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Notes Chapter 31: THANK YOU for all reviews! Hope you enjoy this chapter. Please continue reviewing - I love to know what you think - welcome at any time, for any chapter, always replied to if logged. Thanks to everyone who's alerted and favourited; to fat kat and autumn gold for your reviews, sorry I couldn't send a proper reply; and to electric-dreamer, iluvCSI4ever, Blue Shadowdancer, chrysalis escapist, afrozenheart412 and webDLfan for discussion.

Dedicated to Blue Shadowdancer from a 'poor reader' ;)

Lost Letters: Chapter 31

24th July

… I've been suffering today, and not just with the heat that seems to have set in for the summer. That's one thing I'm finding hard to get used to here in the big city; give me our mountain climate any time! I'd give my right hand for the shade of the trees by the creek right now. And I had a bad moment when I called on Mrs Adams downstairs - I was helping her wash up after she fed me lunch, and dropped and smashed a cup she'd only been saying she was fond of minutes before. I felt just terrible, but she was more than sweet about it, telling me it didn't matter, that there were more important things than cups that could be broken. I guess she's right. Things break too easily; promises, hearts, people. Somewhere hidden inside that tough old lady exterior, I wonder if Mrs Adams has her own broken heart…

………………………………...

"It wasn't her fault. It really wasn't. Never mind what anyone else in the town said, Rita didn't deserve to be treated the way she was. It was wrong! They forced her to leave, and I lost my best friend because of it! I don't know if I can… if I can… ever forgive folks back home for that!"

The young woman stopped with her hands to her mouth and caved in to the sobs that had been threatening for the whole interview. Her shoulders shuddered and her face crumpled up in misery, "It's not fair! She didn't deserve this! She was a good person! Why? Why did this happen to her?" Her words almost drowned in tears, as she spluttered despairingly, "I should have helped her more, I was her friend and I let her down! I should have realised, and come over, or sent money… or… or something. It's my fault!"

Her words burned into Lindsay's emotions, melting the ice floes of detachment she tried to protect her heart and self with so often.

Feelings flooded as she leaned forward in empathy, "It's not your fault, Jenny. Don't say that. You did everything a friend could have done. You can't blame yourself."

But the young woman was lost for the moment to any comfort, caught in cataracts of sobs, and Lindsay pulled herself back, and waited. Realising she needed some moments to pull herself out of her own guilt.

Jenny Anderson had flown to New York from Wyoming, after discovering what had happened to her best friend, Rita Franklin. Jenny, as Lindsay saw it, was one more victim of the man who had murdered Rita. Another, but not just another. One of so many victims; and if she was inclined to, Lindsay could put herself in that category - the gash where the bullet had sizzled the skin of her arm itched if she thought about it, and its fierce red line still marked her flesh. She would be wearing long sleeves for a little while yet. She rubbed at it, and then pulled her hand away, embarrassed for thinking about it, when others had suffered so much more.

Not least the two they had almost lost: fifteen days after the crime scene and Danny remained in hospital, and likely to be so for that number of days again; Stella had been released two days ago, but was forbidden to return to even lab duties for at least a week.

Visiting her yesterday at home, Lindsay had listened as Stella vented her frustration, and offered all the sympathy and friendship she could, trying to purge the guilt from the memories that sank poison-dipped talons into her.

Knowing it was the first time she had seen Stella since the night they had found her so near death, having manufactured reasons and excuses for not visiting her at the hospital, Lindsay had bowed under more shame: still horrified with herself for not calling in the stolen car immediately after it almost ran her over, driven by the men who had abducted Stella and hit Danny with its ton of deadly metal; still suffering with the thought it might have saved some of Stella's suffering if her radio had not been defunct and her reactions cauterised by the scorching near miss.

She had failed a friend.

Stella did not blame her, however. That was not the kind of person she was, Lindsay knew, and had known. And when she faced her friend and colleague, and was welcomed with an embrace and warmth that thawed tears frozen for so long, she had been able to talk and confess, as she felt it, every bitter moment of that day.

As she talked, salt water sliding in hot trails down her cheeks, Stella had offered comfort and reconciliation, along with a mingling of her own tears. Relieving the weight Lindsay realised she had been carrying only with its removal.

She had not failed.

She left Stella's apartment with a buoyant heart, knowing she had a friendship that was unbroken, and the promise of its continuation.

But as Jenny sat in front of her now, and cried with the anguish of friendship broken by death, Lindsay felt the encumbrance of her uncertainties.

