"So," Lisbon said the next day, leaning against Cho's desk and taking a sip of her coffee as she addressed the team. "What have we got so far?"

The rest of the team exchanged glances. "Not a whole lot," Van Pelt admitted.

"Well, it's early days yet," Lisbon said. "This is a long haul, not a sprint. I don't expect you to have all the answers after only one afternoon. Just tell me what steps you've taken so far. Rigsby, you go first. Have you made any progress on Rebecca Anderson?"

"Not really. The woman's like a friggin' ghost," Rigsby complained. "I talked to everyone in the building who ever said hello to her, and none of them knew a thing about her except that she had a lot of cat pictures by her desk. Everyone said that she was polite, didn't make waves with anyone. She would make small talk if approached, but never volunteered anything personal about herself."

"What about HR?" Lisbon asked. "She had to have gone through a background check to get a job at the CBI. Have you gone through her personnel file?"

"I took a look at it," Rigsby told her. "All the numbers were disconnected."

Lisbon frowned. "Well, they had to have been connected when she applied for the job. See what you can do to figure out who those numbers connected her recruitment officer to when the background check was run."

"Will do, boss."

"Anything else to report?" Lisbon asked him.

He shook his head. "No. Haven't started in on Johnson yet. Spent too much time running around asking about Rebecca yesterday."

"All right. Van Pelt, how about you?"

Van Pelt sighed. "I haven't managed to learn anything about Craig that I didn't already know. He seemed like such a golden boy, you know? He wasn't like Rebecca, lonely and isolated. He had friends, a stable family. I talked to some of his friends, and they'd known him for years. Never suspected a thing. I talked to his supervisor at the FBI, and he said Craig was an exemplary agent. He made his career on a RICO bust, saving the lives of two of his fellow officers at great risk to himself."

Rigsby frowned. "That doesn't sound like O'Laughlin."

"What do you mean?" Van Pelt asked, startled.

Rigsby looked away. "Nothing. Never mind."

"It's not nothing," Jane said. "You're thinking of something specific that made you say that. You witnessed an event that made you think O'Laughlin wasn't quite the golden boy everyone else thought he was, perhaps?"

"No, I didn't," Rigsby protested weakly, but it was no use. Rigsby was an even worse liar than Lisbon.

"Spit it out, Rigsby," Lisbon said. "This could be important."

"Fine," Rigsby said reluctantly. "It was during the Hartley case. Me, Grace, and O'Laughlin went to talk to that creep Melling, and he and his cousin and his crazy mom drew guns on us. Grace's gun jammed as one of them creeps was about to come up behind her."

"I remember," Van Pelt said. "You saved me. You shot the guy before he could get me."

He avoided Van Pelt's eyes. "Yeah."

"It should have been Craig," Van Pelt realized. "He was in a better position. You had to cross into the open to cover me, putting yourself in greater danger. But you did it anyway."

"Of course I did," Rigsby said, lifting his eyes to hers and sounding almost angry. "But O'Laughlin should have stepped up. He was engaged to you. He got to come home to you. How could he face the possibility of never being able to come home to you again and not do everything in his power to make sure that never happened?"

Van Pelt just stared at him. The air between them was charged, and the rest of the team had the distinct impression that the two of them had forgotten that anyone was in the room.

Cho broke the moment. "So how did O'Laughlin convince everybody that he was this great agent if he was such a coward?"

Rigsby looked away from Van Pelt, looking confused at the interruption. "Dunno," he muttered, though Cho's question had really been addressed to Van Pelt. Van Pelt, for her part, was blushing furiously.

Lisbon cleared her throat, clearly wishing she could erase from her mind this new evidence that all non-partnerly feelings between her two agents were not so far in the past as they had been pretending. "What's your next move, Grace?"

Van Pelt had composed herself by this point. "I thought I might go out to Iowa for a couple days, actually," she said hesitantly. "I'd like to talk to Craig's mom, see if she can shed any light on how Craig turned out like he did."

"Good idea," Lisbon said. "You can get cash from Jane for the airfare."

Grace shook her head. "No. I'll put it in as leave and go to see my family. They live in the same county where Craig grew up. It will be easy to drive over and talk to Craig's family while I'm out there, and it'll be less suspicious." She smiled weakly. "My mom's been bugging me to visit anyway. And my sister had another baby a couple months ago, so I can go meet my nephew."

"All right," Lisbon said. "Put it in as leave, but let Jane know if you need help on the airfare. No reason you should have to pay top dollar for a flight at the last minute when we have plenty in the petty cash fund."

"Thanks, boss."

