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-Liv
She was in my room.
She was in my room.
Ronnie Masters fled her own apartment at two o'clock in the morning. No gun, no shoes, no jacket. She grabbed her phone and her keys and left without even a second to check if her mother was still in her home. Childish, debilitating fear clutched at her heart, choking out her ability to reason, blinding, suffocating, screaming in her skull.
She was in my bedroom.
She could still be in my house.
She took her motorcycle, but not her helmet.
Roaring down the nearly empty street, completely forgetting about her police protection, bare feet grinding into the spiked foot pegs, hair and robe whipping in the wind. She didn't feel any of it. Her apartment building got smaller and smaller in her rearview, and with it, the massive knot of terror in her chest, as though her mother was permanently tethered to her home.
She was in my bedroom.
When she showed up at Cho's door, in a jersey tank top and shorts and a polyester robe, eyes glazed over with panic, he'd just gotten home from the team's flight back from Tijuana. Wearing blue pajama bottoms and in the middle of tugging on a t-shirt, freshly showered and hair dripping, the beleaguered agent stopped short at the sight of Ronnie in his doorway.
His ever-passive face scrunched up in confusion. "Masters?"
"She was in my bedroom." Ronnie still hadn't met his eyes, just stared straight ahead at his chest like a blind woman.
Carla Masters, set in her memory, gray as a ghost, kept laughing in the confines of Ronnie's mind. Rasping, wheezing, grating laughter, scuffing between her ears like nails on a chalkboard. In her bedroom, in her apartment, crazy eyes watching her sleep.
The words spurring him instantly into motion, his hands went to her shoulders as the blood drained from her face. "Your mom?" He peered past her, down either end of the hallway as though the woman had followed her to his building.
She might have.
It wouldn't be uncharacteristic.
Ronnie couldn't turn her head enough to look. She just felt his warm hands gripping her shoulders, keeping her grounded, keeping her upright. She couldn't feel her forehead. "She was in my bedroom, Cho."
He stared at her clothes, the thin jersey material and tiny shoulder straps, the shorts that barely came to mid-thigh. She smelled like gasoline and a carburetor. She'd driven her motorcycle wearing those clothes? Where were her leathers? Where was her helmet? She was practically naked, relative to appropriate motorcycle attire. "You rode here like that?" He soon stopped examining so closely—she wasn't wearing a bra, and she wasn't sound of mind enough at the moment to determine how comfortable she was under his scrutiny. Embarrassed, he dropped his hands from her shoulders and let them hang awkwardly at his sides.
All that, and she was still standing in his hallway like some kind of senseless beggar.
Cho pushed his door open wider and stepped back to allow her entrance. "Come in, Masters."
She didn't move, eyes coasting distantly around his kitchen behind him. "In my bedroom."
Five-foot-seven, packed with muscle, and she'd never looked so frail.
It didn't take some kind of psychiatrist to see that the woman was listing into a state of shock. The fact that she'd managed a ten minute drive in her condition without accident or injury or even missing a turn was a miracle. Cho could count on one hand the number of times she'd visited his apartment, and somehow she'd made the drive at 2 a.m. with about seven percent mental faculty.
"Ronnie." Cho reached out again and cupped her elbow in his hand, pulling her gently into his foyer. He didn't like the way she was so unresponsive that he was actively moving body weight when he did so.
Stumbling on feet that moved like chunks of concrete, nearly falling to the floor, the traumatized young woman was ushered into the warm, sparsely decorated living room, thrust into familiar, companionable silence as Cho closed and locked the door behind her.
While she stood like a statue in the middle of his floor, he put his hands through his wet hair and shook excess water out of it. "We knew she's been in and out of your apartment," He strode into the kitchen, putting a cheap-looking, small kettle on a burner and turning on the stove. She'd had a rough day, spending it mostly in the hospital, mostly in and out of consciousness. He didn't blame her for having a bit of a breakdown. "This isn't new, Masters."
She didn't answer.
Cho glanced at her over his shoulder while he dug tea bags out of an old cardboard carton. She had a shell shocked look in her eyes, looking more like a haunting in his living room than a woman. Setting the chamomile down next to a couple of mugs, he gazed at his partner discerningly. She was regressing. Something happened that made her revert back to the little girl under her mother's thumb, injured, frightened, hollow.
