A/N: Thanks for hanging in there with me.

Chapter 7

Don listened to the steady ring of the cell phone in his ear as he pulled out into traffic. Somehow, he felt better just to be driving away from FBI Headquarters. He hit a button to let the window descend. Maybe all he really needed was a little air. The ringing stopped in mid-tone. "Hey! Charlie!"

"Don?" Charlie's voice sounded muffled, and Don tried to imagine whatever experiment he might be involved in this time.

"Yeah. You got a minute? I wanted to bounce a couple of things off you - thought you might have some ideas for me."

"On your case?" Charlie's voice sounded clearer this time, as if he was climbing out from under something.

"Yeah." Or maybe he was cleaning out the garage? "Where are you, exactly?"

"CalSci."

"Oh." Don was silent while he negotiated a lane change. "I thought school didn't start up for another couple of weeks?"

"It doesn't, but that doesn't mean that I don't have to prepare. What do you think teachers do before school opens?"

"I don't know. Guess I always tried not to think about teachers at all unless they were standing right in front of me. Now a good time?"

"Now's fine. Was the one last night the same MO?"

Don winced. "Yeah. Pretty much the same. I'll be there in about ten, okay?"

"See you then."

Don hit "end" and put the cell phone on the seat next to the empty Tupperware container. Maybe he should make time to stop for some real food? Apple pie made a handy breakfast, but it was probably missing some of the basic nutrients. He saw his exit looming and decided against it. What the heck. It had fruit, right? And the crust was some kind of carbohydrate? He could almost hear his mother's tongue-click of disgust at his reasoning and smiled. She sure seemed to be on his mind lately. It's all this stuff about the past.

The past. He wheeled his SUV down the approach to CalSci. Maybe that's where the answer was - if only he could get ahold of it… Somebody trying to help him? Someone asking for help? …Something more sinister?

He turned into the parking lot and made a face. Man. Was every teacher in the world here already? He was going to have to park in - like - Gdansk. He pulled into a parking place marked "faculty" and turned off the engine. What the heck. If Campus Security tried to give him a ticket, he'd flash his badge. He could almost hear his mother's tongue-click again. Yeah, I know, Mom - total abuse of power. But I'm too tired to split hairs right now.

He jogged up the steps of the math building. The inside hallway was cool and quiet and his spirits brightened some. This had been a good idea.

Hope you can do that magic that you do, Chuck, he thought as he rounded a corner. Because at this point, I think I'm too close to it to see anything.

He knocked a brief tattoo on Charlie's office door and rode the handle inside. "Hey, Charlie, I - " He stopped abruptly. Oh. "Hey, Larry."

Larry. He didn't know why he was surprised to see him there - whenever he visited Charlie, he was there as often as not. So often, in fact, that he occasionally wondered when the heck either one of them had time to do any teaching. Struggling to regain his mental equilibrium he stammered, "What are you boys up to?"

"Contemplating the potential of another academic year," Larry intoned pleasantly. "It's always most exciting just before you find out exactly what you have to work with, and exactly what you're up against."

"Sounds like starting another case." Don picked up a koosh from a bowl on Charlie's desk and tossed it from hand to hand. Charlie kept a lot of great toys in here. Someday he'd have to ask him if they really had anything to do with math, or if they were just something for him and Larry to play with while they talked.

"Speaking of cases, that's what you're here about, right?" Charlie stood up from his spot on the floor, dusting off the seat of his jeans.

Don paused. "Sort of." He had spent half the morning trying to think of how he was going to tell this to Charlie; now with Larry here, he felt obscurely embarrassed to get into it, and oddly guilty. He tossed the koosh in the air this time and caught it.

Damn. This was stupid. He had nothing to be embarrassed about, and he certainly had nothing to feel guilty about. Of course, knowing it and feeling it were two different stories. Come on, Eppes - Victimology 101 - the victim always feels responsible. It's usually your job to reassure them that it's not their fault. You're pretty good at it, too - so let's try some of that handy patter on yourself. He winced. Tough to do when you were already cringing away from the label "victim". He certainly wasn't a victim in the same sense as Meyers and Alderman and Motta…they were dead. He was just…what was he? An accessory after the fact? A target? He couldn't tell yet. He hitched himself half onto Charlie's desk, bouncing the koosh lightly in his palm.

"What happens to yearbooks around here anyway - do you know?"

