TITLE: Cold Case
FANDOM: Without A Trace
AUTHOR: ELG
EMAIL: [email protected]
MAIN CHARACTERS: Martin Fitzgerald, Danny Taylor, Jack Malone, Samantha Spade, Vivian Johnson.
CATEGORY: Gen Hurt-Comfort, Drama, Action Adventure
RATING: PG-15
SPOILERS: Takes place at the beginning of S5. Major spoilers for previous seasons.
SUMMARY: A missing woman leads to a mass of trouble for Jack Malone and his team, and especially for Martin and Danny.
NOTE: This fic was originally published in a Charity Zine organized by sg1scribe and put out by jmas to benefit Mercy in Action, a UK based charity committed to helping the poorest of the poor in the Philippines. Many thanks to foliogal for the beta.
DISCLAIMER: ‘Without A Trace’ and its characters belongs to Jerry Bruckheimer Television, CBS Productions, and Warner Bros. Television. This story is for entertainment purposes only and no money exchanged hands. No copyright infringement is intended. The original characters, situations, and story are the property of the author. This story may not be posted elsewhere without the consent of the author.

Cold Case

Part One

Four Hours Missing

Mary Ryan looked like the Madonna. Jack Malone had thought that the first time he saw her, when she opened the door to them, and he thought it again now as he gazed at her photograph. Not the tranquil version in blue with a baby in her arms, but the one that looked as if she had been signed up to a deal that involved suffering for the sake of other men’s sins. Mary could have been a younger sister Jack never knew he had; one who had endured as he rebelled. The fall of brown hair, the haunted dark eyes; every time he had looked at a photograph of Mary’s missing daughter he had been disconcerted by how similar Margaret was to his own children. He remembered Mary holding a white cotton handkerchief in her fingers that she had washed and ironed so there wasn’t a single crease, and which she slowly mangled into a damp twist of despair as first the hours and then the days crawled by and there was no word of her daughter.

That had been four years previously; before Martin had joined them, before so many things had happened, regrettable and memorable and painful and so beautiful he hoped that he would always carry them to the grave. Impossible to think of memories now without thinking of his father, his mind at the last a Pandora’s box from which more than ills were escaping; recollections taking wing and flittering away to be scattered, perhaps forever, or perhaps to be there again on the next visit. For himself, when that time came, Jack was sure that the lost children he had never found would be the last memories to leave him. All those days of never knowing; he had seen them erode marriages and sanity, like rainfall on rock. He and his team lived in the fissures left by other people’s disappearances. Margaret was one of the ones who would always haunt him, and now here was her mother’s photograph staring up at him reproachfully, come to join the missing, gone to join the lost. He groaned aloud.

And he had been thinking that with the last case wrapped up in a way that was nothing other than depressing he would at least be able to let everyone knock off early to try to get over it….

“Something wrong?”

He looked up to find Vivian Johnson gazing at him in concern. He beckoned her into the office and pushed the file across to her. “Remember Margaret Ryan?”

Viv grimaced. “Vividly.” Jack knew how she hated unsolved cases. She was as tenacious as she was compassionate, that was what made her such a good agent, but the flip side to that was the way the unsolved ones ate at her. Especially when children were involved. “Seven years old, went missing on her way home from school, appeared – from the one grainy security video that ever showed up – to have been abducted by the stranger who asked her for directions, was never seen again. Have we got a new lead?”

“Possibly – if we can find a link between Margaret’s disappearance and her mother’s.”

Viv’s warm brown eyes widened. “Mary Ryan has gone missing as well?”

“Four hours ago.”

She looked at the pictures and Jack followed her gaze, black and white photographs of that dark-eyed girl, already appearing so wistful – even in a school photograph – as if she had always known she was intended for tragedy.

“Who reported her missing?”

“You remember Mary’s husband, Frank Ryan?”

Viv’s eyes betrayed a flicker of amusement for all her concern. “I remember how well the two of you hit it off.”

Jack had to acknowledge that with the glimmer of a smile. “Yeah, we really got along great. Especially when I pretty much accused of him being involved in his daughter’s disappearance only to have that security camera footage from that gas station turn up showing her with a guy seventy pounds lighter and six inches shorter than him.”

“At a time when Ryan had the alibi of being in the local store – as seen by six other customers and a time-dated security camera.”

Malone narrowed his eyes. “Now you’re just rubbing it in.”

“Just showing that I have perfect recall of the case, Jack.”

Jack picked up the file and led the way out to where Danny Taylor, Samantha Spade, and Martin Fitzgerald were sitting in the bullpen, sharing that wilted body language that always followed a tragic conclusion to a case. They all looked exhausted and rumpled. Danny and Martin had both loosened their ties and were half-heartedly trying to write reports. Sam was still staring at the photograph of the dead woman that she had evidently just taken down from the whiteboard.

As Jack walked in, Danny looked up, brown eyes reading Jack effortlessly and already having decided that this was something out of the ordinary. He and Martin had not exactly had a fun time today, most of which they had spent interrogating a particularly difficult suspect, who, despite having elevated stupidity to a whole new level, had still taken three very long hours giving them all manner of crap before finally admitting to murdering their missing waitress; killing the hope they had been nurturing that he could have just injured her. It was always difficult when they had spent forty-eight hours getting to know every aspect of the life of a missing person, becoming intimately connected with his or her hopes and fears, only to have their search end with a cold corpse in a dumpster.

