Chapter Text
Lisbon knows that it’s irrational to keep going to the church where Jane appeared nearly months ago like a manifestation of all her most hopes, but she can’t help herself. Every time she steps over the threshold, she thinks to herself, Maybe. Maybe this time he’ll be here. If anyone could pull off another impossible sleight of hand, it would be him: appearing like the punchline to a joke, like his endless, infuriating stunts.
Saint Mark’s Church is as lovely as ever and brings to mind a thousand Sunday Masses from childhood, days of feeling safe and loved and protected and days of feeling terrified for her and her brothers’ safety. Evening sunlight trickles through the stained glass, the last gasp of day before another night falls. Candles shimmer, wood gleams. The air holds that ringing sound of a beautifully acoustic space. If she listens closely, she can still hear the memory of her own voice in the rafters: “God, I hate you Jane. I hate you!” Is that the echo of his laugh in her mind, or is he crawling between the pews right now? If she wishes hard enough, could he appear?
But no. It’s been two months since Jane went through with his insane plan to trap Red John with a faked breakdown, and two months since Jane was kidnapped by the serial killer for his troubles. And what did they have to show for it? Nothing.
No, not nothing, Lisbon mentally amends with a shiver; they had two of Jane’s fingers that had been cut off with garden shears and left in the dust in a foreclosed suburb of Las Vegas. He had been pushed into the limousine and had disappeared along with Red John and any leads they might have. Bertram had been furious at both the deception and the outcome, and it had only been by groveling at Wainwright’s feet that any of them still had jobs. The team didn’t know who Red John’s accomplices had been – Jane had neglected to mention any names – and they could hardly trace one black stretch limousine in Vegas without knowing its plates or any other identifying features. They’d played right into Red John’s hands, and Red John had won.
Even Agent Darcy had left the Red John case after she had put out an arrest warrant for Jane just in time to arrive at the CBI and see his fingers carted in on ice as evidence. She’d sputtered something to Lisbon and Wainwright about Jane working with Red John and it had taken everything inside Lisbon not to deck her for the impertinence. Van Pelt, on the other hand, had calmly and concisely told Agent Darcy that if she thought she was going to besmirch the name of a kidnapping victim to the people who cared about him most in the world, she had another thing coming.
In the meantime, Lisbon is working overtime on whatever cases come across her desk, as if solving enough random murders will tip the cosmic scales and bring Jane back. He’d be the first to mock her for the religious undertones, but there isn’t anything else for her to do but bury herself in paperwork and homicides until a lead comes their way. Her current case is particularly grisly: an employee at a battered woman’s shelter tortured to death and, a week later, a member of the shelter’s board of trustees as well. Earlier today, Rigsby found evidence that the shelter was doctoring the books to make at least six women disappear, but that had only expanded the list of people who might want to hurt Julia Howard or Jason Lennon.
Lisbon makes the sign of the cross, kneels, and closes her eyes. If all she can do is pray for her partner’s safe return, then she is going to do that at least. The sounds of a door creaking and soft footfall echo in the chapel, and she squeezes her eyes just a little tighter.
“I’m envious, you know,” says a voice just to her right. For a moment she imagines that it’s Jane come back to her, but the feminine timbre is all wrong. Opening her eyes, Lisbon turns. The woman seated next to her in the pew is pretty, a slim brunette in a leather jacket, hair pulled up and away to show off wide eyes and rounded cheekbones reflection candlelight. It takes Lisbon a moment to track back to what she’d said.
“Envious? Of what?”
“Your faith. I used to have absolute faith, but not anymore. I miss the certainty.” She kneels next to Lisbon, tucks her boots underneath the pew gracefully.
Lisbon doesn’t know how to say that her faith isn’t absolute, that these days it feels like she’s screaming out into the void for a miracle that will never come. It was bad enough when Jane had run away to Vegas, when she knew that his cruelty with her heart was all of his own volition. These days, though, she longs for the days when he had chosen his exile.
“Ah,” the woman says, responding to whatever Lisbon’s face is telling her. “Not faith, then. Just praying and hoping.”
It’s so Jane-like – when will anything not remind her of Jane? – that Lisbon’s voice goes low with anger. “Hoping for what?”
