FIC: Acrimonious (19/21)
Title: Acrimonious
Author:
sirenofodysseus
Disclaimer: …it’s probably better that Bruno Heller owns The Mentalist, really.
Rating: NC-17
Summary: After FBI Agent Susan Darcy is overheard telling Special-Agent-in-Charge Luther Wainwright that Patrick Jane may be working with Red John, Red John steals Jane’s body and begins to destroy the team’s lives one-by-one.
Spoilers: Brief spoiler for Crimson Hat (4x24), but the rest of this story is set after Something Rotten in Redmund (4x20).
Warnings: Violence, language, drug use, sex, non-con situations, mentions of child abuse/domestic abuse, negative character portrayals, major and minor character death.
Pairings: Red John/Teresa Lisbon, Patrick Jane/Teresa Lisbon, Wayne Rigsby/Sarah Harrigan, Kimball Cho/Summer Edgecombe.
19-
The seconds of silence ticked into minutes, as he kept his eyes focused on Darcy and Lisbon. Darcy had her eyes buried in the case file, probably trying to remember every little detail of the case, while Lisbon focused her attention on everything except him. The handcuffs hurt his wrists and he was beyond thirsty, but he ignored both issues to focus on how he was going to get out of this entire mess. Darcy and Lisbon clearly believed that he was guilty of at least six crimes (maybe even more) and unless he could talk them out of their silliness, he knew he was going to jail.
Jane opened his mouth to speak, when Darcy beat him to the punch. “We never thought we’d see you again, Mr. Jane.” He closed his mouth. “Of course, you always did have a soft spot for Teresa, didn’t you?”
“Lisbon is my friend.” Jane replied, softly. He was upset with Lisbon for not trying to clear his good name, but he couldn’t hate her. Lisbon was probably under a lot of pressure from Bertram, Darcy and Wainwright; and the last thing he wanted to do was cause her anymore problems. “Ergo, I have a soft spot for her. You can’t honestly tell me that you don’t have soft spots for your friends, Susan.” Darcy merely smiled; her dirty blonde hair pushed away from her face, as she brought the case file back down to the table.
“I have soft spots for all of my friends, Patrick.” Darcy dryly admitted. Jane doubted that, as the woman was too hard on herself to actually have friends, outside of a work setting. “Then again,” she continued with a sly smile, “I’ve never killed or hurt any of mine, like you have.” He stared at her for a moment. In his years at the CBI, he had never gotten any of the members on the Serious Crimes Unit killed; he had endangered their lives a few times with his silly stunts and he had almost gotten them fired, but he had never set any of them up to die. Darcy must have taken his silence as a form of guilt, as she asked her next question. “Would you like me to call you a lawyer, Patrick?”
“No.” Jane knew he was innocent, regardless of what anybody else thought. He had woken up in the Child’s home, hours ago, with no memory of any of the crimes that Wainwright had rattled off to him. Whoever was trying to frame him (Jane guessed Red John or one of his friends) had done an excellent job at getting the CBI and the FBI on his back, but he had no fear that he couldn’t get out by finding someway around the supposed evidence. “I’ve done nothing wrong, aside from jaywalking. But everybody does that, now don’t they?” He wore a smile, as he brought his attention back to Lisbon. “I know you don’t believe me, but I am innocent. I might mislead you, but I have never lied to you...”
Lisbon didn’t even glance in his direction.
“DNA rarely lies, Patrick.” Darcy interrupted, as he still looked at Lisbon. “Forensics found your semen and Grace Van Pelt’s blood on the sheets of your motel room.” Jane blinked in surprise. He hadn’t been sexually active with another person since before his wife’s death, as he had been in too much of a bad place to even think about his own pleasure. “Tell me, how does your semen get on the sheets if you weren’t raping her? Unless you were sexually pleasuring yourself, of course.” Darcy eyed him.
“Are you asking if I masturbate, Agent?” Jane asked and he glanced back at her. Darcy nodded and Jane glanced down at the silver table. Once or twice, he had done that after his wife’s death; but he had stopped shortly after entering the CBI, as he was working way too much to even think about doing it anymore. “Doesn’t everybody do it though?” Lisbon jerked her head up, which brought his attention back to her.
