Chapter Text
They spent the rest of the drive holding hands, glancing at each other too frequently for it to be considered responsible driving, and saying basically nothing. Evening had begun to fall when she pulled up in front of a pretty suburban home, pleasantly lived in, kids toys scattered across an otherwise well maintained lawn. It was totally discordant with everything else that had come up in the case so far.
She looked at him. “Not even a hint?”
He smiled, leaned across and kissed her on her nose. “No,” he said. “Just follow my lead.”
As they climbed out of the car, he said, “It’ll be really embarrassing if I’m wrong, you might stop having feelings for me.”
She smiled and knocked her shoulder into his arm once he had rounded the car. “Nah,” she said. “I bet I’d find you being wrong kind of cute, actually.”
Jane made a considering noise as he jumped up the steps of the porch. “Much to think about,” he said, glancing back at her before knocking on the door.
A minute later, a frazzled looking woman holding a toddler on her hip pushed it open. She looked them up and down and said, “Journalists?”
“No,” Jane said. “Are you Barry Liston’s wife?”
She nodded, chin raised defensively, although she looked like she was about to cry. Teresa couldn’t get a read on the situation at all. “Who are you?”
“We’re from the city,” Jane said. “We’re looking into a case there we think might have something to do with your husband.”
Teresa watched her hand grip the doorframe, her knuckles turning white. “You know where he is?” she asked, barely more than a whisper.
“So he is missing?” asked Jane, a half question and half statement, like the wife had confirmed a theory.
She frowned. “Isn’t that why you’re here? What do you know?”
“Not enough, not yet,” Jane said. “I wanted to ask about that case your husband was involved in a year ago—”
The woman’s face turned cold. “You are journalists, aren’t you?” she said. “I’ve told you, that has nothing to do with this. They never had any evidence, they never even arrested him, all they could do was ask him questions. And now he’s missing, and people want to linger on some bullshit accusation from over a year ago instead of looking for him. It’s been a week.”
Her voice broke on the last word, and Teresa’s heart broke a little too. She mightn’t have much of an idea what was going on, but the obvious reason for them to be reaching out to the family of a missing person was if they thought the missing person was the body. She scanned the lawn behind her, all the toys. This woman probably had more than just the one kid she was holding.
“A week exactly?” Jane asked.
The woman clenched her jaw. “Who are you? The papers have the details.”
“I told you,” Jane said. “We’re investigating a case in the city that we think might be related. When did your husband go missing?”
“Saturday,” she said, warily.
Jimmy had been caught with the suitcase Sunday morning, but hired for the job on Thursday. It chilled her, the premeditation, that they had hired the person to dispose of the body before they’d actually carried out the murder. Jane nodded.
“Thank you,” he said, and his voice had softened, and there was some pain in his expression she wasn’t sure she’d always been able to see. She wondered how difficult it was for him, to interact with people who were bereaved like he’d been bereaved. And he couldn’t even talk about it, couldn’t tell this woman what he thought had happened, not until it had been confirmed. Not even Jane would be that reckless. “And I’m sorry,” Jane added. “For what you’re going through, I’m sorry.”
She looked surprised, like she heard sincerity in it she wasn’t used to hearing, and she nodded shakily. Teresa and Jane retreated quietly, but at the car Teresa hesitated before getting in. Across the roof she said to him, “I’m not waiting until we’re back in Chicago for you to tell me what the hell that was all about.”
He looked at her and after a couple moments nodded. “Okay,” he said. “But don’t get angry at me.”
-
They found a nearby kitschy cafe and ordered coffee, mindless of the late hour. She felt jet lagged, her body clock out of sync. The case and the kiss made the idea of trying to sleep in the next six hours seem laughable.
“Start from the start,” she said.
“I’m not that straightforward,” he said, leaning back. He immediately leaned forward again, taking her hand, like he’d just remembered he could. She smiled. He said, “It’s hard to know what the start was. Maybe it was you, the conversation about cops breaking rules. When it’s okay and when it isn’t.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
He sighed and shook his head. “First I wanted to ask you a couple questions, actually.”
“Sure.”
“Is it strange that Jimmy got pulled over, or just bad luck?”
