"I didn't know where else to go."
In the three seconds it took Liz to speak her sentence, Ressler's agent instincts had instantly started to kick in; he registered the level of hurt and desperation in his partner's voice. In those same three seconds, plus an extra two observing, he had noticed the puffy and blotchy skin around the area of her eyes; he had been drawn straight to them the moment he opened the door. As they stood there, fresh tears started to build up along her eyelashes and Ressler had the sudden desire to pull her to his side and comfort her. But he didn't. Instead, he nodded his head slightly in understanding, moved to the side and motioned with his hand for her to come in. As she walked past him and into his apartment, Ressler scanned back through his mind and, over the last ten months, there were only two people he could think of that could reduce her to this state - Tom Keen and Raymond Reddington.
She may never had been in his apartment before yet he observed how she moved through it to the living room with ease. Ressler followed her after closing the front door but stopped to look at her when he noticed her staring at the coffee table. His half drunk bottle of beer, that says newspaper and the T.V. control were abandoned upon it in his haste to answer the door not two minutes ago. She looked up to him when she could no longer hear him move and her voice shook as she spoke.
"You're busy. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have come. I-"
"Sit down, Keen. You want a beer?"
"No thanks," she held up the car keys that were still gripped in her had. "I'm driving."
She sat down on the furthest end of the couch, with Ressler joining her a few seconds later. They sat in silence for a few minutes; Ressler waiting patiently for her to be ready to talk and Liz was nervously twitching, having an inner debate on how to start. Finally, after five solid minutes of silence, Ressler spoke.
"Keen, talk to me. There's something wrong and I know it has something to do with your husband or Reddingotn. I know you asked Aram to run some form of search under the radar this morning. I'm your partner, you can tell me anything, that's what I'm here for."
"I know," Liz finally looked up at him, fresh tears finally from her swollen eyes and down her cheeks. "And that's why I'm here. I need someone I can trust, someone who will listen to the full story but won't judge without knowing and understanding all the facts."
Ressler stared at her in bewilderment and it wasn't until she pleaded him with her eyes that he nodded to give her the go ahead.
"You're right when you say that's what's wrong involves Tom, but that's only one problem. Reddington has also played a large part. So what problem that's ruining my life would you like to hear first?"
"Tom, definitely Tom. I get the feeling Reddingtons part will take more time."
She nodded, took a deep breath and started her explanation.
"We were all wrong about him. He wasn't innocent after all. The gun, the money, the passports - they were all his. Tom Keen is an alias, always has been. My whole marriage, the last four years of my life has been a lie. I don't know if he's a spy, a secret agent or what." She paused for a moment to wipe the tears away and briefly look at Ressler. He was still staring at her, only now his mouth was open slightly in shock. He gave her a curt nod to continue. "I found out the truth, well part of it, a couple of weeks ago. He didn't know though and I did some investigating. But he grew suspicious, something alerted him to the fact I knew and he ran. I didn't know where he was, until I returned home from work two nights ago and he was tied to one of the chairs in the dining room, being guarded by none other than the Pavlovitch brothers - courtesy of our favourite neighborhood criminal. We talked, I screamed, we fought and he got away. The downstairs of my house now contains no usable furniture. Tom was placed in my life by someone named Berlin, and the reasoning? Reddington."
She wiped the tears with the back of her hand. Ressler wanted to shout at her for not telling anyone, for not telling him, before. But she said she needed someone who would hear all the facts, and that's what he was going to do.
"What led you to figure it out?"
Liz was relieved, she thought he was going to berate her for not telling anyone. "Since first finding the box, I guess I never fully trusted him. I mean he was tied up, beaten and stabbed by Zamani, and as much as I wanted him to be alright, I couldn't help wondering why Zamani chose to attack him. I'd already been told by Reddington when I stabbed him that if he died, I'd never find out the truth about Tom. I should have taken that threat a little more seriously, considering he was right. When I sent the bullet to ballistics, I convinced myself there was nothing to it, that it was just a gun hidden under my floorboards. But then I found out about Victor Folken and we faced Gina Zanetakos and everything pointed to Tom, a part of me wasn't even surprised. When it was proved that Tom was innocent and it was all Gina, I found that I couldn't trust him, something in me refused to believe he had nothing to do with it." She sniffed and Ressler passed her a box of tissues from the side table. Liz blew her nose before continuing. "Thanks. A couple of weeks ago, a woman, a 'work colleague' of Tom's went missing. Her name was Jolene Parker; she'd been in my house, Ressler, I got to know her, or at least I thought I did. I did my own research into her disappearance and tracked her movements to a warehouse. I looked around a bit, it looked like some sort of base; guns, plans, there was a board that had pages and pages of stuff ripped off of it and the papers were burning in a bucket outside."
