This story is going to be a little different, there will be mystery and intrigue and, unlike previous stories, a lot of focus on Cal's POV.
Eteri: this should be around 13/14, haven't decided yet. May I ask why you want to know? Eh eh
By the time the car he was waiting for pulled up beside him, it was dawn. Cal watched the vehicle approach from a distance and sighed, then slowly got out and leaned back on the car to show himself. The following couple of minutes were the first time in hours that he had taken his eyes off of Gillian's house, but up until then he had been staring at the building with nervous attention.
Not that it would have made any difference. Whoever had been there had already gone, Gillian included it seemed, and it was unlikely that they would come back. Still, after the first urgent calls and some following ones he'd had to postpone until a more humane hour, Cal have had nothing to do but wait and as stupid as it might sound watching over her house had made him feel better.
On the contrary, making the first call had not been easy and as he watched the man coming out of the newly arrived vehicle Cal braced himself. He did have a glimmer of hope however, a bit of a scam really, but Cal hoped that the reason for that call might have softened whatever reaction Ben Reynolds might have.
The FBI agent got out of the car slowly, looking impeccable and, to Cal's humble opinion, not at all like someone who had almost met his maker by means of a couple of bullets to the chest. Reynolds looked at him then glanced over at Gillian's house, the door slightly ajar as Cal had left it, before looking back at him.
"Should we take a look?" He asked then.
Cal was grateful he jumped right on it, but a part of him had also hoped for some sort of mention of what had happened since their last encounter. However, he was well aware it wasn't the right time and that was probably why Reynolds hadn't brought it up. So he nodded in response and they walked up to the door, Cal giving Ben a summary of the events as he knew it and making sure the agent knew exactly what he had touched or moved before putting in the call.
When they entered the house Cal had to push back emotional flashbacks of all the horrible things he had thought about upon entering, then gathered his mental energies long enough to add a few information. It was mostly generic babble about Gillian's holiday, or at least the original plan, and that he had already called the hotel he knew she had been staying at. While gloving up and looking around Reynolds shot him a sideways glare, but Cal didn't flinch. The luggage tag was self-explanatory but taken by a brief wave of delusion he had wondered if maybe there wasn't something else to it, if maybe Gillian hadn't sent the luggage back in advance because she didn't need the whole lot for just a couple of extra days…which was ridiculous as much as any other scenarios he had come up with. Still, Cal didn't feel he could be faulted for trying to give himself something positive to cling on and he had called the hotel, only to hear that yes, Gillian Foster had left her room on Saturday as scheduled and the private car she had rented had taken her to the airport.
"Was she supposed to come back on Saturday?" Reynolds asked then. "Or maybe it was Sunday and she came back a day earlier?"
"Unlikely." Cal sighed. "I checked the agenda and the out of office message she set up before leaving. She planned to be back in the office on Monday but the message said she'd be available on Sunday, and I know Gillian. She always comes back a day earlier to check on stuff and get back into work mentally before actually coming back."
Reynolds nodded to himself, still looking around with a seemingly unphased expression. Cal knew that wasn't the case, that the agent was taking in the scene - crime scene - with expert eyes and processing whatever information he could see, but he was starting to itch for some feedback.
"And you said she told you she'd stay away a little longer."
"Couple of days, yeah."
"Did she change the automatic reply after she told you that?"
Cal waited for a second before answering, disappointed with himself for having failed to see that might have been a detail to add to the picture.
"No, why?"
Ben nodded to himself, trying not to let Cal see his face but failing at it. The concern on the agent's face was honest and somewhat touching, but mostly it scared the crap out of him.
"Reynolds-"
"Let's take a look at the bedroom."
He was way too quick in changing subject and Cal took note of that, but decided to postpone his questions until after the inspection. So he huffed and nodded, then they started moving towards the bedroom but Cal stopped when Ben's hand took hold of his shoulder and held him back. Surprised, Lightman turned around and immediately followed the agent with his eyes as he made his way to the back door. Before Cal could ask what was the hold up, he noticed the detail that had gotten the man's attention. There was shattered glass on the floor by the back door, slightly open as it was, more likely coming from the big gape in the window panel that had certainly provided easy access to the handle on the inside.