“I didn’t.” Lisbon muttered and Jane raised his eyebrows in response. Out of everything he had been expecting the woman to say, that answer hadn’t even been on the list. Darcy ignored Lisbon’s comment with the tilt of her head.
“I’m going to take that as a yes.”
“You can also take that as a go to hell.” Jane replied, calmly. Darcy lost her smile and leaned back in her chair, before she crossed her arms against her chest and fixed him with another stare. “I have never raped Grace Van Pelt, so your so-called truthful DNA is obviously lying.” Lisbon should have known that he would never touch or violate anybody like that. Grace was attractive, yes. But he wasn’t about to try and force his way into her pants, just because of that.
Darcy shook her head. “You didn’t make Grace Van Pelt get down on her knees or tell her to…” He watched Darcy glance back down at the case file, which she flipped open again. “…fuck you with her tongue?”
“No!” Jane said, absolutely horrified and disgusted by the idea. “I didn’t! I would never say or do that!” Darcy continued to stare at him with her lips pursed. “Where are you getting this ridiculous information, Susan?”
“I am getting this information from Teresa, who was there when you admitted that you blew up Kimball Cho, who watched you blow Wayne Rigsby’s face clean off, and who watched you force Grace Van Pelt down on her knees.” Darcy uncrossed her arms and went for the glossy crime scene photos within the file. Jane said nothing, as she slid the two photos to him from across the table.
He glanced down at the two photos, while he wondered if everyone had gone crazy. The first photo, was set in some type of a warehouse; the concrete floor had been a soft gray, littered with broken glass and cigarette buds, but what had caught his entire attention was the body and the amount of blood on the floor within the photograph.
“His face was shot clean off.” Darcy explained, as Jane pushed the photo away in horror. He had seen many horrible things in his time with the Serious Crimes Unit, but he hadn’t been expecting to see one of his friends lying face down in a pool of his own blood. “Sarah Harrigan, Wayne Rigsby’s girlfriend at the time and the mother of his son, had one heck of a time identifying his body.” Jane glanced up at her. He would have never killed Rigsby or taken him away from his son; Jane had grown up without his mother and he had never wished any child not to have both of their parents around to raise them. Rigsby had been trying to right the wrongs of his father and although life had never been fair, it seemed especially unfair that Rigsby had been taken from his son and Jane was being blamed for it. “You did that, Patrick. Teresa and Grace watched you pull the trigger; they were there.”
But he hadn’t been there. He had been at the Child’s home, solving a murder.
“It happens three months ago, Patrick.” Darcy continued. “Do you know where you were three months ago?”
Jane nodded. He’d prove his innocence! Darcy had been with him three months ago, as they had been solving a crime together. “I was helping you solve a case, before I helped Lisbon close hers.” Lisbon stared at him, surprise written all over her face. Had he said something wrong? It was still May, wasn’t it? Three months from May had been March and he had been with Darcy, who had asked to borrow him to keep her job. “It’s May, isn’t it?”
“No, Patrick.” Darcy replied, softly with the shake of her head. “It’s April 2nd of 2013.” Jane glanced at her in disbelief. It couldn’t be 2013 yet; they hadn’t even been in 2012 for that long. “Are you missing months in your memory?”
He blinked. When Amy had pulled the trigger, it had been the day before the three-day Memorial weekend; he had wanted to solve the Child’s case, so Lisbon could take her holiday. How in the world had he missed an entire year almost? He just knew, he couldn’t answer Darcy’s question with either yes or no. If he told the truth and said yes, she’d think he had something wrong upstairs-which he didn’t! But if he lied and said no, she’d think he was working for Red John again.
Either way, Jane knew he wouldn’t win with Darcy.
Unless, he tried to reason their behaviors silently, they’re pulling my leg.
Jane stared at Lisbon and Darcy. Lisbon, he knew, had a sense of humor but there was a limit to what type of a joke she would play; she had never tried anything that could harm another person, yet the handcuffs were still cutting into his wrists. And Darcy’s sense of humor hadn’t seemed, to him anyway, to involve cuffing one’s arms behind their back. Instead of saying anything, Jane glanced back down at the photos. There had to be something there that would exonerate him, otherwise they would have never provided him with the pictures.
The second glossy picture involved a ER table. Jane could just barely make out Cho with the doctors and nurses around him, but the man looked absolutely horrible within the photograph. Cuts, bruises and burned skin stared back at him from the photo and as if it had burned him, Jane dropped the photo back down on the table.