Sam looked pinched from the snow outside, as if she were waiting for spring so that her blood could thaw. For a woman born in a state with an average snowfall of forty-five inches, she really did detest the cold. Martin was gazing up at Jack as if he were waiting for the day’s lesson to begin. It was difficult not to look at Martin these days and see a walking reminder of the toll this job took on all of them. Martin had found his equilibrium once more but he was never again going to be that shiny-faced self-confident new agent who offered his opinion so eagerly; a lot of his certainties were gone, probably forever, and although Jack had waited a little impatiently for Martin to get some life experience and toughen up, he now wished that life could have gone a little easier on him and broken him in more gently.

When Jack paused to pin up the picture of Mary Ryan, her eyes seemed to gaze at him with renewed sadness; as if his inevitable disappointment of her had never been in doubt yet was still to be regretted. He tossed the file onto the desk and it spilled its contents, fanning photographs of the next life that would be touching theirs.

“Mary Ryan, aged thirty-six, mother of one daughter, Margaret, herself an unsolved missing person’s case from four years ago, went missing four hours ago from the Wayne Memorial Hospital in Honesdale. Mary is eight and a half months pregnant. She called her neighbors and asked them to take her in to the hospital in Honesdale because she started having what seemed to be labor pains. The neighbor dropped her off at the hospital, but by the time the doctor saw her, the contractions had stopped and they couldn’t find anything wrong. Mary Ryan used the hospital payphone to call her husband to come and pick her up, and said she’d wait for him in the hospital lobby. By the time he got there – and it’s a three-hour drive for him because they live up the ass end of nowhere – she wasn’t there. No one’s seen her since. According to her husband, she didn’t pick up her purse, which means she doesn’t have any cash with her or even a front door key.”

Viv tapped the photographs of the house in which the Ryans lived, which Jack remembered vividly, that stone and wooden homestead buried so deeply in the woods. A house that dwelled in shadows, as he recalled it, a place the sunlight could barely find and which the snow iced annually like birthday frosting. “Mary was definitely seen at the hospital?”

“Yes, seen by several witnesses as well as the doctor who examined her, and Ryan was seen – also by several witnesses – at the market a three hour drive from where she was at the time she went missing. The local PD talked to him. He said his wife was a little tired when he left in the morning for the market but insisted she was okay. She called the neighbor about three quarters of an hour after he left.”

Sam said, “Why didn’t she call her husband? Most expectant fathers need to be surgically detached from their cell phones.”

“She said she felt she was going into labor and she couldn’t afford the time for him to drive back.”

“Who are the neighbors?” Danny put in.

“Doug and Karin Box. They only moved in a few weeks ago. They live about twenty miles from the Ryans’ place. They don’t really know the Ryans that well but they knew Mary was pregnant and had seen her in the local store in Unity, so when they got the call, they got out their car and drove her to the hospital. They’re waiting to be interviewed now.”

“She could still be getting a lift back with someone else,” Viv suggested. “What about car accidents?”

“That’s our first line of enquiry but I don’t want to waste any time on this one, so, let’s assume it’s an abduction but hope for the best.”

“Who’s with the husband?” Danny asked.

“Locals at the moment. We’re having his calls routed through here to save setting up a team on the spot. He’s…well, he’s not the easiest guy in the world to get along with and he really doesn’t like having strangers in his house. The last time he got pretty fed up with having an agent camped out in his living room so this time we’re trying another way.” Jack looked around the expectant agents. “I want all the hospitals in the area called, the morgues, everywhere. Sam, can you handle that?”

Samantha reached for the phone. “I’m on it.”

“Danny, Martin, you two talk to the neighbors who drove her in; find out everything you can about Mary’s state of mind. Did she seem depressed or excited about the baby? Did she seem frightened of anything or anyone? You know the drill. Vivian, you and I get to drive out to Honesdale to interview the hospital staff, see if somebody saw something.”

Martin looked up from the file. “What about the husband? Is he coming in?”

“He wants to stay in the house in case she calls or turns up, so, I’ve told him that you’ll come to him. Given that we completely failed to find his daughter for him when she went missing four years ago, I think that’s the least we can do.”

Danny was examining the picture of Margaret. “Are we assuming the cases are connected?”

“We’re not assuming anything right now. We’re keeping a completely open mind.” Jack glanced across at Viv. “I heard that.”

She held up her hands. “I didn’t say a word.”

“I heard you thinking it.”

Sam’s voice could be heard clearly as she spoke into the phone: “A Jane Doe, no identification, no purse, thirty-six years old, dark hair and eyes. No one matching that description? Okay, thank you…”

Danny narrowed his eyes. “Am I missing something here? Would you like to fill us in on whatever it is you’re not telling us?”

Jack had a vivid memory of that angry confrontation in the dark kitchen; Mary watching from the doorway while tempers sparked like cinders from a campfire. “The last time around, the FBI agent leading the case screwed up, he thought Ryan had something to do with Margaret’s disappearance. He was wrong, and he wasted a lot of time pursuing that line of enquiry that would have been better spent in other ways, meaning that Ryan probably doesn’t have too good an impression of the FBI right now, so it would be good if you two could treat him with kid gloves.”

