A/N: Ok, Long, LONG time since update. Sorry 'bout that. Two reasons: Part of me hoped for some more reviews, seen as I only got one when I first published the chapter...I just got a second like...yesterday, made me extremely happy. And two, when I'd left the writing for this chapter for a while, I'd left it in a place where I just looked at it and simply had no inspiration for the next bit. But after much brain working and revelation, I managed to continue it. It's frustrating when you have cool ideas for the rest of the story, but you just can't get past that one bit. But hey...success! Hope you enjoy. Happy New Year to everyone by the way. :)

Chapter 10. Where are you?

I'd waved it off as nothing to the team back at the apartment...but internally, my stomach was doing flips. That one moment between us had had such an effect...

It was time to return it. The book. I shouldn't have taken it in the first place, and now I'd read what Jane had thought I would never see, or what he wasn't ready to tell me. Something that would make our relationship so much more complicated now that I knew, but he didn't think I knew... wait, would he know? He'd seen it now, even in his state. Would he remember finding it? Rigsby must have eventually recalled kissing Van Pelt in his hypnosis... Jane's mind was sharper. I'd quickly got upstairs to his hideout again, placing it onto the pillow in exactly the same position as I'd found it, safely nestled in its little hollow. Was I thinking that if it was in exactly the same position, that Jane wouldn't remember it ever having left? Maybe. It was all I could do. I scoured the room, making sure everything was in place before I swiftly left, back down to the break room.

I poured myself a mug of coffee, carefully sipping the hot liquid. It sent warm ripples through me as I felt it travel downwards. I shivered a little.

What would Jane do now? He'd read what he'd written only a couple of days ago. Was he having an internal battle with himself? Trying to figure out what he'd meant? Where would he have gone? What was there even to do now for us? The forensics lab hadn't brought us anything from the police department except from a load of dust and old, unrelated fingerprints and evidence of people having used the building.

I wandered over to the bullpen, meeting with my team.

'So...what happened last night?' Rigsby asked.

I wandered a little further, leaning back against Jane's desk.

'I was sat at home, just reading, and there's this loud banging at the door. There was no reply when I asked who it was. It stopped, and then there was scratching at the door, someone trying to pick the lock. I picked up my phone and my gun, trying to ring one of you, but I accidentally pressed the speed dial for Jane because I wasn't looking at the phone. I was about to hang up, but I heard ringing from outside the door...'

The three agents listened attentively as I continued. I saw Rigsby swallow nervously.

'Eventually, the door opened and Jane came in. I asked whether he was ok, and he pointed a gun at me.'

The team looked at each other worriedly.

'It's all because of Kristina.'

'Kristina?' Cho repeated.

'He was angry at me...because of what happened to Kristina. He seemed to think I had her...' I wasn't lying. I just wasn't telling them everything.

'Why would he think that?' Van Pelt asked.

I couldn't tell them what had happened. It was between me and Jane. Personal. For one, there were work regulations, and two, nothing had properly happened. It was something that I just refused to share.

'I don't know.'

The three agents shared confused looks before setting their eyes back on me.

'What are we going to do then?'

'Apart from wait for Jane to make an appearance again?' I replied, 'We've got nothing. I've sent off Jane's gun to ballistics...but there's a low chance of anything coming back.'

'Well we can't just sit here,' Rigsby pointed out.

'Jane's in trouble...' Van Pelt murmured worriedly.

'What do you want to do?' I snapped frustratedly, 'Red John's far too meticulous to leave anything behind, and there's nothing to process. We've gone as far as we can with the information Red John left behind. It's doubtful that it's even related to him.'

Silence fell, and I took a shaky sip of my coffee. The warmth wasn't comforting anymore. I'd just solidified the fact that we had nothing to do, and I couldn't help myself being worried sick about what Jane was doing right now. If something, only the tiniest thing, had been left behind, we'd have at least something to look at, but there was nothing.

'We could talk to Kristina again. See if she'll say anything else,' Cho suggested.

I watched the warm brown liquid in my mug lap at the ceramic walls. I'd found Kristina unbearable when I'd talked with her last. She didn't seem to care what was happening to Jane. I'd only just been able to restrain myself from hitting her. I swallowed. I hoped Red John had done something to her to make her act like that, because I really hoped that if Jane ever had a relationship with her, she'd give more of a damn. She didn't deserve him right now.

I drank the rest of my coffee and placed the mug on Jane's desk before standing fully and nodding for Cho to accompany me to Kristina's interrogation room.

'Wayne?'

Rigsby's gaze flickered from Lisbon and Cho leaving, over to me at my desk. 'Grace?'

'We've got to do something. Go back. Find something else.'

'Where?'

'Any of the places that Red John has sent us before. There's got to be something. Something we missed.'

