow. An undercurrent of cedar and fir.
She woke up all at once.
She woke up in subtle shades of recognition.
It was both.
She woke up inside an electric scream and it was the desperate, caged neon quality of the scream that let her think that, yes, yes, she was awake.
Waking up into the gentle yellow glow of her bedroom, a bedroom lost somewhere in emotional maturity between 4 and 12 years of age, a stunted and safe place. Tragic as a dead baby in a jar of formaldehyde, forever safe, forever young... shut off from life with more nuances to the picture, because Red John had blotted out almost every human desire save for food and water, sleep and release of bodily fluids. The need to be safe.
Forever lost in a time before that could never serve its purpose.
Small pokemon figurines and troll dolls on wooden shelves staring at her with large, curious eyes from their stations. Stuffed animals and brightly colored posters on the walls. Lava lamps. Nothing scary here, smiling, friendly, plastic friend faces.
You'll be okay, Charlie, the plastic friend faces said. Play with us. Play with us and forget.
Regress.
She pushed her legs over the edge of her bed, got up on unsteady legs which felt like hot rubber. Into the bathroom, she floated. Slide down the wall and sat on the ground in a little sweaty heap of bad feelings trying to rip their way out of her, trying to scream themselves free so their pain could be heard and validated.
Her heart was hammering and it was a strange feeling; too fast, too light, and she found herself wondering if she was having a heart attack. If maybe she should wake Patrick up and let him help?
Because maybe... truly... this was something serious?
The other times, this feeling hadn't been physically indicative of anything serious. But maybe this time, this one time, right now... maybe this time it was serious?
Wake Patrick up?
Maybe?
The fear grew, spiking into waves of panic. Huge. Crashing. Blinding. The terror of a cardiac arrest, of dying, of becoming rotting flesh, of becoming a corpse in the ground.
She'd had panic attacks before. Many of them. Hundreds, if not thousands of these beasts, taking over her brain and emotions and adrenal glands.
This was just more of the same.
This was old hat Red John emotional scarring acting up from something in her subconscious she was trying to process and work through.
Surely, that was all that was happening.
"More of the same," she said out loud in a trembling voice, a whisper.
She could feel her eyes wide and hot in her head, the eyes of a puppet in a puppet's body, hot and wide and unseeing, waiting for the panic to reach a crescendo.
Her heart sputtered a few more screwy beats.
There was a pain like a knife in her chest.
Her lungs felt sucked clean of air, the insides stuck to each other, unable to pull in air. She could feel a scream trying to bubble up through the pinprick hole of her throat.
She had a sudden, devastating mental image of a young woman on a dirty pavement with a sheet of saran wrap stretched over her face so tightly she couldn't breathe, was turning all sorts of funky colors. Blue and purple, lips going that neon cyanotic color they'd stay while she was embalmed and lowered into the too-perfect grass plot.
She couldn't tell, at that moment, if the mental image was a real memory or a phantasm, something left over from the dream.
She wasn't awake enough, not yet, to be able to know what was real, what was dream imagery, what was repressed horror bubbling up like pus from a wound being lanced.
It didn't matter. It was horrific and she was scared bone-cold and shaking.
The imagery, whatever its origin, had served its purpose.
"Fucking, just leave me alone. Just... I never did anything to you," she told herself, aloud, breathy and choked voice, verging on tears.
She hadn't done this, but it was to her the images kept coming. Back and back and back, like ghosts seeking her to help fix the wrongs that were their murders.
They didn't stop. Pale, hollow faces with the consciousness dripping out of their eyes, out of their pupils, consciousness leaving some tacky, sweet smell in the air to mingle with their blood.
She'd seen enough kills to know that consciousness dried up and bled out before actual blood.
The person felt the knife and they knew... they knew. It was real. It was unavoidable. He wouldn't stop.
He wouldn't relent. He would not grant absolution. He would not grant a reprieve.
If they didn't know it the first time the blade went in, they knew it by the third or fourth time. Red John would keep playing with his toys until he cut what he, at one time, called a spurter. Blood would shoot forth like it was almost happy to escape the confines of the body.
At the point, all she could do was make eye contact. Couldn't say sorry, couldn't say "I'm right here, with you. You are not alone," because even small kindnesses would piss Red John off.
So she just stared at their dazed, dying cow eyes (she thought of them as human cattle after a while, being processed for meat like dairy cows who had fulfilled their use and were being sent to slaughter, and that made it a tiny bit easier).
She stared at their eyes. They didn't seem to know or care they were bleeding after the first handful of screams.
Eventually, they all got the message. There was no escape. There was no point in screaming: nobody around to hear, who cared, or was able to help.
No point in begging, that would only extend the torture.
No point in praying, because God was obviously on his lunch break.
She stared at their eyes, all shades and colors, all races, all ages it seemed like... watching them die.
Over and over and over. The human cattle.
