I see I got your attention…
CookieSprinkles: all very good points, you and Cal are on the same page!
Now, there are a couple of things in this chapter I hope will be clear enough: one is an answer to a big question, the other might get a bit lost so don't be afraid to ask!
He actually couldn't believe he made that call, and judging by the reaction of the person on the other side of the line, neither did the recipient. It wasn't a pleasant conversation, for neither of them really, due in no small part to the early morning timing, but Cal managed to smooth-talk his way to what he wanted.
The second call, a lot easier, was to the towing company. They operated 24/7 and they answered quickly, more than happy to tell him where Foster's car was and how - for how much really - he could get it back. The last call was to Torres, who went from annoyed and sleepy to maximum alert in a flash the second he informed her about Gillian's accident, and by the time he was giving her the address of the impound where the boss's car was so that she could meet him there she was fully awake and ready to roll.
The late winter dawn was cracking through the skies when Torres parked her car next to his, wrapped in a warm jacket and scarf as she got out of her vehicle. Cal was leaning on the hood of his own and straightened up when she approached, promptly handling her a steaming out cup of coffee.
"For the wee hours summon," he mumbled as she immediately wrapped her hands around the hot container.
"Don't worry, and thanks. How's Foster?"
"Her left arm is going to be out of commission for a while and she's got a bump in her head, but she's ok." He summed up absently, making it clear that he didn't have much to say about it.
"Did you speak with her?" Torres asked, knowing she probably shouldn't have but unable to stop herself.
"She was sleeping, I didn't want to bother her."
Torres could see that was the honest to God truth, but was puzzled by the fact that Lightman didn't seem to be all that guarded as he usually was…as he normally would have been with anything regarding Foster. It was odd, he meant what he had said and yet she could tell there was something else. Something that probably explained why he was there, his finger glued to the intercom outside the gate in the cold morning, instead of being at the hospital and wait for his-
Yeah, it would have been nice to know exactly what Foster was to him and vice versa at that point. Business partners for sure, even more so after the recent restructure; friends yes, she still thought they were or he'd never been there to sort out things with the wreck of her car. Then what else? They obviously hadn't stopped caring about each other in a way that went beyond simple friendship, but then again they had been like that since the first time she had seen them interact with each other up close.
They weren't back together, Torres knew that much, as much as everybody else in the office was well aware of Lightman's recent strings of dates and Foster trying to get back on the scene too. She took shameless advantage of the fact that he was busy trying to get someone's attention on the other side of the fence to study him as she would have never dared otherwise. He looked tired, but that was understandable if he had been woken up in the middle of night. He was worried, despite Foster's seemingly not-serious injuries, but that too was easy to understand. But there was something else underneath that, something she couldn't identify not because he was hiding it from her but because he was hiding it from himself too.
Eventually, someone showed up at the gate and let them in. Torres stayed a few steps behind as the boss spoke with the man in charge, clearly referring to a previous phone conversation. As they spoke, the man guided them through damaged cars and a considerable amount of rubbish and metal scrap, eventually stopping in front of what used to be Gillian's car.
Cal thought about what Dr Lyle had told him, that the car had hit a tree head on the passenger side, but knowing that didn't prepare him enough. The airbags had been deployed on all sides, and as he imagined - not that he wanted to - the impact he was never more thankful that Gillian was not one to save money on safety features. The passenger's half of the front of the car had been turned into a crushed metal U shape, pushing the dashboard all the way into the back of the seat. Mildly aware of it, Cal heard Torres gasp and he knew exactly what was going through her head: if someone had been on the passenger side, or if the car had hit on the driver's one, at the very least Gillian would have lost her legs in the blink of an eye. Cal clenched his jaw and fought back the thought, closing his eyes for a second and forcing himself to remember that he had seen her, sleeping but alive, legs and all, just a couple of hours before.
Aside from that, not that it wasn't enough, the car didn't reveal much else. Gillian's personal effects had been collected by the EMTs, and even after his conversation with the not so friendly Officer Ollison it wasn't like he expected to find empty bottles of beers on the floor mats. Still, Torres watched him walk around the car with his hands in his pockets, absently scratching at his beard every now and then and studying the wreck as if it was a suspect in the cube, as if he was waiting for the car to show some microexpression he could read.