I knew there was little hope; that I was probably clutching at straws, but I saw the way Lisbon was in a state, feeling less and less confident in her ability to find Jane before something went wrong - snapping at us. I knew I was usually the one to feel worried sick when something like this happened, but Lisbon seemed to be in a worse state this time, and for what reason, I didn't know. Despite the gun that Jane had pointed at her, and the fact that Red John was the centre of all this, I would have thought that Lisbon would have been more composed than this. I could tell that my boss was trying to hide things from us - worry, anxiousness, fear maybe, but it wasn't working all that well. Long silences, far away looks...it was obvious that something was picking at her.

Rigsby nodded once, 'Ok.'

Cho and I faced Kristina across the table. She seemed absent, and didn't once look up from the table at the two agents staring at her. I looked at Cho briefly, who gave me what I believed was a reassuring flicker of a smile, before starting.

'Jane came back,' I began, hoping it would generate some sort of reaction...but Kristina didn't look up.

'Tried to kill me...know anything about that?' I asked calmly, as if it was nothing. It was apparently nothing to Kristina though. I watched her finger nail scraping across the desk in the same motions over and over again.

'Kristina?' I glanced at Cho, who returned the same sort of confused expression.

'Kristina, do you know anything about what's happening? Is there anything you can tell us?'

It was like she couldn't hear me. I turned my gaze to the table, where her finger nail was still scraping, now beginning to create wearing marks on the shiny surface of the table.

'Cho...what does that look like to you?'

I tilted my head slightly to be able to see what she was drawing in the shine of the lights. Cho did the same.

'...A Red John smiley,' he murmured.

I felt dryness in my throat as I continued to watch her trace over and over the eyes and mouth, scratching down tears as if it were blood trickling down a wall. I started to fear for what it meant. Had Red John hypnotised her to do this in the hope that Jane would have killed me by now? Or was it a warning? Was it a warning to say that Jane would die if he didn't do what he was told? My breathing stepped up several paces and I felt mildly dizzy. Jane hadn't managed to kill me...did that constitute failure?

I felt light-headed as I stood and threw open the door. I half walked, half jogged to my office, before sinking to the floor behind the door, out of sight. I tried to persuade myself that I was jumping to conclusions. It didn't necessarily mean anything. I pulled my knees up to my chin and let my head fall back against the wall.

'Calm,' I told myself inwardly, 'Nothing's going to happen.'

I walked amongst the dust and dirt of the deserted house in Knight's Parkway. This had been the most relevant place to check, considering that we didn't know much about it, and it was a more likely place to find any evidence or information. Rigsby walked just behind me, scanning the walls and floors, scouring every inch of the surroundings. Remembering the warning Jane had given about the crumbling ceiling just ahead, I quickly moved away from it, to the other side, warning Rigsby at the same time. Searching the ground floor and finding nothing, I came upon a set of stairs towards the back of the house, leading to the upper floor.

It immediately hit me that it was going to be extremely unsafe walking on the floors above, considering the state of the ceilings on the ground floor, but I couldn't just leave it if something important was up there. I called to Rigsby, telling him I would be going upstairs and probably shouldn't stand anywhere where there was a dodgy ceiling. He protested, naturally, but I refused to be swayed as I began up the creaking steps. A threadbare carpet runner led up the centre of the staircase, probably once a rich red, but now an empty, unenthusiastic brownish orange colour. I could see cracks spreading from underneath the runner, as thin as a single hair, weaving across the worn wood like spider webs. The strain got worse as I climbed, the creaking becoming louder, but I refused to stop. My heart was pounding in my ears, but I refused to listen.

I reached the top, letting out a long breath. I observed the corridor reaching out to the left. I could see branches and twigs poking up through the floor just beyond. Daylight poured through large holes in the ceiling above, illuminating the corridor with dusty streams of glowing yellow. I swallowed and made the first step forward, the floor screaming out, warning of imminent collapse. I pushed down the fear and edged along the wall to the first door on the right, stepping through a thick column of light. I stopped, reaching my hand out and pushing open the door to a small room with two windows, one on the wall opposite and one on the next wall round to the right. The room had a bare bed frame, but no more.

I switched my gaze back to the corridor, looking straight across at another door, pushed wide open. I tilted my head carefully, looking round into the room. My heart almost skipped a beat. On the furthest wall inside that room, were lines upon lines of drawings, scattered on the peeling wallpaper.

'Wayne!' I called. I heard him answer, his voice thick with worry, but I was far too excited to really pay attention, 'I just found Red John's room!'