"Ronnie." He went around his counter and pulled out a chair. "Sit down." She heard him but couldn't respond, so he pulled her gently by the arms, put an arm around her back, and urged her again to sit. She plunked herself down on the seat in a way that seemed more like someone had knocked her legs out from under her.
He considered retrieving some smelling salts.
"Ronnie, what happened?"
"She was in my bedroom." Ronnie pulled her robe around her front, wrapping it tightly like a security blanket. Goosebumps raised the skin and hair on her arms. He'd never seen her so unsettled before. She was famously unshaken, but the past couple of days, she'd been seeming more unraveled than unrattled.
At the same nonsensical answer, Cho reached out and laid a warm hand over her frigid one, ignoring the way it twitched under his fingers. "What happened, Ronnie? Tell me why you're here. She was in your bedroom?"
His touch, hot and firm against her all-but-numb extremities shocked some reality into her. She blinked slowly, little by little shutting out the swarms of memories and sensations and emotions that had plagued her life under the reign of her mother so many years ago.
She sat in Cho's kitchen, on an ugly brown bar stool. Air from the vents circulated around her bare legs. She still wore her pajamas. Cho was holding her hand, his hair wet, his t-shirt water-spotted, smelling like Old Spice and Kirkland shampoo. A kettle steamed on the stove.
"Cho," The drive from her apartment, which might as well have been haunted, and his, was all a blur. She didn't remember how she got into his home, she didn't remember where she left her bike. "My mom—"
"I hear you, Masters," He smiled encouragingly, the way he did with the more subdued types that he'd interview. With the hand that wasn't already holding hers, he touched her arm for a second, a type of physical affirmation. "Carla was in your bedroom. Tell me what happened."
Ronnie sucked in a deep breath, feeling her hands shake. "You texted me."
Cho nodded. He'd texted her about Renfrew on the flight home from Tijuana.
"I woke up when I heard my phone alert. I saw your text, I messaged you back." She paused, squeezing her eyes shut against the jarring memory. That despicable woman was there, always there, forever stamped on the insides of her eyelids, standing in the dark, eyes white and bulging. "I put my phone down."
Her mother couldn't hurt her. She was with Cho. All the lights were on, there was no one but the two of them, she was completely safe. They were in pajamas; they were having tea; chatting over the countertop; what could be safer than that?
Sensing her distress as the words stopped, Cho swiped a thumb across the top of her hand. "Ronnie."
Her name on his tongue brought her back to the moment.
"She was standing at the foot of the bed—by the door. She was laughing. Just..." Ronnie opened her eyes as though the memory would suck her in if she didn't escape. "She was just laughing, staring at me."
Cho's eyes widened, fingers gripping hers a little tighter, his breath pausing. "What then, Ronnie?"
A few tears dripped suddenly from Ronnie's eyes, before she knew she was crying. "She left. She left my room. She might still be in my house. I don't know. I don't know, Cho, I just ran. She might still be in my house." Her hands clenched into fists, only to flinch suddenly away as the kettle began to whistle.
Cho pulled away and took the kettle off the stove, quietly pouring hot water over the tea bags in the mugs.
When he turned around again, Ronnie was up and pacing. Her robe fell open again, fluttering around her legs like nervous wings as she crisscrossed the room anxiously. A sweaty sheen covered her forehead and throat. "She might still be in my house. She was in my bedroom."
He placed his partner's tea on the counter in front of the stool she'd been sitting in and set his own down near the sink. "I think we should get some sleep, Masters, and face this in the morning. Come on. You can have the bed."
Ronnie shook her head, fighting the urge to rip her own hair out. Carla Masters had been in her bedroom, staring at her. "No, no, Cho. I'll take the couch. Thank you for letting me stay." Once again making sure her robe was wrapped snugly around herself, she moved in her bare feet across the living room and sat gingerly on the sofa.
Cho hadn't noticed before that she was completely barefoot. "Really, Masters, take the bed. I've got the couch."
"I can't, Cho." Ronnie mumbled, staring out the window into the street. Cho lived on the fourth floor. Somehow it made her feel safer than her second floor apartment. "I'll sleep on the couch."
Knowing better than to press the issue, Cho went looking for some blankets and came back with two. He moved the pillows so there were two at one end and unfolded the blankets so they draped over the couch like a tent.
