E-MAIL: eli @ popullus.net
RATING: PG-13
POSTED: Feb. 3, 2006
SUMMARY: Don always knew there'd be a time when Charlie wouldn't be there when the FBI needed him.
NOTES: Early S2. For Barkley. Thanks to Jen and Sal; anything you spot isn't their fault.
DISCLAIMER: Read
Don always knew there'd be a time when Charlie wouldn't be there when the FBI needed him. Just because Charlie was always around to help out now, that didn't mean that crimes wouldn't happen when he wasn't around. It was really kind of a stupid thing to think.
And now Charlie was off in Budapest for a conference. No, a "symposium," although that probably didn't improve the quality of the food, but either way, Don suspected that the FBI wouldn't look too favorably on him trying to slip international calls into the consulting budget for a serial arson case in Pomona. Greenhouses getting torched. That was a new one. And it wouldn't have been theirs except for the local arson unit determining that the owners had been locked inside the last two. Multiple dead bodies encouraged even the most self-sufficient of communities to cede to federal jurisdiction. Anyway, five and six had occurred in the last 30 hours, number five coming with a cracked skull to boot, which would have been bad enough, but then the techs pulled a clean .45 from the wall behind where number six had been slumped. Thing was, except for being confined to Pomona and definitely escalating, hell if any of them could figure out the pattern. No common times, places, friends, suppliers, and god, when had Pomona gotten so many damn greenhouses? Didn't anybody just plant little rows of whatever in their back yard any more?
"Is there something wrong with Amita?" his dad asked after Don collapsed onto the couch with that last question.
Don started to ask the ceiling, What? but he'd never gotten an answer from there, so he dropped his head forward again. "Amita has a back yard?"
"Nooo, Don," Alan said, that patient tone in his voice that made Don sigh. Alan folded the sports section and leaned forward, eyebrows raised. "I'm asking, is there a reason you can't ask Amita to help you? Is that crossing some legal line of the FBI's?"
"Uh, no." Positive that this really should not be this confusing, Don forced himself to pull out of the very comfortable slouch he'd achieved, fighting exhaustion and the cushions all the way. Close to 32 hours with only two maybe half-hour naps; he shouldn't have sat down. "There's no line. Why--"
"Since she's not Charlie's student any more," Alan explained. "I don't know, maybe the FBI frowns on solving cases using experts who aren't professors."
Don huffed out a laugh. "That's-- No, dad, there's nothing wrong with using any kind of expert. I just..." He shook his head and folded forward until his elbows hit his knees, scrubbed both hands over his face, tried to gather some form of coherent thought. "I guess I thought she didn't want to help now that, as you said, she's not working with Charlie. She hasn't come in with him on a case in months."
"Well, it's not as if her expertise went away," Alan pointed out.
"Yeah," Don said as he sat up again. And Charlie had never said that she didn't want to help. In fact, he hadn't said anything. Amita just hadn't come up, except for that concert that Charlie hadn't... "Huh."
"It works better if you call her."
Don blinked, then scowled and tightened his lips to hold back another laugh. "Gee, thanks for the tip, dad."
Alan shrugged and managed to not look smug. "You seemed a little lost," he said as he shook open the paper again.
~~
Amita had sounded surprised, although she'd covered it quickly. She'd said, "Of course," and the next morning, she and Megan were flipping through folders and peering at a laptop, while Don and David and Colby went over and over the maps pinned up on the boards, until Don was pretty sure he'd be able to drive through Pomona blindfolded. He was seeing grids in his coffee, that was for sure, and it sure wasn't normal.
"Forty-four greenhouses," David muttered, glaring at the boards across the room. "There's no way we're staking out forty-four greenhouses, even with the locals pitching in."
"Am I disagreeing?" Don put the coffee down, carefully pushing it away from the edge of the table. "But there has to be some reason those were the six that were hit. I really don't think that whoever this is was throwing a dart at a map in their garage."
Colby held up a finger. "Hey, I only said that that was what it looked like."
"Actually..."
Don spun, coming up out of his seat. Eyes widening, Amita stepped back into Megan, who was right behind her coming through the conference room door.