Well, actually it wouldn't have been Red John's room, because his mother was only six when the place was deserted, but he'd been here, obviously. He'd found out about it somehow, and came here to see. A whole story line began to form in my head:

One day, Jacob, before he became Red John, had asked his mother about his grandmother; how she had died, and what she was like. Alayna had recalled what she could remember about her, and it brought her back to the damaged child she became when she stumbled upon her mother's body. She began to remember her mother so vividly that she fell into a whole new process of mourning and heartbreak. Eventually it drove her to the edge of insanity, and she killed herself, leaving Jacob and Eleanor alone, without their mother. Jacob found the house in which his grandmother had lived maybe a few years later, an injured soul, and he'd began to think about it all, and he'd started to draw smiling faces on the wall with paint, trying to cheer him up, maybe trying to remind himself of his mother when she used to smile.

I stared across at the dozens of smiley faces covering the walls inside the opposite room. They were all rough images, with some kind of resemblance to the Red John smiley face we knew now. Completely transfixed, I stepped forward, forgetting the condition of the floor until my foot went straight through it. I cried out as I fell forwards, my leg caught in the floor boards. My face almost slammed into the floor, but I just managed to keep it up.

'Are you alright?' Rigsby yelled up, hearing my stumble and crash.

'Uh...' I tried breathlessly, 'Sort of.'

I groaned as I tried to push myself up. I lay flat on the floor, my right leg disappearing through the hole, and my other leg stretched out behind me. Pushing with my hands as if I was trying to do press-ups, I got up onto all-threes, my upper leg now visible. I could feel bruises already forming in a thick ring round my thigh. Slowly, I managed to pull the other half of my leg up, carrying a torn pant leg, which itself carried a few splinters.

'Oww...' I muttered, rubbing my bruised leg as I hobbled over to the corner of the landing by the stair rail.

'I'm ok!' I called back down. I ignored the new throbbing in my leg and stood up fully again, edging round to the room I had tried to get to before weakening the house's structure a little more.

'Phew,' I blew out, standing in the door way of the room. My breathing began to slow again and I stepped inside, the floor to this room in a much better condition than that of the hallway. Yellow painted smiling faces grinned off the wall at me from all directions. I slowly reached for my pocket, pulling out my camera phone and taking snapshots of all four walls. As the smileys progressed around the wall, they came to look more and more like the current smiling face we saw at each Red John crime scene.

At first, they were neat, normal, but then they became rougher, dripping more, like tears falling from their eyes, and black paint had started to take the place of the bright happy yellow, then finally to faded crimson. It wasn't blood; it was peeling away from the wall, cracked and thick. No DNA. The room was otherwise bare, apart from some old blankets and flea-bitten pillows in the far corner. I turned, studying the pictures on my phone briefly before leaving and getting back to Rigsby with a slight limp in my step.

'Look,' I murmured softly, holding out the phone to him.

He cycled through the pictures, 'So...this is Red John practicing his calling card?'

'Not at first, I don't think,' I replied, 'I think this was because of what happened to his grandmother and mom. I'm thinking he found out about this place after his mom killed herself. And maybe...he tried to remind himself of his mother when she was happy...smiling. But maybe...he became more and more obsessed, until it got too much.'

Rigsby nodded, swallowing.

'So the clues were for something then I guess.'

'It doesn't help us find Jane though...' I murmured quietly.

'Don't worry. Let's just take it back to the CBI and see whether we can work with it. Maybe, if it's anything like what you've said there might be a record in a psychiatric hospital of either Alayna or Jacob.'

I nodded giving a flicker of a smile. 'Ok.'

I stirred my cup of tea, tendrils of steam curling and folding into the softly illuminated air around me. I took a sip of the hot brown liquid, looking up briefly at the set of three computer monitors before me. A flashing dot marked where Jane was on a map of California, with closer and closer shots on the second and third screen. I'd placed a small tracker inside his waistcoat before sending him on his way. I needed to make sure he did what I wanted him to do. My lips curled softly in a wicked smile before I took another gulp of tea. I let my head fall back a little, scratching the back of my neck, rolling my head to the side. I felt the warmth of the tea gathered in my stomach, sending out warming ripples at all angles. I was in control, and it felt so good.

However, when I let my gaze fall back to the screens, I saw the flashing dot flicker a little...

My stomach filled with a flittering nervous feeling as the dot flickered a little more, falling in and out of existence for maybe a second at a time. I leant forward slowly, narrowing my eyes. It was flickering violently now...like the signal was going...

I pushed my tea cup and saucer onto the wooden table with a soft scrape, as I stared intently at the screens. The dot disappeared for a few seconds...and then it was gone. My heart began to speed as I tapped at the keyboard, pressing keys, whizzing the mouse around the screen, trying to find Jane again. There was a brief flash of the dot once more as I slammed down the enter button, but it was gone again before I could barely register it.

'What the hell?' I muttered. Nothing was getting the dot back... 'Shit...'

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