“Bad luck,” she said. “The cops hadn’t been tipped off to look out for anything, if that’s what you mean.”
He nodded, not looking surprised. “And when you met Cho today, did he think it was the Kavanaghs?”
She raised her eyebrows. “No,” she said. “They’d used their own money to pay Jimmy, and the other mule, but it’s not one of their bodies.”
Again, he didn’t look surprised. “What does this mean to you?” she asked.
“Your brother said he had bad luck,” Jane said. “I’m not superstitious, but in this line of work, you do meet people who just seem to get dealt a rough hand, over and over. I wonder if Steve had paid someone else, someone with better luck, if the body would have ever been found.”
She bit her lip. It was strange to think that her brother getting pulled over could be a good thing – could lead to the apprehension of a murderer. She figured, if Jimmy got off easy, that would eventually be how he’d spin the story.
Jane looked at her, squeezed her hand. “That was the first thing I wanted to know,” he said. “If your brother was deliberately framed or just an unfortunate fall guy. It’s important because it’s not that great a frame job. The case against him has been pretty weak from the start. And the rest of the murder, the whole arrangement, seems like it was orchestrated by someone careful and paranoid and meticulous. If their intent was to frame, they would have left the murder weapon in his house, or something. They’d have given him the whole body, unless they thought having three or four different couriers increased the likelihood of them being caught. But still, it would be strange if it was a frame job.”
Teresa nodded. So far it made sense, and he hadn’t said anything to annoy her.
“And if it was someone being that meticulous, drugs didn’t make sense,” Jane said. “The guys at the top are never the ones who pull the trigger, and the guys lower down don’t have the time or resources to be this careful. Their bosses don’t want them to get caught, sure, but this was… this was the plan of someone whose life would be ruined if they were caught.”
Teresa nodded again.
“I mean, it was just that we kept talking about cops – Rob was talking about cops, about Whitley. It was just putting it in my head. Not the most logical train of thought, but that’s how I started to wonder.”
“About?”
“About the case against Pete,” Jane said. “It was a fuck up, some cop fucked up, ruined a perfectly strong case. Like how Rob ruined the case against Tommy by fucking up. Naturally it occurred to me to wonder if the same thing had gotten Pete off the hook. A cop fucking up deliberately, I mean.”
“We’ve all wondered,” Lisbon said. “It’s not that rare, for people like Pete to magically get off the hook.”
“Because local cops take bribes, right?” Jane said. She nodded. “But what if this was barter, instead? They didn’t pay off a cop, they just offered to do them a favor. Or the cop offered to sabotage the case in return for a favor.”
She felt disgusted, and pushed her coffee away from her. “Disposing of the body? You think a cop killed someone like that?”
“I’ll admit, I didn’t have strong reason too. It just occurred to me as a possibility. So today I went to read the publicly available files on some closed cases to see if the theory held water. Let me tell you some things.”
“Please do.”
“Firstly, the case that fell apart against Pete was the weapons charges that Whitley was handling, the one Rob mentioned. Secondly, something Rob didn’t seem to realize, she was the cop who fucked up on it. She tried to hide it, but if you pay attention it becomes obvious. Thirdly, about a year ago she had a case she went to bat for—”
“That’s in the file?”
“No, Robert told us that,” Jane said. “Said she never let go of cases she couldn’t bring across the line. She had a few cold cases and I found the one I wanted—”
“How?”
“Do you understand what I’m saying about her, by now?”
“Yes,” Teresa said, but she still had to build up some nerve to say it. “You think that she got so frustrated with not being able to pin some crime on someone, someone she presumably knew was guilty, that she killed them. And you think it’s this Barry Liston who’s missing. But how did you know it’d be him?”
“For Rob not to have heard gossip about something happening to someone she had it in against, and for the disappearance not to have been connected with the dead body, I knew the case had to meet a couple basic criteria. Firstly, the suspect couldn’t have been arrested or charged in the crime she thought they were guilty of, or that’d come up in the system when they were reported missing. Secondly, while the crime itself must have happened in the city, the suspect must have lived outside of it, so that the cops investigating the disappearance didn’t overlap with the cops investigating the murder. Whitley’s been with Chicago PD for three years, and two cases met that description. One was a non-violent robbery, the other was a woman who still hasn’t been identified who was found murdered in a hotel room. I figured Whitley was more likely to get worked up about the latter, and that led us to Barry Liston. Brought in for questioning six times, never charged.”