Red John's melodic voice in the background, referring to them always, always, as "it".
"Do you see how it stops struggling when it realizes an artery has been severed? That seems to be the point, when, most of them, realize it is useless to keep fighting."
The horror draining out of their eyes, replaced by something like acceptance. Most of them got that look if the bleeding out took more than a minute.
Going into shock with white faces.
"Why are you opening and closing your mouth at me?" That was Red John, talking to a young girl, murdered in her place.
Because Charlotte had tried to escape. And he had to teach her a lesson. Same age, same suntanned skin, same slightly wavy golden blonde hair, hair that would have looked adorable in ringlets if the current murder victim hadn't been so much a tomboy.
"Are you trying to beg?" Red John's voice, amused, rising into something that wanted to laugh.
"I couldn't save you now if I wanted to. I don't want to. Let's be clear about that. I want to see you die. But nobody can save you. Your carotid artery has been severed. You'll be dead and starting to decay within 2 minutes."
That had gotten a spike of terror out of the girl.
Charlotte licked her lips and tasted iron and salt on her lips. Spray from the girl. Opening and closing her lips like she was trying to talk, but couldn't, and her teeth were so bright and red with blood.
Looking, now, to little Charlie.
"You think she can help you? She is the reason you're here,"
Red John had said and Charlotte had felt her insides twist. She wanted to scream for the girl, but she had been just as frozen.
"She doesn't really believe she will die, this one," Red John had said, jerking his handsome face at Charlotte. Looking back at the girl on the ground with an expression of faux concern.
"Don't fight it. Just go with it. Rotting is not so bad," Red John had said.
The consciousness was almost gone from the girl's eyes. Evolution was protecting her from the fear and the horror...
"It's going to be okay," Charlotte had said, but in her head, because she couldn't risk Red John hearing.
"There is a light in you that will never go out. It can never go out. You can never die, the part of you that is real," Charlotte had said into her mind, screaming it, hoping beyond hope the girl could hear her thoughts.
Charlotte had gone to the girl. Touched her cold, clammy skin. Only slightly colder than her own skin.
"Watch what you did, Charlotte. Watch it all. Don't make it suffer in vain," Red John said, but he was already bored. He began to walk back towards the car they'd come to Mexico in. There was the sound of Mexican pop music, fast Spanish, farther away, the neon light pollution of a big city.
Charlotte touched the girl's lips with her fingers. The girl didn't move and was already getting what Red John called "black about the pupils". Dilated pupils.
Peoples' pupils dilated when they died. Or when they were in shock. Or otherwise not really there.
Not really there.
I AM SORRY. Charlotte said in her head, in her loudest internal praying voice. She leaned down and touched her lips to the girls. Kissed her on the lips.
But the girl was gone.
And Red John was amused.
"I said learn from it, don't make out with it!"
His voice was full of vile joy.
She would not cry. She would not cry. She would not cry.
A flashbulb. The sound of a piece of Polaroid film sliding through the camera. Red John was flapping the film and waiting for an image to appear.
Charlotte, pale as a November cloud under her Mexican tan, eyes as dark as the corpse's.
"Going in the scrapbook," he said and was back to the car, and she knew, as much as she wanted to, there was no point in running. He would always catch her, always find her, always get her.
Comply.
Compliance.
There was no other alternative.
She got up, on legs which looked and felt like somebody else's, and ran her wrists under cold water from the tap.
She was in the bathroom, in Jane's apartment, in a new life. Jane seemed okay. Looked a hell like Red John but so far no savagery, no staking out the bathroom or pulling her from under covers into the dark, wet night of screams.
They could both be soft and gentle, but Jane's gentleness seemed earnest, not mocking.
"Don't cry, don't cry, don't cry," she told her reflection in the mirror.
DO NOT CRY.
Wrists under the cold water for another go. Chill the blood. When you chilled the blood, you physically slowed down the sense of panic.
Chill the blood.
Doing that was supposed to help with panic. She splashed cold water on her face. Felt her pulse by pressing a few shaking fingers to the throbbing vein in her neck.
Another electric feeling to the chest. A hummed, repressed scream. She sat on the toilet with the toilet seat down, rocking slightly, eyes closing to slits, praying for this panic to abate.
After what felt like a lifetime of blinding panic episodes, one might think she would have grown out of them. Learned not to become so terrified.
But panic attacks weren't logical by definition. And they were overwhelming in intensity, frying her brain, electrifying her emotions.
She began rooting through the under-the-sink cabinet and pulled out a box of tampons. She dumped the tampons on the floor, gently pulled the plastic dime bag with the ativan she had been rationing out of the bottom.
She'd been getting a few hundred 1 mg ativan sublingual tablets from a kid she'd connected with online years ago.
Almost a full year with Patrick, and she was down to her final 2.
Fuck.
Charlotte carefully put her right pointer finger in the bag, pulled the ativan from the baggie, put it under her tongue.
