FIC: Acrimonious (4/21)
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 The 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.
4-
At a little past six in the morning, Red John found himself with the Serious Crimes Unit bullpen. He had Jane’s badge clenched tightly in his fingers, as he glanced around the dead and dimly lit bullpen. Desks remained in almost every available space and he knew without a doubt that most of the desks within the cluttered room belonged to the members of the SCU.
Red John had always believed in the concept of psychology and from a distance, he noticed that each had probably been decorated to reflect its current owner; some of the desks had small trinkets nearby (cheap toy vehicles, a plastic basketball hoop off to the side), while other desks were colored by paperwork left over from Friday evening. He briefly stepped over to the desk closest to him and lifted the discolored manila folder with vague interest; he knew he would find the case information for either Amy or Alice Childs, but he wanted to see if the agents had discovered anything unusual about the case yet.
Grace’s legible handwriting graced each page within the folder, as he flipped through and scanned the details of the case. Amy Childs had always shown some psychological distress prior to her sister’s death, Terri Childs had said. Red John shook his head with a scowl. Terri and Bryan Childs, the matriarch and patriarch of the family, had only ever paid attention to their youngest pride and joy, Alice Nicole. If either Terri or Bryan had taken the time to properly appreciate and nurture their eldest daughter and her various talents, Amy wouldn’t have been so easy to entice into making her younger sister drink undiluted sanitizer from a plastic bottle that she had filled at her local workplace.
Red John shook his head at some of Grace’s written comments. Whether the redheaded agent knew it or not, the immediate family of Alice and Amy would paint the eldest daughter as a criminal; Amy had gone to a state university for a creative writing degree two hours away from her hometown, though her parents had wanted her to stay close and obtain a license to practice medicine. Alice, on the other hand, had been encouraged to take up a major in acting, which had made Amy somewhat bitter.
Amy had never once belittled her sister’s acting talents, but the entire family had continued to belittle Amy over her ultimately useless major. He had watched the young woman take hit after hit about her lack of talent, until he had eventually offered her a hand in something great; the chance to make something of herself and show the world that she was more than just Amy Childs, the repressed daughter of an abusive family.
He sat the manila folder back down on Grace’s desk, before he turned around to face the nearly empty desk near the decrepit leather couch. Red John had never been able to spy on the unit within the bullpen, but both Rebecca and O’Laughlin had told him about Jane’s property within the bullpen; a desk, adorned with books on the human condition and a rather old, leather couch.
Neither accomplice had been able to tell him which one the man had preferred though, but he doubted anybody would kick up a fuss about his decision to sit at the desk. With that thought, Red John slid into the uncomfortable desk chair and closed his eyes. Yesterday had been a hectic day; he hadn’t slept well, as Jane’s body had outright refused to acclimatize to his own sleep schedule and because the neighbors next door had decided that everybody within hearing distance needed to be privy to their cheating ways. Thomas had called him with concerns about Jane’s odd behavior in the bathroom, which had irritated him even more. The isolated bathroom, deep within the bowels of his rural hideout, had been constructed by occupants in the early eighteen-hundreds to contain their supposed mentally unsound daughter. The small cell of a room had been redesigned with soundproof walls and only held a porcelain bathtub, a matching toilet, and an uncomfortable metal bed with leather restraints.
Patrick had apparently taken a turn for the worst last night, as the man had a seizure under Thomas’s watch.
“I’m not a doctor, sir.” Thomas had said, when Red John had pressed for more details over his cup of morning tea. “Mr. Jane had been in a cationic state for most of the night, until right around three this morning.” The time of the seizure had surprised him, as he had dozed off around that time. “From a distance, I watched his body shake. His mouth frothed, I believe and I could smell the unmistakable stench of urine again.”
“Why didn’t you restrain him?” Red John had asked, through clenched teeth. Seizures had been known to kill individuals before and if Patrick had died due to the stupidity of his accomplices, heads would roll. He wasn’t asking Thomas to take the man to the doctor; he was just asking the accomplice to take care of his body, the individual residing inside of it and not to look under the mask he had left on his body. “Do I need to return?”
