Disclaimer and beta thanks in Chapter 1.

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Chapter 4
Friday, June 17, 2005
6:55 P.M.
Eppes residence

Charlie rounded the corner from the kitchen into the dining room as the front door opened. "'Lo," Don's voice rang out as he stuck his head inside.

"Don! You're just in time." He set the wooden salad bowl on the table, catching a few green leaves as they tried to fall out.

"Hi, son. Charlie mentioned you'd be coming over." Alan was sitting on the couch, watching the last of the evening news.

"Yeah, I heard something about a steak with my name on it." Don closed the front door behind him and dropped his bag by the door. "Smells good."

"I was just about to take yours off the broiler," Charlie said, adding over his shoulder as he turned back towards the kitchen, "Those of us who actually like our meat cooked will be waiting a few minutes longer."

"Forget to start mine late again?" Don called after him.

Alan cut in. "Where you picked up this habit of eating pink meat, I don't know. You were perfectly content to eat a well-done steak when you were growing up."

"He thinks it impresses the girls." Charlie pitched his voice to carry out of the kitchen. "It's more manly or something."

"What!" he heard Don exclaim. "Where'd you get that idea?"

"A little birdie told me." He wondered if Don would call him on it, since he was actually making it up. He reasoned that Don's change in eating habits had come about sometime after he left L.A. for the FBI, and since talking about that time period was often a little touchy, Don would probably let it slide. Half the fun of teasing your older brother was knowing when you could get away with it free and clear.

Sure enough, a long-suffering, "Whatever, Charlie," soon came from the living room. He grinned to himself.

"Charlie, could you bring each of us a beer when you come out?" Alan called from the living room as he clicked the television off.

"Sure." Charlie reflected as he opened the refrigerator door and pulled out three dark brown bottles. No matter how old he was, it was still a little strange drinking in front of his father. Not that he'd sneaked a drink too many times when he was underage, but it was still a little odd. He deposited one bottle at each plate, and went back for Don's steak as the other two settled around the table.

"Now, this is nice," Alan said, looking at the both of them once Charlie was settled in his seat. "Friday night with my two favorite people."

Don and Charlie clinked their bottles with his, and Charlie said innocently, "You'd really rather be with us than Esmerelda?"

"Who?" Don asked, taking a swig of the amber-colored liquid.

Alan was shooting Charlie a glare that he blithely ignored. "Never mind."

"Someone Dad had dinner with earlier this week." Charlie scooped some salad onto his plate. "I understand she was quite taken with him."

"Dad?"

"She's not my type." Alan grabbed the salad bowl from Charlie. "Where 'my type' means someone with all their mental faculties."

Don choked on a sip of beer and Charlie gave his dad a reproving look. "Larry wouldn't have set you up with someone he thought was mentally deficient, Dad. She is a CalSci professor, after all."

"Oh, I don't mean to be cruel to the poor woman; she was perfectly nice. She's a marine biologist, about my age, and Larry thought we might get along. We went out to dinner at that nice Italian place on Green Street and for three hours, I didn't get a word in edgewise. She barely paused long enough to eat anything. I certainly learned a lot about zebra mussels and snakehead fish, but it wasn't the most enjoyable dinner I've ever had."

"Snakehead fish?" Charlie asked. Dad hadn't mentioned that earlier when he'd related his disastrous date story.

Alan chewed his salad before replying. "It's a kind of fish that can actually walk on land for short periods of time. It's invaded the Chesapeake Bay. Esmerelda studies exotic species, plants and animals that end up in an unfamiliar ecosystem and then take over." He waved his fork in the air. "Usually they're brought in accidentally, either in a ship's ballast water or as pets that get away."

"Sounds like you did learn a lot," Charlie said encouragingly. He'd attended a lecture by Dr. Esmerelda Ashford a couple of years ago and found her quite interesting, if a little long-winded. When Larry had tentatively suggested introducing her to Alan, he'd been taken aback for a moment at the thought of his two worlds of home and work colliding in such a fashion. Then he'd reflected on what he knew of Dr. Ashford and figured it wouldn't be so bad. From what Dad was saying, though, it looked like he wouldn't have to worry about it.

"Well, yes, I suppose I did. I'd still rather be eating dinner with you boys." He looked at Charlie. "Even if it means eating a very well-done steak."

