Chapter Five

Being in Lisbon's doghouse was boring, he'd discovered that before. In lieu of his refusal, Lisbon had gone to sit in observation while they interviewed Matthews. Jane, however, had gone for a walk. He'd considered joining her in observation, just to taunt her, rile her up, perhaps get her talking about the previous night, but then he'd been distracted. He found a better target, a better means of conversation (not that he considered Lisbon bad conversation, just that she wasn't always fun to talk to when she was mad). Outside of observation there were several chairs for those waiting for questioning, and sitting there was a girl of similar age to the victim, her head buried in pages of handwritten notes and an open book beside her.

"Hi there,"

The girl looked up at him with a gasp, visibly jumping. She was surprised to see him standing nearby, but it gave him a clear look at her face without the paper covering it. He recognised her instantly as being in several of the photographs that had been in Melissa Joliss' room. Her auburn hair made her look like a younger Grace, but her hair was shorter, framed around the face to accentuate her green eyes.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you," he said, holding up his hands.

"I didn't realise anyone was-"

"There isn't, they're interviewing your friend. It's just me. Sarah Walcott?" he checked.

She nodded. "Yeah."

"Hi, I'm Patrick Jane," he said, extending his hand for her to shake. "I'm a consultant on Agent Lisbon's team. I'm sorry for your loss. Losing a friend is very hard."

She gave him a sad smile. "Thanks."

"You're studying?" he guessed.

"Yeah, I have an English paper due tomorrow."

The same one as Melissa had been doing, he supposed. This was the friend she had supposed to be checking her essay against sometime before they were due to hand them in. "Crime scenes aren't an excuse for a late turn in, I assume."

Sarah snorted. "Not even when it's your best friend. The way my teacher is, she'd just assume that it was a 'highly imaginative concoction to avoid a pressured workload'."

He looked impressed. "That's quite the description."

"It's what she said about my last excuse," she revealed.

"High school, huh?" he mused, taking a seat beside her on the chairs.

"Yeah, you know what it's like."

"Actually, no," he corrected.

She looked at him curiously. "Home schooled?"

He searched for the answer, and then chose not to elaborate. Most people stopped taking him seriously the second he used the word 'carnival'. "Something like that," he settled on.

"Lucky," she complained. "I wish my parents would have home schooled me."

"No, you don't," he said, reading instantly into her words. "You might not like the work, but you enjoy the environment. Pep rallies, homecomings, proms..."

"I enjoy some of the work," she told him, unconsciously tapping her fingers against the paper in her hands.

He smiled at her movement. "You must enjoy the work you're doing right now."

"What makes you think that?" she asked.

He shrugged, indicating to her notes. "The fact that you have very recently lost a very close friend, and while you're waiting to be interviewed you're writing a paper on a William Blake poem."

She frowned. "How did you know it was-"

"Your textbook," he pointed out.

"Oh," she realised, looking down at the book beside her, Songs of Experience. "Yeah, I guess that makes it kinda obvious."

He nodded. "Which poem are you studying?"

"We had our choice of which one to analyse," she explained. "I chose The Tyger."

And then he was back on that chair, tied tightly to it with endless layers of what he had worked out to be ordinary kitchen cling wrap. It stuck to itself with such strength that it was impossible to move his shoulders, even when he heard the ominous footsteps behind him, so rhythmic in sound that it was frightening. He could remember the tremors starting as the chair was lifted from the ground, set back at the correct angle. He remembered the sight of that distorted Halloween mask hiding the identity of the man who had been causing him to take the deep, even breaths that were all that was keeping him vomiting from being touched by the same hands that had killed his wife and child. He could almost feel Red John's breath by his ear as he taunted him with those words.

Jane found himself muttering them along with the memory. "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night. What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?" Oh, how he remembered those words, how they had traumatised his insomnia, making it so much worse as he mulled the words over in his mind.

"You know it," Sarah observed.

Jane just nodded. "I've heard it before." Several times, usually on an endless loop in the dead of night.

"You must have a pretty good memory," she admired.

"It's necessary in my line of work," he told her. "It's a hard poem to understand, though."

"At first, yeah," she agreed somewhat, her face clearly contradicting her. "But once you go through it line by line, it's actually crystal clear."

He smiled. "Or perhaps you're just incredibly intelligent."

Sarah dipped her head, blushing. Obviously not many people commented on her intelligence, he realised. That was probably why her face had betrayed her a while before. She knew in herself that she understood the content, the structure...every part of this poem she studied, but she lacked the confidence to show it. She would no doubt do a wonderful essay, but were she asked to stand up and present this in front of her peers, she wouldn't do as well. "No, it's not that," she told him. "You should see the rest of my grades. I figure if this is the one thing I can analyse well, I'd like to milk it for all it's worth, you know? Rub that A grade in Ms Lucian's face."