Thomas had reassured him that he didn’t need to return. Red John took the words from his accomplice under advisement, as he had spent the rest of the day holed up inside Patrick’s motel room, exploring his various options.
Red John opened his eyes and scanned the dark room; nobody else had joined him within the room, yet something didn’t feel quite right about the room. He took a quick glimpse in the direction of the dark kitchenette, only to find it completely lit and his movements stilled. Had the CBI custodial crew decided to start their day? Or had someone from the Serious Crimes Unit decided to start their early, as well? Red John heard the click-clack of shoes from a distance and he willed his body to stay put.
He had started his day early to get a handle on the CBI and each of its dysfunctional agents within the SCU, but he had never counted on another agent joining him at six-thirty in the morning. He closed his eyes again and tried to ignore the unknown presence, as he wracked his brain for information that he had gleamed about the members of the SCU from the various moles he had placed on the inside. Red John had known that the unit held four agents-Kimball Cho, Wayne Rigsby, Grace Van Pelt and Teresa Lisbon. He had also learned that the CBI had gone through two bosses in the past four years and that they were currently on their third one: Luther Wainwright, who nobody could take seriously due to his youthful age.
However, his friends had given him a few new pieces of information yesterday.
Kimball had a girlfriend named Summer, who dallied in the professions of prostitution and snitching out her clients’ dirty laundry. The man, according to one of his many friends, was smitten with his blonde prostitute; answering her calls at work, always running to her side if she needed him, and allowing her to span his addiction to painkillers.
Red John had often found the concept of love to be a silly thing, good for only luring individuals into committing atrocious acts to help better the world. Feeling love for anything, he believed with a scowl, makes you weak and undeserving of good things. His father had never truly loved his mother and the world had still gone on, without even caring that a little boy at the age of seven had to listen to the screams of his mother almost every night.
He shook the childhood memory off with the satisfying image of his father’s bloodied body; his ghastly head buried under an old oak tree back home, after having been garroted with a length of red speaker wire. His father had gotten what he deserved in the end, much like everybody else eventually would.
Wayne had a girlfriend named Sarah and a little boy named Benjamin. Wayne had worshiped Grace for years, until the enchanted agent had apparently realized that the redheaded female was no better than a ten cent whore and that he needed to move on with his life.
So he had, with a defense lawyer, and the man hadn’t been able to keep his manhood in his pants, as baby Benjamin had been conceived on a red couch and had become a bastard out of wedlock.
It had also seemed as if the younger agent had the philosophy of if that one doesn’t satisfy you, throw it away and find a new one toward women, which Red John immensely approved of. In his opinion, women were nothing but tools that should only be used for ultimate sexual gratification and for the manipulation of others.
Grace was still reeling from the death of Craig O’Laughlin, her ex-fiancé. Grace had taken O’Laughlin from him via her whorish ways and he felt the need to teach her a lesson. Women like Grace also needed to be dominated and he knew exactly how to do it, as he had broken many women into his ranks.
Red John knew that by the time he was completely finished with her, the female agent would learn to keep her legs closed. His mouth went dry at the thought of nipping at her tits with his teeth, much like he had done with Lorelei; he couldn’t wait to get too started, but he knew he had to wait. Patience, whether he liked it or not, was vial to understanding how best to destroy the entire Serious Crimes Unit.
Teresa though, was his ticket to everything. The unit looked up to the Senior Agent, who had taken down more criminals than they ever had (or would) and Red John knew her heart (pure and good natured; two things that could be easily manipulated) belonged to Patrick. Of course, how could it not? Damaged intensities were highly attractive and Patrick, an ex-con with a past that just screamed help me over and over again, attracted Teresa’s undying attention due to her ever present saving people complex.
After all, Teresa hadn’t been able to save her alcoholic father from ending his own life and because Patrick was still alive, she probably hoped that she could save him from either prison or death by leading him astray from his quest for revenge. Leading Patrick astray in his quest would never work though. The life of Patrick Jane belonged to him, as did the lives of everyone else that Patrick cared for.
