OH my, I totally forgot to say I was going to be away for a few days! Sorry all to keep you waiting with no warning.
Not that it makes any difference, doesn't look like most people noticed anyway. Sometimes posting feels like dropping a rock in a bottomless pit.
Well, for those of you are actually waiting for an update, here we go.
Cal and Gillian are dealing with a lot right now, not just the enemy chasing after them but also forces within: how will they address these, if at all? Could it be a distraction from the rest?
Eteri: where are you my friend?! It's two chapters you missed now!
"Whatever it is, you need to get past it."
Gillian looked up from what she was reading, clearly confused by those words and even more surprised by the fact that they had come out of Reynolds' mouth. She frowned and leaned back on the chair, honestly clueless and, to his credit, somewhat intrigued.
"I'm sorry Ben, what are you talking about?"
She didn't mean to sound funny, it would have been nearly impossible after all, and quite out of place. She had walked out of Cal's office a couple of hours before, on unsteady legs and with a strange weight inside brought on by the way their conversation had ended. From there, instead of looking for a way to unwind and distract herself, Gillian had gone to her own office and tackled Warton file head on. There was no light at the end of the tunnel that she could see and shying away from the situation wasn't going to help, so she had decided to jump from one uncomfortable thing to another.
Professionally speaking, Warton's profile was too complex and interesting to pass on; from a personal point of view, Gillian Foster had seen enough in her life to believe that knowing your enemy was usually the best of strategies.
All of that might have explained why she was alone in her office, reading about the man who wanted to kill her, but still gave no indication as to what Reynolds was saying.
The agent stared her down for a few seconds, eventually being the one abandoning the contest and averting his eyes in a masked eye-roll. He sighed and stepped closer, sitting on the other side of the desk with a very serious expression. Gillian watched him go through it still without a clue as to what he was up to, but noticed that he seemed a little uncomfortable and extremely reluctant in spitting out with his mouth whatever his mind had been chewing on. It wasn't a good sign, not with everything that was going on, but Gillian figured it was best not to push him and just wait.
Eventually, her approach paid off and Reynolds took a deep breath, leaning back on the chair and looking at her with a serious and yet somewhat delicate gaze.
"You two," he said, which already gave Gillian plenty of background information on his curious approach. "You've been a solid united front on this crazy thing from the start, more than any other time I've seen you. No matter what happened you two have been singing the same tune, and that is the main reason I have been going out of my way to help." He paused, leaning forward a bit. "I am all for minding my own business and I appreciate you already shared with me more than you'd liked, but if two are not on the same page or there are other issues you're not telling me about-"
"Everything is fine, Ben." Gillian cut him off, gently but leaving little to no doubt with her response. "I mean, besides what's happening. We're tired and scared. That's all."
"Gillian, I know it's been a rough night." Reynolds sounded a little condescending and he knew it, but he had forgotten how difficult it was to get through to her. "Now I'm no expert like you guys but I'm not blind either."
"You heard the lady, no issues."
Cal's voice came from behind him, as casual as it could have been, but when Reynolds and Foster looked in his direction, his serious face did not match the tone of his voice at all. He had his hands in his pockets and was leaning on the open door, not a style choice but simply because it helped him ease the weight put on his swollen ankle, and he looked like Reynolds had just said the most idiotic thing in the world.
Then Cal hobbled on to the closest armchair and dropped down on it with a lough sigh. Reynolds was not convinced, it was hard to take him seriously when he looked like every word and gesture coming from him was dictated by pain, so he looked back at Gillian. She was staring at him with a nearly blank expression, her hands on the desk, as if he was there for a job interview and wasn't doing a good job at impressing her. Then he turned around on the chair to look at Cal, who seemed to be looking through him, ignoring his presence and instead simply locking eyes with Foster on the other side.
He wasn't entirely sure he knew what that look between them was about; it certainly was different, more on a positive vibe than the last time he had seen them interact, and perhaps that explained why he didn't feel comfortable being trapped in the middle of it.
"That's good," he muttered then. "Cause you won't like to hear what I found out."
He had decided to let go. Reynolds wasn't entirely sold on the new found harmony they seemed so hell-bent on showing off, but it was clear they were on the same page enough to want to convince him of that so he figured he might as well move along. Besides, what he had just said had gotten their attention and they were now fearfully waiting for him to elaborate. He nodded to himself then pushed the chair back a little, so that he could say both of them without having to turn his head all the time, then he sighed and went on.
"I took the gun and the knife to the lab, Warton's prints are all over them but that much we knew." Cal grumbled and rolled his eyes, clearly pushing him to get to the non expected part he wasn't looking forward to telling them. "I also made some calls about his release. It was incredibly hard to get a reasonable explanation as to why he got paroled nearly 3 years before being up for it. If you ask me, the fact that nobody wants to talk about it clearly means that someone with a certain degree of authority and power was behind it."
"He had about a dozen convictions for violence related crimes and misdemeanours, the sentence he was serving was for manslaughter," Gillian scoffed, absently patting the folder on the desk. "Why would anyone want to help him get out earlier?"
"It's more than that," Reynolds added, feeling the need to continue before someone could suggest unpleasant scenarios. "I tried to track down his movements and establish a timeline. He was released from a penitentiary in Seattle a couple of months ago, had one recorded meeting with his parole officer and then was on a plane to Washington DC the day after."
"Was leaving the state allowed by his parole terms?"
Asking the right questions, Lightman! Reynolds thought as the scientist asked.
"Nope. And while we're at it, we might wanna talk about how his bank account went from $173 to $5000 in a day, minus the 500 bucks he splashed on a one way ticket to Washington DC."
"Hold on a second," Cal stirred in his seat. "Are you saying that someone moved behind the scenes to get him out of jail early, then financed him to come over and mess with us?"
Yes, Gillian thought with a shiver. That is exactly what he's saying.
Yet, Reynolds wasn't going to say it out loud and frankly, neither of them truly wanted to hear it.
"That would explain how he found you," the agent conceded then, somehow bypassing Cal's question.
"Finding us wasn't the problem," Gillian mumbled, annoyed by the still implied revelation. "The company is named after Cal, and business has been booming since he published his new book. We mended our relationship with the FBI, we doubled our contracts with law enforcement agencies and we got a lot of good publicity with the jury selection for the Mc Vicar corruption case."
"The real question is always the same." Cal interjected in a low voice. "How did he know it was us he had to find?"
None of them had a real answer to that question, only a handful of theories they didn't want to explore. Before Reynolds' latest they might have entertained the idea that somehow Warton had decided to dig into his long lost brother death nearly a decade later while still locked up, used that as a motivation to become a model inmate beyond reasonable standards to score an impossible early release, had somehow uncovered a carefully hidden truth and found a way to finance his vengeful cross country trip. However, they were all smart people and the not so subtle picture painted by those confused broad strokes was starting to come together no matter how hard they were trying to deny it.
Just throwing some more pieces of the puzzle on the table.
Hope to hear some feedback on this, the plot starts to thickens