A/N: Thank you Dinogal95, max2013, twobrothers, Penny Blossom73 (x2!), and SiouxAnne3 for reviewing!
"L" is for Lost
Don arrived at the office at the ungodly hour of 5:45 Monday morning. But after last Thursday and Friday, he was anxious to see Colby, to welcome him back as he deserved, to start undoing all the damage he'd thoughtlessly done, to make up for the opportunities already lost. And since Colby had decided that's when he needed to begin his day, well, then Don would too. Although that would be one of the first things Don tackled: Colby wasn't sleeping enough because of the ridiculous hours he kept, and it was time to end it. Colby did matter—despite what they'd led him to believe—to all of them and to the FBI, hell to Alan, Charlie, and Amita. And they'd prove it to him.
He wasn't the first one there. But neither was the person he most wanted to see.
"Hey. Where's Colby?"
Megan and David—looking as agitated as Don had ever seen him—greeted him with the same undisguised disappointment as he'd greeted them. They'd all had the same idea, and they'd all hoped the next person on the floor was Colby.
"Not here yet," David answered distractedly, attention immediately on the elevator lobby as the doors chimed upon opening. It was only Liz.
"Well, he doesn't technically need to be here 'til eight," Megan reminded them, perching on Colby's desk. "Maybe he decided to take advantage of that. Or maybe he had to take a muscle relaxer last night and it slowed him down this morning. That was two stories." She shook her head. "I still can't believe he came back to work the same day."
Yeah … well, there was that. Don grunted, moving over to his desk, putting his things away. He picked up the two pieces of paper sitting on its surface without reading them and narrowed his eyes at Colby's desk. To make sure he saw what he thought he did, he stalked across the aisle to the other cubicle, ignoring Megan's quizzical expression. "Where's his keyboard? And tower?"
Son of a bitch. Had the same bastards who made Colby leery of accepting open drink containers messed with his office equipment now? That's it. Don was going to find out who that was and put a stop to it.
"Don't know," David answered unhappily. He scanned the empty office (because no one else was dumb enough to be here before 6 o'clock on a Monday morning) as if looking for something he'd lost.
Don sighed. In a way, he supposed, David had. But he'd get it back today, and Don would get his team back. They just needed Colby.
Liz joined them, sipping a cup of coffee. "I didn't think I'd be late this morning," she remarked mildly.
"You're not," Megan said, sighing.
"But I'm not Colby," Liz finished for her.
Don summoned a smile for her and turned his attention to the papers he still held. The top was a workorder promising Colby's computer back by Thursday with a temporary replacement brought up today. Don scanned to the 'Work to be Done' section. For damage done by coffee.
Huh? Colby was always careful—more careful than the rest of the team—when he had beverages at his desk. Don didn't see him carelessly spilling coffee—especially not in the quantities it'd take to damage his tower given its location.
Unless, Don thought darkly, getting pissed, Colby hadn't done it. Someone else had. Someone who set Colby up to take the blame. Is that why he was 'late' today? He dreaded another public dressing-down, perhaps afraid Don'd finally had enough and would tell Colby he couldn't come back after all? Because why would he expect anything different? Look at how Don handled the 302 incident.
He'd told Don then that that wasn't the report he'd turned in. Of course, Don hadn't believed him. No, he'd degraded and humiliated Colby in front of everybody.
Don exhaled wearily, remorse and shame replacing anger. Shit. How hostile of a work environment had they created for Colby? The wonder wasn't that Colby figured he didn't matter but rather that he accepted it as the price he had to pay to work there. No, Don decided, that was so much worse, that Colby's self-worth was so damaged (thanks mainly to Don, David, and the rest of the jackasses on the floor) that he thought he deserved it.
Goddamn it all. It was reprehensible how hard and shamelessly he'd screwed Colby since he came back. It didn't matter if it was intentional or not; Colby suffered for it either way. Don added it to the growing list of things he needed to talk to his junior agent about as soon as he came in.
The second sheet of paper filled him with sick foreboding. It was for a week's vacation. For Colby. Starting today. Signed off by ADIC Phillip Wright.