It took a few seconds for his words to register. When they did, Charlie leaped out of his chair and into the kitchen, yanking open the broiler. Fortunately, the two remaining steaks were not yet burned, though they were quite crispy on the outside. "Sorry, Dad," he called, wincing as he inadvertently touched the hot broiler pan.

After he had deposited two very well-done steaks on their respective plates, ignoring Don's smirk as he cut into his own meat, Charlie took his seat again. He was about to ask Don how the smuggling case was going, when Alan asked, "So, Don, how was your date yesterday?"

Don nearly choked on his bite of steak. "What?"

Charlie exchanged a glance with his father. "You mean a real date? With a girl?"

"What, is that so hard to believe?" he snapped back.

As always in the role of peacemaker, Alan said, "Don, I called your office, and Terry said you were out to lunch with someone. She implied it wasn't work-related, so…"

"Her name is Dr. Karen Fisher. I don't think you met her, Charlie, but she was the witness that Cooper and I were protecting." Don gave a little shrug. "She's been having a little trouble dealing with what happened, and I just thought it would help if she talked to someone. So we went out to lunch yesterday. It wasn't a date."

"That was considerate of you," Alan said. "Were you able to help?"

"Yeah, I think so. I told her about -- " he gave their father a sidelong glance and went on -- "similar situations I've been in, and how I dealt with it. I mean, I'm no psychologist, but I think it helped."

"And are you going to 'help' her some more?" Charlie couldn't resist. The age difference and rivalry between the two of them had been too great when they were teenagers for him to tease his brother about his string of girlfriends. Even if it was over fifteen years later, he didn't want to pass up the opportunity.

Don shot him a glance from under his eyebrows. "Yeah, we're going out to dinner tomorrow." He stabbed a piece of lettuce. "Can we talk about something else?"

"You don't sound very happy about it," Alan said cautiously. "I thought going out to dinner with a nice, intelligent woman was a good thing."

"It is!" Don exclaimed. "I just…I don't want to jinx anything, you know?"

Charlie looked at him thoughtfully. Normally, Don had no problem with his family making comments about his personal life, at least within in reason. If he was being so touchy, either he was really serious about Dr. Fisher, or something else was bothering him.

"Okay," Charlie said slowly, deciding to let it slide for now. "So, uh, what's new with the smuggling case?"

Don grimaced in mid-bite. "Nothing."

"Smugglers?" Alan asked. "That sounds kind of old-fashioned, if you ask me."

"Yeah, but it's something very modern that they're smuggling." When Alan raised his eyebrows in inquiry, Don went on, "Freon."

"That's your contraband?" Charlie exclaimed.

"I didn't tell you?"

"No, all you said was that it was some kind of illegal material." He explained to Alan, "Don stopped by yesterday morning to ask for my help with the case."

"So what are you doing this time?" Alan asked him.

He looked down at his plate. "Nothing, actually."

"Too busy at the end of the term, right? Don, you have to stop relying on your brother so much. He has his own job, you know."

"No, Dad, it's actually something I can't do." He glanced up at Alan's astonished expression. "It reduces to a P vs. NP problem."

"Oh." Alan paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. Then he seemed to recover his equilibrium and looked at Don. "So who's smuggling freon?"

"We don't know," Don sighed. "We don't know where it's coming from, either, which is where I was hoping Charlie could help."

"If I could borrow some more of Larry's time on the supercomputer on campus -- " he started, already tracing possible approaches in his head.

"No, it's okay." Don leaned back in his chair. "Dad's right, we have our own resources and our own ways to figure things out. It's okay, Charlie."

He looked at him for a moment, then picked at his salad. He'd never had to turn down his brother before. He wasn't sure if it helped or not that it wasn't a matter of time constraints, but that Don had actually come up with a problem he couldn't solve. It made him feel less guilty, but it was a blow to his ego.

Don was outlining the basics of the case to their father. "So you see, we don't know where the ship might have gone to pick up this extra cargo."

"There's no manifest?"

"They tried to get rid of it. We have a good forensics expert reconstructing it, but it'll take time, and it might not be completely accurate anyway. So far she's found one container that disappeared somewhere along the way, but that's the opposite of what we're looking for."

"Maybe that container had the payment for the freon," Alan suggested.

"That's what we were thinking. It was one of the heavier ones listed on the manifest, at least from what we've seen so far."

Charlie lifted his head. "Was the ship weighed at all points along the trip?"

