Edited.
"The guard from the prison still isn't making any waves. No movement from his bank account and no hits on his passport or ID." Van Pelt announced from her desk some time that evening, shooting Ronnie a sympathetic look. They'd hoped to have some kind of clue by now. "Still no leads on where he might be."
Lisbon nodded to Cho. "Cho and I will take the warrant and go to his last known address, see if we see anything. Rigsby, Van Pelt, stay here and make sure Jane and Masters don't do anything stupid." She rose to her feet, snatching up her jacket and headed for the parking lot.
Jane had spent the afternoon griping about his condition, being as irritating as humanly possible and then tossing out half hearted apologies and claiming that the blindness was making him mean. Lisbon was more than ready to spend some time away from him.
Cho glanced down at Ronnie, who still lay curled up Jane's couch. Her head was trapped between the cushions of the arm and the back, where she'd claimed that the pressure on either side made the pounding stop. Her knees were raised, legs folded to make room on the sofa for Jane.
Jane, who was sitting on the far end with one hand clutching his walking stick and the other resting on the tops of Ronnie's socked feet. Every so often the girl kicked his hand off, only for it to come back to rest petulantly right where it had been.
Eyes closed, Ronnie reached out a hand and let it hang emptily in the air. She regretted leaving the hospital more and more with every passing second, wallowing in the absence of ready painkillers and consistent hydration. At least while she was there she could have nurses at her side instantly and all the jello she wanted. "Cho."
If she begged him to drop her by the hospital on his way through town, would he?
Honestly, it was a wonder he hadn't dragged her back there already.
He grabbed her wrist before she could smack his hip unintentionally. "You need anything before I go?" His eyes traveled her weary form once. There was no blood showing through her shirt, so he was confident that the stitches in her shoulder were holding up, and she hadn't puked or anything, so she seemed relatively fine.
Apart from appearing a little green, that is.
"That's such a sweet offer, Cho." The mentalist butted in suddenly. "You're so doting."
He shot a quick look at Jane and found the blind man smirking with great amusement at the latest episode of the Cho and Ronnie Show.
Ronnie paid the older man no mind. "Can you bring me a pack of Gatorade and one of those microwaveable heating pads? I don't have anything for this headache at my hotel and I'm not allowed to drive myself to the store." She pried one eye open, squinting against the overhead lights, and shot him a pouting look. "I'll give you cash for it." She'd also be asking him to drive her back to her hotel at the end of the night, since she couldn't drive herself there, either.
That favor would come later.
She'd learned from experience that he didn't like feeling like the errand boy, so she was better served by making her requests gradually over a long stretch of time.
"No problem." Cho let her hand go and tugged his jacket on. "Keep your money. We'll be back in a few hours."
She threw up a thumbs-up and let her eyes shut again, vaguely hearing Jane ask someone to make him a cup of tea as Cho followed after Lisbon. There was something routinely wrong with Cho being sent out on an assignment without her. She always went with him, no matter what the task was—up to and including pretending to be his wife at a luxurious country club.
She should have been going with him.
Damn that bombing. Regardless of whether or not someone had been trying to kill her by taunting her to find a bomb and then exploding it in her face, she'd been very neatly put out of commission by it.
Ranger Kyle's panicked face appeared in the forefront of her thoughts, the scribbled words on his forehead smudged by sweat and grime.
Carla had hired him weeks ago to try to spook her —to see how easy it might be to crush her spirit and play with her head.
If Carla hadn't arranged for him to be killed by a bomb in the parking lot of the CBI with a threat written on his forehead in permanent marker, then who had and why?
Who could afford the trouble of paying off a guard to break him out of prison and then rig him to an explosive?
And for what reason?
A text tone rang, snapping Ronnie out of the migraine of their current case, and Van Pelt's quiet giggle entered the silence.
"It's the coffee cart man." Ronnie guessed. She grinned into the void, thinking back to the way Grace had smiled so happily at the man's attentions. "Your date is cute."
She heard the other woman's modest laugh. "Yeah, he's nice."
Jane rose from the sofa then, his walking stick clacking against the floor noisily. "I'd better go make sure Rigsby is making my tea properly. I'll leave you hens to your clucking."
Ronnie threw a throw pillow in his general direction and didn't open her eyes to see if she'd hit him. "Where did you meet him?"
"He's a lawyer." Van Pelt responded softly, not wanting to be overheard by the poor fill in the kitchen who had been harangued into making tea. "He was meeting a client here and I ran into him. We've only been on a few dates."
"So what? He makes you smile." Ronnie shrugged. "I am kinda surprised though."
"Why?" The redhead sounded curious. "Because he's a lawyer?"
"Because he's not a meathead detective."
Silence ticked by tensely. "I don't know what you mean."
Ronnie let out a scoff. "Please. You know. Everyone knows. Rigsby is pathetically in love with you."