Cal and Reynolds exchanged a look charged with concern and suspicious, then Cal slowly drifted into self loathing and anger. He had missed that not so small detail previously, and he knew why: the moment he had thought Gillian could be in danger he had gone in panic mode and forgot about anything else, including making sure the place was safe.
Reynolds kneeled down and examined the glass fragments and the door, then stood up and they resumed their journey. Uncharacteristically for him, Cal stood behind by the door as Ben entered the bedroom, not really feeling like repeating the invasion of such a private space no matter the dire circumstances. He watched the agent look around, careful not to touch anything unless he needed to. Judging by the look on Reynolds' face Cal thought part of it was out of respect for Gillian's personal effects, something he appreciated along with the fact that the agent didn't feel the need to state the obvious with regards to what had happened there. It was clear that whoever had been there had been looking for something, the question was whether they had found it or not.
And whether Gillian had been there when they had come looking for it.
"Can you find out if there's blood, anywhere in the house?"
Cal heard the words coming out of his mouth as if he wasn't the one speaking them, in a voice he couldn't recognise for how unstable and weak it was. Reynolds' look in response wasn't much steadier, he couldn't bring himself to tell the man he had been thinking about the very same thing, but at least was relieved that there was no sign of blood that the eye could see.
"I'll get a team to do a thorough search, Cal." He reassured him, looking around and then focusing on something. "You think you can try not to get in over your head for now?"
Cal grumbled something in between his teeth and Reynolds gave a scrutinising look to the man in front of him. He was standing there, just inside the room now, with his hands forcefully stuffed in his pockets as if he was afraid of what they could do. It had been a while since he'd been around Cal Lightman, but Reynolds knew all too well that there were two things that could make the man's blood boil: his daughter and his best friend.
"Have you met me?" Lightman tried to joke then, obviously reading the man's face. "C'mon off it Ben, what am I supposed to-"
"Look at this."
Muscle memory was a great thing, Reynolds found it surprisingly easy to ignore the early sign of out of control Lightman by simply changing subject. Then he went over to the flipped mattress and lifted it a bit, motioning to Cal to come closer. Mildly intrigued, Lightman approached and bent down beside him, finding himself looking at the cavity that had been dug inside the mattress on the down facing side. It was a rough hole, Cal had no experience in carving holes into mattresses but he imagined it wasn't an easy task to accomplish in an elegant way, and it was clear it had been meant to nest something.
He looked at Reynolds, appreciating by his look that he was supposed to take that as a positive sign but struggling to do so. Then Ben put the mattress back as it was as best as he could and started looking around, eventually spotting something half hidden under one of the pillows that had been thrown around. Against his better judgement, something that was increasingly hard to maintain with Cal literally breathing on his neck, Reynolds reached out for it and found himself holding the box of a pay-to-go phone. He opened it up, the phone was gone and so was the SIM card, and anything that might have indicated the number to identify that had been removed.
"A burner phone?" Cal asked, a confusion in his voice that wasn't natural at all.
"Looks like it." Reynolds frowned then went back to the mattress bringin the box along, trying to match it with the hole they had found. It was a near perfect fit, which confirmed his hint. "This was Foster's. She hid it here."
"Why would she do that?"
"I don't know, Cal. Any chance this holiday of hers wasn't a holiday?"
Any other day of his life Cal would have said no, no way Gillian might have lied to him so extensively and about something so big. Then again
It depends on the lie
it was obvious that she had been keeping things to herself. He knew there was no point in convincing himself that Reynolds was wrong, it was clear that the hiding place had been Gillian's doing.
Graciously, Ben didn't press on and took his silence as face value, then he stood up and took out his phone. It was time to call it in.
Hours later, Cal was once again waiting in his car outside Gillian's house. He'd had to move it, of course, to make space for the vehicles of the crime investigation team that had swarmed the place like locusts. For a while he had tried to stick around, thinking they might benefit from his knowledge of the location, but after a while he hadn't been able to take it anymore. There was no visible blood anywhere, but the sight of officers wrapped up in protective suits taking pictures of every detail in Gillian's house was somehow even worse.
Out of desperation, he had tried to call her once or twice as he waited, this time receiving a cold voice notification that the number he was calling had been deactivated. Damnit Gillian! He thought, hastily tossing the phone on the driver seat. Where the hell are you?
