A/N 1: In this fic, there's an anti-hero, an antagonist, and a villain. Which is which? It's a shell game, like the Loyalty spoilers. A reminder to readers to be cautious about reading reviews if you don't want to be spoiled; I encourage speculation about the disposition of this case. :D
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN: NAVIGATION
McCarran Airport, Las Vegas
5PM Monday afternoon local time
"Captain? It's Goren."
Bobby hated to admit how relieved he felt when he heard Ross's voice on the other end of the line.
He'd done his best to focus on the casefile on the plane, but once he'd gotten to researching the ADA, concern for Eames and worry over her self-appointed enemy wrought havoc with his concentration and his constitution. With difficulty, he'd wrested logic from the grip of anxiety, but now that he'd landed, he realised he was desperate for a lifeline. He just hoped Ross wouldn't hear that desperation in his voice and take advantage. Things with Ross had been a bit better lately, but he was still sensitive to the way their Captain seemed to be spurred to irrational and sometimes destructive action at Bobby's first sign of weakness.
"So, it looks like Carruthers was already dead when Eames got back to the room. Do you think?"
This was a surprise. Bobby had expected something like, 'So what have you learned, Detective,' or, 'Did you manage to get through the casefile?' One of the aggressive, slightly condescending openers that had gotten Bobby's back up so many times in the past.
As Bobby shuffled at top speed towards the airport's main concourse, he felt the muscles in his forehead and shoulders begin to relax a little, despite the circumstances.
It was nice to feel like he was being given permission to talk.
o.o.o.o.o
"What about the ADA, Dreyfeus?"
Bobby was in a cab, heading towards the city. The light here was thin and pale. The air conditioner in the car was giving him a chill. Or maybe it was just because he was bone tired.
His conversation with Ross about the particulars of the case had been brief but civil. Bobby's words had flowed with greater ease as his mind unlocked and the lump in his throat dissolved.
Bobby sighed. He didn't really want to open up to his Captain regarding his conclusions about the ADA, but he had to talk about it to someone. To get it straight in his mind, separate the likely from the remote, get a reality check. He didn't trust himself 100%, didn't trust his judgement in isolation.
"It's not about Eames," he stammered. "With Dreyfeus. It's about men. It's about…" He couldn't say it. "She feels – protective of men she thinks are with inferior women… women, who – who don't understand them."
Ross grunted. "She has a genius fetish."
"Um, maybe."
"Great. Another woman who's got in for Eames because of you."
Bobby blanched at the stark words. Ross had said what he himself could not.
"What else?"
Despite the circumstances, Bobby felt himself sinking into the familiar, comforting rhythm of profiling.
"She thinks that no matter how big of an…" He hesitated over the most appropriate word.
"Ass?" Ross supplied.
Goren grunted. "…A man is, he gets a pass, and a second chance. He gets pity. She excuses the bad behaviour of men by blaming the women in their lives."
Part of him wished that Ross had never read any of the files – about the case, or about the ADA. There was something so prurient, so unwholesome, about the whole mess that it made Bobby feel as if it was somehow exposing Eames, in a way that made him want to shield her from scrutiny.
Reading the ADA's old court transcripts had given Bobby a clear idea of her issues. Without intervention, she might succeed at burying his partner; Bobby would need a plan both subtle and supple to change the direction of the investigation. Hopefully talking to his Captain would help clear his head enough that he'd be able to come up with one. If only he could be talking to Eames, instead…
"You got all that from her old transcripts?"
"Yeah, but there are a few things that I'd like you to try to confirm for me if you can, about her background. Her pathology is pretty straightforward – she has an animus towards women who she thinks are inferior to the men in their lives. What's objectively strength, independence and healthy boundaries she perceives as emotional distance, lack of empathy and a need to control. She would have been the daughter of an absent, cheating father and a mother who she thinks pushed him away. She blames her mother, both for driving her father away, and for not being a worthy rival for her father's love."
"That sounds irrational. I could never picture Eames in either of those roles."
