A/N: Giving you two more chapters tonight, since they're both short and deal with a lot of the exposition and set up for the rest of the story. Enjoy!
P.S. I feel the need to defend Lisbon's bulletin board. I came up with Lisbon's bulletin board before whichever episode first showed Jane's, I swear! I was a bit flummoxed when his showed up, actually. But it should be clear pretty quickly that this story does not parallel the events of season 5 in any way, so I think I'm safe on that score.
xxx
When Jane returned to the bullpen, Lisbon had gathered the team in a little half-circle around one of those bulletin boards held up by two skinny metal legs on wheels. The board was turned towards the wall and the mailing tube Lisbon had been carrying earlier was lying empty on the table beside it. Jane took his place in the little group, coming to stand between Cho and Grace.
"Okay, listen up," Lisbon said, her soft concerned voice replaced with the authoritative tone she used when she wished to command attention. "I've been thinking a lot about the Red John case over the past few weeks, and the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that we need to stop being so reactive in how we deal with him."
"What do you mean?" Rigsby asked, puzzled.
"Every time we catch a Red John case, we follow up leads until they fizzle out, and then it's like we're just waiting for him to kill again on the off chance that he'll leave some evidence this time around. We need to stop being so passive. We should be forcing him to react to us, not the other way around."
"Okay," Van Pelt said slowly. "But how do we do that when every lead we get always ends up being a dead end?"
"We do it by changing our approach," Lisbon said. "We've been treating Red John cases the way we treat all our other cases. We get word of a new victim, and search through the evidence to piece together the different elements of the victim's life. But Red John operates differently than other killers. He isn't motivated by jealousy, or greed, or rage. And he doesn't work alone. He has an extensive network of followers who will apparently do his every bidding. Our usual methods don't work with him, because he's a different breed than most of the killers we go after. We're going to use those differences against him."
"Use them how?" Rigsby wanted to know.
"I've been working on developing an approach that will help us do that." She turned the bulletin board around so it faced the team.
Over half the board was covered by a large map of California, which was stuck full of multi-colored pins. Across the top, there was a timeline with notes, dates, and pictures of every individual who had ever surfaced in connection to any Red John case the team had ever looked into. Jane recognized a family picture of himself with Angela and Charlotte from his case file and repressed the urge to tear it down from the display. The right side of the board seemed to be devoted to the miscellaneous. It included index cards and post its with words and names such as "Cut Iron Properties," "He is mar," and "Sparrow's Peak" scrawled in Lisbon's familiar hand. In the center of this collection, there was a note saying "How does he choose them?" underlined several times. In addition, there were pictures and drawings scattered over the space. The familiar image of the macabre smiley face was there, but there was also a picture of a lone teacup with blue flowers which Jane recognized from the crime scene photos from the farm property where he and Lisbon had rescued Maya Plaskett. There were also pictures of complex surveillance systems, and a schematics drawing for an explosive device. It took Jane a moment to realize the schematics were for the bomb vest that had been strapped to Lisbon's chest for several hours on one of the most terrifying nights of his life.
Jane stared at the board, appalled. He had never seen such a thorough and complex visual representation of a collection of facts relating to a case outside those movies where the psycho killer's true nature is revealed when the police storm his basement and discover evidence of his obsession in the form of a wall of photographs of his victims. This particular representation was meticulous in its level of detail, but that was Lisbon for you. Apparently, when she decided to become obsessive about something, she was all in.
"Like I said, we're going to have to change our approach—" Lisbon began, but she didn't have a chance to finish her thought.
"This is what you've been doing all weekend?" Jane burst out incredulously. "You spent three days in the mountains building this crazy bulletin board?" She'd scared him half to death for an arts and crafts project?
She looked annoyed about being interrupted. "I had an idea to think through and I needed to be able to concentrate. I asked my friend if I could use her place and she said it was okay, so yeah, I spent the weekend up there working up a different perspective on this case."
"What friend?" Jane demanded.
"What does it matter?" she said, irritated. The rest of the team exchanged uneasy glances, clearly wishing they could be elsewhere during this exchange, but not knowing how to leave the meeting without drawing unwanted attention to themselves.