"Hey, sorry--"
"Sorry, I--"
"Okay, then," Megan said in a bright voice. "Everyone's a little overcaffeinated, I think."
She gestured toward the front of the room and Amita walked forward, skirting around Don, who sank back down into his chair and tried not to wonder why he didn't usually jump with close to a full pot of coffee running through his system.
"What do you mean, 'actually'?" David asked.
Amita turned to give them all a crooked smile. "I mean that I'm almost positive your incidents are in fact occurring in geographically random places. Or," she grimaced, "at least as random as anything can be. Six data points is hardly enough to be a hundred percent certain, but..."
Colby made a dismissive noise, not far off from a snort. "As long as there's some fancy name for how you know that, I'm good with being proven right."
Her smile broadened. "Not very fancy, no, but I can give it to you in Greek if that would make you feel more secure."
It took Don a moment to identify the pause in the room as shock that they weren't going to get a math-speak lecture that they'd have to drag back down into English. Then Megan choked back a laugh, ducking her head, and Colby just said, "Nah," and leaned back in his chair without too much of a smirk.
Don felt himself relaxing in his seat. It felt good, god knew, to relax even a little after the tension of the last few days, waiting for the next call to a scene. But that tension was there for a reason -- a bell ringing, incessant and painful, like a fire alarm, not the deep dong of a church bell -- and "relaxed," he knew, wouldn't get it to let up. He cleared his throat.
"Well, however you got there, how does that help us? Can this equation with the non-fancy name predict and help us stop a random occurrence?"
He'd meant that to come out sort of like a joke, like, great, there really were still equations that you didn't need a diagram to pronounce. A second after it left his mouth, though, everyone turned with different frowns on their faces, his team looking as surprised at the sharpness of his tone as he was. The emotion behind Amita's frown wasn't as easy to pin down.
Don took a deep breath and rubbed his forehead.
"This guy, gal, whatever, they're not only an arsonist, they're a murderer," he reminded them, and he could still hear the edge in his voice, but hell, he was frustrated. "We're not talking about preventing property damage, here."
"We know that," Megan said, cocking her head and focusing on him even more than before.
Profiler-mode, Don recognized, and he frowned back at her. When she only raised an eyebrow at his response, he shook his head. Lack of sleep, killer on the loose, a random pattern...if patterns could be random. Charlie would probably wince and go off on a sternly worded warning about the dangers of terminology misuse. But hell, he wasn't questioning how much help Amita's answer was because he was hard-ass.
She was still looking at him, her head tilted to almost the same angle as Megan's. But her jaw was set, just slightly, at a defiant angle that Don had seen only once before, when he'd walked into the house and had immediately gone into the kitchen to find his dad, no idiot, hiding in there from the debate being waged in gobbledygook at the dining room table. Part-stubborn, utterly confident, that was exactly how she looked now.
"It helps," she said, "because a random distribution isn't a random selection."
Amita wasn't Charlie. That was stating the obvious, but maybe it needed to be stated again here and now. She wasn't Charlie, who he could be annoyed with and let out a little irritation at without really needing to be careful. She was someone he should be treating like an actual consultant and, right now, he definitely shouldn't be thinking of her as someone who he'd teased his brother about, or someone he'd driven home more than once after a question-turned-dinner... Someone who sort of felt like family for a while, there, until suddenly, she'd practically disappeared.
He took another slow breath.
"We know that, too," he said, not leaning forward, keeping his body language easy and non-confrontational. "By trying to make it random, they space it out predictably and all that. Charlie walked us through the demo the other year, you were there." But not all of them had been; he remembered that when he saw Colby's questioning look, but he also saw David nodding. "But can you really tell where the, what is it called, clumping? Where that is from only six incidents? We had thirteen in that--"
"It's called clustering, and it's what you get with a true random sequence." A closed-mouth smile curved Amita's lips, nothing like the one that normally brightened a room. "Which is what you have here. Which means there is a uniform distribution, and every point is equally probable."