Her tongue wasn't breaking the tablet down fast enough, so she chewed it carefully and pushed the paste back under her tongue to get it into her bloodstream as soon as possible.
Ativan could soothe the panic when nothing else did, but it was highly addictive and she was hooked.
She'd tried Heroin a few times, crying the first time. Just a little kid then, no more than 10, trying to get the fucking tourniquet on, trying to find a vein.
Might have ODed because she woke up with Red John there, slapping her face, concerned and unhappy and under all that concern and unhappiness there was the rage that he might lose his most interesting toy.
Slap, slap, and the sting of another needle and she'd come back with so much fear and pain in her head that she wanted to die.
Red John had cured her of the Heroin habit before it had become a habit, but he either didn't care or had never known about the ativan.
Jane had ativan on hand, but he kept it somewhere in his room and liked to dole it out when he thought she was about to lose the plot.
Charlotte found that intensely embarrassing, to have Patrick see her weak and panicking like that.
So she'd been using her own stash. Nearly gone, now. She'd have to bus down to San Jose and meet up with Keef.
School would be easy enough to get out of after Jane dropped her off. She'd hack his email account, send a bullshit email to her principal claiming "Charlotte" had phoned him feeling sick and he was coming to pick her up.
It was the coming-to-pick-her-up part that would fool them.
They would assume nobody would be that brazen, to just lie about a parent coming to pick them up when they were, instead, going to call a taxi cab to the nearest Greyhound station.
They wouldn't wait for her outside. The email from Patrick Jane would seem just as legit as the handful of other times she'd sent similar emails from "Patrick" in order to get out of school and instead had spent the day walking around parks, at the Chuck E. Cheese, at the roller rink, smoking pot and eating candy.
One day spent drinking malit liquor and sobbing hysterically behind the bowling alley.
That had been a bad day... but she had survived.
Around 3:40 pm she'd get a taxi back to school. Be waiting there for Jane when he pulled up.
So yeah. Today would be fine for a trip to the city. Monday was a good day to take a bus trip. Jane would probably be late picking her up anyway, it being a Monday and all and Jane being stressed out about Halloween.
Seeking a mental and emotional escape from the ongoing tension in the form of a CBI case.
And she'd be back, and she'd have her ativans so she could freak out and medicate in peace without Jane watching her; that tight, scared, nervous look on his face which tried so hard to look calm.
She couldn't bear that look.
She couldn't tell him it was hard sometimes just to be in the same room as him, because even though he didn't seem or act like Red John, the familial resemblance was just too much and she felt like she was losing her mind a little teensy bit.
It made shame wash over her in what felt like heavy tidal waves of hot tar.
Shame and guilt. They often paired off together, the asshole emotional twins.
She had to get the ativan, because she was almost out, and she couldn't endure her mind alone without something to dumb the terror.
And telling him was impossible.
Most people might not have noticed it, would have bought Jane's carefree act, but Charlotte was not most people. Could see the sadness and fear and concern in his features as if they had been scribbled on his face in neon magic marker.
"I'm sorry Patrick," she whispered into the dense bathroom air. It smelled like hand soap and shampoo and here, something like cedar which was Jane's aftershave.
"There are just some things you can never know..."
Shortly after 5 am she'd taken the ativan. She got up and padded back into her room, trying to breathe deeply and calmly.
Just after 5 am.
The sublinguals didn't work instantly like they were supposed to, not for her, but in 30-45 minutes the worst of the panic would be chemically suppressed.
"Just get through the next 30 minutes," Charlotte mumbled to herself, and she walked down into the kitchen. Her knuckles were yellow-white, skin taut against the bones and tendons of her knuckles.
The urge to just let go and scream in a dazed panic felt like it was growing, becoming bigger in her mind and the space around her, taking on almost a physical presence in the ether.
Just scream and scream and scream and scream and scream.
What would happen if she just did that one day?
Lost control of the terror and began to scream, and couldn't stop?
What would Jane do?
She'd gone through the shit in his room once, had found a pale vial of medication, but no needles to use with it.
Palmed the meds just in case. Too afraid to ask Jane why it even existed in his room.
"Breathe you little freak," she told her self, and then smirked even despite the terror.
She had a very, very nasty internal critic, as the overpaid shrinks on TV would say.
Negative self-talk, and all that jazz.
No shit, Sherlock.
Very carefully and slowly Charlotte got a glass juice tumbler and filled it with milk. Stirred a large drooping squeeze of strawberry Nesquik syrup into the tumbler and stirred it fast. The final product was the same bubblegum pink color as Pepto Bismol.
She took a sip and nodded.
Felt another wave of panic trying to crash through. Felt another electric cardiac irregularity.
Not a heart attack.
Just adrenaline.
That strawberry Nesquik, undiluted by milk, had looked too much like arterial blood...
Breathe through this.
