A/N: A sincere thank you to Sam Worth who brought Charlie into the investigation and read over this chapter. Any errors are my own. Be sure to check out Sam's upcoming Numb3rs story "Value of Friendship."
Thanks to Dinogal95, Anaid, twobrothers, Tree66, Penny Blossom73, max2013, and SiouxAnne3 for all the wonderful comments and reviews!
"M" is for Malign
It was Independence Day, a federal holiday, and you couldn't tell that by looking at the LA branch of the FBI. The office was almost fully staffed. Colby had been missing for twelve days—June twenty-second had been the last time anyone—including CCTV—had seen him; this was only the third day they'd known. It already felt like an eternity to David.
There were those who said Colby had deliberately taken off—who better than an ex-Army FBI agent with outdoors experience from growing up in rural Idaho to fall off the grid if he so chose?—but David didn't know who they were. No one dared malign Colby in David's hearing. They didn't do it in front of anyone on the team after somebody maligned Colby's character as Megan walked by and she reduced the 15-year veteran to a quivering mess; from what David heard, it would've been kinder had she shot him. After that, everyone kept their comments to themselves. They damn well better keep it that way, David growled to himself; as if Colby'd run away from anything!
Charlie desperately wanted to help, coming in as soon as Don'd told him what happened, but even the genius mathematician couldn't pull something out of nothing. As he'd told Don: "You've given me a single datum—Colby's missing. Math isn't magic. I need more data."
So they'd spent the last three days trying to provide him with more, but they were going nowhere fast.
The Minneapolis office had taken over the search for Clark Stewart; as far as LA could tell, the guard was the last person to have seen Colby. They'd interviewed his fellow guards, the agency for which he worked, friends, and family, and delved into his financials and didn't come up with a whole hell of a lot of anything. Phone records yielded nothing strange or suspicious. About the only useful thing they determined was that Stewart had indeed gone on vacation, to the dinky town of Finley, ND to visit family, and they'd handed that portion off to the regional headquarters. Minneapolis had yet to get back to them. With the holiday in the middle of the week, David thought they'd be lucky to hear from them by Friday.
Forensics found nothing foreign to Colby's car or possessions. David made sure they doublechecked everything and if one more person told him they'd already done so, he wouldn't be responsible for his actions. SID, being the smart folks they were, seemed to sense this and stopped uttering it and any related phrase to David; they just nodded along and did it.
The team spent that first afternoon going over security footage from the twenty-second to see what'd kept Colby in the office for so long. They got their answer sometime before 5:00 according to the recording's timestamp, and the only reason Ross and Browne were still alive was because they were out on assignment. Don was as livid as David had ever seen him, but Don would never get a turn. Livid couldn't even begin to describe David's feelings as he watched those frigging sons of bitches with their coffee. And what he felt watching Colby, despite the pain and fatigue the camera caught, clean and put the cubicles back in order…. They were going to wish he'd used a gun by the time he finished with them.
Don and the A-Dic were working with counterintelligence, the CIA, NSA, and the DOJ, putting feelers out, making sure Lancer's entire network was behind bars or on the run, that his contacts hadn't come after Colby for vengeance; trying to determine if the Chinese had abducted him, had taken him to China.
David didn't want to imagine what the Chinese could do to Colby: for dismantling their network, for indirectly costing the life of an asset as valuable as Lancer had been to them, for the two years of false intel he'd been feeding them.
He somehow doubted the DOJ or FBI would risk an international incident by either accusing the Chinese government of kidnapping and holding an American prisoner or going in guns blazing to retrieve him. David didn't know if the decision would make it to Congress or the President, or if they'd pretend the whole thing had never happened, that Colby'd never existed.
That was just too goddamned bad. For them.
David was still in contact with Navy SEALs he'd met while posted in Tel Aviv. He was a frigging FBI agent; he could find out who Colby's friend was in the Pentagon. If Colby was a prisoner in China, David'd get him out one way or another. Between the SEALs and Pentagon, he'd damn well make it so.
And God have mercy on anyone who got in his way.
Liz was with Matt Li and Jonathan, going over security footage from underground parking on the twenty-first and twenty-second of June, making sure that every vehicle that went into the garage left again, cross-referencing everyone that entered those days with the parking logs. Colby had to have left somehow, though. Any they didn't see exit and weren't still parked according to the logs were deemed those that left the premises during the fifty-one minutes the cameras had been down. The owners needed to be interviewed and as far as David was concerned, they were all suspects in Colby's disappearance.