The other woman seemed to struggle with her words for a few seconds before clearing her throat awkwardly. "You're one to talk."
Confused, the blonde turned her head in the general direction of her colleague and opened one eye. "Eh?" Had she been hypocritical?
She hadn't thought so.
"Oh come on, you're telling me you can't see it?" Van Pelt demanded incredulously.
Ronnie was genuinely confused, though her mind did flash momentarily to a few weeks ago when Lisbon made a comment about Cho buying her coffees every morning. Surely that wasn't actually circulating as a rumor. "Can't see what?"
"You and Cho."
She opened her eyes then, squinting at Van Pelt in disbelief. "You're serious?" When the younger woman didn't back down or laugh it off, she pushed herself upright and ignored the intense pounding of her cranium. "There's no me and Cho, you know that, right, Van Pelt?"
Grace barked out a laugh that clearly said she wasn't buying it. "You don't expect me to believe that you don't see it."
"Gracie, if you think I like Cho—"
"Oh, I'm not sure about you yet, but he likes you." Van Pelt said with great certainty.
Ronnie felt her cheeks warm. "He doesn't."
The redhead started ticking things off on her fingers, thrilled by the fact that the attention was off of her and her newly budding relationship. "He was jealous when Ranger Kyle started showing you attention; he gets cranky every time Jane gets close to you; he absolutely despises Agent Pike."
"Agent Pike?" Ronnie's mind went back to the Moro case, when FBI Agent Marcus Pike had spent the day working the Arlov angle and then ended the day by kissing her. Twice. She smiled pleasantly at the memory. That case had given her so much confidence.
Van Pelt's eyes widened excitedly. "You should have seen him when Pike said he was gonna kiss you in Arlov's gallery. He started pacing—like he does when he's pissed, you know? He threatened to report Pike for professionalism."
Ronnie rolled her eyes. "He was pissy all day."
"He wasn't pissy until Pike showed up."
"Pike kissed me before he left." When she admitted to it cavalierly, wanting only to share the tea with a girlfriend and potentially change the subject from the one that might ruin her only good relationship, Ronnie was surprised to see disappointment cross Van Pelt's face.
At least she knew what it felt like to see her go after a guy who wasn't Rigsby.
"You kissed him?"
Ronnie shrugged with a little smirk. "Guess I'm not totally defective."
Grace leaned back with a pitying frown. "Oh, Ronnie, you're not defective."
Shaking her head, cautiously getting to her feet, Ronnie leaned on her desk to get accustomed to the new position for a second. "Cho doesn't like me, Gracie. He's protective."
Van Pelt watched her curiously. "Do you like him?"
The smile that lifted Ronnie's lips was distant. "I love him."
Grace's jaw dropped. "Oh my god."
"Not like that." Ronnie pushed her hair back into a quick braid, feeling overstimulated by the loose strands falling over her face. "You don't know this, but when my mom abandoned me, she did it by bringing a warehouse down on top of me. Cho found me, buried in the bodies of men who had held me captive. He hasn't just trained me, Gracie, he literally rescued me and gave me a new life. He's the one person in my life that I cannot lose. Even if I did like him,"
She saw Grace's face fall in saddened understanding.
"Even if I liked him, I wouldn't date him. If something happened to us and I lost him the way I have him right now, I don't know if I could handle it." She broke off with a laugh. "I definitely need to work on that codependency thing."
Grace gave a sympathetic smile. "I'm sorry, Ronnie, I didn't realize."
"Just don't tell him I said all that, yeah? His head is big enough as it is." Ronnie shuffled out of the bullpen. "I need to get my sweatpants out of my car. I'm suffering in this suit."
Passing the kitchen, she overheard Jane complaining indignantly about the tea Rigsby had made, and Rigsby's responding defensive disappointment in his own failure.
the MENTALIST
The searing pain in her shoulder brought Ronnie back to bleary consciousness. Something in the air around her smelled like old musty hay.
Her arms were suspended above her head by something unyielding and metal, severely aggravating the injury that had clearly popped its stitches.
Where am I?
What is this?
She peeled her eyes open, feeling her head lolled back heavily on her neck.
Handcuffs.
A chain hung her from handcuffs to a wooden rafter high above her head, her feet barely reaching the hay-covered cement floor of some kind of livestock stall.
"What the hell?" Voice cracking, breath coming in short rushes, her arms strained with effort. She was trussed up the same way that Kyle had been.
So was there a bomb nearby?
How had she gotten there?
Hadn't she been at the CBI? She'd been talking to Grace.
She'd been leaving the building, headed for the car, wanting to change out of her work clothes and put on her sweatpants.
With great effort, she checked her clothes.
Still wearing the suit.
So she hadn't made it to her car.
Ronnie glanced around at her surroundings, wondering if she'd been taken alone or if someone had gotten anyone else from her team and captured both of them.