Teresa tried to process it. “But what made you think of Whitley in the first place?”
Jane smiled, clearly pleased with himself. “Because Rob made it sound like she was a good cop, but a good cop wouldn’t have thought your brother was guilty. It only made sense if she had an ulterior motive, and it couldn’t be a grudge against your brothers because she hadn’t been in Chicago long enough to really know them.”
Teresa dropped her head into her free hand and groaned. “There’s no evidence,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “But I orchestrated a run in with Whitley and she seemed murderous to me. Didn’t she give you a bad feeling?”
“Well, yeah,” Teresa said. “But I thought it was just because she was locking up my brother. And—”
“And what?”
Teresa bit her lip. “And I respected her too. You can tell when a cop really cares about their job. I could tell that about her, how seriously she took it.”
“Too seriously,” Jane said, and Teresa made a vague noise of agreement, remembering with some distress Cho’s offer. She would take that job too seriously as well.
Of course Jane knew exactly what she was thinking, and said, “You’re nothing like her, Teresa, don’t be ridiculous. What you did isn’t at all comparable to this. You’d never do something like this.”
Teresa nodded, taking in a breath. “I know,” she said. “You too, by the way.”
“What?”
“When you killed Red John,” she said. “If it’s true about Whitley, what she did is different to what you did.”
“How so?” Jane asked, sounding curious.
“You didn’t try to cover it up,” she said. “You were always willing to serve your time. You certainly wouldn’t have let another innocent person take the fall for it. And—and I don’t think you’d have taken a father from his kids, either.”
Jane smiled momentarily and nodded. Teresa cleared her throat and said, “But I still don’t know if it is true, what you say. I mean it’s a fine story but you haven’t made it solid. There’s no proof at all.”
“I know,” Jane said. “Look, I know you said you want this done straightforwardly, but she’ll have been careful. I could come up with a way to get her, if you let me cut corners.”
“No,” she said, instantly. The idea made her sick. “No, I can’t let this get messy, not when Jimmy’s in the middle of it. We can hand it to Cho, see if they can make it real. If not...they’ve learned enough to know it’s not Jimmy, at least.”
“And Whitley will walk free?” Jane asked.
“I mean, that’s what happens to people you can’t prove are murderers,” Lisbon said. “It’s what’s supposed to happen.”
-
Jane took the wheel for the drive back to Chicago, so that she could phone Cho and relay the theory. Apparently Jane resented ever having to explain himself twice. She found she resented having to defend Jane’s intuitions when she herself was doubtful, but she was eventually able to get Cho to agree to look into Whitley. She appreciated that it would be awkward for him, investigating a cop on the basis of a second hand hunch. Knowing Cho would say no and some other choice words, she texted Fischer and asked her to keep her updated as much as she could about anything the team found out. Fischer of course agreed happily, sending a supportive message about Jimmy getting out soon. No one had broached the subject of what charges might be leveled against him even if he escaped murder. She’d seen people go down for less.
She put away her phone and sighed, regretting letting Jane drive. She’d grown used to his speed, but she hated not having any task to occupy her mind with. “Where to next?” she asked. “I mean, is there something you think we should look at?”
Jane glanced at her and then turned back to the road, looking like he was holding in a smile. “No,” he said. “I think you and I are done for the day.”
“It’s not that late,” she said.
“That’s not what I mean,” Jane said. “They’re going to have to root out some dirt to get that evidence you all care so much about, and if you want this done right, you need legitimate police doing it. That’s not us right now.”
“So, what, I just have to wait?”
“I imagine it’s a foreign concept,” he said. He cleared his throat and spoke slowly. “Selfishly, I’m glad we don’t have anything to do. We haven’t really spent that much time together. I mean just us, when we’re not working.”
“Right,” she said, and felt giddy all over again. “You told me you loved me earlier.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That kind of got lost in the shuffle.”