No, no, no, no. Had they lost Colby?
Had he decided they'd never want him back, so he pursued the DC job? Go out there, see for himself if their attitude toward him would be any different than his current teammates', all with the ADIC's blessing. But Colby never ran away from his problems: he faced them head on and dealt with them, damn the consequences. Then again, why would he believe anything'd change here? What had they done to show him they'd get over it?
Maybe they hadn't lost Colby. The ADIC knew they'd watched the video—Don talked with him and SAC McDonagh briefly Saturday when he returned it. And IT was sending a replacement computer and fixing the original one; why would they do that if Colby was leaving? For a new agent? The hell with that. That spot was Colby's and Don'd be damned before he gave it to anyone else. Maybe Colby just needed to clear his head, gain a fresh perspective on everything. To find the relaxation or serenity or whatever the hell he needed to continue working in these conditions. Maybe he'd gone surfing or fishing. Maybe he'd gone to visit his family in Idaho, get some peace, unwind.
But what if that led him to the conclusion that he'd never be able to come home? That they'd never give him a chance. What if he decided he deserved to be treated better, that he wasn't the piece of filth the office made him out to be?
While Don wanted that with every fiber of his being—it tore at him to see Colby's failing self-confidence—he (all of them, really) needed to prove to Colby that he belonged here, that he was theirs, that he mattered oh so much to them. Don needed him to see that.
If they'd pushed him away, if they lost him now….
"Don?"
David looked as worried as he'd sounded, and Don wordlessly handed over the vacation request. The girls crowded around him to read it.
Don checked his watch. Whatever this did to him, he knew it'd hit David even harder. If they lost Colby now, right when they finally got their heads out of their asses….
Goddammit. They couldn't lose him, not when they'd just figured things out. It'd be too cruel, especially for Colby.
"This doesn't make sense," David said. "He only came back a few weeks ago. He wouldn't leave again so soon."
Don thought so too. Which meant they'd driven him away. Maybe for good. He saw the moment David came to the same conclusion for he slammed his fist onto the nearest desk and stalked off.
/1234567890/
Don wasn't the only one who called Colby throughout that endless week: by Wednesday, neither Granger's cell nor home phone could take one more message. He wasn't the only one who drove to Colby's apartment building either: he'd seen Megan's car once or twice, David's almost every time (he swore the black man had slept in his car in Granger's parking lot at least once), but never a hint of Colby.
Maybe he had gone away for his vacation, maybe he just hadn't gotten back yet. Maybe it wasn't proof that they'd lost him forever. Don's gut tightened anyway, and he knew he'd check again tomorrow.
The whole office tread carefully around the Eppes team that week, and later Don couldn't recall the details of a single case or meeting from that time. All he remembered about it was feeling inadequate as a team leader because he'd lost Colby and an aching dread that they'd never get him back, never be able to apologize to him, never make it up to him. He lost count of how many times he caught himself staring at Colby's empty desk, how many times he found David doing the same.
It was a long, stressful, even fear-filled week and Don was glad to see the end of it. Of course, it didn't lessen his misgivings one iota for the coming week.
/1234567890/
By unspoken design, the entire team was in the bullpen by 5:30 Monday morning. Colby remained a no show.
Eight o'clock rolled around and still no Colby.
At 8:03 Don gave up all pretenses of work and calmness and gave into the inner voice telling him something was horribly wrong.
"David, try calling Colby at every number you have. Get LAPD out there to perform a welfare check. Have them talk to all his neighbors—to everyone in that building—and find out the last time anyone saw him.
"Megan, get a trace on his phone; put a BOLO out on his car, page him.
"Liz, start interviewing everyone here. Find out if anyone's seen Colby today; the last time anyone saw him."
They sprang to it without hesitation.
So, yeah, maybe Don was jumping the gun, going all out for a man who was three minutes late … but he had the sinking suspicion that he wasn't.
He picked up his phone and placed his own call.
"Security, Jonathan speaking."
Don's nerves settled a little at the guard's familiar, reassuring voice.
"Jonathan. Don Eppes. Have you seen Colby today?"