She seemed to be in some kind of barn, chained to the rafters of a horse stall.
A dark silhouette in the far corner caught her eye and she stopped searching, trying to focus on the shape. "I can see you." She snapped breathlessly. "What is this? Why am I here?"
"Little Ronnie Masters."
The smarmy, Russian voice made her skin crawl with recognition as the man stepped out of the shadows. "Imagine my surprise when I found out you were a state agent."
Shiralai Arlov.
Her mother's old partner, and the man she'd stolen a priceless painting from only weeks before. The imposing blond man leered at her through furious eyes, the hard lines on his face only exacerbating the drawn emotion there.
"Arlov, you didn't seriously kidnap me because I ran out on your party." Ronnie scoffed. Her feet scrambled desperately for purchase. If she kept hanging from that shoulder, she'd pass right out.
A wicked grin crossed Arlov's face. "Not at all."
His closeness made her itch. His breath blew over her face, the scent of his expensive cologne seeming strangely out of place in that dingy stall.
"Agent Veronica Masters." His hand pushed back hair that had fallen into her face, but he pulled it back when she held eye contact. "Your trick with the paintings was rather clever. I congratulate you and your partner."
The words gave Ronnie pause. "You knew?"
His eyes darkened. "You think I don't know a genuine work from a cheap imitation? One glance was all I needed. Of course I knew."
"You fraud." Ronnie fought the impending darkness that loomed over her vision like a curtain. The fact that the pompous Russian ass before her thought he had turned such a clever trick by catching their deceit gave her too much pleasure to pass up. "You couldn't tell the Renaissance from the Restoration. You don't know art; you look through your magazines, your museums, your galleries, and you pick anything that makes you look expensive."
Arlov glowered at her. "How dare you—"
"Your painting was a fake." Ronnie watched his face freeze with cruel joy. "It was a cheap imitation to begin with."
"You're lying."
"The real one was in the possession of some random curator. Not only are you a fraud, but you're kind of a waste of time. We didn't even need to find you that night, as it turned out." She couldn't help the bursting laugh that filled her chest. "I can't believe you kidnapped me over a fake painting."
Arlov drew back, attempting to regain some footing. "I didn't. I presume you received my message?"
"Your message?"
He cast a significant look to her shoulder and watched as blood oozed down her front at the strain of her arms pulled above her head.
Ronnie was fading. "What was blowing up Kyle Brandon supposed to mean? I was one of the people who put him in prison."
Arlov smiled grotesquely. "You had a little romance with him, did you not?"
"I definitely did not."
"My son will have your current romance here shortly, have no fear." Arlov promised, pulling a chair out of the shadows and sitting down. "Everything is nearly ready."
Ronnie's vision was darkening. "My what?"
The stabbing pain in her shoulder had moved until she could feel it in every inch of her body, wearing down on her until she couldn't feel anything but it's pulsing presence.
"He's borrowed your lady agent to get into the building. As soon as Agent Cho is back, he'll be joining us."
Grace's new relationship.
Ronnie kicked herself. How had nobody run a background check on this guy? "Why? You don't need Cho."
"If you think I haven't noticed that Carla trains her minions to withstand some discomfort, then you're less than I'm giving you credit for. I need a little leverage, and your very protective partner will serve my purposes wonderfully. Don't worry. He'll survive it."
She didn't catch the end of his sentence before the darkness fell over her and everything faded away.
the MENTALIST
Meanwhile, at the CBI, Cho helped Van Pelt out of her jeep, quickly unlocking her cuffs. He and Lisbon had returned from their fruitless search of the prison guard's apartment to find both Grace and Jane on the run. He steadied her, hands on her arms, while she stumbled to get her feet under her. "You alright?" He wondered, checking her for any sign of injury.
Lisbon was around the other side, helping Jane out.
The man who had posed as Van Pelt's boyfriend lay on the pavement at Cho's feet, felled by Lisbon's shot. He wasn't moving.
"Get him inside, we need to figure out who this guy is." Lisbon ordered the paramedics as they arrived on the scene. Once they had her instructions, she rushed Jane inside, her arm wrapped protectively around his shoulders.
"Where is Masters?" Cho wondered, glancing at the back seat of Van Pelt's car where she and Jane had tried to escape her new boyfriend. The blind driver and a handcuffed passenger hadn't made it very far before Cho and Lisbon had happened upon them, seconds away from being executed.
Van Pelt's face blanked cluelessly. "I don't know. She went down to her car to get a change of clothes and then I didn't see her again."
Jaw clenching, Cho helped Grace inside. She broke away from him to find Rigsby while he went straight upstairs and did a quick search for Ronnie.
When he didn't find her anywhere, he made his way down to Security and requested that they play the feed from that evening for him.
The result filled him with burning rage.
Ronnie Masters, struck down and abducted by Shiralai Arlov.
end of episode 16