The imagined image and feel of Grace’s large, quivering tits between his teeth hadn’t flooded his body with heat quite like Teresa’s vulnerable body had and he couldn’t wait to acquire her body for what it was ultimately worth. Teresa didn’t need to be taught a lesson like Grace did, but it didn’t mean that he couldn’t make an example out of her.
Patrick Jane couldn’t love women, as he had been in love with his demons for so long and Teresa Lisbon was just wasting her time with him; she was his collateral damage, after all. Teresa and her unit probably could have caught him eons ago, if the senior agent hadn’t been so invested in her own personal cause to fix and reform him into a better person.
The slender brunette was an idiot, in his opinion. She should have listened to the various warnings from her co-workers about Patrick and about the extent of carnage he left behind in his wake. If she had heeded those warnings, he would have never felt the need to try and reform her also. An eye for an eye was how the idiom often went, and Red John had never been one for ignoring idioms.
Teresa Lisbon rechecked the time on her computer, before she stood from her desk and drained the last drop of coffee from her white CBI mug with a grimace. The coffee within the bureau had never tasted spectacular, as the coffee machine was probably older than most of the younger employees on the floor, but the cup she had just finished off tasted worse than usual and she debated silently on the idea of retrieving another cup.
Crap tasting coffee or not, she needed the caffeine to try and wean off the inevitable headache she was bound to have later on. Lisbon could already feel the tension slowly creeping in, although she thought it might have had something to do with the way she had been hunched over her paperwork from their latest case and not due to the amount of lingering alcohol in her system.
After Wainwright had given them all three days off, Lisbon had been glad to return back to her desk and back to the mundane world of paperwork for a while. The past weekend had been a horrible one, due to the Child’s case that had weighed heavily on her mind all weekend. She had wondered if she could have stopped Amy from ending her own life, by wounding the younger woman.
But the more she had thought about it, the more she realized that Amy would have found another way to end her life. Not that the wistful thought had helped elevate her guilt, but still.
Lisbon glanced briefly at her desk phone, the grimace still on her face; she had been waiting for it to ring all morning and after the clock had crept past nine without a peep, she wondered if Agent Wainwright dealt with protocol differently than Minelli had. She and Jane had witnessed a traumatic sight and she knew from the last time-Dumar Hardy, Red John’s friend, almost having killed her and Jane having shot him in her defense-the bureau would want them cleared, before they were even allowed to return back to duty.
Wainwright, while young and inexperienced, didn’t seem like the type of CBI boss to go against protocol and Lisbon wondered if her previous experience with ex-CBI psychologist, Roy Carmen, had something to do with his radio silence.
After all, Lisbon told herself, Wainwright knows.
Minelli had included notes into everybody’s personnel file before he had retired and Hightower had approached to ask her about the Dr. Carmen situation shortly after. To her, it was common knowledge that the CBI bosses took the time to glance through the notes from their predecessors before they conferred with the heads of each unit to ask about anything disquieting. Wainwright, in their first meeting alone months ago, had only asked about the team’s role in the Timothy Carter/Craig O’Laughlin debacle and she had just assumed that Hightower had added more complete notes to her file about Carmen.
She yawned into her hand. Lisbon had been doing paperwork since she had stepped into her office at a little past five that morning, aside from the brief coffee break and the trip to the bathroom that she had taken due to the fullness in her bladder earlier, she had not been away from her paperwork for too long. With the coffee mug in her grasp, Lisbon decided to leave her office to drop in on her team, who hadn’t interrupted her all morning. The silence had been nice, but the lack of Jane’s presence troubled her.
The blonde consultant usually, fights or no fights, made his presence known early on in the work day. After he had been kidnapped by Rachel and had been cattle prodded enough times last year, Jane had refused to go anywhere without dropping in on her first (something about how he knew how much he meant to her and how he didn’t want to rob himself from her life). Of course, she had just rolled her eyes at his egotism.