“Who was the screw up?” Martin enquired as he tightened the knot on his tie and smoothed down his jacket, trying to look as if the day had not already felt over to him, as if he had not mentally already been on his way home.

“You’re looking at him.”

Danny glanced up with a frown. “Something about the guy set off your radar?”

“We just didn’t hit it off.”

Viv shrugged. “I don’t know – I thought you were getting along fine until you accused him of having played a part in his daughter’s abduction.”

“I never actually said that.”

“Maybe not, but I think he got where you were heading with those enquiries.”

“Did you get him to take a polygraph?” Danny asked.

“Took it, passed it.”

“Are you sure you did screw up?” Martin pressed. “Because I’d take your gut instinct over…”

Every time Martin did that – started trying to set Jack Malone up as the guy he wanted to be when he grew up, Jack was torn between enjoying it and wondering if he ought to nip it in the bud. He honestly thought he could have done a kinder job of raising Martin than Victor Fitzgerald; and had thought that from the first time he’d watched Martin squirming uncomfortably around his father, torn between irritation and embarrassment, while Victor barked orders and Martin tried to work up to that teenage rebellion he should have had a decade earlier. But nor did he particularly want to replace Victor as Martin’s first stop for Daddy Issues, especially as, if Martin’s affair with Samantha was anything to go by, then at least some of Martin’s Issues could be Oedipal. But he understood, as a son who had never had enough of his father’s attention in his time, that it wasn’t enough to be told what was expected of you and that you had to unquestioningly accept parental authority, just because. He got that sometimes a man’s father had to earn his respect through his actions, not just expect to have it handed to him on a plate because he’d been there at the conception. And, as a man with no sons of his own, he was perhaps not entirely uncomfortable with the role of playing surrogate father to Martin and Danny.

“Well, don’t. Not over six eye witnesses and a time-stamped security video. Sometimes even I get it wrong.”

“Can we have that in writing?” Vivian asked mildly.

“No,” Jack assured her. He turned back to the two younger agents. “Ryan’s not the kind of guy that takes questioning well. He’s six feet five, two hundred and fifty pounds, and looks as if he bench presses grizzly bears. He inherited this big farm in Wisconsin from his father, which he worked before and after his father’s death until he sold up and moved to the Catskills, so he’s always been his own boss. I think he’s a little out of practice at people not treating him with a certain amount of…deference, and he was in a high stress situation. He’s just got a whole alpha male thing going on, but don’t let it get to you because I don’t think it’s relevant to the case. So, after you two have talked to the neighbors, I want you to drive out and join Viv and me in Unity, and then I want you to drive up to Ryan’s place and talk to him, but you need to tread carefully. Be polite.”

“As opposed to how we usually are?” Martin sounded hurt and Jack wished he would lay off with the reproachful eyes. It wasn’t exactly a secret around here that Martin had become short-tempered with pain after that last fall of his and that it had made him more of a liability than an asset when interviewing witnesses for a while, but that had been out of character for him and wasn’t an issue now. Jack felt he should probably make that clear before Martin started beating himself up about what he imagined to be a criticism.

“I’m saying be extra polite. Otherwise you’re just going to waste time butting heads. Call him ‘sir’ a lot like you mean it – he likes that. But try to find out what you can about how he and his wife were getting along and what her state of mind was in the days leading up to her disappearance.”

Sam put down the phone from another fruitless call and looked across at Jack. “You don’t think she’s suicidal, do you?”

“I don’t know. That’s something I hope we can establish by talking to the people who met with her but we know she took her daughter’s disappearance hard, she’s got another baby due any minute and still no word on Margaret. She’s probably tired and hormonal; she may have felt momentarily overwhelmed.”

“Or that the only way to protect her unborn child from the world that took away her daughter, was to kill it and herself.” Sam was careful not to meet anyone’s eye.

“That’s a different take on the word ‘protect’ from any I would use.” Martin took a sip from a cup of coffee that had been cold an hour before and Jack wondered when, if ever, he was going to trade in that damned FBI mug and get something less geeky.

Sam’s eyes momentarily flashed a look of hurt. “It’s not something a man would understand. She may have thought it was the only way to keep it safe from all the harm out there.”

“Rabbits do it,” Danny put in. As everyone looked at him in surprise, he expanded: “Eat their young to protect them from predators.”

“It’s still murder,” Martin insisted.

Sam gave him a look of exasperation. “Why don’t you wait until you’ve already lost one child to God knows what and lain awake every night for four years wondering if she was raped or tortured before she was killed, and then try being eight and a half months pregnant in a world where every headline tells you there is no safe place to raise a child and see how rational you feel?”

They all watched her move away to another desk and Martin looked not unlike a schoolboy who had just received a scolding he wasn’t entirely sure that he deserved. “Did I say something wrong? Because I didn’t mean…”

“It’s okay.” Danny patted his arm. “Just tell Sam you’re sorry later.”

“But I don’t know what I did.”

“That’s not the point. The point is, she’s upset, so you say you’re sorry. That’s what you do with women when you upset them. You not knowing that – that’s the reason you’re single, right there, buddy.”