"I haven't, but I only got in at six. Hold on and I'll check the log."
While Don waited, he scanned the floor, visually connecting with the rest of his team, busy with their own searches.
Jonathan came back on the line. "Don … Colby hasn't signed in yet."
"Dammit," Don breathed on an exhale.
"Is there something wrong?"
Yes! Don's instincts screamed at him. Out loud, he said, "I really don't know. Call me the second you see him, huh, Jonathan? Tell him to report to me immediately. He's not in any trouble or anything like that. Tell him that too. I just really need to talk to him."
"Sure thing, Don."
Don hung up as David stood up, grabbing his gun and jacket.
"You got something?"
"No," David said. "He's not answering. I'm going out there to help LAPD."
"No. I need you here."
The look David flung him was equal parts fear, worry, frustration, and rage. "What the—"
"David," Don barked, cutting him off. "You know which bank he uses, what credit cards he has without me having to dig into his life." It was too close to what he'd said during Colby's interrogation all those weeks ago and that was why he used it now, despite the pang it gave him, to get David's attention. It worked; he could see the memory haunting the other man too. But he was listening now. "I want to know the last time his accounts were accessed. I want any future transactions flagged and reported to us immediately."
David shook his head, the fear and anxiety in his eyes almost painful in their intensity. There was guilt, too, and a slow-building anger, all of which concerned Don.
He could see David was on the verge of insubordination, ready to crawl out of his skin with nervous energy, was ready to take control of this investigation to find his brother—damn protocol and chains of command; Don wondered how long he'd be able to keep David in check before the black man snapped.
"It'll go faster if you do it, man," Don gently prodded him.
David gave a stilted nod and stiffly sat back in his chair. He looked lost.
Megan's phone rang, Don's a second later. Goddammit! That better not be a case. Don swore viciously under his breath. If it was, Wright could assign someone else to it; Violent Crimes had their own damn mystery to solve.
"Eppes."
"Don. It's Jonathan."
"Is Colby here?"
Don's relief was tangible, giving his voice an unexpected timbre. He felt giddy. A smile tried to overtake his face. Okay … okay; Colby was okay, everything would be okay.
"No, Don, sorry. I knew you wouldn't've called down here if things were copacetic, so I did a little follow through. Colby hasn't signed in since the twenty-second."
"Yeah," Don said, trying to keep the bitter disappointment out of his voice. "He's been on vacation." Even as he explained, he wondered if it was true. A tickle of dread tracking up his spine made him doubt it.
"I figured as much but…." He trailed off, and Don realized how he must've sounded earlier to Jonathan for him to look into it. "I checked the parking logs. His car doesn't show up Saturday or Sunday, but it's been logged every day since the twenty-fifth. Including today. In the exact same spot he had on the twenty-second."
Don didn't know what the odds were of that happening when they didn't have assigned parking—Charlie could probably tell him, whip up some expression or algorithm to give them the precise odds—but Don didn't need his kid brother's math for this. No fricking way.
"So either Colby's here and forgot to sign in or that car never left," Jonathan summed up.
Don ran a hand through his hair. "Yeah," he agreed distractedly, mind changing gears. "Hey, do you know which security guard was on duty Friday night through Sunday?"
"Clark Stewart. I already made inquiries. He's on vacation this week, apparently out of state visiting relatives. I have his contact information ready for you at the desk."
"Thank you, Jonathan. I'll be down in a minute."
He'd barely hung up when Megan slammed her own phone down.
"That was the cell carrier," Megan said tersely. She looked like she wanted to hit something. Or scream. Maybe both. "They can't trace his cell—it's off." She abruptly whirled on Don, who stumbled back a step. "Was his phone updated when he came back?"
The FBI had developed a GPS for their agents' phones that didn't require the phone being on to work and had recently launched a rolling schedule until all cells were upgraded or replaced with the new technology. LA had received theirs three weeks ago.
"Yeah; yeah, I gave it to him myself," Don said, fumbling for his handset, but Megan was already talking to Control, speaking rapidly and tightly into her phone.
