So, what is going on with Gillian? Ask the question, am I right?
I'm sure you'd appreciate why I won't engage with speculations, he he. But I can tell you this, nothing to do with Burns! Also, Cal is already have a tough time as it is, no need to play that card too!
Eteri, no worries, this one sure needs a fair amount of chapters.
There was quite the buzz in the office when they arrived, somehow word had gotten around already, but things went up a couple of notches when Cal came in followed by Ben Reynolds. The additional pair of agents with the big yellow FBI letters on the back of their jackets completed the picture, and staffers around the office parted like the Red Sea as the group walked down the hallway.
"You," Cal pointed at Torres as they passed by, "with us."
Torres immediately followed, exchanging a concerned look with Loker who was on his way out for a meeting they could not ignore. Once they got up to Lightman's office, the two agents with the jackets continued on, likely to Gillian's office, and the three of them entered Cal's.
"What's going on with Foster?"
Torres asked as soon as the door was closed. It was clear by the tone of her voice and posture that she wasn't going to back away without an answer, Lightman's resistance and personal relationship with Foster be damned. She stood there, staring at him and somewhat ignoring Ben for the time being, ready to fight. But she didn't have to, which was terrifying. The look Lightman gave her in return, with that tired face of someone who hadn't slept a minute the previous night, didn't speak of secrets of lies about to come: it only screamed of a deep sense of loss and confusion.
"We don't know, not yet." Reynolds spared Cal the humiliation of having to admit that out loud, but she could see it was true no matter what. "It seems that she came back on Saturday and then went AWOL, possibly in relation to receiving this."
He passed her the evidence bag with the package, not sure it might tell Torres anything more but still feeling like she had to be part of what they knew. Torres looked at it then at Lightman, who was now behind his desk nervously working on the keyboard of his computer. She knew that mode, focused on the surface but likely panicking on the inside. Thankfully, she knew that either way her boss was going to spend every ounce of energy he had in fixing what, by the look of it, was a big ugly mess.
"We've checked it for prints and we're trying to figure out where it was processed before being delivered to Foster-"
"Where's Loker?" Cal grumbled from his seat, oblivious to the ongoing conversation. "I need Loker."
"He left. There was a meeting scheduled with the Fire Department to discuss their recruitment programme." She babbled, struggling to sustain Cal's intensely annoyed gaze. "It has been in the calendar for weeks and we are on a retainer with them, someone had to go and-"
And you were nowhere to be found and Foster is missing and someone had to keep things going! She wanted to respond, but before she had a chance Cal waived his hand in the air and shut her up.
"I need to see the security cameras' recordings, this archive is a mess!"
He nearly yelled, tossing the mouse aside and then visibly fighting back the instinct to grab something to throw across the room. Torres exchanged a quick look with Reynolds who just nodded, it was taking longer than what he had expected but not surprisingly the out of control side of Lightman was creeping to the surface. Torres sighed, having seen it before didn't make it any easier to witness but at least she knew how to deal with it, then she quickly walked over to the desk and took over with the computer.
"What do you need?"
"I wanna see the tapes from Saturday." He instructed. "Her plane landed around lunch time, so anything after that."
"Do you think she came here?"
It was Reynolds' question but Torres didn't mind hearing the answer either. She had to believe that Lightman had a plan, that even in such a dire situation the boss' mind was clear enough to see that he had to do something and try to find a way through. But when she looked down at him, just a quick glimpse while she navigated through the system, she was disheartened to see that he didn't seem to be all that present.
"I don't know," he muttered. "I just hope, I guess."
A very heavy and uncomfortable silence wrapped up the trio, now all very close behind the desk and anxiously staring at the screen. Torres found and selected the useful files, then worked the keyboard and soon they were looking at the split screen magnified on Cal's office wall. Lightman stood up and walked closer, staring at the images with a nervous energy oozing through his skin. There wasn't much movement on them, as expected for a Saturday when not even the most dedicated of employees would come in unless they really had to. Past 4pm there was actually no movement at all and Torres took the liberty to speed up the video, knowing that staring at hours of empty hallways was only going to stress out Lightman even more than what he already was.
After a while, when they could see from the windows on the screen that daylight had been replaced by night time, Cal was getting visibly restless. He hadn't honestly put too much hope into that, but it gave him something to do and cling on, yet as that already possibility seemed to be slowly fading Cal started to realise how much he had truly counted on that hail Mary to bring something to the plate.
"There!" He nearly screamed when something moved on the corner of the screen, stepping closer as if he wanted to run into the wall and anxiously pointing at something. "Go back."
Torres obeyed and went back a little then let the video play at normal speed, coming around to stand closer and take a better look at herself. They watched the screen, showing Gillian entering the deserted office late in the evening, not even bothering with lights unless really necessary. She was dressed in a very unlikely Foster way, sneakers and jeans topped by a baggy leather jacket over a hoodie, and she was carrying a backpack. Cal's eyes flickered when he saw her, wishing he could reach out through the screen, grab her and ask her what the hell she was doing. Instead he kept his mouth shut, they all did overtaken by the stupor of seeing Gillian Foster of all people seemingly sneaking into her own place of work like a thief. She went into her own office, where they lost the view since she had made sure that there would be no cameras there, but she reappeared a couple of minutes later making a beeline for Cal's office through the library. Here they lost her again, and they shouldn't have, until they saw her again some ten minutes later leaving the office and disappearing.