Charlotte very carefully crossed over to the cupboard which housed the twinkies and grabbed a few Twinkies, a few Hostess cupcakes. She took the snack cakes and the strawberry Nesquik and milk back to her room and laid her food and drink down on the floor. She sat down and sat cross-legged, very slowly sipping the milk, very carefully chewing the pastries. Sitting in the dark lit up only by her cartoon nightlight meant for preschoolers, eating cake and drinking milk and waiting for the ativan to kick in so she could find a modicum of peace again.
She just needed relief. A way out of the hellish memories. Just some peace.
She'd gone up into the attic around 5:45. Rooted around under the floorboards. She had an old 80s toy which was an extendable robot arm. She pushed that into the empty, black space, rooted around with the claw hand.
Nothing. The toy hand was just grabbing air.
For Fuck's sake.
"He better fucking not have..." Charlotte breathed into the musty air of the attic. She went to her desk, pulled open a drawer, looked through odds and ends until she found what she was looking for. A pocket maglite. Incredibly powerful light. And a novelty periscope she'd purchased online.
She went back to the loose floorboard and laid on the ground, face near the open space. She turned the flashlight on and angled the beam into the dark. Used the periscope toy to see underneath the floor.
It was fucking gone.
Jane had taken it!
An old Mrs. Butterworth syrup jar, in the shape of Mrs. Butterworth herself, washed out and stuffed from the inside with tiny plastic baggies of marijuana. Mostly indica. Taped to Mrs. Butterworth was her glass pot pipe.
Jane had taken it!
Fuck!
"He had no fucking right," Charlotte grumbled to herself. She pushed the floorboard back into place and put the periscope toy and flashlight back in their ordinary home.
She thumped down the stairs, walked to Jane's bedroom door. Open a crack, for her. In case she needed him in the night, maybe. So he could hear.
So he could respond and soothe.
But...
He'd stolen her pot! Like he knew what was best for her! Just gone and taken it!
He had no right!
Charlotte stared at the nearly closed door. Felt her irritation growing. She needed to get away from her past, her thoughts, her emotions. Patrick cared about her (she thought so and wanted to believe) but he was so damned sure of himself, sure that he knew how dark it got in her head, certain he knew all the right things to say and do to help her.
He had no right to presume to know how dark and scary and soul-sucking the nights could get.
He had no right to take a herbal medicine she used to just squeak through the long, dark days.
He had no right to just go and take it, root around in her stuff and just steal her Mrs.-Fucking-Butterworth full of carefully selected marijuana strains.
Had he used the robot arm to reach the Mrs. Butterworth? Probably.
He'd fucking taken it!
She forced herself to breathe and stay calm and think.
He usually got up at 7 am on Mondays. A quick shower, his English crumpet and strawberry jam, two scrambled eggs, a cup of tea...
It was nearly 6 am.
He lost an hour of sleep for being a presumptuous jerk and stealing.
Charlotte reached forward and knocked hard on his door.
She could sense he was rousing almost immediately.
"Patrick! That was mine!"
She stomped into Patrick's room, not caring that she was making more noise than she had to wake him.
The urge to sob was so huge, she could only hide it by being angry. If she lost the annoyance, the anger, she was going to lose it, was going to sob and shake. Maybe she would be unable to stop crying.
Her lips on the girl's cold mouth, like she could maybe breathe life back into her with a kiss, like something from a Disney movie...
"What?!" Jane said. He sat up, ran his hands over his face, wiped at his sleep-buggy eyes.
He had a few grey hairs now. More than a few. He hadn't had grey when she'd come back, had he?
"Charlotte!? What's the matter?"
"You went up into the attic and stole my Mrs. Butterworth from under the floorboard!"
As she said the words, heavy and fast, her breathing hitched and she bit the inside of her cheek to keep from crying.
She wasn't really terribly surprised by Jane, or the loss of her pot. But it was what she could face. What she could deal with.
She couldn't deal with the rest of it... so she wouldn't.
She'd make this about pot.
Patrick blinked heavily. He was trying to work spit into his mouth.
"Your Mrs. Butterworth? Charlotte, what are you talking about?" He was still sleep-dazed, still not fully awake.
"My washed out Mrs. Butterworth! My... the plastic container shaped like a woman? Under the stairs?"
She gave him time to think and remember and wake up. He sat up in bed and rubbed at his eyes and in that moment, with that gesture, Charlotte could quite easily imagine her father as a little boy, confused and on the edge of getting in trouble, trying to make sense of the upset.
"Brown plastic? Shaped like a frumpy housewife from the 1940s?" Jane's voice was slow, just waking up.
Charlotte nodded. Stared at him without blinking. She was pale again under her tan, like she had been that night on the cold, Mexican road which smelled of motor oil and Red John and blood.
"Full of tiny plastic baggies of green stuff that was never oregano?" Jane continued. He was using humor to deflect and she was too exhausted for that.