"It's 275$ for the tow," the man from the impound said then, clearly not interested in the show the man was putting on. "And 20 bucks a day after that."
Lightman didn't look like he had been listening but then he did produce a business card out of his pocket and gave it to him.
"Send the bill here." The man motioned to reach out for the card but Cal pulled it back one second before he could take it. "And I'm not going to report you to the authorities for overcharging if you answer my question."
A few minutes later, with the location of the accident safely stored away in his phone, Cal and Torres walked back to their cars in a gloomy silence the young woman could barely stand. She was also thinking that it still wasn't clear what she was doing there, why had he called her to look at a wrecked car and terrorise the tower, but she knew better not to ask. By the look of it, Lightman either didn't know himself or whatever explanation he had was not something she would have liked. Instead, she watched him furiously type on his phone for a while, seemingly going back and forth messaging someone, and waited patiently.
Once he was done, Lightman put the phone back and walked over to his car, half getting in as he looked at her.
"Go to the office, pull all the footage from yesterday- No, make it the last two days."
"Footage of what?" She asked, wondering if she was being dense or it was him not realising there was something missing in his instructions.
"Our surveillance cameras," Cal clarified dismissively, entering the car and looking away. "I want to take a look at it."
He hoped, he thought it was enough, with him being her boss and all, but as he started to close the door Torres instinctively reached out for it and stopped it. He sighed and shook his head, buying the time to put up an expression that would let her understand very clearly that she was crossing a line. When he looked up at her, Torres did feel the impact of his gaze and hardened face and gulped nervously, thinking it had been a long while since he had looked so intimidating.
"Are we…investigating Foster?" She managed to ask somehow, against her own best judgement really.
Torres kept her eyes on him, bracing for deflection or at the very least that expression only he could pull, absolutely void of any emotion or movement. Instead she saw something she didn't expect, not as rule with Lightman and even less that morning: honesty.
"No Torres, we are not," he assured her, and not only she didn't see any signs that he might be lying but she didn't see any clue that he was trying too hard to hide from her.
Satisfied with his response, still wondering the reason for the task he had assigned her, Torres nodded and let the door go. Cal nodded in response and closed the door, then pulled out his phone and messed around with the navigator to input in the location he wanted to go to. He only gave Torres one sideway glance, just to make sure she was on her way, and once she was gone he leaned back on the seat and took a moment to regroup.
He hadn't lied to her, not really. But if she had been studying Gillian's sciences and skills as much as his, she probably would have realised the truth behind at least one part of his sentence.
It took him a good hour and a half to get there, even in the faint traffic of the early morning, and not for the first time he asked himself what the hell Gillian might have been doing out there the night before. When he got there, she was there waiting for him inside her own car, looking every bit as annoyed and displeased to see her as she had been on the phone. Cal bit at his bottom lip, thinking he should have grabbed another coffee on his way over, but then shrugged and stopped his car behind Wallowski's, parked on the side of the rural road.
When he got out he was shocked by cold, it seemed even colder out there, in what he considered the middle of nowhere. Then he took a moment to look at the road, this time replaying Officer Ollison's words in his head. That part of the road was a long straight stretch with woods on either side, a left turn at the end of it. It didn't seem a particularly nasty turn, more like a gentle curve easing its way in between the woods, yet another thing Cal had to file away in a mental folder that was getting too thick for his likings.
"Long time no see."
He turned around to look at Wallowski, not surprised by her harsh tone. It wasn't so much that he had called her at the nick of dawn, but more the fact that he had called after nearly a year of acting like he had lost her number all together. That, and he had asked her to go out of her way to do him a favour.
"Thanks for coming," Cal mumbled sincerely, then eyed the folder in her hands. "And for that."