It was a long, pain-staking process to get to that stage, however.
And it still left too many variables. It'd been after hours, so the gate wasn't manned, eliminating another witness from the equation. They'd also discovered that the cameras in the adjacent Bureau parking lot—from which habitué of the underground parking had to pass through—were down too for the whole of Colby's abduction. They just didn't know if anyone had entered and subsequently left during that period.
Megan called area hospitals and morgues. They didn't know what happened to Colby or where he was, so it had to be done. Best case scenario, Colby Granger was a patient at one of the hospitals, having escaped or been dumped somewhere. Worse case, they were looking for a John Doe who matched Colby's description. They knew he didn't have any ID on him and if he couldn't give his name…. Worst case, they'd find him in a morgue.
But they didn't have a body, so Colby wasn't dead.
David refused to even consider that death might be preferable to wherever and whatever Colby was going through now.
So far Megan had had no luck, which meant widening the search if they couldn't find him by any other means.
To David fell the task of calling Colby's family. But how did he tell the mother of his best friend (who he'd maligned for weeks, an unwelcome voice unhelpfully reminded him) that her son was missing? Hoping not to alarm her, he went the roundabout way and asked if Colby'd recently contacted her.
He needn't have bothered sparing her feelings.
He found this out the hard way, after an awkward initial few moments of conversation, tossing the script in his head out and (traitorously) improvising with what she gave him. David listened to her malign her own son; no—not her son, not anymore. Listened to what she'd done, what she planned on doing. Sometimes when she paused for breath, when suspicion tinged her voice, he told an anecdote, urging her on, playing for a concession.
God, David wondered, is this how he'd sounded? Had he spewed this same hate-filled vitriol in an effort to malign his partner? Was it his malign words that created such a poisonous work environment for Colby? That gave Browne and Ross the permission they needed? He felt unclean, listening to her; felt ill, maligning his best friend, gratifying his mother.
Death and blood and even the antiseptic smell of a hospital didn't bother him.
But words against his partner had him swallowing convulsively and taking deep breaths to keep from throwing up. It was the koi pond all over again, only this time he succeeded. He had to, to reach an understanding with this bitch.
He couldn't look at Megan after sharing how he didn't bring Colby any lunch (which wouldn't've cost him a single goddamned thing), and then embellishing it by adding he'd lied to Don and said the money was his own, not Colby's. He felt Megan's glare at that, her barely suppressed outrage and hoped she let him explain before she ripped him apart. But Tina Granger delighted in the story, telling one of her own in turn, forging an alliance David didn't want but would use if it meant finding Colby later.
Mostly he felt appalled and grief-stricken. The woman (legally!) disowned her son, deliberately tried to physically hurt him (because just mentally and emotionally hadn't been enough for the bitch) at the same time David'd been treating Colby like and making him feel like shit. Who the hell had been there for Colby when he needed it most? It made sense out of his reaction when David had told him he wasn't worth it.
Oh God … he had confirmed and affirmed what the younger man's family thought of him … that he was a throwaway, that he held no intrinsic value, that he was expendable.
David turned gagging into a harsh cough, extracted a promise from that bitch before hanging up, and smashed a fist through the glass portion of the nearest partition.
"David!"
He slammed his fists onto the broken partition, onto his desk, releasing the fury which had temporarily subsumed the revulsion of what he'd done to his best friend before it consumed him. David had always had a temper—it was unavoidable, the way he'd grown up—but he'd kept it firmly in check, realizing it was an education, not violence and rage, that'd get him away from the gangs. He'd cultivated patience and calmness over the years until that was his nature and let the anger atrophy, so it was slow to kindle these days. But he felt it now. Apparently, Colby was the only person capable of igniting it: what he'd felt when Colby confessed to being a spy, all throughout his five weeks of imprisonment at Northcom, and even when they hunted him down was nothing compared to what was building now; at himself, at Colby's family, at whoever had taken him, at whoever maligned him.
He knew he couldn't let it control him, not if he wanted to help Colby, so he wrestled with it until a simple thought doused it to nothing.