Lisbon nodded curtly and addressed her second in command. "Cho, you're up. What have you got?"

"Gupta bought the gas station he owned about three months before he blew up Dinkler," Cho reported. "Paid for it in cash. I haven't found much of a paper trail for him before that. I took a look at the schematics on the bombs he rigged on Dinkler and you and the details on his surveillance equipment, though, and he's definitely ex-military with explosives and surveillance expertise. I'm betting he was in a special forces unit, probably the Rangers or the Navy SEALs. Right now I'm operating under the assumption Gupta is an alias and that he served in the military under another name. Given his age and the kind of weapons expertise he had, I think I should be able to find out his real name by cross-checking records of military personnel with everything we know about him."

"Think you'll be able to run his prints through the federal database and get a hit that way?" Lisbon asked.

Cho shook his head. "Tried that. Didn't get any hits. I asked Van Pelt to run his picture through facial recognition programs instead. We figure Red John must have hacked the records and swapped out the prints in Gupta's military file so he wouldn't pop up on our radar when we first found out the connection between them. We're still waiting on the results for that, though."

"Good work," Lisbon said approvingly. "Anything else?"

"Not yet. I'm going to go over to the gas station tomorrow, see if I can find anyone who knew him personally. He had one employee who stayed on under the new owners, so hopefully I can get something on him."

"You're on desk duty," Lisbon reminded him. "You're not supposed to be going out in the field yet."

"I'm not going to be chasing anyone down," Cho pointed out. "I'm just going to drive over there and talk to the guy."

"I'm not sure that's a good idea," Lisbon said with a frown, clearly fretting over any potential risk to the health of her recently injured agent.

"I'll be cleared for active duty next week," Cho told her. "It's only a few days difference."

"Exactly," she said. "We've waited this long, so a few days won't make much of a difference at this point. Put the interview off until next week. It'll hold that long."

Cho regarded her with a look Jane knew meant he knew he would be fine, but he was willing to wait and go along with the formality of getting cleared by the doctors before engaging in field work for Lisbon's sake. "All right," he said. "I'll get started on Deutsch tomorrow instead."

"Great," Lisbon said, looking relieved. She turned to Jane. "Jane, tell them what you found out about Hardy."

Jane filled the team in on his discussions with Maya and the goon squad at the San Angelo police department. He shook his head. "Honestly, Lisbon, they need someone like you go step in and wrangle them into shape. They're like a bunch of ten year old boys who have been left home alone, not sure what to do with themselves." He told them about his theory about Cassidy's death, but to his surprise, Lisbon was more interested in the story of the cabin in Redding.

She frowned. "Redding? Why would Red John buy property up there? It's not exactly a bustling metropolis, and there have never been any murders matching his style of killing reported there."

Jane shrugged. "It's near Mount Shasta. Maybe he's a nature buff."

Lisbon crossed to the bulletin board and picked up two black pins. She put one up in Redding and placed another one next to Emma Plaskett's pin in San Angelo.

"What's that one for?" Jane asked curiously.

"Sparrow's Peak," Lisbon informed him.

Jane frowned. "The property where we found Maya Plaskett?"

"Yes. Remember we came across the address because Van Pelt got a hit on it by searching Cut Iron Properties?"

"Yes. What does that have to do with anything?"

"I was re-reading your statement from when you were talking to Hardy when the two of you first went into the basement there," Lisbon told him. "He told you that it was an old family farm."

"And?"

"He told us when we first went to the Plaskett's that he'd only lived in the area for ten years," she reminded him.

"Right, but he was a lying murderer," Jane said, not seeing where she was going with this.

"I did some digging at the county records office, and it turns out what he said was true. That property belonged to Orville Tanner before he died. After Tanner died, the state was unable to locate his next of kin and the state took possession of the property. They auctioned it off for practically nothing, and then a few years later, Cut Iron Properties approached the new owners with a very generous offer they couldn't refuse. The company paid way more than it was worth."

"Didn't Red John buy it just so he and Hardy would have a place to keep Maya after they kidnapped her?" Cho asked.

"That's what I thought at first, but now I'm not so sure," Lisbon said. "Rosalind said Red John smelled like pine and nails, and Jane figured out he was doing construction in the area."

"So?" Rigsby said.

"That farmhouse had been there for over a hundred years. There were no signs it had been recently renovated, and it was the only building on the property. So what were they doing with all that construction equipment?"

Van Pelt shrugged. "Maybe he bought it for Hardy to get his help and he was doing the construction nearby."

Lisbon shook her head. "From all appearances, Hardy was already devoted to Red John at that point. I don't think he would have needed to buy him an old house to get his help."