“We’re only interrogating you out of common courtesy, Patrick.” Darcy spoke again. “We already know you’ve committed all of these crimes; we just want to know why you did it.” Jane continued to stare at the pictures of Cho and Rigsby. He would have never killed or tried to kill anybody on Lisbon’s unit; they had all helped him and none of them had done anything (unlike Red John) to deserve death. “I can only speculate, but I believe it has something to do with how tired you were getting.” Jane glanced back up at her. He was tired, but it wasn’t because he hadn’t gotten enough sleep. It was because of her endless and pointless questions that wouldn’t get them any closer to the real murderer. “After all, you can only chase yourself so much, before the thrill wears off. Right?”
“What are you implying, Susan?” Jane had a feeling where the conversation was going and he didn’t like it one bit.
Darcy leaned forward in her seat. “You did an excellent job, Patrick, up until the very end.”
“I’d like to think I actually know what you’re talking about.” Jane replied.
“Just make this easier on us all and admit to what you’ve done.” Darcy answered and Jane raised his eyebrows, as he shifted within his chair. Darcy wasn’t making any sense at all, really. He glanced at Lisbon for further clarification, but she kept quiet. “Your confession won’t get you out of prison or the possibility of the death penalty, but…”
“The death penalty?” Jane exclaimed. Darcy nodded. “I haven’t committed any crimes, recently. I would understand if I had killed someone again, but you have no proof aside from two photographs, DNA, and the testimonies from a pregnant Grace and a jilted Senior Agent, who hasn’t said more than two words this entire time.” He would have pounded his fist against the table to make a valid point, if his hands had been free. “Have you thought that these photos could be doctored, Susan?” Darcy opened her mouth to reply, but he refused to let her have the last word. “Red John has men everywhere. You’d be a fool to not look into that first, before you go around throwing aimless accusations at me.”
“Ah.” Darcy replied, leaning back in her chair again. “Just the topic I was waiting for you to bring up, Patrick. Red John.” He didn’t appreciate the glances or the tone that she kept giving him, but he kept his mouth shut. “Tell me, Patrick. How do you recruit your followers?”
Jane saw red at her implication. He jumped up from his seat and lunged toward Darcy, even with his arms restrained behind his back. Darcy merely shook her head and stood from her seat. Lisbon sat frozen.
“This is one hell of a way to prove your alleged innocence, Patrick.” Darcy commented, as he watched her stick her hand into her jacket pocket. “If you don’t sit back down in your seat and finish our conversation like an adult, I’ll have security take you away.” Jane glared at her.
He wasn’t Red John, he despised everything about the serial killer who had taken his wife and child away from him. Darcy’s so-called truthful accusation was based on hearsay, even if she had forensic reports and photos of alleged crime scenes. Slowly, he sat back down on the edge of his seat (which he somehow had managed to not upturn in his anger) and watched Darcy smile.
“That wasn’t too hard, now was it?” Darcy asked. Jane kept quiet. If he lashed out at her (or Lisbon), he knew that Darcy would hold him for police brutality; and nobody, aside from criminals, took hitting an officer of the law too kindly. “I only asked a simple question, as I know Red John has his methods. If you’ve studied Red John, like you say you have,” she obviously didn’t believe that he was a grieving widow, who was still trying to move on with the loss of his wife and child, “then you should know how he recruits others.”
“I’m not Red John, Susan. I also told you months ago that I wasn’t one of his friends, after you and I discussed the death of your sister.” Jane answered and Darcy lost her smile. “You obviously have an alternative motive for why you’re asking how Red John gets his friends. Did you have a friend who worked for Red John, Susan?” Her silence told him all that he needed to know and he nodded in response. “Was it Craig O’Laughlin?”
Jane watched in silence, as anger crossed Darcy’s face for a brief moment; the FBI agent was good at keep her emotions away, but she wasn’t great. He could still read her like a book.
“Susan.” Jane continued. “Craig was a foolish man; Red John picked him for the amount of hubris he had. Loyal, but extremely foolish in his choices.” Darcy remained silent. Jane hadn’t gotten to know O’Laughlin very well, but he had quickly learned that the liaison for relations between the FBI and the CBI had thought that he was better than everyone else because of his posh title.