"Yes, and all of the weight changes are accounted for by what we've been able to make out of the manifest."

"Oh." He halfheartedly took a bite of steak. There had to be an answer here that he was missing. If the records were incomplete, then the truth had to be somewhere in the pattern of containers: when and where they were loaded. "Have you looked at the order the containers are stacked in the ship? Presumably the ones on top were put on last, right?"

"Our Customs guy says sometimes they rearrange them to put the lighter ones on top. So even though the freon was on top, that doesn't mean it was the last stop."

Charlie put his fork down. "So it was a relatively lightweight container." He could almost hear the light bulb click on in his head. When Don nodded, he went on, "And you figure what they traded for it was pretty heavy, right? But the weight didn't change overall?"

"No, and that's the weird thing. Nearly all of the containers on the ship have been accounted for, and it looks like nothing was added to make up for the weight. We're waiting to see if the whole manifest will tell us something once it's been reconstructed."

He looked over at their father. "What do you put in a ship to make it weigh more?"

Alan looked puzzled. "What do you mean, Charlie? Usually you're trying to make it weigh as little as possible, right?"

"Not if you're nearly empty and don't want to tip over in a storm. Or, not if you're trying to hide something." He briefly looked at Don, and could almost see the wheels turning in his brother's head, trying to catch up with his mental leap. He supposed it was the teacher in him, but he couldn't come out and say it without dropping a hint so they could figure it out for themselves. "Esmerelda?"

The two older men looked at each other, and then Don gave a nod. "Ballast water," he said.

Charlie sat back in his chair, satisfied. "If they switched a heavier container for a lighter one, but the weight didn't change, they must have taken on some ballast water at the same port where they loaded the freon."

"You think we can figure out where that is based on the chemistry of the water in the 'Buir Lake' or something?" Don asked, pulling his phone out of his pocket.

"Not the water," Alan said. "What's in the water. Charlie's right, I heard enough about this the other night. Whatever plankton and other little creatures were living in the water in your mystery port, they're now in the ballast tank of your ship. Assuming it hasn't been emptied into the harbor yet."

"It shouldn't have." Don was dialing a number. "No one is supposed to go near that ship." He patted Charlie on the shoulder as he rose from his chair. "Great work, Charlie. You, too, Dad. Thanks." Then his voice changed. "Hello, is this Jason Ramos? Agent Eppes here."

Don's voice faded as he walked into the living room, and Charlie grinned across the table. "This time you didn't even have to think like a criminal, Dad."

"No, just a marine biologist. And before you say anything -- " he pointed his steak knife -- "I guess something good did come out of that date after all. But don't tell Larry I said so, or he'll set me up again."

"You know, Dad, she'd be an excellent choice for studying the organisms in the water if they can get it out of the ship," Charlie said innocently, taking a sip of his beer. "I'm sure she'd been even more amenable to helping if it was someone she already knew who asked her."

Alan gave him a sharp look. "You already know her. You're a colleague of hers. I think that carries more weight than a man she went out to dinner with once and didn't learn anything about."

"Okay, but don't say I didn't offer."

Alan muttered something and sliced off a piece of steak.

Charlie hid a smile behind his beer bottle. He'd never really been comfortable teasing his father until Don returned to California. They'd been brought up to strictly respect their elders, and since for Charlie most of his peers were also his elders, he'd had a hard time getting over that long enough to make friends with people older than him. Don had always been closer to their father, and Charlie remembered him teasing the older man like Charlie never would have dared.

It wasn't until their mother's fight with cancer that he began to realize his parents were normal, fallible people, just like him. While there certainly wasn't a lot of laughter in the Eppes household for a few years, once the storm of grief had passed, Charlie found himself acting differently towards his father. They had all endured something together, despite their different relationship to Margaret Eppes, that put them on the same page. He and his father were now equals in a sense. He supposed every son realized at some point that he was a grown man like his father, but his mother's death had put that into sharp relief.

The first time he pretended to insult Alan, over a game of chess, his father had had a snappy comeback that left him both insulted and relieved at the same time. Since then, he'd gotten his son back a few times. Charlie's purchase of the family house had made him even more of an equal with his father, and the teasing had increased proportionately. Looking across the table as he chewed his last bite of steak, Charlie still couldn't believe that not only had he called Alan an "old man" a few weeks ago, but it had gone over without incident.

As long as you considered a 388-72 Scrabble score as being "without incident."