"Yearbooks?" Charlie frowned quizzically. "What about them?"

"Well, they must print an overrun, right? More than one per student? What happens to the rest? Are they archived? Are they tossed? Where do they go?"

Charlie dropped into his desk chair. "I have no idea. They don't exactly fall under my academic area. That's what you wanted to talk to me about? Yearbooks?"

"Not just that, but - can you find out for me? Megan's looking into it on a broader level, but I'd like to know if it differs from school to school."

Larry screwed his face into a frown. "Why on earth would the FBI be interested in - yearbooks? An innocent commemorative of academic nostalgia?"

"Yeah, well, you'd be surprised what some people can turn into a weapon." He pushed away from the desk and wandered the perimeter of the room, rolling the koosh between his hands. "What if you wanted to find out about somebody - their past. What would you do?"

Charlie folded his arms and tilted his head at him. "Don, you work for the FBI - you have access to some of the most sophisticated databases in the world."

"I don't mean me." Don stopped walking to look at him. "I mean, how would somebody else? Somebody not FBI?"

Charlie raised his brows. "Then that would depend on the somebody."

"Okay, say Joe Average. Let's start there. How far could just your average guy get in piecing together somebody's past?"

Charlie shook his head. "Then it would depend on the person he was researching."

Don turned away again, walking the line of the back wall. "For example, how about somebody like - me."

"Like you." Charlie nodded. "Well, anybody with a computer could start with Google. Have you ever Googled yourself?"

Don stopped again. "No. Why would I do that?"

Charlie shrugged. "A lot of people do. Curiosity, I suppose. You wouldn't be too hard to find."

"Me." Don watched his face. "You I can see, because you're published. Why me?"

"Well, for one thing, your name - Eppes. It's not that common. If your name was something like Don Jones, it would be much harder, because there are so many - it's hard to predict if yours would ever come up in a search, depending on what the other Don Joneses had done to distinguish themselves or to make their records more search-prominent. A search engine works like - "

Don held up a hand. "Yeah, Charlie - thanks. I actually get that part. You said that was one thing. What else?"

"Well, do you have a blog?"

"A - ? What is that?"

Charlie smiled. "A sort of online journal. People post their thoughts and the details of their day - all kinds of things."

Don looked at him in disbelief. "Right online? Where anybody can read them? Why would anybody do that?"

Charlie shrugged. "My students love them."

"The age of privacy is past, Don - " Larry explained. "And the age of notoriety is upon us. With the burgeoning pace of technology - "

"Yeah - I can see." He liked Larry, even found his philosophical rambles entertaining, but sometimes you had to cut him off at the pass or he would wander so far from the original point that he couldn't find his way back. And he took you with him. "That should make my job easier - people can confess right online. You got one of these things?"

Charlie gave him a look. "Me? No."

Don chuckled. "Guess it would all be in numbers anyway. What if you don't have a blog? What then?"

"Then…it becomes mostly a matter of past - and probability. If we're still using you as an example, you'd come up under the Stockton Rangers, for instance."

"Stockton Rangers." Don stopped, the koosh squeezing flat in his fist. "What makes you bring them up?"

"Because it's a public domain you're likely to be listed under. That, and any newspaper articles you've appeared in - I'm assuming it's not possible for just anybody to access FBI files."

"Sure shouldn't be." Don released his death grip on the koosh, using one finger to coax it back into shape. "So, if somebody couldn't reach the classified documents they wanted, they might resort to what they could find."

"It'd be a place to start." Charlie eyed him curiously. "There identity theft involved in these murders or something?"

Don returned to the desk and seated himself on the corner again, releasing the koosh from captivity and rolling it back into the bowl with its brothers and sisters. "Something like that."

"Did you bring me any files…?"

"I didn't wait for somebody to make copies." Yeah, that sounded convincing.

Charlie leaned forward to rest his elbows on the desk. "Well, you said there was one man and one woman, bludgeoned to death with objects they owned…"

"Two men and one woman now. All bludgeoned - one with a wine bottle, one with a golf club, one with a cast iron figurine. The murders all look planned, but they all used weapons of opportunity. All three lived alone. Two were discovered by neighbors - the intent of the murderer, who created a sound disturbance to attract attention; the third was discovered by a regularly scheduled visitor - a call girl. Our guess is the murderer knew she was coming and so didn't bother to attract attention another way."