Don wavered: his team was doing what they could, and he didn't know how long it'd take Control to lock on Colby's signal, but Jonathan was waiting. That car and those logs and that guard could be potential leads and clues in what could be a crime against one of their own.
At the same time, there wasn't really a crime yet. Yeah, they couldn't reach Colby and he hadn't called, but he was an adult with ample reason to take off. Except….
Except Don's instincts were telling him something was wrong.
"Keep at it," he said. "I'm going down to security."
He turned around, avoiding David's eyes, when Megan blurted, "You're certain? Got it, thanks," and hung up her phone.
"It's here … his phone is here," she said, flustered, storming over to the opposite cubicle, yanking open Colby's desk drawers and riffling through them all.
"Damn it!" she snarled, slamming the last drawer closed. "It's here in this building. It's not in his desk. Where else could it be? Unless … maybe he just got in?" she added hopefully.
Don's heart sank, and he felt the first tendrils of unease and apprehension morph into fear.
"His car. C'mon."
/1234567890/
Jonathan took the three of them straight to Colby's car—Don kept Liz on interviews and didn't bother arguing with Sinclair. It was parked in the furthest reaches of the parking garage, tucked into a corner where the distance to the elevators and the gate at the entrance/exit along with inadequate lighting made it the last to fill if not remain empty most of the time. Unless you were looking for it, it never would've been noticed. He remembered Colby's quiet pronouncement that he didn't matter and thought of course Colby'd park here, out of the way and inconspicuous and wished they had assigned parking, so they would've seen something amiss immediately.
Don walked around the car, pulling on a pair of gloves because at this point, they just didn't know but saw nothing awry.
David, also wearing gloves, tried the driver's door. It opened right up, fanning the panic in Don's gut even before David said, "Colby always locks his doors."
David would know: the two of them carpooled often enough before the goddamned Janus List had been given to them. Don thoroughly hated that List and fervently wished Ashby had kept the fricking thing to himself. He sighed, knowing he was being unreasonable. Colby had had to get into prison to get close to Carter, to get to the mole. Better if Carter had half the morals and patriotic loyalty as the man he'd saved from the Humvee so he wouldn't've put Colby in that position to begin with. Better still if Lancer had never left China. Because of him, Don's team was in tatters and Colby…. Goddammit! Don was so over Lancer screwing his team, screwing Colby. Dead or not, Don's team was still reacting to and dealing with the fallout of all of Lancer's machinations.
He resolved this was it, Lancer was done screwing them all. They'd find Colby—because they hadn't lost him, they hadn't—and the entire team would form a stronger bond with him; they'd be better than ever so Lancer could rot in hell for all of eternity as far as Don cared.
"Do we need a crime scene unit?" Megan asked uncertainly.
She looked as shell-shocked as Don felt, and inexplicably he thought of freighters and needles and tortured agents. No. Not this time.
David popped the trunk.
Heart trip-hammering in Don's chest, he stepped behind the vehicle beside David and Megan. Let it be empty, he prayed frantically, nudging the lid up. Jonathan held an industrial flashlight steady on the area.
No body (thank God) but Colby's personal effects sat in the center of the trunk.
Nononono.
Megan picked up Colby's credentials and dog tags, which she kept running through her gloved fingers. Don wondered if she even knew she was doing it.
"He wouldn't leave these," she said. There was no doubt in her voice, and fear in her eyes.
Don automatically checked the magazine and cylinder respectively in Colby's FBI-issued and back-up guns. All the bullets were there. There was no way in hell Colby would leave his guns (his loaded, unfired guns, part of Don's brain unhelpfully added) in the trunk of his car. Ever.
Opening the orange prescription bottle revealed the remaining pills. Don ran a quick mental calculation and figured none were missing beyond what Colby'd already taken.
"His credit cards are all here," David said tightly, carefully going through Colby's wallet. "So's his debit card and uh … let's see … $43. And his driver's license."
He looked up, expression grim. "How do you go on vacation without ID or money? Or your damn car? How do you come back without your frigging keys?"
David held up Colby's keyring. In addition to the car key were what looked like a mailbox key and keys to Granger's building and apartment.