She smiled. “You know something, Patrick?”
“What’s that?”
“In Chicago I can’t give out speeding tickets.”
-
They got back to Jimmy’s in record time, and Jane hurried her up the short path to the door. She spun to face him in the hallway, not much space between them. Her heart was beating hard, and when he closed the door behind him, the noise sent thrills all through her. “I guess there are things we have to talk about,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“So we should talk,” she said, but he kissed her instead, and she gave in immediately. She threw her arms around his shoulders and he wrapped his around her waist, lifting her off her feet for a moment, making her laugh. They dragged each other up the stairs and backed into the spare room where Jane had slept. The sight of the mussed sheets on the bed made her flush. She created a little space between them, looked at him, and he looked back with an expression she’d never seen before. After all these years, there was so much to him she still didn’t know. “What do you want?” she asked, hardly more than a whisper.
“Can I undress you? I think about undressing you.”
She froze, then nodded, and he stepped closer to her to begin the process. He was gentle, and attentive, and slow. He kissed her skin and breathed her in and ran his fingers over her. Clothes dropped from her body very gradually.
She said, managing to keep her voice steady, “I didn’t think it would take this long.”
“Why would I rush?” he said, and she could hear his smile without seeing it.
“I’m impatient,” she said. “I’m kind of hoping to get laid here.”
“Don’t think about what’s happening later,” he said, glancing up at her, pulling his lips away from her waist. “Think about this moment. You like what’s happening to you in this moment.”
She did. “Is this about that thing you said? I mean are you just really desperate to know you’re doing something to me no one else has ever done?”
He smiled against her hip. “I’m already doing something no one else has ever done?”
She couldn’t let him get smug so soon. “Only because what you’re doing is weird and unnecessary.”
He laughed and it made her shiver. “I’m up against your body, Teresa, this is the worst time to lie to me. I watched you start to sweat and your skin get flushed, I can feel your heart race, I can hear your breathing. I know this is working on you.”
He began to pull down her jeans, and she almost apologized, but the tone of his voice stopped her. Almost wondering. “You like that,” she said, uncertainly. She didn’t mean it as a question but it half came out as one.
“You’ve no idea how much,” he said, muffled in her thigh, and she held in a gasp. “No idea the things about you that drive me crazy.”
She stepped out of her jeans, clenching her eyes shut as he kept talking. “You’ve no idea what it does to me that you still treat me like this when we’re about to fuck.”
Her legs had grown unsteady and she couldn’t formulate a reply. He dragged himself up the length of her to standing, and pushed her onto the bed. She fell back laughing, taken by surprise. Laughing during sex would be pretty new to her too, but she didn’t tell him that. She wanted to tell him something, but she struggled to put it into words. Something still stopped her from telling him she loved him, even now, with him standing above her and smiling down at her, so painfully breathtakingly beautiful.
Slowly he lay down beside her, holding himself up on one elbow. She said, “Patrick.”
Whatever he heard in her voice made him still, lock eyes with her. She swallowed and said, “I’m not sure I’ve ever been this happy.”
His face broke into a smile she’d never seen before, and then it changed again, a look of revelation. “Then I know just what the occasion needs,” he said. She made a noise of complaint, reaching out for him as he pulled away, bending his body over the side of the bed. He returned a few moments later, holding a blue and purple floral sun hat. She stared at it, and then burst out laughing.
“You’d have punched me if I’d given this to you when you weren’t in a good mood,” he said, and gently placed it on her head, kissing her cheek.
“This is one of the worst things I’ve ever worn,” she said. “And I was the eldest child in a family dependent on hand-me-downs.”
“Yeah, but I love it,” he said. “There’s a story behind it, you know.”
She pushed the brim back so she could get closer to him. “Yeah?”
“My tailor knew I was writing letters to... someone important to me, so he offered to make you something. I said you’re not that interested in fashion and he said lovers who are apart should get each other as many presents as possible, should never say no to one, because it’s a way of telling the universe you plan to see them again. Which I guess was just a marketing ploy, but—”
“No, it’s great,” she said softly, resting her fingers on his jaw. “It’s like what you said about the chocolates.”