Red John looked for followers, who had been jaded by a past life experience (years of childhood abuse, years of cutting, someone who had a certain amount of ugliness fostering deep within them) or had been hurt by a past love, to join him and O’Laughlin had probably been sucked into the promise of better things that had eventually led the man to his death.
He continued to stare at Darcy. Jane knew there had been more to Darcy’s cold exterior than just the hurt from a family loss; most children could get over a loss of a sibling, provided that their parents had nurtured them right (and Jane could tell, just by looking at Darcy, that her parents had given the right balance of love and strictness). In his opinion, Darcy hadn’t only been hurt once in her life; she had been hurt twice and her indirect question hinted toward the fact that she and O’Laughlin might have had a few interactions together that were less than innocent.
“You’re better off without him, Susan.” Jane said. “In the end, Craig was trouble and if he had been given the chance, he would have dragged your career to nothing.” He fixed her with a stare. “Or worse.” Jane didn’t even want to imagine Darcy as one of Red John’s many friends, as the woman had a good head on her shoulders and her heart (while sometimes misguided) was in the right place.
If only she’d listen to it though, Jane thought. If Darcy or Lisbon listened to their gut instincts, they would have know that he just couldn’t be the killer of Rigsby, the rapist of Grace or the bomber of Cho. Jane had only ever wanted to kill Red John, as Red John threated them all over and over again with his sadistic ways.
“You know nothing, Patrick.” Darcy replied, after a moment of silence.
“I know enough, Susan.” Jane said and Darcy glanced down at the table. “But that accusation that I’m Red John is ridiculous.” She met his gaze, almost appreciatively and he wondered if she would take the hint that he hadn’t done any of those things. “Why would I kill my wife or child, Susan? Why would I want to hurt anybody on Lisbon’s unit?” He paused for a moment to let his words sink in. “Even if I was Red John, which I’m not, why would I want to kill the individuals who were of more use to me alive than dead?”
Red John enjoyed his kills, but he also enjoyed having others to toy with and others to show off to. He had specifically chosen the Serious Crimes Unit to toy with, as he had told them all years ago to keep up the good work and no serial killer went through that much work only to kill off his little dented trophies of success. Any profiler with half an education could have probably told Darcy that, but the woman still appeared to not understand basic psychology or logic.
“Did you not tell me that you’d get around to taking a lie detector test when you remembered exactly where you had put your kitchen knife and rubber gloves, almost a year ago?” Darcy asked.
Jane couldn’t help but chuckle at her words; out of the FBI Agent’s mouth, it sounded so serious. Darcy and Lisbon glanced at him briefly and regardless of what Darcy thought it meant, the line (and whoever had said it) was brilliant.
“Oh come on,” Jane said, after he had finished laughing. “You can’t tell me that isn’t funny.”
“It would be funny,” Darcy agreed with a small grimace, “if you weren’t Red John, Patrick.”
And there it was. The direct accusation that he had been waiting for her to make since before he had lunged at her. Jane shook his head at Darcy’s lack of logic and piss poor deduction skills. He had been chasing after Red John for nine (or ten, depending on if Darcy and Lisbon weren’t still pulling his leg) years and the fact that Lisbon couldn’t vouch for his moral character stunned him.
He had saved her from Dumar Hardy, from Roy Carmen, from the loss of her job (many times) and her way of repaying him was to keep quiet when he needed her the most? Their friendship had been based on the concept of saving one another from the very beginning and if she couldn’t even save him when it was needed, could he even consider her as his friend?
Jane tried to give Lisbon the benefit of the down. Darcy was in the room and Lisbon had never felt comfortable with the FBI Agent, who had butted her way into their Red John case with a flourish. He had a feeling that if Darcy left the room, he’d have an easier time of talking to Lisbon and convincing her of his innocence, but it didn’t seem as if Darcy was going to leave the room or them alone anytime soon.
“You can’t believe any of this, Teresa.” Jane tried to plead with Lisbon again; he knew Lisbon had logic, as she was an intelligent person. She had to believe what he was saying, didn’t she? He hoped that the use of her first name would cause her to react again, as he desperately needed her to say something to make him understand what was going on. Darcy kept quiet as Lisbon glanced up from the interrogation table to stare at him, unmasked hurt in her green eyes.