Viv glanced across at Jack. “I’ll talk to her.”

“You sure?” Jack looked over in some concern to where the blonde agent was doggedly dialing more numbers. Sam was looking as if the cold had got into her bloodstream today, a bone-deep chill, and he suspected this case was going to get straight under her skin. It was already under his, like an itch. He had failed Mary Ryan once; he was damned sure he wasn’t going to do it twice. “She okay?”

“Jack, you don’t need me to tell you that this job sucks some days. This is one of those days.”

Sighing, he rose to his feet. “Okay, well, it’s you and me for Honesdale. Again. And I was so hoping I’d seen the last of that place.” He glanced at Danny and Martin. “You two know what you’re doing?”

“Don’t we always?” Danny countered.

“I don’t know. The last time I took my eye off you for five minutes, Martin managed to get himself shot and you got yourself concussed. So, can you make it to the interview room and back without need of the paramedics?”

Danny glanced at Martin. “I don’t think we need to dignify that with a reply.”

“Me neither.”

Jack watched them head out of the door towards the interview rooms, turning to find Viv watching him with that expression on her face that told him he was not yet on her shit list but did need to take a behavioral exit turn before he got there. “What?” he said defensively. He thought he had shown some admirable restraint in not also mentioning Martin getting knocked down a staircase or nearly getting shot and having to be saved by a well-placed bullet from Danny, or all the various terrifying things that Danny had done while suffering from PTSD.

“It’s been months, Jack, – it’s probably time to dial down the over-protective thing.”

The moment hung there as Jack thought about how to play this; he had been waiting for someone to call him on his attitude for a while and had been ready to go in hard and defensive, but with Viv holding his gaze with all that understanding in her eyes, he felt he could afford an acknowledgement; an admission that, yes, he knew it was a problem, and, yes, he was dealing with it.

“Hey, you did your part in making me what I am today when you decided to have open heart surgery on my watch.”

“You know, I didn’t actually do that on purpose, and I don’t think Martin got himself shot just to fray your nerves either.”

“I’m not so sure.” He pulled on his coat, his gaze letting her know he got it and he really was working on it for all the flippancy of his reply: “It’s classic adolescent acting out at a father-figure behavior. It’s right up there with painting your bedroom black, playing your music too loud, and smoking pot. He does it again, he’s grounded.”

***

Martin had spent a long time learning the common signs of deception; the gestures people made when they were being evasive or untruthful; all that tugging at their clothing, adjusting their hair, hands uncomfortable in any position, refusing to meet the eye of the person questioning them; white collar crime was good for studying all the many ways in which apparently respectable people would, given the right – or wrong – circumstances, lie through their teeth. Then he had also had the opportunity to study the common signs of evasion from the inside, as he pretended to be something he wasn’t while concealing what he had become. So, he considered himself something of an expert on lying these days, but so far, the Boxes hadn’t said or done anything to trigger his radar. He believed that they were telling at least what they perceived to be the truth.

Karin Box was thirty-two and her husband was thirty-six. She had a likeable face rather than a pretty one, her wiry fair hair barely tamed while his was starting to thin back from his temples. Their clothing looked workmanlike rather than smart, their thick sweaters and heavy boots reminding him just how cold and rough the terrain was out of the city; also the kind of clothing one might expect people to throw on quickly when they needed to go out in a hurry in answer to a phone call. So far he was making them as nothing but concerned and honest.

Martin noticed that Danny, like him, was being extra polite in readiness for talking to Ryan. He was still getting flashes of guilt and self-hatred over various interviews he’d conducted when sweating his way through withdrawal; skin prickling with need and every witness feeling as if they were thwarting him out of spite by not furnishing the information that was necessary to get the job done. Ever since he’d stopped being a slave to the painkillers he had been watching himself carefully to ensure that he asked the right questions, used the right words, checking with Danny probably too many times in each interview, a shared glance to reassure himself that he was doing this right. Danny had never lost patience with him, gaze steady and kind. But today he felt normal again, or as close to normal as he could get, and the rhythm had come back to him, all that hard won knowledge still there when he needed it. Despite what Jack had told them about being wrong, Martin couldn’t help thinking there had to be something that would have set off Jack’s radar, but nevertheless he picked his words with extra care.

“So, have you known the Ryans long?” Danny pressed, politely.

“Not really. We only bought our place a few months ago, but we’d seen them around, you know…? In the local stores, buying groceries. Frank Ryan always made a point of saying ‘Hi’ and even Mary would smile if she saw you wave. We knew Mary was pregnant and we’d heard in the store about what happened to their little girl. I think everyone was really rooting for the baby to be okay and for her to feel better.”

“She wasn’t well?”

Karin Box leaned forward. “She always looked so sad. Sometimes, when they’d come into town, she’d stay in the jeep while her husband did the shopping, and I’d see her watching the kids in the school and I just knew she was thinking about her little girl.”

And Martin could see her then, Mary slightly misted behind windshield glass, watching the children spill through the school gates, so vivid and animated while she was a grief-paled ghost, the thread that connected her to life growing thinner and thinner with each year that passed and there was no word of her missing daughter.

“What about when she called you?” Martin asked.