He made a questioning noise, kissing her shoulder. She leaned back in the bed. “After we first met,” she explained. “You wouldn’t give me your address so I could send you chocolates because you said it’d be like admitting we weren’t going to see each other again.”
She felt his smile against her skin. “I was always coming back,” he said.
“I know,” she said, surprised he thought it needed saying. “I was always going to be here.”
He leaned up and kissed her, and kissed her again, harder, leaning his weight into her. She turned her head to the side so his lips landed on her cheekbone and said, “You’re right, it’s a great story, but do you really want me to be wearing this hat the first time we have sex?”
He reached up and gently removed it from her head, and then much less gently flung it across the room, making her laugh.
-
In that coffee shop Teresa had thought she wouldn’t be able to sleep in the foreseeable future, but that turned out not to be true, and she and Jane both dozed off after some light, half nonsensical conversation. She was woken by a text from Fischer: got some stuff from a witness to the Liston disappearance. And potentially some DNA from the disappearance, though it’ll take a while to verify. Looks promising though.
She smiled, releasing a breath. She felt conflicted in two directions: guilt over being happy about Jane when her brother was in jail, and regret over not being able to be more happy about Jane, because her brother was in jail. But she felt more hopeful that he’d be free soon, and the real perpetrator locked up.
She rearranged herself so she was half sitting up against the headboard and looked down at Jane. She loved the look of him when he was asleep, how much more at peace he seemed. Although the difference wasn’t so pronounced these days, like he got to keep some of that peace when he was awake, too.
He didn’t open his eyes when he woke up, just smiled. She smoothed some of his hair away from his forehead. “How are you?” she asked quietly.
“Fantastic,” he said.
She laughed. “No, I mean… in general.”
He made a questioning noise. She hated to get into anything so heavy when he’d just woken up, but she’d had a few minutes to get lost in thought. She said, “I was selfish, letting you come back here. I just needed you. But I know it might have been hard on you, this kind of work again.”
He opened his eyes and looked at her and then closed them again. He said, “I loved getting to help you and your family. I mean, I’ve always loved that the work helps people. What got to me was the chase… the gnawing, constantly seeking something out, looking for the next thing. That was what killed me. There wasn’t too much of it with this case, though.”
“So you won’t go back to it,” she said, faintly disappointed even if she wasn’t surprised. “I mean if you’re coming back here, you won’t return to your old job.”
“No,” he said, quiet.
“Do you know what you’ll do?”
He sighed, turning on his side and opening his eyes for good, giving in to her need to talk. “Maybe I’ll go back to bartending. I did enjoy that for a while.”
She smiled. “For like three months.”
“That’s a long time for me,” he said, smiling too, and up this close to him she could barely handle it. “And it’ll be easier in a place where I speak the language.”
“Mmm.”
“They speak English in Blackbrook, right?”
She froze, turning her head fully to look at him, the lazy gentleness of the conversation killed. “What?”
“Are you going back to Blackbrook?” he asked. “Because I figure, from here on out, I’ll just go where you go.”
She lay back down in the bed, staring at the ceiling. Shock stopped her from feeling perfect happiness, but she knew it was on its way. “That sounds nice,” she said, breathless.
“I’m glad you think so,” he said. He did sound glad. “So are we off to Blackbrook, once your brother’s free?”
“Yes,” she said, and bit her lip. “But maybe not for long. Maybe just to sort out my job and my house and stuff.”
“Yeah? And then where will we go?”
Suddenly she understood those couples that said we all the time. It was a beautiful word. She swallowed. “Cho offered me a job with his team.”
It was Jane’s turn to be surprised. “And you want it?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I mean I know now that I can be stronger than I was back then. That I can be trusted.” She’d been good on this case, kept herself in check, refused to enable Jane’s corner cutting. It’d restored some long lost faith in herself.
“God,” Jane said, and laughed. “To think of all those years where I was desperate to get to work with you all the time. And now you’re joining the team after I quit.”
“Seems a shame,” she said.
“Maybe I’ll come back as a consultant for a few months,” he said. “Just for the experience. Then I can look at bar work again.”