Jane ignored them. "Whose cabin was it?" he persisted.
She glared at him. "It was Bosco's cabin. He used to take the boys hunting up there. I called Mandy and asked if I could use it for the weekend and she said she didn't mind."
This brought him up short. Bosco's cabin. Lisbon had asked Bosco's wife to use their cabin? Lisbon hated to ask for favors. Yet she had felt this was important enough to merit asking for one from the wife of a man who had been in love with her. He knew she still felt guilty about that, even though she had never reciprocated Bosco's feelings. She'd trusted him, though. He scowled. If Bosco had been alive, she probably would have told him where the hell she was going when she decided to leave town for three days.
Lisbon took advantage of Jane's temporary distraction as he considered this thought to pick up where she had left off. "As I was saying," she said with a pointed look at Jane. "Obviously we're still going to take into consideration his choice of victims, but we're going to re-focus the investigation on his followers. Getting as much information from his followers as we can is going to be our top priority from here on out."
"But they're all fiercely loyal to him," Cho pointed out. "The ones who aren't end up dead."
"Look, all those people that he's gotten to follow him over the years didn't grow up in a bubble," Lisbon said. "They all have people who've known them, cared for them. It's always bothered me how he's managed to get such a complete hold on his followers. I want to know how he convinces them to give up their lives for him, to follow him unwaveringly. To do that, we need to reconstruct their histories, find out what led them to Red John in the first place. His network is like a spider web- we're going to identify all the connections in the web, and then we are going to use the common threads to lead us back to Red John."
Van Pelt was staring at the map. "What do the pins mean?"
"Red ones are victims that fit the profile of his original targets," Lisbon informed her. "Young women he killed by stabbing them while they were at home alone. Purple ones are the victims that he killed directly that deviate from the profile in some way. Yellow ones represent the last known location of his accomplices, and the green ones represent people killed by his accomplices."
Jane peered at the board. Each pin held a scrap of paper with a name and a date scribbled on it to the map. He saw a blue pin with his own name on it next to two purple ones in Southern California. "I see this blue one is meant to be me," he commented.
"That's right," Lisbon confirmed.
"Why do you have me in Malibu when I live in Sacramento?" he inquired.
She shook her head. "You only live in Sacramento because of your pursuit of Red John. You were in Malibu at the time you initially got involved in the case."
He scanned the rest of the map. "I'm the only blue one."
She shrugged. "You don't fit any of the other categories."
There was only one other pin without any other companion pins of the same color. This one was silver. He took note of it, but didn't inquire. He would let it be, for the moment.
Lisbon continued. "The whole concept behind what we're going to be doing here is similar to how those social networking sites work. Even if Red John's followers can't lead us to him directly, it's likely that at least some of them know each other, or know other people who also know him. And chances are that those people aren't as clever or as careful as Red John is. One of them will make a mistake, and that's how we're going to finally crack this thing."
There was a brief silence while everyone processed this. Cho was the first to speak up. "Where do we start?"
Lisbon checked her watch. "I have to go a ten o clock meeting with Bertram. We'll have to wait to dive into the details until I get back. This is going to our primary focus for foreseeable future, so go ahead and take a little time to tie up any loose ends you can on your other work. I'll be back in an hour and I'll give you your assignments then."
She left.
Rigsby exhaled. "Whew. It's a pretty big change from standard procedure. Think it'll work?"
Cho shrugged. "It's the best idea that anyone has come up with for this case in a long time. And what we've been doing hasn't been working, so a change is probably a smart idea."
Grace was still staring at the map. "It's brilliant."
Privately, Jane agreed with her assessment. It was such a straightforward idea, elegant in its simplicity. By reorganizing the evidence to sort through it using this new perspective, Lisbon had taken everything they'd ever done to catch Red John and turned it on its head. This paradigm shift opened up possibilities he had never considered before.
The others continued to discuss the elements of the board, throwing questions back and forth.
Jane tuned them out. He only had one question about Lisbon's new approach to the case...
Why hadn't he thought of it first?