Jane nodded, perhaps thinking that all this Ms Lucian needed to do was show some more encouragement. "I must say, I'm curious about your analysis. Agent Lisbon won't be ready to interview you for some time and-"

She frowned. "I thought Agent Cho was interviewing me?" she asked.

"Agent Cho's going to be busy," he explained, knowing that somehow it'd end up being Lisbon who questioned her. He had a feeling.

She kept her frown, though, not allowing it to drop as she tried to find something in his words. "Did you find the person who hurt Melissa?" she asked anxiously. Hurt, he noticed. She said hurt, instead of killed, or murdered. Hurt. She was still in disbelief that her friend was dead. She was failing to associate the act of violence with the friend she had known for so long. It was why she was so composed, why she was able to focus on schoolwork only two days after her friend was killed, and while she was waiting to be interviewed on the last time that she would have seen this friend.

"We'll find out soon," he assured her. "Agent Lisbon still needs to ask her questions, though, and since we have time, why don't you share your analysis with me."

She gave him a tiny smile. "You don't have to cover up babysitting me by pretending to be interested," she said.

"I'm not babysitting you," he told her, looking around them. "In fact, I'm pretty sure that Agent Lisbon has insisted on somebody babysitting me."

She smiled at that. "They're not doing a very good job," she noticed.

"No, but they may find me soon," he realised. "So, without further ado..."

"Right," Sarah nodded, passing him the book so that he could see the entirety of the poem. It was right before him, he realised. Red John had quoted this exact poem for a reason, and he was about to find out what it was. Months of struggling to understand the words was about to end with a seventeen-year-old with an English assignment. Someone objective, someone who wasn't looking at the words and trying to associate them with Red John, she was just trying to make an analysis for her school project. A fresh mind, exactly what he needed. On the other hand, he was attempting to use a schoolgirl under false pretences to figure out something that he admittedly failed at, but it's not like anyone knew about Red John's reference to the poem, he'd spectacularly lied about that, and it wasn't like this was the lowest that he'd sunk.

"So, this first verse," he prompted her. "What does it mean?"

"Well, the whole poem is Blake wondering, sharing his thoughts, basically," she started to explain, her voice taking on more of a formal tone. She'd have been good a presentation, had she the confidence. "Blake is comparing the fierce nature of the tiger to a burning presence in dark forests, and he wonders what immortal power could create such a fearful beast."

He completely agreed with that. Red John had been right in using the start of the poem as his quote of choice. It had been Jane's morbid fascination every time they had started each Red John case – what power could create a monster like Red John? He'd run through the possibilities in his mind, the classics; abused as a child, neglected, act of rebellion against a childhood he'd been forced to give up, witness to a brutal crime that had never been fully explained as wrong...but nothing that seemed to fit. Nothing that explained the sheer brutality of his nature. Red John was the tyger of Blake's words, but who had created him? Something powerful, something awful. He said nothing, not wanting to alert Sarah to his motive of hearing her words, and moved onto the next verse.

"In what distant deeps or skies, burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire?"

She consulted her notes for a moment and then returned her eyes to the open page of the book he held. "That's Blake saying that the eyes of the tiger are like a distant fire that only someone with wings could reach, and only with impermeable hands could hold," she said, indicating to the page as she spoke. "So, he's wondering where such a powerful fire could have come from. I think that the 'deeps and skies' could represent Hell and Heaven. That means Blake's insinuating that the creation of the tyger could only have been done by God or the Devil."

Once again, he nodded softly in agreement. Something stronger than the usual force had bought Red John down his path. Something that they wouldn't discover until they learned his true identity. "And what shoulder, and what art could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, what dread hand and what dread feet?" Jane read aloud.

"That's an allusion," Sarah jumped in immediately. "Showing how hard-hearted that the tyger must be towards the prey that it kills."

Oh, how hard-hearted Red John was. He must have been. How else would he have the heart that take life from so many young women, and a small child as well – his small child – unless he was really the heartless bastard that they all believed him to be. There was no likelihood that Red John went home after every murder and cried himself to sleep, or was kept awake all hours of the night through guilt. No, he wished those emotions and reactions upon everyone else. He wanted their families to cry themselves to sleep each night, and their loved ones to spend the small hours wandering around their homes, wracked with guilty every time they passed their wedding photograph, their daughter's handprint, their wife's laundry still folded, their daughter's tricycle.

"And this verse," Jane asked. "What the hammer? What the chain? In the furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp? Dare it's deadly terrors clasp?...that refers to the tyger's creator?" he guessed.