"What's your theory, then?" Jane asked, intrigued.

She turned to him. "I think Hardy told Red John about the property, and he bought it for his own reasons."

"Which are what?"

"I pulled some old maps from the library and checked all the construction permits filed for the time period when Red John was in the area with the construction equipment. I couldn't find any major building projects in the area during that time, but a few months beforehand, there were some meeting minutes from a town council meeting where they were debating the pros and cons of a big development project that was being considered. Based on the discussion of the meeting minutes and comparing that to the maps and the construction permits, I think I figured out what Red John was building."

Good Lord, the woman had been spending too much time with him, Jane thought. She was really developing a taste for the dramatic build up. "What is it?" he asked impatiently, wanting to skip to the big reveal.

Lisbon released a breath. "A dam," she said proudly.

The rest of the team stared at her, non-plussed. "A dam?" Rigsby echoed. He sounded a bit disappointed.

Jane had to admit Lisbon's revelation was a bit anti-climactic. A dam? He'd expected a secret military fortress at the very least.

"Why would he be building a dam?" Van Pelt asked skeptically.

Lisbon looked a bit frustrated that the team didn't seem to find this information as significant as she did. "Guys, this is a really big clue," she insisted. "California is the fifth largest supplier of food and agriculture commodities in the world, and half the state is a desert. Water rights and irrigation are critical to California farmers, and dams are one of the primary ways that irrigation is managed throughout the state. We've always assumed Red John has a lot of money—what if this is how he makes it? Water is big business. If he builds dams for a living, and is smart enough to buy up land that would be favorably impacted by the construction of new dams, he could be raking in millions. Plus, if he's in construction, that accounts for his movements throughout the state over the years. He must have a home base, but goes to each of his construction sites while those projects are being worked on. He could use his projects as opportunities to scout for new victims, and then go back to kill them after his main work is done. Or maybe even during the projects."

"This is why you were so interested to learn about the property in Redding," Jane realized. "You think he was doing more construction work up there?"

"Exactly."

"But there's already a dam up there," Van Pelt pointed out. "The Shasta Dam is right above Redding, isn't it?"

Lisbon shrugged. "Maybe he was contracted to work on maintenance and repairs. That's an older dam. I'm sure it must require specialized knowledge and training to manage its upkeep."

"Water rights are a tricky political business," Jane observed. He was beginning to catch some of her excitement over this new clue. "Maybe this is how he's made connections with his more powerful contacts. Greasing the wheels of business with political payoffs and promises. He's charismatic, too. He probably doesn't even need to pay them all off, just weaves his spell over them and then bides his time until he needs a favor."

"It's possible, isn't it?"

"Definitely possible," Jane agreed. "Very impressive work, Lisbon."

Lisbon flashed him a smile. "Thanks."

"I can set up a search," Van Pelt offered. "Check county and state filings for major water projects over the past fifteen years and look at the companies involved in the contracting work. It will take awhile, but we should be able to compare that to the locations of the Red John murders and see if there are any overlaps."

"Okay," Lisbon agreed. "Go ahead and set it up, but I want you to walk me through what you're doing. That way I can do some of the legwork on this one while you go out to Iowa and continue looking into O'Laughlin."

"I can put it off a few days," Van Pelt offered. "Stay here and help with the research."

Lisbon shook her head. "No. This is still a bit of a long shot and I don't want us putting all our eggs in one basket. Your idea to talk to O'Laughlin's family is a good one—I think you should follow up with that. If you show me what to do to keep the search secure, I can handle the research on the construction companies."

"Well, that sounds tedious and boring," Jane said. "So I'm sure you'll be very happy with this self-imposed assignment, Lisbon."

She raised her eyebrows at him. "I take it you will not be volunteering to help with this effort?"

"I'd love to," Jane said breezily and untruthfully, "but I'm afraid I already have another assignment, remember?"

"You have another idea about how to get information about Hardy?" Lisbon asked with interest.

"Not exactly. I think I might have to go back to San Angelo at some point and poke a few hornets' nests, but actually I'm referring to Timothy and Sally Carter."

She smirked. "Ran out of brilliant ideas about Hardy, huh?"

"Not at all," he said smoothly. "I just need to let things on that front percolate for awhile while I pursue other avenues of investigation."

"So you're going after the Carters. What's your first move with them?" she wanted to know.

"Well, they were both religious zealots, weren't they? At least on paper, anyway. My first choice of possible compatriots, therefore, is obvious."

"And who is that?" she prompted him.

"The priest, of course," he told her. "Who else?"