Doug Box shrugged. “Karin took the call. I was just heading out, but she came out after me and asked me to wait, said Mary Ryan was on the phone and thought she was having contractions. I asked if I should go and look for Frank, but Karin said Mary wanted to be taken straight to the hospital. So, we drove up there, and picked her up, and then drove for Honesdale. We’re still getting used to the winters around here, and I don’t mind telling you, driving down those rough roads, with the puddles all frozen and snow everywhere, and a pregnant woman in the back – well, I was glad when that journey was over.”

Karin smiled and patted her husband’s hand. “Doug says if we have any kids, we have to move into Honesdale for the last three months of every pregnancy, just for the sake of his nerves.”

“How did Mary seem during the journey?” Danny gave Karin his best encouraging smile and Martin ducked his head to hide a smile as he saw the woman visibly responding to the warm light in Danny’s soulful brown eyes.

Karin and Doug exchanged a glance. “She was quiet,” Karin offered. “I asked her if she was in a lot of pain and she said it wasn’t that painful but she was just really worried about the baby and she was probably fussing about nothing and I said it was better to be safe than sorry.”

“She didn’t really say much,” Doug put in. “We asked her how Frank was and she said he was fine and we asked if it was always like this in the winter and she said it was, pretty much, but that it was so beautiful in the woods sometimes, that it made up for it.”

“I asked her what it was like where they’d lived before,” Karin added. “She said it was a thousand acres of nowhere in the middle of nothing.”

“I tried to ask her about family,” Doug added. “But she said she didn’t have any family except her husband, not any more.”

“Did you get the impression that she was depressed?” Martin looked down at his notepad and saw that he had written ‘a thousand acres of nowhere’. He really wanted to know how she had referred to the baby, if she had seemed connected to it. That was the difference sometimes, the pregnant women who were unwilling vessels for a life they’d never wanted, and the ones who were bonding with their unborn through every kick. Had this baby been Mary’s way back to life after the cryogenic suspension of grief from the loss of her first child or just something with which she was unable to connect?

Once again Doug and Karin exchanged a glance, confirming their impressions with one another. “No, a little excited, maybe. Her eyes were kind of bright. I thought she might be getting the beginning of a fever.”

“What about frightened?”

“No. Definitely not.”

“Did she talk about the baby?” Danny put in.

Karin visibly tried to remember. “I asked if she knew if it was a girl or a boy and she shook her head and there was kind of an awkward silence. You know how it is when someone’s lost a child? You want them to know that you know and you’re not going to say anything crass but at the same time you don’t want to bring it up. Anyway, Doug said Frank seemed the kind of guy who would probably like to have a son. She looked kind of… I don’t know… She seemed cold and I told Doug to turn up the heater. And I asked her about names and she said sometimes you couldn’t know what a baby was meant to be called until it was born and you held it and then sometimes you knew.”

Martin and Danny exchanged a look of relief. A woman talking about holding a living baby and choosing a name didn’t sound as if she were contemplating suicide.

Danny tossed the question in as if they just had to ask it and it wasn’t even that important: “Did you get the impression that everything was okay between her and her husband?”

Doug shrugged. “I guess.” He looked at his wife. “Karin…?”

She grimaced. “She’s just so quiet when he’s around, you know? He’s a nice guy. He helped out the Wentworths when that tree went down on their barn. Came straight over with his chainsaw and cut it up for them for kindling. But he’s so sure about everything and I always think when I see them together that if I was living with someone who took up all that space and never had any doubts, I’d find it hard to know who I was, too.”

Her husband looked amused. “You’re just used to having a man like me who’s house-trained and does as he’s told.”

She grinned back at him. “Well, yeah, honey, that’s the way I think men are meant to be. Can’t go around letting them have their own way all the time. It’s not good for them.”

“That’s how Mary Ryan strikes you?” Martin leaned forward, trying to catch hold of that tantalizing thread of information before it was snatched away again. “Someone who doesn’t know who she is?”

“I don’t know. She’s just so…quiet. There could be a lot going on inside, but I don’t think she’d talk about it. I like her fine, she’s just not someone you can call up for a girl chat when you’re having one of those days, you know?”

“You didn’t notice anything strange? When you picked Mary up, during the journey, or when you dropped her off at the hospital?”

Another shared look between the husband and wife and then a helpless shrug from both. “No, I’m sorry,” Karin said.

“No one out of the ordinary?” Danny suggested. “No one hanging around suspiciously?”

“Didn’t see anyone like that – but then we weren’t really looking.”

“What was the last thing she said to you?”

“I wanted to go in to the hospital with her but she said not to wait, that she’d call Frank and ask him to collect her. She apologized for coming out without her purse and said she would give us gas money next time she saw us. That was pretty much it until we got the call from Frank – he checked the last number she’d called – and he asked us to come straight here.”

Martin gave them a warm smile. “You did absolutely the right thing. Thank you for your help. An agent will be along to take you home.”

Danny followed Martin into the corridor. “Not very observant but I think they’re honest.”

“They may not have seen anyone waiting because the kidnapper either wasn’t there or he was out of sight. But, I agree. I think they’ve told us everything they know. It’s just a pity they know so little. Ryan sounds kind of…controlling.”

“Well, that would explain Jack not liking him. Jack likes strong women who know their own minds and don’t take any crap from anyone. When women aren’t like that he tends to get suspicious.”