“I don’t know what to believe anymore, Jane.” Lisbon replied, quietly and the raw pain in her voice made his heart ache. She had seemed so full of life when he had last talked to her; she had yelled at him for his treatment of Darcy and Wainwright, while he had flipped through the radio channels within the SUV. But now, she just looked and sounded lost. “I thought you were a good person once upon a time, but I guess I was just an ignorant Senior Agent of the Serious Crimes Unit.”
Was? Jane caught onto her word choice with an inquisitive stare. Wainwright’s earlier use of Ms. Lisbon toward the Senior Agent had set off a few warning flags within his head. The Special-Agent-in-Charge had always usually called Lisbon by her official title, mainly out of respect, and Lisbon’s shrug following her ignorant comment concerned him. The Lisbon he had known would have never shrugged off the loss of her job (he assumed that whoever had framed him for all of those crimes had somehow caused for Lisbon to lose her job, the one thing that she prided above everything else), she would have found someway to challenge the decision. Although, Jane was slightly confused as to why Lisbon was still at the CBI, especially if Wainwright had fired her.
Jane wanted to grab her from where he was sitting to tell her that everything would be okay, but he couldn’t. Instead, he continued to wonder what in the world had happened to her. What had happened to the Teresa Lisbon had had once known and had thought the world of? The woman before him was a mere shell of her former self, aside from when she had punched him in the nose earlier.
“Who said that?” Jane asked her and she continued to glance at him, her stare unwavering. “I did?” Lisbon nodded and he stared at her with a frown. Lisbon was one of the smartest Senior Agents that he had ever known and he could say that, because he had worked with Ray Halfner and his group of overgrown monkeys for a week. “I would never say anything like that to you, Lisbon. I know how well you’ve always done your job and even if you’ve made a few mistakes,” he took a moment to glare at Darcy, “I promise we’ll work through them.”
“I made several mistakes.” Lisbon said, quietly as she glanced back down at the table. “I got Rigsby killed, Summer killed, because I didn’t listen. I got Van Pelt raped and pregnant, because I didn’t use my head. I almost got Cho killed, because I didn’t see it. But above all of that,” Lisbon met his eyes again, “falling in love with you was the worst mistake I’ve ever made.” She bowed her head toward the table again and he stared at the top of her head, confusion written across his face.
Lisbon had been in love with him?
He tried to wrap his head around the thought of her loving him, as he vaguely heard Darcy leave the interrogation room. He and Lisbon had been friends for a long time; she had seen him at his worst, she had been the one to help her get her memory back (even if he had resented her about how she had gone about it for awhile) and she had stood by him, when everybody else had left him to suffer on his own. But he had never thought of any of that as love, because Lisbon had always been an extremely loyal and private person.
Apart from her one night stand with Walter Mashburn, Lisbon had never taken a lover in the years that she had known him and a woman as beautiful as her (even as a workaholic with a damaged intensity) had to get asked out or hit on every once in a while, didn’t she? Jane had never thought of her staying single as being directly related to him though; he had just thought it had something to do with her job (the odd hours of her job made relationships nearly impossible) or Red John, who had the tendency of getting jealous when someone new entered the playing field.
Jane continued to stare at Lisbon. How had he missed it? The lingering stares, the easy smiles, the way she had always tried to save him from his own messes, and the way she dropped everything for him and for his crazy plans to catch Red John.
She had been completely in love with him and he had never given her anything to work with. Too consumed with his quest for revenge toward Red John and the memories of his lost family, he hadn’t even seen what Red John probably had.
That he, Patrick Jane, was in love with her, Teresa Lisbon, too.
He opened his mouth to tell her how much of an idiot he had been and how much of their time he had wasted already with his silly apologies, but before he could get the words out, Lisbon stood from her chair and left him in the interrogation room; alone with only his demons and regrets to keep him company, until Darcy returned and allowed for someone to take him from the room.
--
Part One - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four - Part Five 1/2 - Part Five 2/2 - Part Six - Part Seven - Part Eight - Part Nine 1/2 - Part Nine 2/2 - Part Ten - Part Eleven - Part Twelve - Part Thirteen - Part Fourteen - Part Fifteen - Part Sixteen 1/2 - Part Sixteen 2/2 - Part Seventeen - Part Eighteen - Part Twenty 1/2 - Part Twenty 2/2 - Part Twenty-One