Disclaimer: It ain't mine.

A.N. I know, I know, another long wait. Sorry! I'm a bit worried I won't get this finished before the new season starts so I'm going to have to kick my writing into high gear! Enjoy the chapter!

Chapter Five

Lisbon forced herself to her feet and made her way to the couch, beckoning Connor to sit with her whilst taking in his appearance. While the detective was only six, maybe seven years older than herself, he looked as though he had been run ragged. His hair, which she remembered being brown and curly, was now peppered with grey, shorter and thinner. The wrinkles around his eyes, she was sure, could not be attributed to laughter. She vaguely remembered seeing him at Sam Bosco's funeral the previous year and struggled to remember his condition then.

More than anything, she noted, Philip Connor looked sad.

"You don't look like you've had so hot a week yourself, Connor," she retorted, eyeing the file in his hand. "Want to tell me about it?" She grinned, self-depreciatively, "Might take my mind off my own problems."

He smiled wearily at her before his face settled into an expression that made her cringe. She knew that expression far too well. It was the one she wore, that every cop wore, when they were about to break bad news to someone.

Maybe she didn't want to hear about Philip Connor's week after all.

Jane had been placed in solitary confinement at the County Jail, despite how well he had handled the other inmates the last time he had been admitted. He didn't mind. He didn't particularly want to talk to anyone, and he certainly didn't care to put in the effort to hypnotise, dazzle or generally woo the other inmates around to his way of thinking.

What was the point, in the end? He had completed his task. He didn't particularly care what came next.

Today, however, he was meeting his Court Appointed Lawyer, Justin Nolan, who would, no doubt, try and persuade him to change his plea from guilty to not guilty. He had already heard how Nolan intended to try and get the Premeditated Murder One charge, which could instil the death penalty, dropped all the way to the Self-Defence and Defence of Others, which, as Justifiable Homicide, would leave him a free man.

Personally, Jane thought that was a bit ambitious.

As if on cue a guard banged on the door of his cell and he rose in preparation of being taken to an interview room.

Nolan, it turned out, was exactly how he expected him to be. Young, tall and lanky. Weedy could be an adjective used to describe him. In short, he was a kid and he was nervous as hell to be in the room with a murderer, even one as amicable as Jane. Jane wondered ponderously if he had ever seen the inside of a courtroom, let alone won a trial.

"Mr Jane," Nolan rose, almost knocking his chair over in his haste and held out his hand, obviously meaning for Jane to shake it. Then, seeing Jane's hands shackled together he withdrew it, stuttering sounds rather than words.

They both sat and he began again, "Mr Jane, I hear that you intend to plead guilty. Is there anything I can say to change your mind?"

Jane shook his head cheerfully. "Not a thing."

"Very well then." The sigh wasn't audible, but it was obviously implied by the look on Nolan's face. His shoulders slumped, "I received your statement from the CBI. Let's go over it, shall we? Then we can work on your character witnesses, okay?"

This time Jane sighed. The guy was going to be optimistic to the bitter end.

"Do you remember the first time we met?" Connor asked her delicately. He had dreaded asking the question and it was something they never, ever talked about. Most people assumed that Connor and Lisbon had met on her first day as SFPD when they had been introduced by her boss and his colleague, Sam Bosco. It was a misconception that neither dared correct.

Lisbon's smile suddenly became very fixed as she answered with another question. "Should I assume you mean when you were trying not to throw up in my garden?"

Connor let out a short, relieved laugh. "Yeah, yeah that was the day." It had been his first day at SFPD rather than hers that they had met. Teresa had been a young slip of a thing at only fifteen years of age. She had returned home from school with James and Tommy, praying that their father would be sober enough to take them to the hospital to visit Michael. She had known within a moment of stepping inside the house that something was wrong but she had no way of anticipating the magnitude of it.

Inside, her father was slumped in an armchair, dead from an overdose of pills and alcohol.

She had sent her brothers outside to the garden before calling 911. That was when Philip Connor had arrived with Derek Sullivan, the senior detective. The scene hadn't been particularly gruesome- in fact, there had been no blood, no mangled flesh, not even any vomit. In fact, it was the lack of blood that had left Connor lightheaded. The sight of Arthur Lisbon in a position so atypical of any tired man was so different from what he had expected. He just looked like he was still alive, rather than dead.

Connor had ended up sitting on the step at the front of the house whilst Sullivan took pictures and made notes on the scene, wondering whether going into the police force had been a wise career move when he had been silently offered a bottle of water by young Teresa.

Even now, he thought about the look in her eyes when they had met his. If there was a mixture between despair and relief, he decided, that had been it. He had wondered why until he opened his eyes, figuratively speaking. As he accepted the bottle with thanks he first noticed the bruise on her wrist, not quite hidden by the sleeves of her sweater. He looked up and saw the tiny darkened patch on her lower lip where it had been split. But there were no cuts or darkened, healed patches of skin on her knuckles, so obviously she hadn't been fighting.

Finally, he took the three children in collectively. The older of the two boys had a healing, yellow and brown bruise across his left eye. The youngest child looked largely unscathed by the marks his brother and sister bore but he, like the other two, was dangerously thin. Connor knew there was a fourth child in the hospital and he didn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out what had put him there.

When these children weren't being neglected, they were being abused. And from the hint of relief he had witnessed in Teresa Lisbon's eyes, where by all right's there should be tears at her father's death, he knew in his heart that the dead man in the living room was their abuser.

And so, Philip Connor had continued his career as a police detective, working under Derek Sullivan for the next five years before being transferred from homicide to domestic abuse cases. Some would have called it a demotion but, the way Connor figured it, this way he got to help the living, rather than the dead.

"Do you remember the detective that was with me that day? Derek Sullivan? He died a couple of weeks ago- alcohol poisoning, would you believe?" He smiled, but there was no happiness or cheer in it. It was a bitter, rueful smile. "Few years back he retired from the Force, at least, that's the official story. In reality he was politely asked to leave after taking to the bottle. Complaints were made- he interviewed a victim's family while he was still drunk, or something like that. Anyway," Connor paused to get back on track. "He had no family and I was his closest friend, in the end. I was asked to clear out his apartment after he passed. That's where I found this." He handed over the file, but kept a hand placed on top of it to stop Lisbon from opening it straight away.

"Sullivan always said something didn't ring true about your father's suicide but he was never able to put a finger on what. He was told to drop the investigation after the coroner's ruling, but he always said that something was missing." Connor paused again. Lisbon was staring at the closed file in silence and he raised her chin with a finger so he could look her in they eye, in what could be perceived by an outsider as a romantic gesture, but the tension in the room would have quickly dissuaded them from that idea.

"Turns out, he kept investigating. And he found something- something that was so obvious it should never have been missed in the first place. Teresa-"

This time it was he who looked away. He ran a finger through his hair and bent over, resting his head on his knees so he was much in the same position as he had been when they had met all those years ago.

"Teresa, there's a chance your father didn't commit suicide. That he was murdered."

A.N. Not got as much in here as I had hoped, but I intend to update by Wednesday. I figure I've got about six weeks until the new season starts so I better get by ass in gear and start writing. Let me know what you thought of this chapter!

~Sweetdeath04