"What does this have to do with your husband?"
"I'm getting there. There was someone there, hiding in the shadows. He attacked me, knocked me down and escaped. When the detective in charge of Jolene's case got there, I told him what I'd found and asked him to keep me in the loop - which he did. I got home and he's emailed me the photos of the scene, there was one of the trash and that's when I realised."
"Realised what?"
"That it was Tom."
"How could you possibly realise it was Tom from a picture of a pile of trash?"
"There was a toy. A stupid little educational toy they give to third graders. It was there in the trash under some crumpled paper and coffee cups. Ressler, I'd given Tom that toy that morning. I hadn't tracked Jolene's cell to her warehouse, I had tracked her to Tom's." She sniffed again and sighed. "There was a piece of paper outside that wasn't completely turned to ash, it had 'Berlin' written on it, at the time I wasn't sure whether it meant person or place but now I know that it's the name of the person who hired Tom."
Ressler sat there, wide mouthed and shocked to say the least. He had no idea what Liz had been going through the past few weeks. He know she had been dealing with a few things (he'd covered for her enough times to notice something wasn't right), he just assumed it had something to do with pulling out of the adoption. He was her partner, he should of noticed signs telling him it was something much, much bigger.
"Why didn't you tell me? You didn't have to go through this alone, I would've helped in any way I could."
"I know, but you had your own stuff going on, and I was already asking too much of you to cover for me everyday. I felt like it was something I had to do on my own; he was my husband, therefore he was my problem. I didn't want to get you involved until I had to, and I guess that's now."
"I'm your partner, Keen, I'll always have your back, whether you like it or not. You know what you have to do now though right?"
"Yeah," she looked up at him and give him a weak smile through her tears. "I need to call it in. First, though, will you go to the house with me tomorrow? I think you'd benefit from seeing it."
"Okay and I'll stay whilst they process it."
"Thanks."
"You sure you don't want that beer? You can have the couch tonight. I'm sure explaining Reddington's part in this will take a while, and I don't like this idea of you finding somewhere for the night." He gave her his best 'agent' look and Liz let out a small laugh before nodding.
"Okay, hit me. You're right though, there's a fair bit to say about Reddington."
Ressler left her sitting on his couch as he headed towards the kitchen to grab two cold beers from the refrigerator. Liz waited patiently for him to return, absentmindedly tapping her foot to some offbeat rhythm until he came back. She took her beer with a quiet thanks and gulped down half of the bitter cold liquid before suppressing what would have been a fairly loud belch. Ressler didn't prompt her to continue talking, knowing that she would do so in her own time. It only took her one more small sip of beer before she started talking again.
"Okay. Alright, so, Reddington. God, Ressler, that man is some form of devil. He's at the center of everything bad that has happened since, well, probably since I was born. There's a connection between us, we all know that. We pretty much figured that out the day he turned himself in, and ten months later he still refuses to tell me. I'm sure Dembe knows; the way he looks at me, it's like he's challenging me to ask him. You've read my file right?"
Ressler nodded. "Yeah, I have. I know that you were adopted at the age of four and that you were in a fire but there wasn't much detail."
"Yeah, yeah there was a fire, it's how I got the scar on my wrist." She held out her hand to him. He took it and held it in his own, turning her palm over to examine it clearly. He'd never seen it properly before; she always kept it hidden, rarely showing it to anyone. He knew that she rubbed it subconsciously when she was nervous or upset and he'd seen her looking down at it sometimes when a case was really tough. It ran from the center of her palm, along the inside of her wrist and continued an inch up her arm. He hated to think of the pain it must have caused, considering she was less than five years old at the time. He released her hand and she placed it back in her lap, using her other to shield it from further view.