"It doesn't matter!" Charlotte's voice was acidic, full of bitterness and something under it... hurt. Hurt that was trying to pretend to be outrage.
"You invaded my privacy and you went through my stuff! And you stole my Mrs. Butterworth! You had no right to take her! She was my property, not yours and..."
Jane made himself get up out of bed. He went to his kid. Tried to hug her but she pulled away like he was painfully hot. Fire maybe. He immediately pulled back, giving her space.
"I'm sorry. I know it was your property. I just... I don't want you using drugs to deal with pain."
"But if they come from a shrink, they are suddenly not drugs, right? I wasn't hurting anybody. So just give it back!"
"Charlotte..." Jane drawled. His fatigue was quite evident.
"It was mine and I paid good money for that! That Mrs. Butterworth! Got me through a lot of hard nights, and..."
She was saying more than she wanted to say. Time to shut the H-E double hockey sticks up.
Jane was making a face. An uh oh face. A face that told Charlotte he had messed up and knew it. He had miscalculated, and he was sorry. Feeling guilty.
Red John had never had that expression on his face. Not once.
"That was my Mrs. Butterworth and..." she started again, trying to sound like an adult.
"We used to use that syrup when you were little, didn't we? For pancakes?" Jane said, eyes distant, remembering. "Syrup bottle like a lady..."
Charlotte nodded furiously.
"She reminded you of home and family, eating, safety... not much more in this world with a safer feel to it than pancakes..." Jane mused.
"Stop psychoanalyzing me, for fuck's sake. I want my pot! That's the beginning and end of my issue."
"Charlotte, I'm sorry... I threw the jar away. It's gone. Maybe getting seagulls high in a landfill somewhere, I don't know."
"What?!"
"I didn't want you using marijuana. It's dangerous."
"It's freaking marijuana, not heroin! How is it dangerous?"
"The more stress a person has been under," Jane started, features stern and almost angry, "the more stress, the more trauma, the greater the chance for a psychotic episode if one uses marijuana..."
"That's bullshit 1940s Reefer madness propaganda, Patrick! Jesus!"
"It's not," Jane said softly. "Marijuana fears are usually overblown, you're right. But there is still a significant risk for a certain subset of the population if they use pot regularly, especially in large amounts, and especially when their brains are still developing. As would be the case with you, since, believe it or not, you are still a child..."
He paused, waiting for her to be offended by the use of the word child. She kept her mouth shut. He continued.
"And with the trauma and incredible stress you've been under for most of your life, you would be at heightened risk to develop psychosis while using THC in large amounts. That's why I threw it out. The last thing you need now is to battle refractory psychosis..."
"You could have told me what you were doing! Heard my side of the story!"
"I know your side of the story," Patrick said sadly. Charlotte glared.
"You could have heard what I had to say before you threw it away!"
"It doesn't matter. You're not going to use marijuana. It's too great a risk and I will not let you risk your future like that-" Jane said, but stopped when Charlotte stomped away in a huff.
"You had no right!" Charlotte called from down the hall.
"You're my daughter!" Jane called back. "I had every right!"
"Says you!"
Charlotte stomped back down the hall, went back up into the attic, stomping as hard as she could, hoping she might cause little cracks to form in the floorboards.
Fucking Patrick.
Thought he was so great. Knew everything. Such a hero.
So awesome, stealing her pot. So certain.
Didn't even want to hear her side!
Charlotte sat on her rainbow bean bag chair and glared across the softly lit room, eyes focused on her laptop.
She got a crafty smile on her face. Got up and went to the laptop. Sat down in the rolling desk chair, stretched her fingers out until her knuckles cracked.
She opened up the email program Patrick used for his CBI email. Entered his login name. Next screen.
Password.
She had figured the password out pretty easily, all things considered.
Bedbug and her date of birth in numbers.
She was in.
She went to the "create new email" tab. Entered the school principal's email. Entered a short note. Charlotte had phoned him at the CBI feeling sick. He was on a case but was sending a taxi to pick her up and bring her home and she would be back the following day. Please, no direct phone calls, as he was interviewing subjects on a homicide case and they were getting close to a break.
The bit about being on a homicide case was genius, Charlotte thought, sucking on her thumbnail. Very few parents at the school actually had jobs where they tried to stop murders from happening.
It was the sort of perfect job you didn't inquire much about because you didn't really want the details (if you were normal) and you didn't question the way things were done when they were done by that incredibly tiny segment of the population willing to stop serial killers.
Send a taxi to pick up one's kid at school? Made perfect sense if you were interviewing serial killers.
Obviously, a consultant couldn't be disturbed when trying to wrangle a confession out of the damned psychos of the world.
"You're brilliant, kid," Charlotte told her reflection in the screen.
People heard the word "homicide" and they short-circuited and got deferential. Sure, Mr. Jane. Of course, we won't interrupt you or question your email. Are you still going to be interviewed for the Netflix special "I AM A KILLER" as a specialist on criminal behavior?