"That's not right," Cal muttered, then went back to the desk. "Something is missing."
"Well, she did come here for some reason. That's more than we knew-"
"No, that's not right." Cal insisted, then rewinded the video to the moment when Gillian had gone into his office and stopped it there. "Here, that's not right."
Torres wasn't entirely sure what he was going for, she didn't find it weird at all that there were no cameras in quite possibly the only two places in the office, aside for bathrooms maybe, where privacy was paramount. Concerned that Lightman might have been losing it faster than expected, Torres looked over at Reynolds, confused by the look of realisation on the agent's face. As his epiphany became hers, she looked up and scanned the room with watchful eyes, forgetting for a moment that there were bigger problems on hand than a hidden camera in Lightman's office she knew nothing about.
For a few moments Cal typed away, muttering to himself what sounded like a not so flattering series of things about Foster. It seemed as if he was looking for something, and when he grabbed an empty mug from the desk and threw it across the room it was clear he hadn't found it. Or that he had indeed, but he didn't like his discovery.
"Foster deleted that part of the recording." He announced then with a resigned voice.
"Are you sure it was her?" Reynolds knew it was a stupid question but he had to try.
"She logged into the system to delete that, I'm looking right at it."
"Someone else might have tampered with it, if they were after her and came here-"
"We would have seen someone else coming in, or there would be more cuts." He slumped over the chair, suddenly exhausted and even more mentally drained as the new information hit him. "She did this, Foster got rid of it."
"But why?" Torres didn't know what to think anymore, she was confident nobody was hiding anything at that point but she still couldn't make any sense of any of it.
"I'm gonna go talk to the guys searching her office, see if they got anything."
Reynolds informed them before exiting the room, leaving a deeply confused Torres with a brooding Lightman. She looked at the boss, who seemed stuck in a loop of rewatching the same portion of the video as if doing that enough times could somehow regenerate the missing clip. He was a trainwreck, she could easily see it and, even worse, he wasn't even trying to hide it.
"You really didn't-"
She didn't get to finish the sentence. Cal didn't interrupt her, at least not with words: all he needed to shut her up was a tired and defeated look, the look of man used to know everything about everybody and yet had missed something huge about the person closest to him. Torres stopped pressing, feeling unease about unmasking some kind of inadequacy in her mentor when he clearly was too exposed and vulnerable to even care.
After a while, not knowing what to do next, Cal stood up and went to get his trusted bottle of scotch, pouring himself a generous glass without even thinking they weren't even past lunch time. Then he started to pace around the room, his eyes scanning the space as if he was trying to figure out if something was missing or out of place, anything that could have explained Gillian's detour before she had left. Torres watched him, standing there in the middle of the room with the glass in his hand, too afraid to make a peep and break his concentration.
That fell on Reynolds instead, who came back into the room on the last words of a phone call.
"I don't think we're gonna get much from her office, unless you could think of anything she might have needed from there?" Cal shook his head and Ben felt bad because he had to keep shoving in his face the fact that he was completely clueless about his best friend's actions. Then he sighed and held up his phone. "That was the lab, no unknown fingerprints at her place. And no blood." Torres could see the relief leaving Lightman's body at that last clarification. "And I got some information on the package."
""What about it?"
"It was mailed in Hong Kong about two weeks ago, give or take. It looks like it made some stops along the way but the previous recipients' addresses were covered with the labels, and there is no sender detail. Our tech says that it looks like the same package has been opened and closed multiple times, the envelope was always the same." He held up the bag with the parcel. "We are still running this for prints but I doubt it would help, this has been around the world and has been touched by dozens of people. But we should be able to find what post office processed it last here in Washington. Not much but it could be a start."
Cal nodded, conflicted on whether to be grateful for Reynolds' desperate attempt to make a big deal out of nothing or just take anything coming his way as the Holy Grail of information. Then he started to process the latest, add the recent updates to what he already knew; not much really, thanks to Gillian's excellent work at keeping things from him. The detail that concerned him the most, and there were quite a lot for him to choose from, was her attire on the video during her little escapade in the office. Aside from the fact he had never seen her wearing anything so casual, he couldn't help but think that everything about that screamed of a person who knew she had to lay low and hide. The Gillian Foster he knew - he thought he knew - didn't do that, she didn't need to do any of that: keeping secrets phones, sneaking around, hiding, acting like-
"Shit!"
The word was still hanging outside his mouth when he dropped the glass without caring about the liquid pouring all over the floor, then dived down toward the safe and kneeled down in front of it. Frantically, Cal moved quickly to put in the code and get it open, trying to be as fast as possible and yet knowing that if he was right he was too late anyway.
"What?" Torres asked, immediately feeling the nervous energy and not liking that one bit.
"I think I know what she was doing here." He didn't sound triumphant or happy about having had an epiphany, clearly hoping he might be wrong. "In my office."
Reynolds and Torres looked at each other, then once the safe was open stepped closer and watched Lightman digging out his very personal belongings until he stopped, his whole body freezing. Then he turned around, muttering another curse as he sat on the floor with his back on the wall, looking down at his down hands as he spoke.
"She took one of my guns."
I wanted to try with giving titles to the chapter but I am not too happy with it. Still, I figured I could try a little something and give a hint on the following one so...
Chapter 4: Special delivery