"Yeah, that's what I think," she agreed. "It's saying how the tyger could only be created in a place that confronts its nature. If the creator retrieved the tyger's brain from a furnace, like it says in this line," she pointed to it, "then it shows that the tyger would have had this behaviour and hostility from the very start, and that its mere creation started off the 'deadly terrors'."

"When the starts threw down their spears, and watered heaven with their tears, did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?...that's God who made the lamb," Jane realised.

"But if God was the creator of the lamb, could he also be the creator of the tyger?" Sarah debated. "It's a conflict of creation. The tyger is fierce and predatory and the docile lamb is its potential victim. This part at the start of the verse is the interesting part, though."

"How so?" he asked.

"It's about the creation process," she explained, "making the starlight symbolic towards the destructive process."

"So the birth of the tyger was the birth of the destruction," he understood.

"Exactly."

"Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye, dare frame thy fearful symmetry."

"It's the same as the first verse, but instead of asking who could make the tyger, it's asking who dares to," she indicated. "So after spending the entire poem working out who was capable of this, he comes to the conclusion that it must be an 'immortal' being so it can't be questioned. But is its strength and power a sign that it comes from Heaven, or does the ferocity and predatory approach to everything else say that it surely came from Hell?"

"Hell," Jane decided. No doubt about it, that monster came from Hell. No way did that sick monster come from the place he had sent Violet and Claire to.

"I thought that at first," Sarah nodded. "But then I realised that it's not about the answer."

"It's about the question."

"It depends on the readers' interpretation of the creation," she explained. "Some people will see the tyger as a beautiful creature worthy of admiration, but others will see it as a monster that slaughters the innocent lamb. Those who see the monster would assume that it's from Hell, because nothing from Heaven could be that evil to prey on the lambs of the world."

And then it made sense. Red John had told him the first verse as a message. He wanted Jane to figure out the cryptic clue he had whispered into his ear. He wanted Jane to work it out, to spend sleepless nights decoding it until he had figured out one more part of the essence that was Red John. He wanted to be figured out, he wanted to be understood, and when Jane hadn't been able to do that fast enough for his liking, he had dragged Melissa into the mix.

"Sarah, which poem was Melissa studying, do you know?" he asked.

"We picked the same one," she told him. "Hers must be way better though," she added, a hint of resentment in her voice.

"Why do you say that?"

"She was failing, big time," she revealed. "Worse than me. She wasn't going to graduate if she didn't ace this paper so her mom agreed to a private tutor when we got the assignment. We had a bit of a fight because he wanted her to do The Tyger and I'd already picked it."

"But she still did it?" Jane asked.

Sarah nodded. "She said that the tutor told her it was the poem with the most insight, and that the interpretations he could share with her would be much stronger than the ones I could show."

The interpretations being Melissa's dead body, he realised. She'd been pushed into doing the essay and then killed as a message. She was the message. Red John was using Melissa's death to hurry him up. It was a perfect taunt – why can't you figure it out, when school children can? Jane shook his head slowly, which Sarah took as an empathy for her situation, but he was scolding himself. Hindsight was 20/20, and he could understand what Red John wanted him to see, and why he had wanted him to see it. It was all about the thrill of a chase with him, and when Jane hadn't figured out the poem quick enough, it had called off the chase, forcing him to kill again to deliver his next message. It was the only way he knew how to communicate, to draw the exact attention that he needed.

"Melissa's parents never mentioned a tutor," he noted.

"Melissa didn't either, only ever to me," she told him. "None of them wanted anyone to know that she was failing. Her parents both went to Ivy League schools and got full honours...her moms a magazine editor and her dad's a published author – and their daughter's failing English?"

He frowned. "Why not tutor her themselves?"

She shrugged. "This guy just offered, apparently. He met her dad at a writer's workshop and they stated in touch."

"Did she ever tell you his name?" Jane asked.

"John something," she tried to remember, as Jane set down the book at her side quickly, it banging quite a bit faster. Sarah looked at him strangely as she realised how the tone of his questions was changing. "Mr Jane, what's going on?" she asked him as he got to his feet. "I thought Agent Lisbon was doing the interview."

"She is," he nodded. "And we need to see her now."

Six words were all it took for Lisbon to abandon the interview with Melissa's boyfriend and allow him to swap the young man for Sarah Walcott. I know who Red John is. That was all it took. Those words, and the fact that he had come into the observation room to tell her instead of taking off on his own. The act of reliance, of attempting to keep that promise he made her in her living room the night before. It was enough to get her to listen, to get her to interview the right person. He'd insisted earlier that the boyfriend had no involvement, but she'd interviewed him anyway. Now, he was doing right, he was proving himself right, and from the fluttering in his stomach, he sensed they were closer than Red John than ever before.