"It is irrational. That's the nature of pathological behaviour." Bobby paused as Ross snorted, then continued more thoughtfully. "The unbalanced psyche doesn't see the world as it actually exists, Captain. Dreyfeus is labelling Eames with… with an archetype created by her own subconscious, an unsubtle mind trying to make sense of things it's incapable of understanding. Then she's placing Eames in a role that reinforces Dreyfeus's assumptions, without requiring her to take any responsibility or learn anything from the situation."
"I'm not getting how this fits in with what's happening with Eames now." Ross was finally beginning to sound impatient.
Bobby was on such a roll he didn't even notice the dig. "She's got her coming and going. When a man has failures, or when a relationship fails, she blames the woman – for not being good enough, for not being understanding, accommodating. Her idea of the perfect relationship is more like that of a cheater and his mistress. To her, all dependency is co-dependence; she can't comprehend symbiosis."
Bobby paused, feeling a bit self-conscious about his words, and how they related to him and Eames. He felt as though he were sharing a coveted secret. "When a woman is strong in her relationship with a man, Dreyfeus perceives it as shrill and domineering, and she tries to undermine it. And then once the woman is deprived of her power, it just makes Dreyfeus angrier, because deep down, unconsciously, she never forgave her mother for succumbing, for being weak – for not being equal to the circumstances of her life."
"So Dreyfeus perceives Eames as both overbearing and inferior, which triggers her. But Eames is also in a vulnerable position, which makes her even more of a target."
"Yeah. The question is," Bobby continued, "What made her fixate on Eames this way. Eames clearly fits with the DA's pathology, but how would she know that?"
"Maybe because of Eames and B…" Ross trailed off and coughed. Eames and Becker.
"I know about Lieutenant Becker, Captain. I've known for years."
"How…"
"I used to have friends in Vegas too." Ross said nothing. "But I'm glad, you didn't mention it before, Captain. If you had, right at the beginning, then, I… wouldn't have reacted well. I would have taken it the wrong way." This was a big admission from Bobby. It felt risky, but good to get it off his chest.
"I'm not sure if it's enough, though. You said, that she knew things… about Eames and me?" Bobby really didn't want to have this conversation with his Captain. He didn't want to look deeper into the pathology of – like he said – yet another woman who hated Eames because of him, and he didn't want to hear from Ross how people were gossiping about them. And where that gossip had come from.
"Yeah. She had pretty, er, detailed information."
"But old? Out-dated?"
"I think her source of intel dried up over a year ago."
"I, have a theory, um, Captain."
"I'm listening." Bobby could hear in his voice that Ross was trying not to sound too aggressive. He expressed his silent appreciation.
"From the transcripts, it's clear that she considered Becker her equal, and they seemed to team up on a lot of cases together. I wonder…"
There was a pause on both ends of the line. "You wonder if it's not about you, but about Becker? Do you think she's the perp?"
"A part of me wants to. But there's no evidence her relationship with Becker was emotionally or sexually intimate."
"And if she is guilty, she's going to be the toughest nut to crack. Not that you're not up to it, Detective, but…"
"Yeah I know." It was true.
"What's your thoughts on motive?"
Ross was really trying. Bobby didn't know whether to be happy or irritated at his attempts to ask neutral, leading questions that didn't sound condescending.
"It's thin. There are so many ways to look at it. If she's doing it to frame Eames, she runs the risk of spurring Becker to be a hero, or driving Eames closer …" He couldn't finish that sentence. The fact that he was even talking so bluntly about his partner's personal life… This conversation was so wrong.
"And if she's doing it to get rid of the competition?"
"Well it depends. Was Becker's relationship with Carruthers a threat to her? Whether Dreyfeus was a lover or just a friend of Becker? Dreyfeus positions herself as the mistress figure in relation to the men in her life; a position of power, no matter how things play out."
"So maybe she'd be happier with the 'other woman' to her 'other woman' still in a man's life, doing all the work and taking the heat."
"That would fit, Captain."
"But it could still be her."
Bobby sighed tiredly. "Yeah."
