3

Morning broke and the California Bureau of Investigation was called by the Pasadena police to an ugly scene at 1465 Crestview on the North side. It was an affluent neighborhood for celebrities, business characters and career people. Each house looked as if it was built from a near perfect mold of the last house. In the house, Amanda Beard the housekeeper had just discovered her employer, businessman Charles Switzer, laid out against the dining table with a bullet through the back of his head and the impact sprayed across the white table cloth. It looked like a mob hit, but that was an unsure conclusion to jump to at this time. Forensics perused the scene inch by inch, police detectives interviewed Mrs. Beard and the grieving widow. Sergeant Teresa Lisbon was the brunette blue-eyed beauty in charge of the investigation. Kimball Cho was her associate. The straight-faced Asian American turned from processing the evidence to give her the details.

"Looks like a through-and-through…" He remarked. "Found the point of impact the bullet took, but the killer must have taken it with him."

"To make it hard to trace." Lisbon mumbled. "Where's Jane?" She looked around slightly annoyed.

"At the curb…" Cho pointed briefly with his pen. A slight sigh, Lisbon turned aggravatedly and strolled out of the front door of the house and down the front steps to the surrounding wall of the property. Over the top of it, she noticed Patrick Jane standing and waiting at curbside as if he was smoking a cigarette, but he wasn't a smoker. He was a recurring pain in her side she respected and sometimes struggled to accept. He turned up his gaze to her, his waft of blonde hair bouncing on his brow as he grinned, postured and stood waiting.

"Isn't this when you look at the crime scene, figure out who did it and then annoyingly do things your way while frustrating me in the process?" She responded condescending to him.

"Is that what I do?" He appeared generally confused then flashed his smile and looked back up and down the street. "Oh, I've got my suspicions… but I'm not doing it now." He paused for another look up and down the street. "The killer's on his way back to the crime scene."

"He is?" Lisbon tried to believe him but she was skeptical. "How will I recognize him?"

"Oh…" Jane was irritatingly smug. "You'll know him… You may want to step back a bit from the curb."

"Oh, I should? Is it because…" There was a sudden loud crash and a silver Mercedes Benz suddenly appeared out of nowhere. The impact of hitting the ground drove all four wheels into their tire wells, and popped the hood and trunk open, from one end the engine was pushed up through the bottom and from the other end luggage vomited on to the street. Lisbon just lightly shrieked and jumped back from the sudden fright. From within the totaled vehicle, its hysterical and terrified driver achingly crawled up from the floor of the car. A minute ago, he was on the way to the airport with a plane ticket for Jamaica, and now Philip A. Hutchinson was back in front of the home of his business partner, the man he had killed. Jane just grinned ear to ear to Lisbon and arched his head backward over the house.

"She's special, isn't she?" He spoke about the tiny red blur hurrying away over northern Pasadena toward the business district and past Cal Tech for the residential district. From her advantage, Bridget could see the Los Angeles sky line and just beyond her right hand the mountains around Mount Lee and the Hollywood sign. Wafted by these high breezes, she brought her right hand forward to keep her flight and drew in her left hand to check her watch. Even without it, she could tell it was getting late. Sunset was peeking over the Atlantic just three hours away from her height, and upon recognizing the block around her apartment on North Los Robles at this height, she dove upward into this ocean of air and then dived downward, her long blonde locks getting pulled back behind her by the thrust of her trajectory. Her apartment building was veering upward to her faster and faster, becoming more than just a dot in her eye line and swelling outward to full-size. A slight dodge and she swooped behind the building and around to the front to enter through her front bay windows… barely seen she hoped. Her head dipped up and her feet reached down to touch floor, some of her momentum carrying her steps forward into her small kitchen. She opened her refrigerator and took out a bottle of water to drink, her free hand tugging off her cape and tossing it aside over a chair. Barely covering it, it instead flittered and fell to the floor. A slight sigh, Bridget sipped her water and sat at her sofa to remove her red boots.