Lisbon stepped past Ron within the hallway to get into the semi-busy bullpen. Her team, she quickly noticed, all sat at their desks and had their eyes focused on Jane’s Corner, which remained empty of the consultant.
“Good morning.” Lisbon greeted her team, who greeted her back with half-hearted smiles and waves. She stared at them all in bewilderment. First day back at work or not, the team usually (especially Grace Van Pelt) greeted her with more enthusiasm than that. She noticed that their attentions had gone back to Jane’s Corner and she grew irritated. What was so interesting about Jane’s couch? “If you take a picture of Jane’s couch, it might actually last longer.”
Van Pelt’s brown eyes met hers first, a light blush dusted the junior agent’s cheeks. “Sorry, boss. We’re just a little confused.” Rigsby nodded in agreement from his desk and Cho merely blinked, which didn’t mean one thing or another to her.
“By what?” Lisbon questioned. She wanted to know what about Jane’s couch had her team so distracted.
“By me.” Jane’s voice came from behind her and she slowly turned to find the blonde consultant, a blue tea cup in his hands.
Lisbon’s eyebrows shot up and her mouth parted slightly in surprise. The team’s baffled expressions made more sense, especially as Jane wasn’t wearing his usual three-piece suit attire; he was wearing an expensive-looking black suit, a white collared shirt underneath and a light blue tie to boot.
“Is there something wrong, Lisbon?” Jane asked her, she watched him take a sip of his tea with a small smile on his lips. “Nobody else would tell me, even though I’ve asked.” Lisbon blinked. The last time she had seen Jane outside of his three-piece suits, it had been when she had caught sight of him on television with her roommate many years ago. Jess had been watching the program in the living room of their apartment and when Lisbon had asked her why, after having left her own room to grab something to eat from the kitchen, the youthful blonde had replied with a simple shrug of her shoulders and had given the answer of: “Teresa, Patrick Jane is attractive. I don’t watch for any of the psychic crap, I just watch for him and his body.”
Lisbon swallowed back her concern for her consultant and friend, as he continued to brightly smile at her.
“Nothing’s wrong, Jane.” She felt the team’s inquisitive stares on her and she brushed them all off. In front of the team, Lisbon knew, Jane would never admit if something was troubling him and she made a mental note to ask him about it when they were alone. She doubted his change of attire was directly related to their fight last Friday, but one never knew with the enigma that was Jane.
Jane stepped past her with a smile still and she turned on her heels to watch him resettle back down onto his couch, he never did though. Instead, the consultant moved to his rarely used desk, put the tea cup down, and lowered himself into the accompanying chair, before he picked a book up and held it to his face.
Lisbon glanced to Cho in confusion. Jane had only ever used his desk to store his crap in, as the man had always enjoyed his couch more. Cho shrugged his shoulders in response and she sighed. If Jane’s behavior was due to some mental break, caused by Amy Child’s suicide, she had to know sooner than later.
Slowly, she approached his desk and cleared her throat when he didn’t glance up from Thomas Harris’s Hannibal right away, which he still held in his hands. From behind the book, she heard Jane eventually speak.
“You remind me a lot of Clarice Starling, Lisbon.” Lisbon rolled her eyes. Only Jane could manage to compare her to a fictional character and still sound patronizing, while doing so. “Ambitious, smart, tough…” Jane trailed off, as if he had more to say on the matter, but he fell silent and rested the book back down on his desk to stare at her. “How may I be of service?”
“Is everything alright, Jane?” Lisbon asked and she watched him take another sip of his tea.
“Yes, Lisbon.” Jane responded, after he had set the tea cup back down. “Why wouldn’t it be?” Because we’ve passed by the ninth anniversary of your wife and daughter’s deaths is what she wanted to say, but instead she shook her head at his question. “You don’t believe me?” Genuine surprise in his tone caught her attention. Jane knew she didn’t believe or trust him, unless the consultant had proof and proof wasn’t a conversation about Hannibal. “I’m hurt that you haven’t even asked who I would be within the book.”