"Jenny…" She began, but could not break through the sobs that were engulfing her, "Jenny, please. Listen to me…" Her voice was urging but gentle, "You can still help, Rita. We have the man who killed her awaiting trial, and we have the evidence to convict him, but I'm still in need of answers, and… and you might be able to help me out. She wrote to you, and she trusted you, so do you think you could help me with some of the questions I have? Please?"

Lindsay reached forward tentatively and touched her hand, "I know this is difficult, and you've travelled a long way and you're tired and… and devastated by what's happened, but this would really help me, and help Rita."

The tumult lessened, until Jenny raised a face smirched and streaked with grief, but hopeful.

"You… you think I can still help her?"

"I know you can, and I think it's going to help you as well." Lindsay passed over a few sheets of Kleenex and waited while Jenny scrubbed at her face, "Start with what happened at home. Why did Rita have to leave?"

With a trembling hand, Jenny reached for her glass of water, "It was a misunderstanding, a terrible misunderstanding. Wyoming's big on empty spaces, but small on towns. Rita and me come from a place with some small-minded people. You probably don't know, living in a place like this…"

It provoked a wry smile, "Trust me, I know. I may live here, but New York is not my home town."

"Where is?" A blush crept into Jenny's cheeks, "That's awfully rude of me to ask, I'm sorry…"

"It's fine. I'm from across the border, Montana."

"Then I guess you understand."

Lindsay nodded, "But you get good people too in small towns, same as any place."

Jenny heaved a quivering sigh and dabbed her eyes, "Rita's a good person. She just… she just made a few bad decisions. And in a small place like home, there were real big consequences." Her hand shook as she placed the glass of water back on the table, and ran her finger up and down the side, "We both had good jobs in a law firm, where I still work, but Rita wasn't happy. She was ambitious and wanted to do more, you know?"

Lindsay nodded again and began to feel an affinity with the person who was so absent, and so present in the room. And began to see her younger self; looking above and beyond the big skies and achingly vast landscape that seemed to swallow her self; that had swallowed her friends, "I can understand that."

"We had contact with a lot of clients, some of them were big names in the town, and one of them took an interest in Rita. He charmed her - sent her flowers, candies, dinner invitations. She refused at first, but then accepted, and told me she was letting him take her out to dinner. I tried warning her against it, I don't know why, but there was just something about him… something I didn't trust." Jenny paused, and her cheeks flushed.

Lindsay pressured her gently, "What happened?"

"He took advantage, plain and simple, got her to trust him, and then used her." The flush in Jenny's face spread to her neck and crimsoned with anger, "He charmed her into altering documents regarding some real estate he owned, telling her he'd been hard done by, and it was simply righting a wrong. Rita was too good-hearted, she knew she shouldn't have done it, but he sweet-talked her into it, and promised he'd take the brunt of any consequences." Her face twisted in disgust, "Oh, he made her all kinds of promises, and then broke every single one of them."

"Rita told you what she was going to do?"

"We told each other everything, we've known each other since forever! I loved her - she was like my sister." Jenny looked at Lindsay with glistening eyes, "It's what we've always done… And yes, before you ask, I tried to stop her, she knew the penalties there'd be for altering legal documents, but there was nothing I could say to persuade her - once she'd made up her mind, it was almost impossible to change it."

The picture in Lindsay's mind was drawing itself before her eyes; the golds and silvers of friendship and loyalty, the livid reds and purples of selfishness, deviousness, and then the darkly green and black of betrayal. Her voice hardened, "She was discovered and took the blame?"

"She was discovered." Jenny's words sighed like the breeze through cottonwoods and creeks, "The client was interviewed when the deception was found out, and he claimed Rita had tried to seduce him and then carried out the whole scheme against his wishes. He was a greedy, selfish and disgusting creep! But who was going to believe Rita against someone with his dollars and his influence? He got a grovelling apology from the firm, and Rita got a dismissal and the disapproval of the whole town. Everyone knows everyone else, everyone knew what happened, and everyone had an opinion on it - Rita was a disgrace in their eyes." Her lips trembled, "But not in mine; never in mine."

"What about her family?" So far, Jenny had mentioned nothing about them, "What was their reaction?"

Lindsay remembered the conversation with Mrs Franklin she had conducted the day before, after an arduous number of phone-calls and messages, when a voice had finally answered to the name, and Rita's death had been made known. The conversation was brief and perfunctory; details requested, practicalities arranged. Rita's parents would not be coming out to New York, business kept them in Wyoming, but they would see to all necessary arrangements. Lindsay had barely kept the acid out of her voice as she responded to Mrs Franklin's clipped vowels and consonants, which lost no love or sorrow in delivery.