The detective nodded but didn't give any sign that she was going to give him the file. Instead she folded her arms and looked around, possibly like him wondering what Foster might have been doing out there and, most importantly, why she was in the same spot. Cal watched and bit at his bottom lip, grumbling something. He would have understood the hostility and reticence more if she hadn't still agreed to look into that, he had been more than ready to pack 'a screw you' and angsty hung up when he had called her first. The thought that she of all people could be petty and making it personal was laughable really, and he was too tired and way too preoccupied with other things to be dealing with that.
"I can apologise if you want, although I'm not sure about what," Cal shrugged. "It was never more than a bit of fun."
"Oh please!" The detective snorted a laugh. "You think I was hung up on you all this time? Get your ego in check Lightman, we both knew who you stood with." Then she sighed and shook her head, looking at the folder in her hands. "Whatever you think you're seeing, I'm just mad at myself for doing this because I feel bad for Foster."
"She's a little banged up but she's alright." It didn't make it any more real or reassuring, to repeat the same thing out loud. "The worst part will probably be trying to convince her that she needs to take some time off."
"That's not what I meant," Wallowski sighed, leaning back on her car. "I feel bad because I don't think you should be doing this, not behind her back."
"I'm not doing anything," he protested, but she gave him an eloquent eye-roll. So he sighed and looked at the road again. "Walk me through it then. Put my mind at ease."
If only it was that simple! The woman thought, then mumbled something and stepped away from the car to walk toward the road. There was no one in sight, so she opened the folder in her hands and took her time to study whatever was inside for a while before looking up and pointing to a 'No litter' sign posted about 100 yards behind them.
"Officer Ollison was positioned there with the speed camera. The time stamp of the images and the report say he clocked Foster going at 70 miles per hour. Not only over the limit, but definitely too fast with the turn less than 20 yards ahead." She looked up Cal, who had come closer to listen and, she suspected, sneak a peek of whatever else she had in that file. "She's gonna get a hell of a speeding ticket."
Cal nodded absently, looking around trying to picture the scene. The officer parked by the post with his equipment, Gillian's car speeding by and then crashing at the end of the road; it was all too clear in the light of day, but even in his vivid imagination something seemed to be missing.
"Will she get a DUI to go with that?"
It had been nearly a year since she had seen him last, and since she hadn't spent any of that missing him or anything like that she had lost her familiarity with his antics. Even if she hadn't, she was under the impression that Cal Lightman was a very different man than the one she remembered. She had heard about him and Foster, their new arc starting and coming to an end, and Wallowski was sure that had a lot to do with the seemingly controlled way he was dealing with all of that.
What she didn't know, what she couldn't have seen since she had never really paid attention, nor respect, to his sciences, was that he was actually hoping, praying with all his being, that the answer to his question would be yes.
"No." Fuck! "The blood test showed no traces of alcohol that could have affected her driving." She gave him a quick look, numbing in between her teeth. "Even considering the delay in getting the warrant."
Cal ignored her jab at his manoeuvres and turned around, closing his eyes and clenching the closed fists in his pockets, actively trying to keep the upcoming epiphany at bait. Then he started walking down the side of the road, mentally tracking the distance he was covering and making all kinds of strange calculations in his mind.
Wallowski watched him in silence, having given up on trying to figure him out. He was looking for something, that much she knew, maybe some deeper explanation for what had happened or maybe, who knew, rethinking some personal stuff in his head. Then he stopped at some point further down the road, starting what looked like a loop of thoughtful stares going to the asphalt, then the direction the car would have come from and eventually the point of impact. That one was easy to recognise, thanks to the missing bark and the cracked trunk of the tree that had stopped the course of the car, but of the three spots Cal seemed to be more interested in the turning point.
A thought suddenly made its way through the detective's mind, then she closed the folder and walked up to him. Carefully, she stood next to him and eyed him from the side. Then, since he didn't look like he had any intention to share what was going through his mind or even to speak, she did the only thing she could and started tracing the same path his eyes were going for.
Until she realised that what he was looking for was not there, and that it was precisely the problem.
Now, just to get ahead of it...I know, why did Cal need Torres? Honestly, I needed to create a situation for their interaction after they check out the car. If you do want a proper reason...I don't know, because maybe she could have seen something on the tow guy, because he's too distracted to notice?
Sorry, I can't get it done properly all the time!