"Well, that's not helpf--"
"It eliminated the theory that geography was the factor," Megan said, cutting off Colby. "And then we found the connection in the owners."
"The owners?" Don was on his feet. He hadn't meant to move, but there he was, standing, his hands in the air and his mouth -- he could feel it -- hanging open. "I thought we went through the victims. We've had three days, what could we miss?"
Megan's mouth tightened, but then she nodded. "We were still working our way through the owners who hadn't been hit--"
"All forty-four of them," Don caught from David's end of the table. He sent David a narrow look, but Megan was continuing without acknowledging the comment.
"--and Amita spotted a connection between Paul Andres, who owns a small house with an even smaller greenhouse up by the college, and the six victims. They're all investors in..." Megan flipped open the folder in front of her and pointed at the name on the printout. "Cinderine. It's a local company, owned by Andres' brother, that's developing a new non-chemical pest deterrent."
Megan slid the folder across the table, and Don picked it up before opening it.
"They're the only investors. Seven people. We got that data only half an hour ago," Megan said, her tone carefully flat while Don nodded and tried to keep his wince to a sigh.
"So we had no way to know before now," he concluded for her.
~~
It took only another hour to establish that Andres' brother had been out of town for the past month, so unless Andres had a truckload of ready cash that they couldn't find, it was him, not some contract killer. The evidence to clinch that was already falling together now that the lab had something specific to look for in the soot and charred leaves and bent metal and cracked glass.
What didn't fall together at all was Don's plan to extract the foot he'd jammed down his throat. Mentioning something about a meeting on campus, Amita took off before Don could get her alone. So he got to say in front of his whole team, "Thanks, you really helped us out," but didn't even get close to saying, "Look, I'm sorry..."
That didn't sit well while they waited for the warrant to come through. He stuck it in a corner, though, filed it away for later before they knocked on Andres' door and found him dead in his kitchen, one shot in his mouth and out through the top of his skull. Experts might know about things like that, the outcome of their theories, but he'd never let them see, Don found himself thinking.
It wasn't until shortly after 4 p.m. that he felt good with ordering everyone home to collapse for at least twelve hours, and even better about leaving before seeing if they complied. He didn't collapse, though. He ended up at Cal Sci, and then he got lost. He couldn't remember if he knew where Amita would be these days, and her number was apparently everywhere except in his cell, so he couldn't even call. What was he thinking? Hunting her down to apologize was a ridiculous thing to be doing, whether he'd meant to do it or not.
He almost turned around and went back to his truck, but Larry's office was just right there down the hall. So much closer than the parking lot.
"Hey. Larry..."
"Don!" Larry's face lit up and he was on his feet, beckoning, before Don finished opening the door. "Now this is a surprise!"
"Uh..." Yeah, Don realized, he didn't just drop by. And he'd never dropped by places on campus that weren't where Charlie was, or should be.
His pause was long enough that Larry paused, too, a worried frown appearing. "It is, isn't it? There isn't any kind of problem with Charlie, or--" Larry's eyes went wide, and his voice dropped to a horrified whisper, "or another bomb?"
"Oh, no," Don quickly said, holding out both hands, reassuring. What about nuclear material was scarier than a gas attack? he wondered. It wasn't like one would make you any less dead. "No, nothing wrong, don't worry. I'm just-- I'm looking for Amita, actually."
That obviously threw Larry for a loop. His head tilted to the side as he frowned, like Don had just handed him a hammer and told him it was the source of Earth's gravity. "Amita?"
"Yeah, she helped out with this--" Don shrugged, because he shouldn't really continue, and he couldn't explain this to himself yet, either. "I just wanted to say thanks. We both had to rush off before I got the chance, and she doesn't have to help us out any more..."
He trailed off, because Larry's frown was growing, he was crossing his arms, his hand went up to cup his chin, and man, it was kind of eerie to be the focus of that look, the one that said, "this is not behaving as expected." Don was about to wave it all off and back out of the room while the getting was good, but then Larry bit his lip and let out a sigh.
"You know, Don, I'm sure she was happy to help you. If she hasn't been around as much lately, well..." Larry grimaced, a tinge of resignation in the expression making Don frown. "...that's to be expected, I suppose."