“Your heart’s desire. I can give it to you, if you like.”
Is this woman is coming onto her? Lisbon is preparing to let her down kindly – though why anyone would try to score a date in a Catholic church is beyond her – but something about the turn of phrase strikes her.
“My heart’s desire?” She doesn’t need to ask herself what it is. Her heart beats out the answer: Jane, alive; Jane, safe; Jane, back by her side.
“Yes. All I need from you is one little thing in return.”
The words feel like they’re happening to someone else, far away. Lisbon can’t make sense of the meaning. Seeing the confusion on her face, the woman continues.
“Don’t worry Teresa, it won’t be anything like what I asked from Patrick. No heads in boxes, I promise.”
Suddenly the whole conversation snaps into focus, and Lisbon’s hand tightens on the Glock at her hip. She turns in the pew to face the woman head on. She’s smiling as calmly as anything when she puts out her hand to shake.
“I’m Lorelei. I’ve heard a lot about you. And I’m not kidding, by the way,” she says, holding her hand out for an awkward moment longer until it’s clear that Lisbon will not be shaking it, then folds it back into her lap. “You and I could help each other.”
“What do you want?” Lisbon’s voice sounds like it’s coming up from the bottom of a very deep well.
“Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night… It’s awfully dramatic, don’t you think? The sort of thing a bunch of boys playing with their toys would come up with. You deal with all the little Tygers, and I’ll give you what you want.” At Lisbon’s blank look, Lorelei continues. “You didn’t really think it was just one or two dirty cops, right? A mole here, a mole there? There are hundreds of them, and I’m not bargaining with you just to get killed as soon as I’m in police custody. You clean house, and I deliver. You might want to do it fast, though. He’ll catch on soon, and all that I can offer you will disappear.”
The enormity of what this woman is suggesting is horrifying. Hundreds…? “He hasn’t caught on already?”
“We have two things in our favor, Teresa.” Lorelei flips her ponytail over one shoulder. “First, he would never suspect his most loyal follower of turning, and second…” Her voice drops into a whisper like there’s a juicy secret on her tongue. “Red John is very preoccupied with his new toy. He’s left the business operations to the side for a moment so that he can enjoy his new friendship. If you strike hard and fast, he might not know until it’s too late.”
The conversation is giving her whiplash; it’s all she can do to keep up. This Lorelei revels in the information she holds, the power it gives her.
“Why are you doing this?” Lisbon asks. The one thing that she has never seen, never even imagined, is one of Red John’s disciples turning on their master.
“I told you. Loss of faith.” There’s suddenly something dark behind her eyes, a violence that Lisbon has seen in the eyes of killers when they confess and, to a lesser extent, Jane on each Red John case. It’s a promise of revenge, but against who?
Lisbon can imagine it suddenly, this seductive voice, this seductive face asking Jane for her dead body, dangling the one thing he’d do anything for in front of him until he couldn’t see anything else. How had Jane put it? “Because he wants to believe.” But Lisbon isn’t a believer, not like this. She won’t put her life on the line for a trap, no matter how desperately she wants what Lorelei is offering.
“I have to go.” Maybe it’s foolish to turn her back on one of Red John’s pets, but Lisbon can’t sit here any longer before doing something she might regret.
“No, Teresa, wait.” A delicate hand catches her wrist. “At least let me deliver a message.”
“That wasn’t your message?”
“That was my own message. I also have a message from Patrick. He says…” Lorelei hesitates, drawing out the moment just before a revelation, just like Jane had so many times before. “He says that he was a coward. He didn’t forget his words before he pulled the trigger, and that he meant what he said.”
Lisbon didn’t think anything Lorelei said could hurt more than “his new toy,” but this does. It’s so final, the kind of thing that Jane wouldn’t say unless he thought he might never see her again. And it is certainly not the kind of thing he would say in Red John’s presence, she realizes. She knows enough to trust that Jane wouldn’t paint a bigger target on her back, which means that he thinks this Lorelei can be trusted, or trusted enough. But can she trust it?
“Tell me what you know,” Lisbon says, her voice soft. A trapped, fluttering feeling stirs between her ribs, her heart pounding in time. It feels suspiciously like hope.