Working on any books, Mr. Jane?
You just keep doing what you're doing, pulling serial killers and rapists and terrorists off the street.
You go, Mr. Jane.
You go.
She smiled at her reflection in the screen. Jane and Red John, both, both of them, in their own ways, thought they were soooo much smarter than everybody else.
Except, she was Red John's protegee and Jane's child. She had learned and studied and come up in the world in a landscape drenched in screams and loneliness.
She had learned to mess with minds, too. Had learned a few tricks of the mentalism trade along the way.
She usually didn't try to manipulate other people, because it felt wrong and dirty, somehow, but Jane had essentially forced her hand this time.
This one was on him.
Charlotte opened a program she had mucked about with. A simple clock, but it could be set to send emails at specific times if you knew how to get inside program files and play with the computer code.
Charlotte set the email to be sent off at 9:30 am. That would give her time to be dropped off, start first period, feel sick, "phone her father" and for her email to get to the principal.
The principal would see it maybe 15 minutes later and she'd be out of there be 10:00 am. 30 minutes to the bus station, 2 hours to San Jose, 30 minutes to meet with Keef and got more ativan and maybe some more pot, 2 hours back, 30 minutes back to school... like 5 and a half hours. She'd be back at school around 3:30.
Then just hang out nearby till pick up time. Maybe smoke a joint and hang out on the tire swing.
Pretend she was a regular teenage girl skipping class and smoking a joint.
Easy peasy.
And Patrick had nobody to blame for her bus trip but himself.
"I should have told you before I threw out your marijuana," Jane said amiably at breakfast, trying to pass the olive branch. He had an English crumpet suffocating in strawberry jam and a plate of cooling eggs. Some sort of herbal tea which smelled like cinnamon.
It was his favorite breakfast and he ate the exact same thing more days than not.
"Whatever," Charlotte mumbled into the fridge.
"Does that mean we're good?" Jane said with almost artificial cheer.
"It means whatever," Charlotte groused, and came back to the breakfast table with a half gallon jug of Sunny Delight.
"You never drink this, do you?" She asked her father, nodding towards the jug of Sunny-D. Jane barely glanced at the fake orange drink, made a face, shook his head.
"Never. That... food product... is all yours."
"Good," Charlotte said to the bottle. She pulled the cap off with her teeth and spat it on the table, poured some sunny D into her cereal bowl, dumped in some cookie crisp.
She sat at her chair across from Patrick, taking obscenely large mouthfuls of cereal and chugging Sunny Delight from the jug.
"That just gross," Jane said, making another face, going back to his eggs. Charlotte opened her mouth in a sarcastic smile, pushed orange-cereal paste through her teeth. and sucked it back before it could run down her chin.
"Just despicable manners," Jane said, only half joking. "Frightening."
"Manners are over-rated anyway," Charlotte muttered after swallowing her chewed cereal.
"They're mostly used to control and dominate other people," Charlotte added when Jane failed to respond.
"They exist so we understand it is not cool to throw our feces in public or act in ways that would lead to early death from disease or injury," Jane said, and his voice seemed to be heading towards pedantic territory. Charlotte rolled her eyes.
"Why do you have to lecture me at the breakfast table? I already understand the basics about manners. I still think they are taken to an extreme and people care more about the surface than what lies beneath."
She hit a nerve with that comment, somewhat, and could see something dark and full of pain flutter behind his eyes. A trapped bird.
Grief.
Oh well. He wasn't the only haunted Jane at the breakfast table, and she, for one, hadn't gone through his private things and thrown shit out. So... yeah.
She turned back to her Cookie Crisp and spooned in 6 heaping tablespoons in close order, chewed and gulped and swallowed.
"If I wanted a lecture before school I would have turned PBS on, for Christ's sake."
Jane was watching her like he wasn't sure how much of her attitude was normal teenage bad day, and how much was something more.
"I won't throw your stuff away again without telling you first. But I will always through pot or other drugs out if I find them, so don't waste your money in the first place," Jane said as he took his last bite of crumpet.
"Such bullshit," Charlotte muttered, getting up, talking into her Metallica t-shirt.
None of the kids at her school listened to Metallica. Metallica was an ollllld band. Awesome band. Just as well the little posers didn't know good music.
She drifted past Jane back to her room to make sure she had everything in her backpack.
"What was that?" Jane taunted lightly as she passed him.
She muttered something else into her shirt.
"You washed your clothes last weekend, didn't you? Because your hoody smells like lemon-scented Lysol spray..."
He never stopped. Jesus.
Charlotte ignored him and got her backpack.
Her school book and pencil case and daily journal in the front pockets. Her Nintendo handheld. A few Tampax tampons in their paper wrappers, a compact mirror, a stick of cherry chapstick, half a pack of spearmint gum, a travel bottle of advil, an extra pair of underwear and socks in a bag. Her old transformers wallet with the plastic cover falling apart. Inside was her school ID and a bus pass and library card and the card to the bank Jane had helped her set up with a banking and chequing account.