Given that it was Larry, that had a 50-50 chance of meaning "expected" in the cosmic sense or in the real sense. "Because she's working on that second degree?" Don tried.
Larry's mouth opened. Then his eyes narrowed and he nodded, and he shut his mouth again on another nod. "Yes, that's...that's part of it."
Don pinned him with a mild version of the look that usually got a suspect squirming within minutes. "Part of it?"
A little smile started up at the corner of Larry's mouth. "There are always multiple variables, Don. It's part of the wonder of this universe that we're all trying to make sense of: everything -- living and inert, visible and only imagined -- is made up of many other elements." He held up a cautioning finger. "The trick and the challenge is knowing when you've identified them all," he said with a laugh that wasn't unkind, but that still did a lot to confirm the stories Don had heard about Larry's sadistic professor credentials.
Whether or not Larry would appreciate knowing there were stories out there, and that Charlie laughed when he told them, became moot when Larry waved his raised finger and swung away, bending over his desk to scribble on a piece of paper.
"But never mind. This should help, rough though it is." He turned back and handed over the paper. "X marks the spot," he said, shooing Don toward the door.
~~
The scribbling, it turned out, was a bare-bones layout of the Cal Sci Physics Department. And Don found her all right, almost right where Larry had put his X. But he hadn't expected to find her surrounded.
Of course she wouldn't have an office, he realized. She wasn't a professor, and he'd bet that solo offices were even rarer here in these classroom-oriented buildings than they were at his field office. It had never occurred to him that she would be in a lecture, though. Around five o'clock was "escape time," according to Charlie -- that half hour between most classes ending, and the start of drinks and any other command performance where you had to stand, and then stand some more, chatting about things that you didn't give a crap about. At five, everyone fled faster than the photons escaping black holes, Charlie had joked plenty of times when Don asked at the end of another long case whether there was anything back on campus to take care of before heading home.
What he was facing here was obviously the necessary exception.
Don eased a little further into the room, sticking to the wall by the door and trying to be as non-obtrusive as possible. He kept a hand on his jacket, though he had no real hope of blending in with the bag-toting grad students, even without a visible weapon to broadcast the difference. He hadn't ever blended into this type of crowd; he'd stopped trying, anyway, once it was Charlie's crowd.
Amita wasn't too far down the rows, she was even toward an end, and for a moment Don considered going to tap her on the shoulder, just to see if she'd want to talk after, since he was willing to sit out another couple of minutes of equations flying right over his head. But, hell. The guy up front didn't pause in his talk as he pulled out another board and kept on writing, and Don sighed. Sounded like this was just getting geared up. Okay, end of the line.
Who knew what it was, what he did or she sensed or whatever, but when he was back at the door, pulling it open, Amita glanced over. Don saw her eyes widen and he immediately shook his head, waving her off. He'd explain later. Way later, because he had every intention of really and truly collapsing after he left this building. On his own bed, not on his couch, he swore. But she frowned and started gathering up her things, and the only way Don was going to stop her now was to make the commotion that he hadn't wanted to make, not when he didn't have a reason that his badge would back up. So he bit his tongue and stepped out, sticking his hands in his jacket pockets while he waited for her to join him.
"Did everything go okay? You have Andres in custody?" was the first thing out of her mouth when the door closed behind her.
"Things went fine," he said, his hands clenching. Why hadn't he prepared for her to ask for details? She thrived on details. "Andres is no longer a danger to anyone."
Hopefully that was vague-yet-truthful enough to prevent any other direct questions; he wasn't ever going to be prepared for sharing details like that, even though he'd finally given up on keeping all but the worst crime scene photos away from Charlie. Her eyes were still narrowed, though, and he could see another question coming. He headed it off with, "That really is thanks to you, Amita."
She blew out a dismissive sound with a wry smile. "Megan would have seen it. I picked up that folder first, that's all."
"Yeah, well." Don shifted on his feet and pulled his hands free, needing to move. Then he mentally kicked himself for being a coward as well as an idiot. "Look, what I'm here for is, well, I wanted to say that I'm sorry. It's been a very, very long couple of days, but I shouldn't have..."