“Of course, Ryan may just be over-protective. Mary’s pregnant and she’s already lost one child. He may not realize he’s stifling her.” Martin darted Danny a slightly defensive glance. “Some woman think you’re smothering them if you ask for a second date. Ryan may just be old-fashioned.” He added curiously: “How come you and Sam didn’t work this case anyway? Weren’t you both on the team back then?”

“We’d been working another case when this one came in. Sam and I were in Miami. We were pretty sure the guy we were looking for was dead as we had an eye witness account of him being shoved into the trunk of a car and most people don’t sleep with their eyes open. But we needed to find the body to be sure. While we were still in Miami finishing up the dumpster search, the Ryan case came in and, as there was no time to waste, Jack and Viv started right on it. They had other people checking records and running forensics but it was basically all those two lived for and dreamed of for a while. By the time Sam and I got back it was pretty much a cold trail and Jack was not in the best of moods, as you can imagine.”

“I’m kind of glad I wasn’t around back then.”

“I think that was the case that made Jack realize he needed someone else on the team.”

“Jack told me he needed an extra agent because he’d fed the last one to alligators for breaking procedure.”

“Well, he was a little pissed with you at the time, Concussion Boy.” Danny gave Martin a sideways look. “So, would you call me up for a guy chat when you’re having one of those days?”

Martin tried to suppress a smile without much success. “No.”

“Okay, now I’m hurt.”

“No, you’re not. You wouldn’t call me either.”

“I’d call you in a heartbeat,” Danny protested.

“You’d call Viv,” Martin pointed out. “Everyone calls Viv. Even Jack calls Viv.”

Danny considered for a moment and then conceded with a shrug. “Okay, but if Viv was out I’d so call you.”

Every now and then they got close to talking about it: the shooting, the terror, the pain, the survivor guilt, the addiction, but they always ended up veering away from it. Martin was still of the opinion that veering away was the right thing to do. Danny had helped him when he needed his help and he had thanked him for it, but there were some things he didn’t think either of them were ready to discuss, and every time he tried out a conversation for size in his head it came full of words that sounded like excuses, and he knew Danny would never want to hear those. And it was true, of course. It didn’t matter how he’d got from not being an addict to being one, just that he acknowledged he was one now and worked hard not to take another pill.

Besides, he didn’t know if words had yet been invented to describe how it had felt to live with that pain every day, the exhaustion of it wearing on his nerves, until he didn’t even feel like himself any more, just a shredded shadow of the man he had once been. Every day he had forced himself to sound like the man he’d been before, still half-convinced that faking it well enough for long enough could make it be true. He still missed the painkillers, not just because of the hit they had given him, but the security they had provided that the pain couldn’t get to him, couldn’t flare up and overwhelm him, making that gray sweat trickle down his spine as his body became nothing except a transmitter for white waves of misery. Even after the physical symptoms of dependency had receded, he still missed the security they had provided. If he’d flushed them after he stopped needing them for the pain, he wouldn’t have had them to hand after that fall down the stairs that had made the pain flare up so agonizingly again, and that thought had terrified him, that he could have left himself bereft, that the pain could get to him and he would have nothing to hand to combat it.

He risked a glance at Danny and caught the tail end of one of those concerned looks. In the beginning they had all overwhelmed him with those, making him feel weak and redundant, so ineffective he needed to be replaced, because even a ninety pound woman was stronger than he was right now… And then it had just been Danny who looked at him that way; he’d faked out everyone else. In the past he’d turned away those looks with flippancy because he didn’t want Danny to know how right he was to be worried for him; now he wanted him not to have the burden of concern because despite his lingering fear of ever experiencing that kind of relentless grinding pain again, Martin actually was doing okay.

Martin shrugged. “Are you going to do that gazing intently into his eyes and nodding sympathetically thing with Ryan, by the way? Because he may get the wrong idea.”

“It’s called normal human empathy, Martin, you should try it some time.”

“Doesn’t sound like something any man in my family would enjoy.”

Danny squeezed his shoulder briefly, and the touch was still a fraction too gentle, as if Martin was too fragile for any greater pressure. “Okay, time to pack for the great outdoors and make tracks for Unity. I’ll pick the car. Jack said we’re going to need something pretty darned Marlboro Man to tackle the terrain where Ryan lives.”

“Get something with snow tires,” Martin warned. “And a really good heater.”

“Just make sure you pack clean underwear and an extra sweater. If your mother calls I want to be able to tell her that her little boy isn’t going to be catching a chill on my watch.”

Martin groaned. “I knew it was a mistake to ever let you and my mother meet.”

“She’s a wonderful woman,” Danny was saying warmly. “And we had some really good times talking about all those cute little things you did when you were a kid. All of which I’ve committed to memory, by the way.”

“You have enough blackmail material for a lifetime, don’t you?”

Danny patted him on the shoulder cheerfully as he headed off. “Several lifetimes, Martin. Several.”