Had Colby taken off? He had no one left—he didn't know how his team spent that Friday, only that his partner had rebuffed him same as his mother. Even with his mental fortitude, Colby'd need to deal with what they'd done to him, so maybe he sought solitude and there was no nefarious plot.
David couldn't make himself believe it. Colby needed him.
If it'd just been one or the other dismissing him, Colby would've been fine. But both his team and his family….
"David?"
What if….
David sat back heavily in his chair, stunned and afraid. What if Colby had … was lying in….
No.
Colby wouldn't do that. Not ever. Not with the uncertainty surrounding his father's death.
But what had they left him with?
"David. Here. Drink this."
David automatically raised the bottle that was pressed into his hand, obeying, though he tasted nothing of the sports drink.
He blinked dazedly. The whole team was there, minus the only one David wanted to see, looking anxiously at him.
He told them about his conversation with Tina Granger while Megan applied pressure to his hands with a handful of paper towels. He finished with, "If he shows up, she's going to shoot him. Say he was trespassing, an intruder in her home, and she feared for her life. Tell the authorities … tell them he's not her son."
They looked at him with the same horror he felt.
As an FBI agent, David had heard worse things, though he couldn't recall when. This was Colby … his partner, his brother. It made the threat more chilling than anything his career had prepared him for. Especially coupled with the menace in her voice, the lack of remorse, her certitude she could commit premediated murder.
"Is she serious? I mean, do we need to arrest her?"
Don sounded like he couldn't wrap his head around a parent turning on her child. For the first time, David wondered what the hell Colby's childhood had been like. He wondered if that's why the normally self-confident man deflected attention and how praise made him shy and self-conscious. Had the man ever heard a positive thing from his mother while growing up?
"Yeah, she's serious all right … but we don't need to bring her in. She's only a threat if Colby goes home." David shook his head. "Goes to her house; it's not his home, not anymore." Something else that had been taken from him. It wasn't fair, it wasn't right. "At this point, it'd be my word against hers. She won't try to hunt him down, though. Besides, I'm not putting him through the circus that'd turn into."
"You built connections," Megan observed bluntly. "Why?"
She wore her professional shrink face—unless you looked into her eyes. They gave away what her voice and expression didn't.
"It was the only thing I could think of to keep communication open between us. If … if Colby goes back there … so we have … we'll know … if she … if he's … he's…." And David refused to finish that sentence.
Megan nodded, pulled away the paper towels. She gave him a brief smile and backed off. David held the paper towels, giving his hands something to do.
"Alright." Don checked his watch, rubbed his mouth. "You need to go to Medical before you do anything else. Then—"
"Then I'm going to his apartment," David interrupted. "See what I can see."
He'd put it off because it seemed like a betrayal somehow when he hadn't been invited. But now the fear after talking to Ms. Tina (he wouldn't name her Granger, wouldn't associate her with Colby in that way) called too many images to mind, each worse than the last and he needed to know, to see with his own eyes. Because Colby's safety (if such a thing existed, wherever the hell he was) trumped his privacy. Because they weren't digging into his life to dismantle him, but to find him, to bring him home … back where he belonged. It was past time for that.
"Johnson!" Don suddenly called, waving the agent over. "Liz, where are you?"
"We just passed the fifty-one minutes; we're checking who leaves after the cameras come back online so we can focus our search."
"Okay. Good. Get back to that. Megan?"
"I finished my last call … wondered if I should start broadening the search."
"No … not yet. I want you to start going through all our old cases since Colby joined the team. Look for any instances where anyone was especially pissed at him or even said something derogatory about him. Anything—no matter how small—that happened in any of those files that even hint at somebody against him, I want flagged. Or against the FBI or one or all of us. Maybe he was the first and we're all targets. Wright has a team going through personnel files looking for threats made against the FBI and him personally."
"What?" Megan asked skeptically. "You think this was just random and he was unlucky enough to be the first? I don't think so. It's been twelve days and nobody else has been taken. We've heard nothing from anyone—that feels too personal."
"Well, I don't know, Megan," Don snarked. "I only know he's not here. Someone somewhere must know something. So, we pull every fricking file in this place if we have to until we shake something loose!"
Obviously, his wasn't the only temper fraying, David thought, gathering his things to make a break for it before it got even uglier.
"Hey," Don said abruptly. "What about … what's his name? … Joseph Karnes? From the Saida Kafaji case. He tried to beat the shit out of Colby."