"You're sure she never mentioned the tutor's surname?" Lisbon asked Sarah for the fourth time.

"I'm sure, she just called him John," Sarah said, confusion on her face. "What's going on?"

Lisbon withheld her sigh, looking over at Jane. "Call Cho," she instructed. "I want Melissa's parents here within the hour."

"Already done," Jane told her. "They're at her house now, should be here soon."

Lisbon nodded, turning back to the young woman before her. "Sarah, can you tell me when was the last time you heard from Melissa?"

"Two nights ago," she recited. "It was the text message I showed you earlier."

"Which said she was staying home to study," Lisbon consulted her notes.

"Yeah," Sarah nodded.

"And the following morning, Melissa's mother finds her dead in her room and Red John's signature on the wall," Lisbon muttered to herself, but Sarah caught part of it.

"Red John?" she repeated. "He's that guy off the news. The serial killer."

"And Melissa's tutor," Jane nodded.

Lisbon scowled at him. "Jane, a word," she ordered.

Moments later they were in Lisbon's office, her leaning against her desk and him stood in the doorway. "Jane, we can't jump to conclusions on this. This could still be a copycat-"

"No, it's him," Jane decided.

"On what grounds, and if you say anything to do with a 'feeling'-"

"It's not a feeling," he brushed aside. "William Blake."

She burrowed her eyebrows together. "What?"

"The girls English assignment was to pick a William Blake poem. They both picked The Tyger, only Sarah picked it out of choice and Melissa's tutor insisted that she picked it. Melissa's tutor, who would have been in the house, helping her study the night that she was killed."

But she continued to frown at him. "Jane, what does The Tyger have to do with Red John?" she asked tiredly.

"He knows the poem," he said simply.

She sighed. "A lot of people know that poem."

"Ah, but not a lot of people use it as a metaphor," he explained.

"A metaphor for what?" she asked.

"Themselves."

She racked her brain, but came up with no logic in what Jane was telling her. "There is no mention of any William Blake references in the Red John files."

"Because it isn't in the Red John files," he told her.

Her suspicions rose at his words. "And why wouldn't it be in there?"

"Several reasons," he shrugged.

"How about you tell me the one I want to hear?" she suggested.

"Ah, now that's a huge compromise, because you know that you don't actually want to hear it-"

"Jane!" she snapped.

"Ok," he surrendered. "I lied to you."

"When?" she asked.

"When you asked me if Red John said anything to me. I lied to you. I lied to you every time you asked me."

She resisted the urge to throttle him with her bare hands. She'd given him an opportunity to add some insight into the case, something that could have bought them to this point before Melissa had died, and he'd lied to her, completely rejecting her invitation for him to open up to her for once. "Why would you lie about that?" she asked him.

"Because I needed time to figure out what eh meant when he quoted the opening verse of The Tyger to me," he explained.

Her eyes could have cut diamonds. "That's the team's job, Jane. Not yours."

"Actually, Lisbon, the only person who's been able to figure out what he means is Sarah Walcott, and she doesn't even know it."

"Jane, it was a high school essay-"

"That for Red John, was a character study of himself," Jane explained. "He was getting Melissa to write his biography and when he read it back, he didn't like what she'd interpreted. Get Sarah to show you her assignment notes on the entire poem, it's actually rather insightful into how Red John sees himself. The poem itself shows that he wants to be seen as The Tyger, this unstoppable, powerful, predatory, and above all, untouchable, creature, but he identified with the words without realising that Blake always represented the Tyger as a creation from Hell. It's why I couldn't figure it out before now, I was suiting the words to him, just like he did. It took the objective approach to the words that exposed the monster that he really is. Read Sarah's essay, it makes perfect sense, and while you're doing that I'm assuming Cho's back now and I'm going to speak to Melissa's parents, because they obviously know who Red John is."

"You don't know that-"

"Yes, I do," he insisted. "They knew him, they let him into their home, and then they let him slaughter their child."

Lisbon was about to interrupt him when a hoard of shouting was heard from outside the office. "What's happening?" she asked, going to the doorway and standing right opposite Jane as they watched countless security guards and agents running in the direction that had just walked from minutes before. The interview rooms.

Both Jane and Lisbon followed them, and when they got the interview rooms they fought through the crowds. They registered the screams of Melissa's parents, but didn't approach them, instead heading over to Cho, who stood in the doorway of the interview room. "Cho!" Lisbon called, creating a path for them.

"He was here," Cho told them.

"What?" she asked in disbelief.

But then the agents before them parted, revealing a daunting smiley face on the far wall, and Sarah Walcott's dead body beneath it.