Lisbon sighed under her breath. Jane would never tell her anything, unless she played along with his little game. “Okay, Jane. Who would you be within the book?” Jane’s smile widened.
“I don’t think I should tell you right now, Lisbon.” Jane replied, which made Lisbon roll her eyes again. Even if Jane had told her who he thought he was, she would have very little idea of who he was talking about. She had read Silence of the Lambs years ago, not that she remembered the book well enough to discuss literary themes with Jane and any comparisons he made from Hannibal would have been moot to her. “Surprises are good for the heart.” Jane’s surprises were never good for anything, except for spiking her blood pressure dangerously high.
“Why aren’t you at your couch, Jane?” Lisbon swiftly changed the subject, as she brought her arms against her chest. “I usually have to beat you away from your couch, but today you’re at your desk?” Lisbon scanned Jane’s face for any sign of something being wrong, but his face gave her nothing to work with.
“Change is good for the cathartic soul.” It didn’t surprise her that the consultant had avoided giving her an answer with an off-handed remark, even if it still slightly irked her. Jane continued to beam at her and with another shake of the head, Lisbon quickly turned away from him to address Van Pelt, who had gone back to focusing her attentions on something else.
“Van…” Lisbon started only to be interrupted by the ringing of Van Pelt’s desk phone. Van Pelt answered on the third ring with an apologetic smile. Lisbon hoped the call wasn’t about a case, but they were homicide detectives and she wasn’t that lucky. She watched the Junior Agent write something down on a notepad, before she hung up the phone and turned to face her.
“We have a case.” Van Pelt confirmed what Lisbon had already known. “It’s at Saint George’s High School in Dustin County.” Lisbon nodded, before she glanced around at her team. She knew that she and Jane wouldn’t be able to step onto the field until she had obtained Wainwright’s permission to do so, however, that didn’t mean that she couldn’t send several members of her team to scope out the scene.
“Rigsby and Van Pelt go with Cho.” Lisbon ordered and she watched the team gather their jackets from the back of their chairs, before she turned back to Jane. “You and I need to stay here, until Agent Wainwright tells us otherwise.” The team left and Jane lost his smile. “Before you say anything; protocol is protocol, Jane. I don’t make the rules, I just enforce them.”
“Call him then.” Jane suggested and Lisbon raised her eyebrow in response. Hurrying the head of the CBI never boded well for anybody, especially not those already in hot water with the upper management. “The longer we sit here, Lisbon, the longer chance the murderer has to slip away.” She knew Jane had a valid point. While Cho, Rigsby and Van Pelt knew what they were doing and she trusted them to follow protocol at a crime scene, the murderer had a chance to slip away if the local PD and the CBI argued over jurisdiction. With her there though, she felt that she could at least alleviate some of the tensions between both groups with orders from Wainwright on who was point in the investigation. Jane stood from his desk and stepped toward her, only to put his hand on her upper arm.
Lisbon blinked down at his hand on her arm. Jane rarely touched others, which made her highly suspicious of him. Was Jane going to hypnotize her into calling Wainwright? She narrowed her eyes up at him, though he didn’t back away from her.
“Jane…” Lisbon warned him and he smiled again at her.
“I’m a friend, who just wants to encourage you to call Wainwright.” His bluish-green eyes met hers and she tried to ignore the knots forming in her stomach. “Nothing more, nothing less.” Jane removed his hand from her arm, as he continued to smile at her. “I’m going to get a cup of tea while we’re waiting for Wainwright. Call if you need anything.” Jane left her and her drumming heartbeat, which raced within her chest. She hated what his touch did to her, as it made it almost impossible to work with him.
Jane’s right, Lisbon told herself, I should call Wainwright. If she didn’t call him, they’d never leave the office.
She went to Van Pelt’s desk and dialed Wainwright’s extension to his office with a new found determination. “Agent Wainwright,” Lisbon greeted, after the youthful boss had answered his phone. “I have a question for you.”
--
Part One - Part Two - Part Three - 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 Nineteen - Part Twenty 1/2 - Part Twenty 2/2 - Part Twenty-One