"Excuse me?" David growled. "Why the hell didn't I know about this?"
"Relax," Megan said, sitting cross-legged on David's desk. "He was fine."
"Fine?" David clenched his fists and one of the wounds began bleeding again. He held the wad of paper towels against it. "Where the hell was his backup? How did he disarm Colby?" He was yelling now, drawing attention; he didn't care.
"He sent me around back," Johnson spoke up for the first time. He looked a little intimidated when David turned his eyes on him. "It took a while for me to catch up to them. By the time I did, Colby had Karnes subdued; he never pulled his gun. He only wanted to talk."
"Karnes didn't feel the same way?"
Johnson glanced nervously between Megan and Don and back to David. "Er, no," he said quickly before David started yelling again. "They were both banged up a little bit, both bruised, but no broken bones or anything."
"See?" Megan said, a fond smile for something remembered ghosting across her lips. "He was fine. But to your point, Don, I don't think so. Karnes has no reason to come after Colby. With all the help he gave him with the Army, Karnes owes him a medal. Besides, he only fought because he was trying to find out who killed his wife."
"I agree with Reeves," Johnson added. "He was running on pure emotion."
Don held up a finger. "Yeah, yeah … but Colby visited Los Alamitos for that case, the JFTB, a friend of his from his Army days. Johnson, you and Milberry get the name from his report and get out there and interview him. Find out if anything—no matter how minor—happened while Colby was there. He served with Colby so find out what you can about his friends, any enemies he could've made with CID. Maybe they're stateside or civilians now with a grudge big enough to do something about."
"Wait, wait," Megan said, getting up.
David and Johnson both waited, though David was still privately grumbling about only now finding out his partner had been in a fight while he wasn't there to cover his back.
Megan stood motionless in front of Colby's desk, before giving a short, sad laugh. She shook herself, then cautiously moved Colby's chair away from it, rolling it to the side. She didn't sit on it, preferring to crouch in front of the bottom desk drawer, pulling it open.
That gesture nearly reduced David to tears. No one sat at that desk, no one used that chair; they were Colby's, and they were waiting for him to come back. The veneration she used to search that drawer now was a far cry from the last time she had done so.
She stood, holding a picture frame. "God," she murmured, "he looks so impossibly young," and touched the photograph. David couldn't see what it was from where he stood, but he guessed it was of Colby. "I saw this when I was looking for his phone," she explained, carefully handing it to Johnson, who wisely received it as if it was precious. "Ask his friend if he knows who these guys are. Looks like they were close. They should be able to give us some insight into his Army days. And you better bring that back in one piece."
Despite the catch in her voice, the warning was plain. Johnson nodded briskly and headed out.
"Send a cleaning crew up here too," Don called after him.
Johnson raised an arm in acknowledgement.
"Alright," Don said crisply. "I'm gonna call CID, get them looking into his old cases there or have them send them to us. You all have your assignments. Get on them."
/1234567890/
They were such little things, unlocking the building's door and then Colby's apartment, but they nearly undid David. He used the spare set of keys from Colby's desk. The ones that used to sit on David's keyring. Before the arrest, before Lancer and that damn freighter, before Colby came back. They should've still been there. At the very least, they should've exchanged house keys again. David promised himself they would, just as soon as they found Colby. Because Colby was his brother, and they'd find him; he wouldn't stay lost. They'd find him.
A box sat on the breakfast counter, filled with ashes and broken things, just like she'd said. He read the letter, his heart aching for his friend, wishing he'd been here for Colby; glanced at the clinic forms, wanting to kill that bitch for sending them to her son (no, not her son—she didn't deserve him), wondering how a person could be so cruel; found the legal documents with their official signatures and seals, and the newspaper advertisement that declared Colby not the son of one Tina Granger and thought Colby hadn't seen them for these pages were mostly unblemished.
He was torn between being sick and going into a rage that she had done these things to Colby. He wanted to crumple all the paperwork, stuff it back in the box, and throw it out in the dumpster. Hell, he'd take it out to the landfill himself, anything to get it away from his partner.