The cute little button Rigsby had given her. A smiling beagle dog, nearly photo-realistic. Bubble words on the button. "HOT DOG".
Cute.
Rigsby was so damned adorable. Charlotte really hoped Van Pelt appreciated the great man she had.
Charlotte looked through her bag...
She had a learner's license and a few rewards and points cards for different stores. Cards for fan club members had been going the way of the dinosaur since the late 90s and the internet moving into everybody's homes, but she had a few laminated fan club cards, too, from years past.
Cards pledging allegiance to her liking of some toy or cartoon had given her a sense of identity in years past. She had a lego fan club card and one for Playmobil and one which said she was a professional cryptid hunter.
She flipped past the bank card and social security card and school ID and there was a small wad of cash, nearly 300.00 in ones and fives.
She put everything back in her backpack and zipped it up. Charlotte walked back into the kitchen and pulled the brown bagged lunch she'd made last night (PB & j, baby carrots, orange, snack pack, Pepsi) out of the fridge and dropped that into her backpack, too.
"You got everything?" Jane said from where he was rinsing off his breakfast plate, getting ready to put it into the countertop dishwasher. Now he was putting it in the dishwasher, and his teacup. He'd already loaded her cereal bowl.
He shut the little door on the dishwasher.
"Charlotte? Do you have everything you need?"
"Oh? Yeah," his kid shrugged, blase as a queen bee.
"Okay. I just have to get my briefcase from my room. You can wait for me or go wait at the car," Jane said.
His kid opened the door and slipped out. Walked down the walkway, down the stairs, bypassing the elevators. Burning off a sudden spurt of adrenaline.
Jane unlocked the car doors when he was almost on the ground floor, waving his fob in her direction. Charlotte pulled the passenger seat door open, sat in her seat and slammed the door.
The need to get her ativan and pot was beginning to burn and itch in her head. She pulled her vape out of her pocket and sucked on it. 12 mg strength, a flavor called Cinnaroos which tasted like Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
"You brought your vape? You know you can't use that on the school grounds, right?" Jane said, walking up the drive to the driver's side door.
"I'm not stupid enough to use it on school property," Charlotte retorted when Jane got into the car and slammed his door.
She inhaled a few more lungfuls of nicotine vapor.
"You're addicted to one of the most addictive alkaloids on the planet. Don't give me that. It's not about stupidity, it's about addiction."
Charlotte stared at him.
"I don't get caught," she groused and began to breathe on the passenger window, exhaling steam and drawing stick figures before rubbing them away with the sleeve of her hoodie.
She had black fingernail polish on her nails, and the nails themselves were short, chewed short, two of them throbbing where she'd ripped the quick chewing. Fucking compulsions.
"If it does get taken away, I can't get it back for you," Jane said as he started the Citroën.
"Of course you could," Charlotte said to her reflection in the passenger window as they pulled out of the parking lot.
"I could, but I can't as a parent," Jane clarified. "There are rules in life. Consequences for one's actions."
Charlotte snorted sarcastically at Jane's comment. She craned her neck to look at him, expression incredulous.
"You're honestly going to lecture me about rules and manners today, huh? Consequences? How often does Lisbon give you shit for pretending to be the King of the World?"
Jane stared back at her, unperturbed, eyes as blue and calm as glacial pools. Her annoyed teenage bullshit was just bouncing off his armor.
"You're doing things that could get you in trouble. Trying anything you possibly can to escape the past," Jane said mildly as he pulled through an intersection.
Charlotte muttered to herself. She felt itchy. A little too anxious for comfort, but in a few hours, that problem would be dealt with.
The ridges of keloid scarring on her chest and belly from Red John's torture seemed to burn and itch under her clothes. The inside of her thighs felt cold and almost bruised. Weird body sensations.
She didn't want to think at length about those body sensations, and why they were occurring. She just wanted them to go away. Be blotted out.
Ativan could do that. So could pot.
She felt so damned itchy.
Withdrawal, mostly. Charlotte breathed through the sensation and stared past her reflection and out onto the road, at the sidewalk and the flickering images of people passing by as their car sped past them.
Cars didn't travel distances, they also travelled through time. It was time travel, riding in a car. One-way time travel. Into the future.
She smiled to herself, continued to draw on the glass. Jane was silent and she could feel his eyes watching her, burning holes into the back of her hood.
Time to plan the school shit...
She'd seem dopey from the beginning and at 20 past ask to use the bathroom. Complain of feeling sick. A finger down the throat to stimulate the gag reflex. Oh yeah. she'd drink some castor oil right after Jane pissed her off. A slurp of syrup of ipecac (just a little, too much could kill you) and maybe do a couple dozen jumping jacks.