Danny and his mother had not met inside the hospital. They had met in the car park where Danny had pulled by to pick up Jack – who, unlike Danny had visited Martin in the hospital even when Martin started undergoing painful physiotherapy – and for some reason, Martin’s mother, who had never wanted Martin to join the FBI and still harbored hopes he might come to his senses and get into politics, had liked Danny. Martin still found it blackly comic that, after all those years of trying to get her attention while she wafted out of the door on his father’s arm on a wave of expensive perfume on her way to some important social gathering, all it had taken, in the end, to get her to spend a little time with him was to get himself shot, twice, and bleed a lot. He had felt almost ashamed of his reaction when he had opened his eyes to find his mother with tears in hers, his father so upright and tense with anxiety for him; the shock of revelation that they loved him with the same painful intensity that he loved them, and then the guilt following hot on its heels that it came as such a surprise.

Perhaps her defenses had been left particularly low by Martin’s shooting or perhaps Danny had just charmed her, the way he charmed everyone. Either way, Danny was now one of the few people that Martin liked whom his mother also liked, and he suspected her of calling Danny up to find out how Martin was really doing. He could almost hear her saying the words: ‘All his father ever tells me is that he’s looking well….’

Not that anyone could say that about him any more, not for a while now. His clothes still hung off him awkwardly and the shadows under his eyes were slow to fade. He knew that sometimes just looking at him was enough to give Samantha a bad case of the guilts. She had it fixed in her head that, if she hadn’t allowed her own irrational guilt over their abortive romance to come between them, that she would have noticed what was wrong with Martin earlier and been able to help him before things got so bad. Martin wasn’t so sure. He suspected that he had used all the skills he had developed as an agent in trying to conceal what he had become very well and he had needed to hit bottom before he would admit that he needed help anyway. Up until the point when he had been too out of things to show up at work, and unable to do his job properly when he was there; up until the point when the first thing he had done in the morning was throw a pill down his throat just on reflex, without even thinking about it, he had never used the word ‘addict’ about himself.

With Danny, it was a different kind of fear of what any conversation would bring forth. He never wanted to see that look in Danny’s eyes again, all that anger and disappointment at the way Martin had let him down. Every now and then he would let Danny know that he was still going to meetings, and Danny was receptive to that, and kind, but he knew that the glimmer of anything that sounded like an excuse or a rationalization and there would be that look in Danny’s eyes again, and he didn’t think he could bear it. With Danny’s help he had gotten himself straightened out, and he was still riddled with regret and shame and remorse and self-loathing if he let it overwhelm him, but he was functioning again, without pain and without painkillers. He wasn’t sure how Danny was doing; sometimes when they exchanged a glance Martin thought he saw himself reflected in those too-expressive eyes, not as he was now, but as he had been after he was shot, when he had slipped into darkness even as Danny begged him to stay with him.

Martin had no recall of any events after that point, of course; Danny calling for an ambulance, Danny putting pressure on his wounds with blood-soaked hands, Danny accompanying him to the hospital and waiting while he was wheeled into surgery; he just remembered the visits that had been regular while he was on morphine, and then stopped as soon as there was the possibility of seeing him in pain; waiting and wondering and then realizing why Danny wasn’t coming, and wouldn’t be coming if it meant he was going to have to see Martin hurting; how Martin had to go and find him first.

It had taken so long for the pain to stop, so many months when it had ground him down to a jagged edge, and it had felt so good when those torn muscles had started to heal and it had finally begun to fade, when he had felt the reins of his life back in his hands again. And yes, bright lights and loud noises still made him flinch, so did sitting behind any van, the thrum of the engine of his own vehicle starting to get into his nervous system very quickly as he waited for the doors to fly open, the bullets to spray…. But all of that was to be expected and wasn’t something he allowed to interfere with his efficiency. Physically he had grown stronger and the pain had lessened. He had been almost giddy with the relief of being able to perform ordinary tasks without constant discomfort…then had come that fall and the unbearable spiking of fresh agony and the knowledge that he simply could not go through this again, day by day and hour by hour, not and do his job. He kept seeing the look in Danny’s eyes as he gazed at him, seeing his own pain searing Danny all over again, feeling weak because he couldn’t hide it, when he should have hidden it better, feeling worse because Danny deserved to be protected from it.

He had imagined Danny telling Jack, telling Viv, people taking him to one side and asking him if he was really up to this, if he could really still cut it in the field. The thought of being shoved behind a desk or having people hovering over him protectively once more, being thought of as weak, a liability, someone to be watched out for when danger threatened, instead of someone who was an asset, that had been unbearable to contemplate. Anything was better than that, and the only problem was the pain. Mentally he considered himself perfectly fit, physically, also, except for the pain which might impede his ability to do his job. The pain had been crippling – like an unwanted acquaintance who had once overstayed their welcome, come for what had promised to be a weekend only to end up staying for a month, turning up on the doorstep again with a suitcase in each hand when he had thought them gone for good.

But the pain could be controlled by painkillers. The pain could be fenced in and ordered and denied the right to screw up his life all over again, as long as he could take the pills to do so, but gaining access to the painkillers was difficult unless he was prepared to explain that he had been injured again, which would mean assessments and more examinations and more time spent as a patient in need of help when he didn’t need any help, he just needed the pain to stop…. The painkillers were like the fairytale trolls who offered help just when he needed it most then demanded their own price. Taking them let him do his job but then it had swiftly become impossible to do his job without them. It became harder and harder to obtain them and more and more difficult to function without taking them…. Which was when everything had begun to spiral away from him, his life becoming as unmanageable as fall leaves spun upon the wind, and the one person he wanted to call for comfort was already dead – after suffering this kind of pain, and feeling herself a failure for allowing it to overwhelm her. A dozen times a day as he felt the weakness and shuddering and sweats and shivering and self-loathing coursing through him, Martin had wanted to call Aunt Bonnie and tell her that he couldn’t do this any more, he couldn’t be this person any more, and yet he couldn’t now remember how to be anyone else.