Amita was staring at him, eyebrows arched and mouth falling open. The sheer oddness of eliciting that kind of shock stopped him mid-apology.
Her mouth opened even further, working on a thought as her brows came down in a perplexed frown. "You don't have to apologize for this morning, Don," she finally said. She hugged her sweater and notebook closer to her chest. "With what little I've done to help you, to help Charlie, I can only begin to imagine what it's like knowing that you're responsible for keeping people from dying." She let out a short, bemused laugh. "That's not an abstract concept, or a theory, that's a fact that you have to deal with every day. I suppose you're all trained to handle that responsibility, but this is the first time I've..." With a half-shrug, she let the rest of the thought go.
Don hadn't been able to interrupt, and he sure couldn't say anything now. He'd love to just brush it off, try to get onto another topic and way away from this one with a joke, making light of something that he couldn't possibly explain. This. This was why he didn't talk about his work outside of the people who chose to be involved in it. But Amita, she was just involved enough.
He went the easiest route, forcing out a bit of a chuckle. "They really do train us. Pretty well, too."
Amita's smile hit like a shot of whisky, hard and straight to the head. Feeling like a fool to want more of that, want it more than his body wanted sleep, he found himself asking, "So, do you need get back in there?"
She looked over her shoulder at the door, and then looked back at him with enough of an indecisive pause that his hands came up and he took a step back.
"Never mind," he said. "I really should get some--"
"Something to eat?"
She wasn't turning to go back into the lecture. He tilted his head, not afraid to ask the question outright, but...
She shrugged. "If he had anything new to say, he hadn't gotten to it yet," she admitted. "And after rushing around to catch up after this morning, I could use a real meal. Like...pizza."
Surprised into a laugh, Don coughed, and then said, "Well, hey, that I think I can handle."
~~
The pizza place by campus was just full enough to not be empty. For the first time, Don could see that the floor was supposed to be gray, it didn't just look that way.
"There some sort of boycott going on that Charlie didn't tell me about?" he asked as they pulled out chairs at a table by the wall.
Amita chuckled. "There are lulls, even here."
Don looked around again. He still only saw the four scruffy athletic guys making two large and loaded pizzas quickly disappear, and the two kids arguing over open notebooks while the third picked all the pepperoni off of the slices that were left on the dish. "This isn't a lull, it's a depression."
"Which means faster pizza for us," Amita pointed out.
"Ah. That means 'go order.'"
There was a tiny smirk on her face as she pushed back her chair and stood. "It means I don't know about you, but I'm craving peppers and onions." She cocked her head. "That okay?"
That pretty much set the tone for the meal: friendly and lighthearted. No mention of his job, especially once he got her going on how all the math she'd been doing had led to astrophysics, because, sure, there had to be math in that, too, but stars and planets and rockets-- He didn't get more than halfway into that question before she was scooting her chair closer to his, and then she was off and running. And it was interesting. She was so excited about the concepts, her plans, the possibilities, that she made it interesting. They were way on beyond the galaxy he knew when Don noticed that he wasn't treating this like an interview any more.
When he followed one line of thought -- she was awfully good at explaining these way-out ideas without losing him in the terminology, how come that had never rubbed off on Charlie? -- to asking why exactly she'd decided to go for the second Ph.D., there was a bump in the flow. Her hand slid off his shoulder, her eyes dropped, her body shifted back away from the table and him. She recovered quickly enough, though, that he didn't feel right calling her on it.
Wasn't his business, he told himself. Her not mentioning Charlie at all in her listing of opportunities and potential and applications and everything else she'd told him about with happiness and fascination shining out of her, that wasn't about him. He didn't need to know. He could, if he really wanted to, drop a casual question around Charlie and tease an answer out of him. Yeah, that was the smarter way to do it.
Amita let him pay. Actually, he made her let him pay, as repayment for missing lunch earlier, thanks to being stuck between helping them and getting back to where she was supposed to be. It wasn't much of an argument; he dealt with the bill while she was in the ladies room, and when she came out he just kept saying that he'd expense it while he shrugged on his jacket, held the door open, hit the locks on his truck, and got in.