A look of loathing marred Jenny's expression, "Her family? They were as bad as everyone else, worse even. Her mother never had much good to say about Rita, and her father was too busy with his own affairs, in every sense of the word. The only thing they cared about was their reputation and name. They pretty much disowned her. They don't know I've come here, and I doubt they'd care."

There was little solace she could offer, but Lindsay tried, "You're a good friend, Jenny, it's not everyone who'd do what you have, and come all the way out here."

"She was my friend." Jenny said simply, "She would've done the same for me."

The two women were silent for a moment. Lindsay saw in front of her the truth of friendship and its endurance; a family in name, Rita may have lost, but a friend in everything else lived on and loved even after death. Ties other than blood bound lives, and she thought of all the lives she knew and how they corded to each other in love and loyalty.

What she had to ask though, she hoped would not be seen as breaking the trust of friendship. But as a detective, she could not lose the opportunity, "I need to ask one more question."

Jenny nodded, "Sure. It's okay."

"The letters, the ones Rita was sending out under different names and addresses, I need to know why, and I think you're the only person who can answer that now. Do you know why and what she was doing?"

She bit her lip and looked down. Her hands kneaded together before she answered. And then she met Lindsay's eyes, "Yes, I know."

………………………………............

The man known so recently as Rich - in name, in deceit and in destruction - sat with everything stripped away from him. In the poverty of his first and last identity, with nothing else to conceal him, and everything that made him who he was to expose him. He was a name and a number and very little else now.

It was all over. The life that he had run away from so many years before, after the death of Irene and the innocence of life before death. The life he had shared with his father, wherever he was now. He wondered, and for a moment the broken heart of a young boy abandoned by the father he would have died for, broke through the caulked and tarred layers he had sealed it up with.

Wearing an identical orange jumpsuit, sitting in an identical cell, on an identical bench to all the others in a city that pullulated with crimes and their consequences, he waited. The man revealed in the end by everyone he thought he had obliterated was nothing but another criminal, invisible in a crowd synonymous with wrong.

A guard, with a look that blanked across him, rattled the door and brought him to his feet.

"You. With me. Now."

The guard was a tyrant puppet-master, and he was learning to fear the blankness that concealed a legion of cruelties. But amongst legions more cruelties, not least his own, no one noticed. No one spoke out.

No one cared.

His feet dragged across the cell as the door swung open, and with every step more of his self broke away.

Until all that was left was fear.

………………………………..........

"It's a beautiful day outside, Mac." Stella sighed, and looked wistfully out of the window in her apartment, the panes giving her a triptych of the city landscape; September sun and glowing skies. A painted view, out of her reach. Only two days back home, and already she was almost screaming in frustration at the walls around her. One confined space exchanged for another: even though she was overjoyed to be out of hospital, her situation was still far from being to her satisfaction.

Once again, the bitterness and resentment at what had happened to her, and to everyone affected, clouded Stella's face. With Lindsay's visit yesterday, she was shocked to see the drawn and pale features of her colleague. Seeing Danny too, so lacking in his usual vitality and with injuries that trapped him to a few inches of movement in a hospital bed, had shaken her.

And she was still caught in the agitation of emotions from all Mac had told her about the interrogation, and his attack of the man responsible for the crimes against Danny and herself. Since the morning six days ago when he had come to tell her what he had done, she could still not decipher the truth of how she felt. But in asking herself how she would have reacted in Mac's position, that she could read clearly in herself, even if the truth was uncomfortable. She could not condemn Mac.

Whilst she sat by the window, he stood and hovered; the look on his face carefully neutral, but not hiding a certain wariness.

Her first reaction to all he told her was anger; anger at Mac for losing his control to such an extent, jeopardising his career, and his life. She had railed at him with all the fury she could muster. And he had listened and received it without a word until she had run down and run out of the energy for anger.

Then with two words of apology from him, she had sunk into guilt for everything he had gone through, and echoed his two words.

All the days since then, emotions between them stormed through her resentment, his defensiveness; her pride, his guilt; her guilt, his sorrow.

Storm clouds ragged around them even now, but Stella could see the promise of friendship tested and survived shining through, and knew the clouds were not permanent. Even though she was about to try the peace between them a little more.

Pulling herself up out of the chair, Stella gave him a half-smile, "You want some coffee?"