Failure had never been an option for a Fitzgerald. Other children possibly had the option of getting something less than a 4.0 grade average but he never had. He had to graduate top in his class, and, of course, he had to graduate magna cum laude; anything else would have been unthinkable. All those lectures when he was growing up, the praise and blame had both been couched in the same terms: ‘Your mother and I are very proud of you, son’, ‘Your mother and I are very disappointed in you, Martin’. Any small rebellion had been treated as if it were such a shock to their systems, as if it had left them prostrate on the floor in need of years of therapy because he’d smoked a joint; because he’d sneaked out one night and gone to a rock concert after it had been forbidden; because he’d lied about Daniel Fisher’s parents knowing about the party at his house; because he’d drunk a beer. His rebellions really had been embarrassingly trivial, the boy he had always been kept on such a tight rein that ignorance of other possibilities made him complicit in the whole business of his life being so over-ordered, so utterly controlled, realizing that he had let those values seep into him, like pesticide into soil. His stress levels would spike unbearably at the prospect of any failure, even if it had originally been his father who cared so passionately that he should succeed at everything; he had been contaminated by those wishes to the point where they had become his own. He was still proud of himself for kicking over the traces of that paternal control so completely and running off to join the FBI – even if his sprint for freedom had been weighed down by all the baggage he carried with him and probably always would. Running off to join the FBI not being an act, as he’d pointed out to his father at the time, on a par with running off to join the circus or deciding to give up a promising career in White Collar Crime to run a vice ring from his basement.

“I just want to do something that matters.”

“You don’t think politics matters?”

“No, Dad. I don’t. I think you end up trying to get yourself re-elected by keeping in with the people who put you there, and any idealism you may once have had gets squeezed out by the system. Not to mention the fact I think for someone to want to go into politics it might be an idea for him to have some political convictions that are a little more fully-formed than mine. This is what I want to do. I think I could be good at this….”

And for a while, he thought he actually had been. He’d made mistakes, certainly, sometimes he’d made very bad mistakes, like the error of judgment that had led to the death of Anwar Samir. But people had been found who would otherwise have remained lost in part because he was one of the agents looking for them. Everything he did mattered in this job, and for a while that had been the most incredible feeling to wake up to every morning; to know that he could walk into the office and make a difference, a palpable positive difference, to the lives of other human beings at their most vulnerable and most in need of help.

Then he had become one of them. He had lost himself so entirely that he didn’t recognize his own reflection, and it was impossible to ask for help in finding himself again – somewhere within the shaking, vomiting remnants that were left to him – when he wasn’t allowed to have got to this point; because the son of Victor Fitzgerald was absolutely not permitted to fail so completely.

But the nephew of Aunt Bonnie would have been. She had always allowed him to explore the possibilities that there might be other ways to be and think and grow; let him in on the big truth that parents were just people with opinions, and their advice and guidance could never be more than that; that even the wisest of them weren’t handing down absolutes on tablets of stone.

“Your father’s a wonderful man, Marty, and he loves you so very much but sometimes…”

“He’s an arrogant blowhard who thinks that saying something is true makes it that way even when it isn’t?”

That smile of hers that told him he was naughty and loved at the same time. “He’s not infallible. None of us are. You can’t expect him to be. And you can’t expect yourself to be either. We all make mistakes. You’re going to make them, too.”

“No, I think I checked my father’s life plan for me pretty thoroughly before I came out, and that’s definitely not on his agenda.”

Her hand on his forehead stroking back his hair so tenderly, sometimes he thought his aunt’s house was the only place where anyone ever touched him. “That’s how we learn. It’s painful and sometimes it’s humiliating, but it’s necessary sometimes to just utterly screw up….”

He could have picked up the phone and called her and known it would be okay, even if he were a sweating, shivering mess, sobbing incoherently down the line to her, telling her that he had screwed up so badly he didn’t think there was a way back for him because he was now an addict and a thief and a liability to the people who trusted him to keep them safe. She was the only person in his family he could think of who may have had some advice to offer him that would have helped, but by then she had gone beyond all suffering and all possible assistance. He helped people every day, or had before he had turned into a junkie, but when she had needed him the most he hadn’t had any help to give her.

He had never felt so utterly lost or so alone, and even now he was afraid of the pain and what it had done to him; how easily it had defeated him; afraid that it might inhibit him, the fear of taking another bullet making him less of an agent that he had been before. Like giving up the painkillers, he knew he needed to give up the fear as well. He could eat and sleep and walk and even run these days; he had a lot to be thankful for and people relying on him to do his job the same way he’d done before, not to become meek or inhibited by the fear of being hurt.

He just wished he could look back on the last few months and see himself as something more than someone who had failed everyone who had ever believed him the first time that he was truly tested.

***