"I don't remember much from that night; I can see flames, remember the heat but nothing else. I escaped it with a burnt wrist and a stuffed toy. I was adopted after that, placed with Sam. He was all I had, the only person in the world until Tom came along. When Sam died, it was like a bullet to the heart. You were with me when Tom called, saw how broken I was." Ressler nodded but didn't comment. He remembered that day clearly, she wasn't even able to fly out to the dying man and say goodbye. "Reddington comforted me you know? Invited me to the house he was staying at because he didn't want me to be alone. Tom was still in Nebraska and couldn't get a return flight until the next afternoon. I thought Reddington was being nice, showing that he could be something more than a criminal mastermind. But I was wrong. He didn't care about me and my feelings, not really. All he cared about was trying to rid himself of the guilt he felt for my father dying."
"Why? Because he gave us the General Ludd case? He wasn't to know that you wouldn't be able to get him. Reddington couldn't have known that planes would have been grounded." Ressler shook his head, not believing that Reddington was involved in something so painful for the one person he so obviously cared about.
"But that's just it, Ressler, he did know. He knew everything, he set it all up. He knew exactly what would happen. He gave us that case knowing that it would keep me away from my father. He stopped me from seeing Sam... so he could..."
"How do - "
"Tom. Tom gave me the information."
Ressler was confused. He had no idea what to think. "How do you know he wasn't lying to you? How can you trust what he says?" He looked up at her and was startled by the heavy flow of silent tears streaming down her face. He picked the box of tissues back up and inched closer to her on the couch before placing it in her hands. There was a lot more to this than he thought. She dabbed at her eyes to stem the flow before wiping the water marks from her cheeks. When she spoke again, her voice was broken and had lost a significant level of volume.
"It wasn't what Tom told me... it was what he showed me. I found a key hidden in a lamp stand; I'd seen Tom hide it there when I watched the video footage from the cameras placed in our hou-"
"What cameras?" Ressler interrupted her, apparently there was a lot about his partners life he didn't know about.
"Oh, you don't know... that's something I'll have to explain after, okay?" He nodded and she continued. "After our fight the other night, Tom revealed that he knew I'd found his key and told me that it was to a safety deposit box. He said that I shouldn't trust Reddington and that the box would give me all the answers I needed. Truth is it gave me a hell of a lot more questions than answers." She dabbed at her eyes again.
"What was in it?"
"A photo. A photo alerting me to the fact that Reddington was at the hospital that day my father died."
She reached in to her jacket pocket and pulled out the now folded photo of Red leaving the hospital. Ressler took it ans studied the image for a few seconds. There was no doubt in his mind that it was Reddington in the photo - he knew that fedora anywhere.
"The photo could be a fake. Tom could have fabricated the while thing to turn you against Reddington?"
"That's what I thought. This is what I had Aram run. He searched security footage from in and around the hospital and he proved that Reddingotn was indeed there, and in my fathers room an hour before he died."
"So maybe the whole feeling of guilt was because, for whatever reasoning, he got to see Sam and you didn't?"
"No." Liz swallowed down another mouthful of beer. "I confronted him. I was so confused as to why he was even there. He knew my father, he knew Sam from years ago. Never had he mentioned to me that he knew No. four on the FBI's most wanted list. He was in my fathers room and... Ressler... he killed me father."
Her hand flew to her mouth as she started sobbing again. Ressler was frozen with the shock of her revelation. It couldn't be true. Why would Reddington kill her father? Maybe she had gotten it wrong...
"Look, Keen, maybe you've gotten it wrong. Didn't you say that he was there an hour before Sam died? How could he have killed him if he had already left?"
"I thought that's what happened. Whilst we were busy chasing down the Kingmaker, Aram took it upon himself to dig further in to my fathers death. He called me a couple of hours ago to tell me that... that he'd called the hospital, spoke to the attending that pronounced Sam and... and my father died almost an hour before they found him. He would have died when Reddington was in his room."
"Keen, that doesn't mean -"
"Yes it does." She stared at him through her tears, feeling herself falling apart again piece by piece.
"How?" Ressler almost whispered to her, not sure exactly what he was supposed to say.
"Because he admitted it to me."