But he didn't know if Colby had had a chance to come to terms with what she'd done to him. Maybe Colby needed to see it all again, go through it in order to make sense of it, in order to let it go. David didn't know. He wouldn't do anything to hurt Colby—he had done that more than enough—and he didn't know what the younger man needed. So, while David wanted it all out of the apartment, out of Colby's sight when he came home so he wouldn't have the reminders of what his birth family thought of him, of how they maligned him, he left it alone.
SID had already dusted for prints and looked for evidence of foul play but found nothing that didn't belong. David wasn't surprised. Colby hadn't vanished from here, but from the office. He went through the one-bedroom unit, looking for photos, phone numbers or addresses, copies of files Colby'd sent to Kirkland, anything that could help their investigation, give them a clue or someone they could contact next before the case went cold. He looked in the obvious places, well aware that Colby's apartment had been thoroughly tossed after his arrest. He carefully replaced everything as he'd found it and made a mental note to call a cleaning service. He wouldn't let Colby come home to anything that reminded him of that time.
He made another note to contact Colby's landlord, find out when rent was due and pay it, no matter how long it took. David'd be damned before he let Colby lose something else.
He didn't find anything helpful.
The calendar in the kitchen, instead of appointments or something to give them another direction to pursue, generated nothing. The single magnet on the refrigerator pinned an oft-handled piece of paper, and David hopefully took it down. It was a poem by Howard Arnold Walter, and he recognized neither the name nor the handwriting. He wondered who'd given it to Colby. Judging by the condition of the paper and where he'd found it, David thought it meant a great deal to him.
I would be true, for there are those who trust me;
I would be pure, for there are those who care;
I would be strong, for there is much to suffer;
I would be brave, for there is much to dare.
David memorized it: because it was important to the younger man, because he doubted more apt words could ever be penned about Granger, because it resonated with him. He hoped it'd brought Colby some comfort; hoped, somehow, while reading it, he knew how many people cared about him, that they did trust him, that he was loved. Hoped it overshadowed the malign words he'd heard far too often.
"Please," he whispered in the silent apartment.
Reverently, David replaced the poem on the refrigerator.
/1234567890/
Eighteen days.
Eighteen days since Colby had vanished, and they weren't any closer to finding him now than they'd been on the first.
The Minneapolis office had called last Friday, reporting Clark Stewart had vanished from Finley, ND. At least they had a lead, David thought morosely, and had promised to report in today, regardless of what they found. It was the reason David was trudging into the building at 6:00 on a Tuesday morning.
The garage surveillance video had yielded a white cargo van that matched their criteria. Further investigation revealed it was a rental and had been rented to Clark Stewart on the twenty-second of June and returned two days later. SID took it in and tore it apart (David made sure of that) despite it having been rented out three more times since then but found nothing. The damn thing was an older model and didn't even have GPS so they couldn't even give coordinates to Charlie to try to backtrack its route in some sort of math thingy to give them a frigging area likely to contain Colby. The van'd been thoroughly cleaned beforehand; either after Stewart finished with it or between customers, David didn't know, but it was something else he planned to ask Stewart when they found him.
He hadn't come back from his vacation as scheduled yesterday and at this point, he was their only lead—such as it was—in Colby's disappearance.
There was also the possibility that that damn van was a red herring. Or a decoy. The cameras had been down for fifty-one minutes: they had no way of telling if someone had come in and left again during that unaccounted time. Someone taking Colby away.
Liz and Matt were now going through every surveillance camera that captured any video of vehicles on the street fronting the driveway during those fifty-one minutes, trying to determine if they'd kept going or turned in. Any likely suspects, they'd then have to try to figure out a make and model, try to get a plate number, try to find the damn thing again somewhere out there.
It was daunting.
David refused to call it hopeless.
JFTB hadn't given them anything, except that they'd called Colby CG. FBI and CID case files had so far generated nothing (David was really starting to hate that word), and Megan's ongoing inquiries hadn't been successful either. She'd broadened her search (it was the only thing they could do) since they didn't actually know where he was or if he was still where he'd started or if he'd been moved or which route they'd used to get there. They didn't know who 'they' were beyond Stewart or how many or why.
It was frustrating. It was maddening.
The one piece of good news (besides not having a body) was that the van gave them a solid lead to track. It also brought Charlie into the investigation.
They'd determined which way the van went after exiting the Bureau grounds with security footage from nearby businesses and traffic cams. Trailing the van in the vast sea of vehicles produced by LA on a given night to its destination would take weeks—weeks Colby just didn't have—until Charlie's key locations.