She liked this place. It wasn't terribly expensive, but it was humble… It was a third floor one-bedroom apartment of a Pasadena walk-up. The elevator didn't work, but she didn't mind. She had a much cozier apartment than when she was living under the name of Linda Kent in New York City, but that one was too big for her. It was bigger, larger and had a nicer view, but this one was more manageable, a bit closer to the room she briefly had at the Hotel Tipton in Boston. The only reason she gave up the Manhattan apartment was that she grew bored with it. It was too impersonal and the building staff was not as friendly as she had it when she was Chloe Tisdale at the Tipton. At the Boston hotel, she became friends with the candy girl, the maintenance man and the lounge singer, but the hotel manager was always hovering too close and trying to impress her. She was scared he was going to learn her secret identity. In fact, she was not too sure that Carey's two boys hadn't figured it out. By then, Bridget had become friends with three white witches in San Francisco, and she went to stay with them and develop and train in her powers through them. Along the way, she picked up her fourth identity, Billie Halliwell, since she had left home in Detroit. Staying in their attic, she would have stayed with them except Piper and her husband was having a baby, and she got pressed out of the place. Prue Halliwell then helped Bridget find this apartment and with that came Bridget's fifth alias since leaving Detroit and her family. Small, comfortable and cozy, this Pasadena place was her favorite place by far. She was friends with the guys from across from the hall, but instead of knowing her as Bridget, Linda, Billie or Chloe, they knew her instead as…

"Penny…" Someone was knocking alongside with the queries. "Penny…" They knocked again. "Penny…."

"Crap…" Bridget rolled her eyes to the door annoyingly. Swearing under breath, she tugged off her red boots, dropped them behind her sofa out of view and pulled her bathrobe up off the top of her laundry basket in the chair to cover up her costume. For all intents and purposes, the tall neurotic from Cal Tech who lived across the hall from her believed she was a struggling actress. He had no inkling of her secret identity, her eight million dollars fortune or even of her past. In the past, she had convinced the frustrating nut she was a former farm girl from Nebraska instead of a costumed crime fighter from Michigan. Pulling her robe up over her costume to appear ready for the shower, she sighed annoyingly and jerked open her door already aggravated.

"Yes, Sheldon…" Bridget wanted to yank his underwear up over his head. She could do it too.

"Penny," The arrogant physicist looked her with two analytic brown eyes capped by a tightly cropped crown of brown hair. "I have a bit of a little conundrum with you."

"What is it this time?"

"Look at this…" Sheldon whipped out his white Flash shirt. "What do you see?"

"A white shirt."

"White…" Sheldon chortled under breath as if he was hiccupping slowly to keep a breath. "Not exactly…" He paused obnoxiously. "Penny, when Leonard blindly asked you to wash a few of our things in your laundry, I was under the assumption that you knew what you were doing. Imagine my surprise when I get my shirt back and noticed that in the color spectrum of hues that my once white shirt had once been had gone from a perfect FFFFFF color scheme to a hideous mockery at FFFFFG. You ruined my Flash t-shirt!"

"Sheldon…" Bridget pinned her nose as if she had a headache and clutched her robe shut with her other hand. "I can't tell the difference."

"But I can!"

"But no one else can!"

"But I can, and I'm the one who demands compensation." He fidgeted a bit completely ignorant of the human condition. "I want a new t-shirt." He requested. Bridget just sighed frustratingly annoyed.

"Sheldon…" Bridget tried to restrain her nearly immortal strength. "Has anyone ever pulled your underwear up over your head?"

"That's anatomically impossible…" Sheldon acquiesced. As struggling actress Penny Parker from Omaha, Nebraska, Bridget stood in her door smiling and picturing it.

"But somehow I believe you can do it." Sheldon finally responded. "Will you replace my t-shirt?"

"Whatever…" Bridget stepped back, her left hand holding her robe closed against her costume hidden underneath and annoyingly slammed the door shut behind her.