That would get everything all mucked up in her stomach. That would cause the right reaction.
Actually make herself retch, that was the way to do it.
That way she'd look appropriately sweaty and pale, have that lingering puke scent. Then they would let her go, no doubt. She'd look and smell sick because she would be sick.
She jerked up, realizing Jane had been talking and asked her a question. She'd spaced on him.
"Did you?"
"Did I what?" Charlotte said, peeved, itchy, jumpy. Jane was getting on her nerves.
"You didn't sell any pot at school, did you? Because, kiddo, that would be a very bad idea. It's a good place for you to be and you don't want to..."
"Jesus," Charlotte sighed at the window. "Do you think I am a moron, Patrick?"
Jane's eyes flickered over from the road to his daughter's tense face and back to the road. Cars speeding by, rush hour on a Monday. Sacramento's working community had offices and hospitals and power plants to get to. Kids had to be dropped off at school. Plumbers had to unclog toilets. Somewhere in all that traffic, a serial killer and a pedophile and a couple tax evaders were tooling around in their vehicles, avoiding Patrick Jane and the team he consulted for, even if they didn't know that yet...
Such people kept Jane employed.
"Of course I don't think you're a moron," Jane said, eyes back to the road now.
"So why ask me if I would sell pot at school?"
"So you haven't, then?" Jane pushed.
Charlotte felt a huge, sudden lightning bolt of craving hit her. She sucked on her vape a few more times.
Nicotine wasn't enough.
"If you don't stop pestering me I am going to go back to smoking cigarettes," she told her reflection.
Jane sighed, tired. They were both on edge. Weeks of fears of Red John and what Halloween might mean meant fractured sleep, low moods. Charlotte was reliving trauma. Jane was processing new traumas, sorting through old childhood baggage he thought he'd buried.
"We'll have a better talk sometime else, then," Jane told the traffic.
"Or... we don't and we pretend we did," Charlotte side to the window and the rushing traffic beyond it.
Another lungful of e-cigarette vapor.
They were about 5 minutes from her school now. Charlotte chewed on her thumbnail, chewing and sucking until she tasted blood. Chew, chew, chew.
"I don't mean to lecture you," Jane said softly. "I know it must not seem like that, but it's true."
Charlotte kept sucking at her thumb, tasting salt and iron. She made a shrugging motion to let Patrick know she'd heard him.
And then she was in the schoolyard and Jane was slowing the car to a crawl and then a stop.
"4:00 we meet here, okay?" Jane confirmed as his kid pulled her door open.
He said that every day before he dropped her off.
"No shit," Charlotte told her sneakers.
All morning, the urge to cry had been with her, trying to break her down. She would not.
She would not.
"Okay, then," Jane said, ignoring the sarcasm and the bad attitude. "I will see you at 4:00. If I am going to be late, I will phone ahead and let you and Julie know."
"Yeah, yeah," Charlotte said, starting to close the door.
Jane smiled at his kid. She gave him a slight nod, dark circles under her eyes, weeks of poor sleep and stress and nightmares brimming right behind her pupils, lurking in the dark places of her eyes, the dark places that were more real than the merely physical.
Jane watched her walk up the stone steps, saw her wave at her aide and hunch her teenaged shoulders, pull what looked like her video game from her backpack (Jane had the fleeting thought that she should put the game away, that if she kept it out it would be taken from her and locked away until after school like half a dozen of her other toys she'd been pissed off had been "stolen").
He drove to the CBI. thinking of Lisbon, and hypoallergenic pillows, and his kid, and the dog's next vet appointment and variables on a case they had started last week at the CBI, insurance scams and murders for life insurance.
He pulled up into the CBI parking lot 10 minutes before he was due to arrive by the clock's standards. Saw Rigsby with a donut stuffed in his square jaw hurrying up the front walkway with a coffee in one hand and a bag of what was probably more donuts in the other hand.
Rigsby motioned to Jane with the hand that held the cup of coffee, just enough of a bounce in his hand for it to count as a wave.
Jane nodded through the glass of his car, smiling at Rigsby, and waved back.
"I think we're going to get another hit from your hot dog button this morning," Jane told Rigsby with affection as he passed into the CBI threshold.
"Oh yeah? Bad day? Test at school?"
"I threw out her marijuana," Jane said, trying to smile and not able to hold it for long.
"Oh, nooo," Rigsby said in a low, put-out tone of incredible loss. He winced. "That's harsh. You threw out her pot?"
"Yeah. So have Van Pelt monitor my email okay? Any hits or movement?"
"Gotcha, boss," Rigsby said brightly as he hurried to press their elevator button.
Jane wasn't sure when it had happened, but sometime in the last year, Rigsby had begun calling their mentalist "boss" in addition to Lisbon.
Jane stepped into the elevator and shook his head when Rigsby shook the bag of donuts at him.
He had a feeling it was going to be a very long day.