Key locations—pivotal places—anything people used to get from one point to another: bridges, overpasses, railroad crossings, on- and off-ramps, tunnels, central intersections, and even gas stations. The things they had to pass to get through LA.
The first thing Charlie did was ask for access to ALPR since they had the van's plates. Don gave it immediately.
Which meant Charlie could create a map with areas bounded by pivotal places, picking them out, collecting the ALPR results, then mapping a timeline/place for wherever the van'd been. If the van didn't get between points A and B in the timeframe Charlie'd calculated, he'd send agents to check additional footage in the surrounding area, ensuring he'd find their exact route and if they'd made any stops along the way.
Ensuring he'd find Colby.
But it was going to take time. The only consolation was that they were finally moving forward.
On the sixth floor, David surprised Ross and Browne, first day back and Colby's desk their first stop as evidenced by the backpacks at their feet, fiddling with the Wooly Bugger, and he thought how Colby'd already lost so much, how that fishing lure might be the only thing the younger man had left of his much-loved father, and he had Browne shoved up into the filing cabinet beyond Colby's desk, arm twisted up behind his back, immobilizing him, gun drawn and aimed at Ross's head where he stood frozen at David's desk before he consciously thought to move.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice barked gun safety at him: always assume the gun was loaded (it was), never point it at someone you weren't prepared to shoot (he was), keep your finger off the trigger (it was) until you were ready to fire. Strangely (or maybe not), the voice wasn't his or his instructors at Quantico; it was Colby's.
Ross leaned back as far as he could, hands raised, wide eyes focused on the gun, not daring to move. Browne gasped what might've been a question or a curse. David said nothing. He stared at Ross, ignoring the commotion behind him, the shouts of Sinclair and gun meaning next to nothing to him.
"What were you doing?" He didn't recognize his own voice.
Ross and Browne both sputtered. Someone yelled, another meaningless sound. Far off, David thought he heard the elevator ding.
"What were you doing?" he shouted, waiting for them to malign Colby as they'd done since his name came out on the Janus List; as his mother had done, as David himself had done and fury uncoiled, fed by guilt and helplessness and raw terror.
Eighteen days. Colby'd been gone for eighteen days, and David's last words to him … the way David had left things between them—
"Nothing," Browne gasped, struggling against him. David would have none of it.
"Just a prank, Sinclair," Ross said. "C'mon, pal. It's only Granger."
"Only Granger." David jerked up on Browne's hand, pushing it up closer between his shoulder blades, ignoring the man's pained shout. He leaned his weight into him. His gun never wavered from Ross. "He's done more good in the FBI—more for his country—than the two of you combined. So, tell me: why only Granger?"
What Browne or Ross may have said remained a mystery.
"David!" Don said sharply, from behind and to David's right, near Ross. He lifted his empty hands. "What're you doing?"
"Caught them messing with Colby's things."
"Yeah, alright. So, they're stupid. That's no reason to kill 'em."
Don didn't get it. David flicked a look at him. "They're the ones who screwed with his 302. You saw what they did with the coffee. They've done nothing but malign him since he confessed to spying." David had too, for a time, but he'd stopped and if that made him a hypocrite, then so be it; he'd be damned if he let anyone else take potshots at Colby. "Who's to say they didn't step their game up? Who's to say they aren't working with Stewart? Or set him up? They set Colby up."
"You're the ones who did that report? You let him take the blame. Did you think it was funny?"
Before David quite knew what was happening, Don had insinuated himself between David and Browne, breaking his hold and pushing his gun hand down (Don'd clearly seen what the others hadn't, that Sinclair'd never taken the safety off, proving his respect for a gun hadn't been entirely displaced). Don shoved Browne into Ross, herded them into the next cubicle. Megan was suddenly beside David.
"Why don't you put that away, Sinclair, and enjoy the show?" she suggested.
David took a deep breath and blew it out forcefully. He re-holstered the Glock while Don dressed down Ross and Browne, mildly surprised no one rushed him to take his gun or put him in cuffs.
The agents who'd responded to the situation followed Don's lead and pretended it hadn't happened, milling about and watching Don vent.
"You know what?" Don finally snapped. "Put them in separate interrogation rooms. Start digging into their financials and backgrounds, take apart their miserable little lives and see if there's anything to indicate they had anything to do with Colby's abduction."