Ronnie made no move to lay down.
When he couldn't think of anything else to provide, he fetched her tea from the counter and set it on the coffee table. "Try to drink this when it cools. It's supposed to help you wind down."
She didn't respond.
Cho knelt next to her, not daring to sit on the couch with her but refusing to just go to bed, and picked up one of her hands. "Are you okay?"
The girl nodded absently.
"Will you be okay to sleep in here alone?"
Ronnie scoffed. "Well, I don't know, you didn't give me a nightlight—"
"I'm serious, Ronnie. No one would blame you for being nervous to be alone in the night right now." Cho thumped her knee at her humor.
Finally feeling a little bit more like herself, she shot him a sideways glance and smirked. "Are you inviting me into your bed, Cho?"
He stood up abruptly, dropping her hand, and it fell like deadweight. "Okay. Goodnight."
Silently applauding her own victory, Ronnie gave a few strange, tense chuckles and caught his arm before he could stalk away. "Wait, no, Cho, I'm kidding, I'm sorry." She could see him roll his eyes, but he stopped when she asked him to.
"Seriously, are you going to be okay?"
She let his arm go and pulled the blankets up to her chin. "I'll be okay. Thank you for letting me stay."
He nodded awkwardly. "See you in the morning."
Ronnie watched him walk towards his room, shutting off lights as he went. When he disappeared around the corner, she snuggled down into the cushions and forced herself to think of anything but her mother and the creepy, devilish grin on her face. Only moments later, Ronnie fell asleep, nestled in blankets and couch pillows that smelled like Cho.
The MENTALIST
In the morning, Cho drove her back to her apartment. Ronnie had awoken barely rested, solemn, and silent. She'd slept well on the couch, but had arisen well before sunrise and planted herself at his tiny dining room table with a cup of coffee, every light in the living room blaring brightly.
When Cho woke up, she had dark bags under her eyes and a hard set to her jaw. She poured him a cup of coffee but said very little, and waited in silence while he dressed and collected his gear for the day. When they headed out to get her things, he gave her a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt to put on over her revealing pajamas.
Upon arriving at her apartment, she bounded up the stairs like the terror and apprehension of the day before had never existed. He searched the rooms with her, turned on all the lights, opened all the doors, checked all the corners. No one was in the apartment. There was no sign that anyone but herself had ever been there.
The police protection detail were completely clueless, oblivious to the intrusion the night before.
Cho made breakfast out of her kitchen while Ronnie took a shower and dressed for work, and they ate together, discussing what she could do to protect herself and her home. She would get her locks changed, and bolt all of her windows for the time being. Carla was well versed in picking locks, of course, but Ronnie couldn't just leave them be.
She would have a new burglar alarm installed, and have security cameras added to her system as Cho had suggested weeks before.
After breakfast, Cho collected their dishes and stacked them neatly in her dishwasher, running the load with the past couple nights' dishes. Casting a few final looks around, they shut the apartment down and headed in to work.
The MENTALIST
A boy was missing.
The team met the police at a place called Elkin's Flower Shop around midday, right in the swell of the California heat. The boy was Cody Elkins, the son of the owners of the shop. Signs had been posted all around town already, with his picture in black and white and the word 'MISSING' in big block letters.
He was sixteen, missing for two days. Police had found his shoes in the gutter and called CBI.
Lisbon had called ahead and sent Cho and Ronnie in to talk to the parents as soon as they'd arrived. They were very plainly distraught, understandably. The father, a tall, soft-looking man of impatient bearing stood quietly with his hand pressed to his mouth in worried disbelief, while his worried wife did most of the talking.
They couldn't believe they couldn't find him. He wasn't the type to run away. It didn't make any sense.
Cho prodded for more information, anything they could think of to point the CBI in the direction of the missing boy. Ronnie had little to contribute. It was a missing child case, not a homicide. They never should have been called in. Arms folded across her chest, she gazed over the flowers.
Bright colors of red, yellow, and orange lifted the shop's atmosphere like summer had just spilled into it.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd even smelled a flower.
"He's our oldest." The mother was saying. "Poor Brad is so worried about his brother."
Ronnie tried not to let her mind take off with that information. All she could think about was Carla's big Coca-Cola truck. She tried not to think about how Cody Elkins could have been taken off the street on his way home from school and shoved into somebody's basement until the traffickers came to collect.
