Lies

"And you're sure you don't know a Monica?" Chuckles never enjoyed the interrogation aspect of his job. But he needed to be sure that every Joe was fit for duty. Thankfully, Ricochet was genuinely confused by the random interaction she'd had in St. Petersburg than concerned by it.

"Absolutely positive there's no Monica in my life." The conviction she had when she stated it made him believe her completely. Which was going to make the rest of this meeting even harder on her.

"You know that as part of my gig here, I read everyone's files, front to back." Chuckles steepled his fingers before him. The absolute seriousness of his tone and expression wasn't softened at all by the colorful Aloha shirt he wore. "So I know you're telling the truth when you tell me you don't know who your biological parents are."

"You also know that I never had adopted parents, or even foster ones. I was a Minnesota state ward in the care of the Sisters of Mercy from the time I was abandoned to the time I enlisted. You know that I was named after Sister Bernadette's favorite actress, and I picked my surname myself. So I really don't know what you're getting at, Chuckles, and I'd appreciate you getting to the point." Ricochet mirrored him but in a slightly modified way. Instead of hiding her face with her steepled fingers, she angled them toward him, only centimeters above the desk.

It wasn't a power move, but psychologically Chuckles knew that it helped her focus all the irritation that was creeping up inside her on him. He sighed, and slid the folder from his right to center it before her. "There is absolutely no easy way to say this. We've never had enough on Mindbender to go digging. We knew a few key facts about him. He was once an orthodontist. He was once a pretty normal guy, actually. But we have access to technology now that we didn't when the Joes were first assembled, so..."

Reaching forward, Chuckles flipped the folder open. Ricochet furrowed her brow as she looked at the top page. It was a print-out of a website, a bio page specifically for a Dr. Brian Bendis. "Mainframe has been doing some deep diving, running facial recognition scans, plumbing the dark web even. He pulled this off a deleted section of a dental practice in Minneapolis." Chuckles continued.

Ricochet tapped the picture of the clean-cut young man. "That's Mindbender?" When Chuckles nodded, she scrutinized the picture more closely. Decades younger, but she could see it somewhere around the eyes. Deviating from the picture, she read through the offered biography, which did little more than outline his dental experiences and schooling.

"Turns out, Dr. Brian Bendis had a wife." Chuckles did the honors of turning the page for her. This time, the print out was of a wedding announcement from a Minneapolis newspaper.

"Monica." Ricochet connected that dot without even having to read the names. But she hung up on the picture. The smiling woman in the photo was beautiful in the way that all bride's tend to be, glowing from within in happiness. Even though the article was in black and white, Ricochet hazarded the woman was blonde. After a few more seconds, she realized there was more than just a passing resemblance. "What the hell? She looks like me..."

"Actually, we think you look like her." Chuckles braced himself. "This is where things get... fuzzy. Sometime after he married, Bendis went off the deep-end. Reinvented himself as Dr. Mindbender, and got mixed up in the likes of COBRA. That much we're sure of. But her... all trace of her ends with her parents filing a missing persons report, twelve months after her wedding day."

He turned the next page, showing her that copy of the report. But Ricochet wasn't looking at the folder any more. She was staring at Chuckles, slowly shaking her head. "Your intake date at the orphanage is-"

"No." That conviction was back, causing Chuckles to pause. He needed her hear her out. "I can see where you're trying to lead this, but no. I spent my entire childhood normalizing the fact that I was abandoned because no one wanted me. I have spent my entire adult life making something, and someone of myself, to prove some faceless, nameless genetic donors that I'm worth something. I am not going to sit here and listen to you speculate, connecting me to a motherfucking terrorist." She placed her hand flat on the folder, preventing him from turning another page, and she pushed it across the table. "So no. It's not true. He said those things because I had him dead to rights, and he was trying to throw me off. Baseless. Lies. We're done here, Chuckles."

Standing up, Ricochet crossed the room and yanked the door open. Without a word, she stormed out. Rubbing the bridge of his nose, Chuckles turned the file toward himself and looked at what Ricochet had refused to read. How Monica Bendis had disappeared while driving to her parents house in Iowa. How she'd had her two-month-old daughter in the car with her. How she'd grown afraid of her increasingly unstable and volatile husband.

The rest was speculation, he wouldn't deny that. Dropping the baby off with no name and no information at an orphanage out in the sticks was a logical action of a woman who feared for her and her child's life. Mainframe was still looking to see if Monica had truly disappeared and reinvented herself, or if she was a casualty of Mindbender's rise in COBRA.

"That bad, huh?" Duke checked in while Chuckles was still putting together his final assessment.

"Yeah, she did not take it well. Where is she now?"

"Topside. Spirit reported that she went out to get some air. Good news is thirty-five miles of Utah desert surrounding us will be a pretty decent deterrent." Duke sat on the table, liberating the file from beneath Chuckles' fingers. "Do you really think this is the truth? That we've got Mindbender's daughter on the team?"

Chuckles scrubbed a hand through his hair. "Honestly, sir. It's all spaghetti on the wall until we can get a conclusive DNA sample from Mindbender. And that prick is so anal-retentive I bet he bleaches his sheets."

"For now, we keep an eye on her," Duke agreed. "She's not the type to leave well enough alone."