"Wait. What?" Ross said, even as agents took him in hand.
"Granger's missing?" Browne added. He sounded surprised. "Oh man, we didn't know!"
/1234567890/
A comprehensive search into their lives proved they were telling the truth. They were given unpaid administrative leave during the ten days it took to investigate and to look into allegations of wrongdoing against Colby. Criminal misconduct charges were ultimately dropped, but popular opinion of the two agents nose-dived after Don publicly reamed them.
David received a fine, a probationary period where he wasn't allowed in the field alone, a refresher course in firearm safety, and a meeting between himself, his lawyer and his FBIAA rep, and legal, which resulted in a mandated session with a counsellor. Sinclair got off easy and suspected he owed that leniency to Don running interference with the A-Dic.
But now they were nowhere.
The A-Dic and Director had called in every favor ever owed them (and put pressure on the AD's and Directors of counterintelligence and the CIA and NSA to do the same) and determined that neither the Chinese nor Lancer's defunct network had taken Colby or paid anyone else to do so. It was another dead end.
Minneapolis found Clark Stewart's body at a campground in Custer County, SD. That case may as well be cold for all the leads they had.
Likewise, CID came up with nothing, and their own searches were netting them the same.
Megan widened her geographical parameters to no avail.
Charlie followed the van via his pivotal places, mapping a smaller and smaller area with cameras until he'd lost it in a low-middle class residential locality away from the spying eyes of CCTV. Mr. Eppes's maps from his city planning days showed how this neighborhood ran into another and another and another, creating a sprawling suburbia that could be creatively travelled without passing a camera at all.
Meaning somebody somewhere had to be familiar with it.
Somebody holding Colby. Or at least who'd taken him.
Given Charlie's past success for the Bureau, Wright sent them out there with help from LAPD, knocking at every house, questioning every resident looking for the white van, looking for the person driving it, looking to see if anyone had a home security system that monitored the street.
David didn't remember what day it was when they found someone who said the van had been parked across the street from him but was gone as quietly and quickly as it'd come.
He hadn't seen anything.
While some of the video footage of the van showed the driver and passenger, it led nowhere: they wore vinyl masks of former Presidents, giving them nothing to go on.
Backtracking the van from the time it was returned gave them the same: it abruptly appeared outside a gated community the morning in question en route from its blind to the rental place. The damn thing must've been parked or puttering around those camera-dark environs since Colby disappeared.
With nothing else to try, they all trooped back to where it'd been last and knocked on doors, showing Colby's picture and Stewart's (CCTV had confirmed Clark Stewart returned the rental), asking if anyone had seen them, asking to search the premises. Asking because they had no probable cause, didn't even know if Granger was there or had ever been there.
It was too much area to cover on too little evidence and eventually abandoned. Most everyone—Sinclair included—thought the van a diversion only.
And son of a bitch if it hadn't worked.
Which meant they had nothing (oh how David hated that word).
Charlie's math couldn't help them because they were back down to the original datum: Colby was missing.
There'd been no ransom demands, no one contacting them to claim credit. The 48-hour window was long past, and the odds of finding a body slim; the chances of finding Colby alive were slim to none.
David knew all this, but he wouldn't give up. Not even when the A-Dic pulled the extra agents who'd been helping the team; not even when he reassigned Liz.
They still had no body. In David's mind, that meant Colby was still alive. If—no, David corrected himself, since; no body equaled not dead—since he was still alive after all this time, then he needed help.
He'd once maligned and spurned Colby, until he pulled his head out of his ass, and there was no way in hell he'd quit on him now. Even though it'd been twenty-eight days.
Didn't matter.
Twenty-eight days didn't mean he was dead.
Twenty-eight days didn't mean he was never coming back.
Twenty-eight days didn't mean he wished he was dead.
David blinked back tears.
Twenty-eight days didn't matter. Not in this case, now or ever. Because this wasn't a case—this was David's brother. And David needed him home. Because he couldn't lose Colby. Because Colby deserved to be saved. Because Colby was a good man. Because Colby was Colby.
Twenty-eight days couldn't be allowed to matter.
They wouldn't.
A/N: Here we are at the halfway point. I'd love to know your thoughts, feelings, impressions so far; please leave a review!