A few seconds later the phone rang and the sound scared the living crap out of him, but once the initial shock was gone he lunged over to pick it up again. He answered so quickly that he didn't even check the caller ID, and for the first time in his life he was disappointed to hear his daughter's voice on the other side of the line. Only then, with Emily screaming in his ear that she had woken up to an empty house, Cal realised he hadn't checked in with her in hours. Emily might have been used to that, not that she had to like it, and so was Foster, sadly; then he realised that was possibly the first time he was on the other side of the fence.
And he hated it.
He hated not knowing, he hated the idea that secrets were being kept and that was the reason why, as incredible as it might sound, he told Emily the truth. Most of it at least, the gist of it, enough to explain why he had been gone hours and why he wasn't likely to come home anytime soon. He also wanted Emily to understand that there was nothing she could do, and he had to swear on his own daughter's life that he was going to keep her updated.
Not long after the call he saw Reynolds coming his way, holding a plastic bag in his hands. Cal sighed, not liking what he saw and only marginally lifted by the expression on the agent's face, then he got out of the car.
"We didn't find any traces of blood anywhere in the house." It was Ben's opening and Cal let go a long and loud sigh of relief. "It's going to take a while to check for prints and we'll have to cross check but we did find this."
He handed over to Cal the bag he had been carrying, which seemed to contain a big brown envelope. Through the plastic Cal could see stamp and postal marks, Gillian's home address hand written in big letters and previous addresses scribbled on the back. He looked at it, turning the bag in his hands about a dozen times wishing he could rip it open, but couldn't make much of it and had to look back at the agent.
"What am I supposed to do with this?"
"You, nothing." Reynolds took it back, he was still able to manage Cal's nerves but he had a feeling the breaking point was near. "We're gonna take it to the lab, see what we can find."
"Where was it?"
"In the trash, under the sink. Look." He pointed at one of the stamps. "This one is from Friday, from a post office here in Washington DC. That's probably when she got it."
"But she wasn't home yet." Reynolds shook his head, then Cal leaned on the hood of the car with a thoughtful expression. "So she…flies back on Saturday, gets home, finds the package and calls me to ask for more time off? Grabbing the hidden burner phone on the way out for good measure?"
"You're jumping to conclusions, Cal. We don't even know if this package has anything to do-"
"Look at this bloody thing!" Lightman ripped the evidence bag out of his hands and shoved it in his face. "Look at the stamps and addresses on it. This thing has been around the world, literally. Gillian gets it and within hours she's-"
She's what? Dead? Missing? Or simply gone on her own accord for some reason she couldn't share with you? His own voice yelled at him in his head, and he had to bite at his bottom lip to keep those thoughts inside.
"Listen, I know it's hard to stay positive but you can't go for the worst case scenario right away. We start with what we have," he gestured at the house behind him, buzzing with police activity, "which isn't much at the moment and that is precisely why we shouldn't-"
"I get that you haven't been around me for a while Benny, but you do remember I can tell when you're lying right? Or keeping things from me?" Cal hissed, showing glimpses of his true self. "What is it? What aren't you telling me?"
Reynolds sighed, taking back the evidence bag to pass it on to another agent. No, he wasn't surprised that Cal had caught something, in a way he was even relieved that the man was behaving more like the type of guy he remembered. He meant it when he said it was too soon to make hypotheses of any kind, but no matter how things were going to unfold it was good to know he was going to have a fighting Call by his side. What he needed to avoid was to have it against him, so he might as well spill the beans and keep things on the right track.
"I checked Gillian's number for phone records, see if we could trace the last movements. The call she made to you on Saturday, it was the last one she placed before the device was switched off. And it pinged to a cell just half a mile from here."
"So she was here, at home, when she called." It wasn't a question, it was a statement and Reynolds could do nothing but keep looking at him. "My timeline holds, it seems."
"Even so, we still don't know exactly what happened."
"If you're trying to be reassuring Ben, you'll have to do better than this."
"I'm not, Cal. I know you, there is no point in doing that, or asking you not to go on a tangent or drop it, this of all things." Cal gave him a knowing look, folding his arms and clearly ready to challenge him if needed. "All I'm saying is that we should take one step at a time. You think you can do that?"
Gillian was missing. Gillian had lied to him. Gillian had secrets, big ugly secrets she hadn't shared with him. No, he didn't think he could take it slow and not jump the gun, not at all.
But he could certainly lie about it.