"We didn't talk about the case at all," she said again. She was still frowning at him from the passenger seat, he saw, but she looked more resigned than really irritated.
"We did, back at the university," he said, pulling onto the road, remembering to head south toward her place instead of north. "And besides, waiting for the warrant that you helped get us to was the first time we had enough time to kill to get real food. If you hadn't had to leave..."
He heard a rough sigh. There were too many cars pretending this was the 10 instead of a surface road to take his eyes off of them for long, but a glance over only got him her hair, dark against the darkening sky, her head turned away toward the window.
"Really, I wouldn't insist on paying just because--"
"Oh, yes you would," she said without a pause, but she said it lightly, so he stopped protesting. "All of you are like that, no matter how much you like to think you're not. So next time I'm buying, okay?"
"All of us?" The light turned as they came up to it, so Don stopped and looked full at her. "Who? Guys?"
She shook her head with a little laugh. "You, Charlie, your dad. You all sometimes go old-fashioned around women."
"What?"
"It's sweet," she said, giving him a smile.
He was still gaping at her when the car next to him moved and, unable to do anything except shake his head, he turned back to the road.
"Terry thought it was funny how it showed up more when you were in the house," she added.
Whoa, that required a response. "You two talked about this?"
"Talked? No. She just-- We both saw it that night your team was all there, remember, when they came over after we tracked down that stealth plane? You pulled out my chair, your father pulled out Terry's, it was..."
Don caught a vague hand motion as he turned onto her street, and he really hoped it meant she was going to stop there.
"...sweet."
He winced. "O-kay," he said, because good god.
"Well, it is," Amita insisted.
Double parking in front of her place, shifting into Park, and leaving the engine running, Don grasped at the one thing he could think of to steer this back into non-humiliating-to-him territory. "Have you told Charlie this?"
Before the silence hit, before he'd even finished the question, he remembered why he had left that out there, why it wasn't already in the conversation. He wasn't going to look over and see that the silence was her hiding a smile. Nice going, Eppes.
He sighed and brought a hand up to rub at the frown between his eyebrows. Amita shifted, the seat creaking softly, but she still said nothing. Listening to her breathe, Don looked out at the one street light doing a really crappy job of keeping this block lit and safe as he took hold of the steering wheel again. It was way past time to go home.
"So, today hasn't exactly been one of my better days," he offered, a way out, laying the fault all where it should be.
She moved, and when he didn't immediately hear the click of the door latch, he turned his head to say, "See you," "Bye," something casual, and her lips pressed up against his.
Her mouth was on his, solid, soft, there, and she didn't spring back and out and far, far away. Don's hands clenched on the wheel when her tongue slid across his lips, tasting, like he'd wanted to, licking. He tilted his head just as she did, and his mouth opened on a breath that shuddered into his throat. She made a small noise, one of his hands was in her hair, he could feel the heat of her cheek against his wrist, and then he could taste her, Amita, a distinct tingle, a spark on his tongue in the corner of her mouth, where her lips parted further when he curled his fingers deeper and his back hit the door--
He broke away, pulling back, everything back, as far back as he could go.
"Um." His tongue touched the edge of his lower lip. She was leaning in close, a hand braced on the dash, and he wanted her other hand on him, arm, neck, anywhere, oh yes, he wanted. He clasped his own hands in his lap, because he shouldn't, couldn't, shouldn't.
She licked her lips, just a flicker in the dark. His breath caught, but wait, no. "Amita? Why...?"
"I've wanted to," she said simply. He could see her shrug, could feel her looking at him, examining him as he flipped through the million responses that sprang to mind. "This has nothing to do with Charlie," she finally added.
"I didn't ask," slipped out without any thought.
Her mouth twisted up, a knowing expression that he didn't need to see her eyes to get. "Well, don't," she said.
Don couldn't move, but when she shifted forward again right then -- the same woman he'd known, he knew -- Charlie wasn't there, and Don stopped asking.
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