She smiled. “It’s nice that it can be flexible. That we don’t need fixed plans.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, none of the details really matter when we have the most important part sorted out.”
“That we’ll be together,” she said.
He leaned in and kissed her, and against her mouth said, “Exactly.”
-
Jimmy made bail the next morning, and with his reduced charges would likely just have to serve probation. She cried when Kim called to tell her, which made Jane freak out, which made her laugh. She straight away got in her car and drove to the jail to pick Jimmy up, collecting Tommy and Stan along the way, and then they all had to wait there for an hour for him to actually be released. During the wait, she got a text from Fischer: warrant for Whitley’s house. Her brothers begged her to tell them what she knew but she didn’t trust them with sensitive details of the investigation; she just said the FBI were on the right track.
She cried again once Jimmy was out, but her brothers were used to it and it just made them laugh, even as Jimmy thanked her as earnestly as he ever had for the help. “You’re not out of it yet,” she warned him, but she doubted he’d much mind being on probation after he was looking down the barrel of a murder charge. She just didn’t want him moving on from his regret too soon.
“Nah,” he said, immediately back to his old, unflappable self. “Your friends have got my back. They’re sorting me out, right?”
She nodded begrudgingly, and her brothers whooped. “We should have them over for dinner or something,” Stan said.
“There’s six of them,” Teresa said.
“Just the ones you like then,” Stan said. “Or we could get take out.”
“They’re probably very busy,” she said. “But maybe tonight. I don’t know. I’ll ask.”
-
Whitley was arrested by five pm and Cho’s team pulled up at Stan’s by eight. The house was instantly chaos. As Jane caught up with Fischer and Wiley, Cho sat down beside Teresa.
“Whitley asked me to tell you something, one cop to another.”
Teresa wasn’t expecting it. “What?”
“Sorry,” Cho said. “She hadn’t set out to frame your brother, and she didn’t think she’d be the kind of person who’d let someone take the fall for her. But the opportunity fell on her lap and she was too weak to resist. She regrets it. I don’t think she regrets the murder, but she regrets that.”
“Shouldn’t that apology be for Jimmy?”
Cho shrugged. “Like I said. One cop to another.”
Teresa nodded, not knowing exactly what to make of it.
“It was a lot of work getting the new people on board with Jane’s theory,” Cho said. “They’ve heard stories about him, but weren’t willing to actually act on faith.”
“Sounds like insubordination,” Teresa said.
Cho made a noise of agreement. “You could teach them a thing or two, you know,” he said.
She nodded, looked over to Jane again. He looked back like he had a sixth sense for her and smiled. She said, “I have to sort things out back in Blackbrook. I wouldn’t want to leave them in the lurch. It’s a new mayor, and...”
She didn’t want to bore Cho with small town politics.
Cho said, “This offer doesn’t expire. If you want to work for me in ten years, you can work for me in ten years. But the sooner the better.”
She nodded. “I’d like to join,” she said. “Soon.”
“Good,” Cho said, and stood up and walked away. She held in a laugh, and caught up with Stan’s wife for a little bit.
It was dark by the time she got a moment alone with Jane. Even before Cho’s team had arrived, her brothers and nieces and nephews had kept them busy, and once they learned Jane could do magic tricks she had no hope of prying him away from them. But when she went to get ice from the garage later that evening, he volunteered to join her.
They didn’t say anything on the trip there, just kept exchanging smiles. They hadn’t told anyone about their relationship, but she wondered if people could sense the change. She wondered how much had changed, and how much was how they had always been. In the garage, he kissed her against the freezer. They took out a new bag of ice and carried it together, unnecessarily, back to the house. Out on the porch they shared another significant look, readying themselves to enter the breach.
She asked, “Do you regret how long it took us to get together?”
“I do if you do,” he said. “I mean if you have regrets, I regret making you feel regret.”
She smiled. It was such a Jane answer. “I don’t regret it. I think we’ve always been exactly what we need. I’m glad this is what we need, now.”
He nodded, the slightest smile on his face, too. She honestly wasn’t sure if anyone else would be able to see it. “No sense in rushing something,” he said.