"I'll make some." He was turning towards the kitchen before she stopped him.

"No, that's not what I meant. Listen, Mac, I'm going crazy in here. There's a coffee shop less than half a block from here…"

The frown was already descending onto his face, "I don't think…"

"Whatever you may think, I want to get out of here, even if it's only for half an hour, okay?"

"You haven't left your apartment since you got home…"

"Which was two days ago, so all the more reason for me, and you, to do so now." She smiled brightly and stretched for her jacket, hiding the sudden wince of discomfort at the movement.

Mac's frown deepened and his arms folded over his chest, "I'm not sure you're up…"

"I'm up to a very short walk around the corner and a half hour sitting down drinking coffee." Stella leaned against the back of the couch and studied his face, "It's not going to hurt me." With a sudden memory of all that she and Danny had spoken of, she added in a softer voice, "I'm not going to disappear, Mac."

His hand clenched suddenly and his eyes steeled, "You disappeared from that crime scene, Stella. You and Danny. Both of you nearly disappeared permanently."

"But we didn't!" She shook her head, and put her hand to her forehead, "Look, I know I can only imagine what it was like for you, and for the rest of the team with what happened to us, and I'm still seeing what it's doing to you now, Mac. But we have to start somewhere in getting over this, and this is as good a start as any." Her eyes met his, "Please, I need to start getting over this as well, and this is one step on the way to that. I know you can understand."

Releasing a sigh, Mac let his arms drop to his side, "I do understand, but I don't want you to get…"

"I'm not going to get hurt."

His eyebrows lifted, "Seems you have every objection answered… All right, you win, but no longer than half an hour." Then a smile lifted the corner of his mouth, "So where you taking me?"

"You're going to love it, they do the best coffee." Stella beamed as her heart lightened.

"I believe you."

Mac held her jacket as she slipped into it. Then she turned to him, offering her arm and the unspoken acceptance of the offer she knew he had been about to make; recognising it was as much about Mac's need as any need he saw in her. Stella did not object to chivalry, as long as it was understood there was no weakness on her part necessitating its offer. And from her most loyal and true friend, she knew there was no judgement of weakness.

He took her arm and at the sedate pace she set, they walked out into the day.

……………………………….......

A man wearing a football jersey and a baseball cap sat in an old Lincoln convertible and scanned the passing sidewalk crowds. A newspaper rested across the steering wheel to divert any suspicion of loitering, but his eyes ignored the newsprint, focusing instead on the doorway of the apartment block opposite. It was the last action of a man reduced to the leader of a decimated legion. Rich was gone; Troy was gone; Jake, Rita and Joe were dead. His other associates had fled, the allure of more profitable ventures and the taint of failure sending them scurrying. It was up to him now, to finish what he had begun.

He was alone.

He was armed.

He saw them.

A man and a woman, the one holding the door open for the other, left the building and strolled down the street. The man's dark hair caught a streak of sunlight as they passed between the sidewalk trees, and the curls of the woman swung as she turned her head, looking at everything around her.

TJ scrunched the newspaper into a ruin of ink and paper, before he uncoiled himself from the car, slammed the door and followed them.

Unseen.

………………………………

Still reeling with the details of what Jenny had revealed to her about Rita, Lindsay walked along in a jumble of thoughts to Mrs Adams's basement apartment. She walked down the shadowed steps, her feet swishing through the first fall of gilded leaves and paused at the door.

More letters, more questions, more answers.

And more than friendship in the past of the old lady. Two lives together that had created a third between them. A child, a little boy, a secret life given away between the pages of love letters. Given up in the whisperings of scandal and disapproval.

Lost years before. But the past created the present and the future; and somewhere was the man the boy had become.

Whoever he was. Wherever he was.

………………………………......

He was behind them, watching from a short distance as the two in his sight stopped outside a coffee shop. He watched his hand on her back as they passed through the door. In a few paces, sinewing through the crowds, TJ stood by the door himself and looked through.

An afternoon clientele filled the chairs and tables along with a buzz of conversation and clink of cups and plates. The man was at the far end of the counter amongst a line of people, the woman was sitting facing the door, but her head was turned towards her companion as she called a few words to him.

Pulling his cap down, TJ wrapped his hand round the comfort of the weapon he carried and stepped through the door. As he did so, the woman turned, and looked straight into his eyes.

Please, please review, I really hope you're still enjoying the story. One more chapter to go. I'd love to know what you think of this chapter, even if you didn't like it, please let me know! Thanks, Lily x