She shook the thoughts away.
That probably wasn't what happened.
Behind them, another CBI SUV showed up and Lisbon and Jane stepped out, catching up with Rigsby and Van Pelt. A few moments later, they came inside, excluding Jane, and had the Elkins repeat what they'd told Cho and Ronnie.
At the rehashing of information, Ronnie stepped aside and stood near the door. She watched Jane interact with some teenage boys across the street for a second, and then turned back to the agents. She stood in silence, arms crossed, listening without comment.
Lisbon flashed her a few questioning looks, which she determinedly ignored.
Cho did, too, and she turned away from those as well.
She was too tired to multitask, anyway.
After Lisbon got everything she needed from the Elkins, she sent them home with Cho and Ronnie.
The MENTALIST
Jane had found Cody's body. He'd been killed and left in what appeared to be the grounds of a ritual, pentagrams and candles and carrion birds all around. He'd been barely a quarter of a mile away in the trees across from the family's flower shop.
All signs, believable or not, pointed to black magic.
Lisbon and Jane came back to the Elkin's house to give them the news and get more information in context of his murder. Mr. Elkins spoke mostly about his football team. He'd been expected for extra practice due to some performance issues he'd had during their last game. The football coach had apparently laid into him pretty hard over it and upset Cody.
As he spoke, Jane moved around the room in his usual manner, fooling with knick-knacks and tinkering with trophies that littered the mantelpiece. When he passed by Ronnie on the way to a bookshelf, he paused and tipped his chin down to look her in the eyes.
Gaze flicking up flatly to meet his, Ronnie raised one eyebrow in question, unamused by his wry smirk.
When she showed him only irritation, Jane dropped the mirth and squeezed her elbow discreetly, giving a slight, questioning frown. Is everything okay?
Ronnie shrugged him off and nodded for him to move along and keep investigating. Not taking it personally, Jane paused only briefly before doing as she suggested.
At some point during the conversation, the little brother stormed out of the room, overcome with his own emotions. Ronnie didn't blame him. Finding out your brother had been murdered was impossible to process in front of people, particularly in front of strangers.
Mrs. Elkins asked how the boy died. As he explained that the circumstances surrounding the death seemed to be suggesting some kind of black magic, Ronnie noticed that the space on the couch between Mr. and Mrs. Elkins, where Brad had once sat, remained empty.
It seemed strange they they hadn't scooted in to be closer to one another in such a moment of grief.
But then, many such moments served to wedge couples apart rather than bring them together sometimes, and she let the matter go.
The mention of black magic wasn't as strange to the couple as the team had thought it would be. Rather than being completely appalled and aghast by the idea, the mother heaved a great sigh of horror. "It was her," she moaned.
"Who is this?" Cho demanded, surprised to have actually turned over a lead.
"Tamzin Dove." Mr. Elkins spat. "She's into all that black magic crap."
"She claims to be a witch. Says she has powers." Mrs. Elkins cried, blotting at her eyes with a damp tissue.
Evidently, according to the witch, Cody had stolen her cat a week prior, which the Elkins denied. Dove put a spell on him in revenge, and reported it to his parents. Nobody had taken her seriously.
When Ronnie glanced away from Mr. Elkins, expecting to see her own disbelief of the claims of witchcraft echoed on her coworkers' faces, she found skepticism in the eyes of Jane and Lisbon, but utter, uncomfortable belief in Cho's.
The MENTALIST
The first thing Cho saw when the four agents approached the house of Tamzin Dove was the brass doorknocker in the shape of a horned goat's head. He was immediately put on edge, and started mumbling about goats being the sign of Satan.
He looked to Ronnie for some kind of agreement but only found her judgmental stare glaring back at him.
Huffing, he bypassed the doorknocker and rang the bell.
Lisbon couldn't help but bait him, teasingly wondering if petting zoos were gateways to hell, but Cho wholeheartedly concurred. He looked so uneasy and sick to his stomach, he was almost completely green. When Jane pointed out the pentagram under the door mat, Ronnie's partner almost fell over.
Jane actually managed to jump-scare him while he was looking into one of the windows.
Nobody came to the door, so Jane decided to pick the lock with a piece of wire he felt trapped against the pentagram, all the while Ronnie squinted harshly at Cho. Popping one of her button's loose to let some air reach her skin, she smacked him in the arm. "Why are you so squirrely?"