Which begged the question: where the hell was Colby?
Don tried to turn on Colby's phone. Nothing. "Battery's dead," he said, forcing the growing alarm down; he needed to think clearly, now more than ever before. Because Colby wasn't lost to them and even if he was, he sure as hell wasn't staying lost. But he wasn't … so Don had to think.
David huffed explosively. "Don." He was practically vibrating.
Don spun panic into patience; he'd need the latter to deal with David until Colby was safely back where he belonged, while the former would only set David off in an incendiary reaction he—at least his FBI career—might not survive. He only had to think of what he'd do in David's place if this was Charlie.
"Get SID down here," Don instructed, including both his agents and the security guard who'd gone above and beyond his job description. "I want everything checked for prints, foreign hairs, fibers, anything that doesn't belong to Colby. Until we know what happened, we treat this as a crime scene. I want a team down here to secure this area. Get me all the surveillance for this garage going back to the twenty-second. I wanna know what happened down here when he left the floor that Friday."
/1234567890/
In a way, watching the CCTV security footage was worse than watching the freighter video. Sure, there was no sound (though Don's mind insisted on filling the silence with Colby's rasping, effortful breathing from the freighter) and no torture, but it wasn't far enough in the past for the situation to have been resolved. Watching Lancer's video, Don knew Colby survived; he had a walking, talking, breathing agent he could interact with any time he wanted. He had no such reassurance watching the FBI recordings. For all Don knew, these recorded images would be the last time he saw Colby … the last time he'd see him alive. It opened a raw sore in his heart that made it hard to breathe.
They crowded into the AV room, Don and the rest of his team, looking over Matt Li's shoulders as his fingers alternately danced and pecked at the keyboard, directing the feeds.
The timestamp on the recording read 9:02 pm as the monitor showed Colby slumped against the back wall of the elevator as it presumably headed down to the lobby. Don wanted to know why Colby was only now leaving the office. He'd told Don he was only staying a couple more hours, and that had been at 2 o'clock. Had he been working that entire time? Or had his delay more to do with the damaged computer equipment? Don was going to watch the floor footage next, starting at two on the twenty-second to see what he could see. He told himself—firmly and unequivocally—that it would not be the last time he saw his junior agent.
On the monitor, Colby straightened and a mask came over his face, belying the exhaustion he had allowed only a moment before. That caused the hackles to rise at the back of Don's neck and he leaned over Matt's shoulder, watching intently, piqued. To him, Colby's manner indicated he felt threatened and didn't want to appear vulnerable. He wanted to know who or what caused that reaction in his guy. The monitor showed no one else in the elevator. Don felt David shift forward too and chanced a quick glance at him. David looked ready to kill, and Don was reminded of the younger man out by the koi pond.
Colby walked out of the elevator, walked into a different camera's view, heading to the security desk. Nothing strange there. Though the guard had a black look as he glared at Colby's retreating figure before a camera picked his agent back up. That guard—Clark Stewart, Jonathan had called him—would bear careful watching.
David growled something beside him as the guard caught up to Colby and the cameras switched back to the elevator, the two men riding down in opposite corners of the car. Don's ire grew by the second, watching the guard surreptitiously watching Colby, his look of hatred caught by the unblinking eye of the camera. Nothing happened, despite the guard's obvious issues with Colby. So far, he was the last person to have seen the junior agent. Don couldn't wait to get Stewart in an interrogation room. David's fingers clenched the back of Matt's chair, and Don bet he couldn't either.
The elevator doors opened, and a new camera picked up Colby stepping out alone into the parking garage. The doors closed behind him. Don held his breath. Colby made a motion—some kind of movement, Don couldn't tell what, maybe turning—before the screen went black.
"What the hell?" he shouted.
Matt Li tapped at his keyboard, bringing up other screens, scrolling through logs, and reported that all the garage's cameras went off-line due to some sort of glitch in the system. From 9:06 until 9:57 pm, when the failure was fixed, fifty-one minutes out of June twenty-second, the cameras picked up nothing.
Don couldn't believe it. They'd lost Colby.