Charlie wrinkled his forehead. "So he wants you to find the bodies?"

"Seems that way."

"Any other similarities between the victims?"

Don hesitated, then dropped his eyes to the edge of the desk. "Yeah - there's - um - " Just me, Charlie. No idea how, but pictures of me keep showing up at the scene. Oh - and yeah - thanks to our High School yearbook, you made a cameo appearance too. Fun, huh? Somehow, the words just wouldn't push themselves past his lips.

This isn't helping, he lectured himself sternly. You're trying to solve a string of murders. Relationships between the crime scenes are what Charlie needs to help you. Your face is one of the relationships between the crime scenes.

But Charlie is my little brother - how well will he be able to keep his distance once he knows? I'm sure not doing a great job of keeping mine. He frowned suddenly. And maybe that's just what this perp has in mind.

"Don?" Charlie prompted, and this time there was a distinct question in his voice.

Don shook himself mentally. He wanted to think about that one a little more. "Uh - David and Colby are looking for a possible mob connection - the third victim was under our watch for doing business with the mob. The first victim was a federal witness, the second was a retired ATF agent."

"So they were all federal crimes," Larry observed.

Charlie glanced at him. "Well, they would have to be Larry," he pointed out. "…or Don wouldn't be working on them."

Don looked from Larry to Charlie in surprise. "No, that's - I mean, you're right, Charlie, but - huh. Sometimes something is so obvious that it's too obvious to notice."

Larry beamed. "Spoken like a true scientist, Don. The ability to observe the obvious with new and unbiased eyes is at the very heart of scientific discovery."

Don laughed wryly. "Well, my High School science teachers would be pretty surprised to hear that."

"But science is in itself a form of investigation." Larry's hands levitated to punctuate his points. "There's actually a theory that the main reason there were so few women in the early scientific community was that their constant involvement with every day objects blinded them to the objects' other potentials. Take the steam kettle and the steam engine, for instance - "

Don and Charlie glanced at each other and exchanged covert smiles. Don shot a surreptitious look at his watch.

"That's - that's - that's really interesting, Larry - " Charlie tried to interject before Larry could get too far. "But I think Don has to get back."

"Yeah, sorry - I should." Because now I have two things to think about. And I'd like to run them past Megan. He slid to his feet. "Can you play with what I gave you, Charlie? See if you come up with anything?"

Maybe that was better anyway. Maybe adding his face to the mix would only be a distraction for Charlie - like those women Larry was talking about. Maybe adding an every day object would only blind Charlie to what was really going on - exactly like it was starting to blind him. He could really use an unbiased eye right now - somebody with a clear head.

"I'll do everything I can. But if you can get me a more complete file, that would be a big help."

"Yeah. I'll get somebody right on it." It wasn't exactly a lie - he'd look at the file and send over everything that made sense. "Oh - and let me know what you find out about the yearbooks?"

"Yearbooks." Charlie shook his head. "I'll see what I can do. The things I do for you."

Don grinned. "Think of all the good karma you're accumulating."

"Yeah. I'm going to expect payback in something a little more tangible than karma. You stopping by tonight?" He trailed Don as far as the door.

Don paused, leaning into the lintel. "I don't know, Charlie…depends on where this goes. What, you need help protecting Dad from Mrs. Nussbaum?"

Charlie quirked his brows. "She dropped off a heck of a stollen this morning. Be a shame for you to miss it. Especially since she keeps insisting they're for us."

"For us." Don shook his head. "She knows I don't even live there, right?" He started down the corridor and Charlie kept step.

"Well, it's an honest mistake."

Don gave him a look. "Hey, who just asked me to come over?"

Charlie's mouth curled into a smile. "I just don't want to be the only one she uses as a cheap ploy. Makes me feel tawdry."

Don laughed. "I'll see what I can do."

"Okay - and let me know if you come up with any other connections? On the murders, I mean."

Don paused at the entrance, his hand on the door, feeling guilty again, but for a whole different reason.

Maybe he should…? Was he being an agent or a brother? He couldn't even decide what made sense any more. What he needed was to get his head clear somehow.

"Yeah," he agreed, after a pause that felt much too long. "Yeah. I will."

As he started down the steps, the tongue-click in his head returned, louder than ever. He made a face.

Shut up, Mom.

TBC