For a few moments, there was silence on the line. The taxi was taking him into the oasis of habitation within the desert landscape; the scrub, strip malls and pink, new houses flew by in a blur of shabby businesses and bright green lawns. Out of habit, Bobby tried to picture Ross at his desk at 1PP. Was there anyone around? Did Ross have that lugubrious, hungry, slightly sardonic hound dog look when he was alone? Had he examined the evidence of the Carruthers murder as closely as Bobby himself had?
Discussing Dreyfeus with Ross had been surprisingly painful and anxious-making. Not only because of the hints of betraying Eames's privacy, or facing the reality of her situation, but for other reasons as well. …absent, cheating father and a mother who she thinks pushed him away. He'd felt that way about his own parents once. Like Dreyfeus, he'd even forced unsuspecting boobs to play out roles in the mythology of his own dysfunctional family, sometimes with tragic consequences. He'd been cruel. Had he ever – like Dreyfeus – been unjust? He didn't believe so, but still it weighed on him.
For most of his life, despite his training, so many of his reactions – to neglectful fathers, frail adults, damaged, insane women – had been unconscious, automatic and unexamined. He realised, in retrospect, that these triggers had been one of the things keeping him from Eames. Was he ready now? He knew there must still be ways in which he was 'asleep', as the Taoists said, and of course Eames was too, but he thought he really was ready for her. To be her partner in every sense of the word.
But what about Eames? He saw from her interview, where she'd tried so valiantly to keep her affair with Becker off the record, that she'd been thinking of him, Bobby. He was fairly sure it was because she cared for her partner as he did her, but that didn't mean she didn't still want him. It also didn't mean that the feelings that had prompted her choice of paramours weren't still there also. They would both be hard to let go of, Bobby knew.
"What in particular jumped out at you, Detective?"
Bobby inhaled sharply; his imagination had taken him deep into his superconscious. "About what? Dreyfeus?"
"Yeah," Ross said.
"In several of her transcripts, when she was prosecuting women – mostly the girlfriends of drug dealers…"
"Who usually ended up with stiffer sentences than the scumbags they dated because they didn't have anything they could deal for…"
Goren grunted in acknowledgement. "She used the same term over and over… 'leading him around by the nose…' It's a surprising – analysis of that type of relationship. I don't think it was just a ploy to get a conviction. She, er, really believed it. And that fact is – telling – it indicates significant delusion, or at least that's what I think."
"Delusion? We're talking about pushers and their mules. What's to be deluded about?"
"Captain… maybe the relationships are dysfunctional, but even people like that don't stick together unless there's something there." Bobby almost stuttered on those words. Almost.
"So she jumped to the conclusion–" Just like I did– was Ross's unspoken coda,"That it was a parasitic relationship." All of a sudden they weren't just talking about the riff-raff in a bunch of closed drug cases.
"She doesn't have the emotional maturity or intellectual subtlety to recognise deep, complex… um,"
"Love?" Ross supplied without irony.
o.o.o.o.o
Ross covered the ensuing awkwardness by asking Bobby about his plans for Dreyfeus. They briefly exchanged information; Bobby about his itinerary and list of interviews, and Ross about Eames's current status and well-being. To Bobby's gratification, Ross seemed to accept his assertion that Eames would be out of custody tonight. Ross's lack of objection made the goal more possible, somehow.
"How do you feel about interviewing Becker, Goren? Is there anyone you could call in as a wing-man?"
Bobby bristled a little, even though he knew in his gut that his Captain's concern was warranted. "No time, Captain," he emphasised the formal address. "I'll be OK."
"But will Becker? Don't break anything. And keep me in the loop."
~.~.~.~.~
A/N 2: I had the most awesome dream a few weeks ago: I dreamt that I was watching the finale of Season 10, and Goren and Eames walked off hand in hand, kissing. It was the cutest thing… le sigh.
You can't make the CI writers include kissing and hand-holding… but you can make me! Play to your strengths! Please review!
WORDS: 2471 UPLOADED Tuesday, October 19, 2010