He all but snapped at her. "Can it, Masters."
She shrugged and watched Jane's little teenage friends approach the street on bicycles and then rip away when the agents noticed them.
Cho tried all manner of avoidance. He tried to time Jane's lockpicking skills, but was unable to even speak a single word before the mentalist pushed the door open on squeaky hinges. He tried to wait out on the porch and not go into the house, but found himself judged by both Ronnie and Lisbon, and sourly followed them inside.
The super evil hippy witch was waiting with a tea service when they stumbled through her bead curtain into the dining room. She'd been expecting them since she heard about the visuals of the crime scene, knowing they'd be led to her and her practices. Ronnie was actually delighted to see that the girl, while plain and blonde and dressed like a boho California pothead, had the physical characteristics of cartoon witches. A long, hooked nose, a broad, jutting chin, and scraggly, feathery hair.
How could she help assuming the role of a witch with those features? Ronnie could just picture her with her skin painted green and a long, pointy, broad-brimmed hat.
Jane explored her personal apothecary, utterly fascinated by her trade, while Cho looked around like he was worried he was going to accidentally step in fairy dust and float out the window.
Tamzin Dove did believe that Cody Elkins deserved to die for what he'd done to her cat, but she had no physical connection to his death. She had, however, placed a killing spell upon him. Evidently, Cody Elkins was her first recipient of the spell who actually died.
Cho looked entirely horrified by this bit of news.
The MENTALIST
That night, Tamzin took them out to her backyard. She had an altar set up within a circle of stones, which they stood around while she burned a selection of herbs and materials in a little metal bowl, describing the new, experimental spell as a binding one rather than a killing one.
This news came much to the relief of one member of the CBI party, and to the amusement of the other three, though all of them did their best to maintain neutral expressions.
Eyes flashing to Cho, Tamzin bore a wicked grin. "What's your name?"
"What's it to you?" Cho snapped, right as Jane announced gleefully, "Kimball Cho!"
"Hey!" Cho snapped, glaring at the older man.
Ronnie didn't dare laugh, but she was glad that Jane had answered the woman and gotten in trouble before she could, because she had definitely been planning on it.
Just then, Tamzin began a wailing appeal to the god and goddess, casting a spell on Cho to be bound by her power and therefore prove her trustworthiness—she entreated that he behold the king of beasts and kneel before him.
It made no sense to Ronnie but Cho looked absolutely horrified. "Oh, come on!"
Tamzin chanted in Latin, and scraped the ashes of her altar into a mason jar.
Unimpressed by the ritual, Lisbon described that Cody had been killed by a blunt instrument, and accused Tamzin of encouraging her friends to murder him, which the witch refuted as an obvious falsehood, seeing that friends of hers wouldn't have left so much evidence that suggested black magic. She claimed instead that she was being framed for murder, which actually seemed somewhat more likely once said aloud.
When the agents wrapped it up for the night and went to leave, only Cho stood in the stone circle, staring at the altar. Everything about the case made him itch, and having his own name thrown into an incantation and burned at an altar definitely wasn't sitting well with him.
"Cho," Jane called as they left him behind.
Cho looked ill.
"Kimball Cho!"
When he caught up to Ronnie, he wouldn't meet her eyes but he accepted her sympathetic pat on the back without a word.
As they made it back to the cars, and Cho finally collected himself, he propped his hands on his hips to confront Jane. "Why'd you give her my name?" He demanded, looking terrified. "She said I was gonna kneel before the lord of beasts. What does that even mean?"
Jane shared a wide-eyed, unbelieving look with Ronnie, who just shrugged back at him. She didn't know why he was such a wuss about it, either.
"Oh, come on!" Jane goaded him. "You're not telling me you believe she's an actual witch?"
"No, of course not. But I mean if dark forces did exist, it stands to reason that there could be people who control them for their own ends." Cho argued reasonably.
Ronnie huffed. If that were true, it wouldn't be someone like Tamzin Dove. It would be someone like Carla Masters.
Evil bitch.
Jane paused dryly. "They're called investment bankers. They don't live around here, I assure you. Relax. No such thing as witches." And with those parting words, he ducked into Lisbon's vehicle and left Cho in a cold sweat.