Title: "Crime Trail"
Series: In the Arms of the Wicked, Part 4/?
Characters: Colby/Charlie, Ian/OMC, Don, David, Larry, Megan, ???
Rating: PG-13.
Spoilers: Season 5.
Warnings: None.
Summary: As Dr. Farrow starts causing trouble, Don finds out that the India case is not over yet.
Feedback: Yes, please. :)
Disclaimer: I don't own anything (characters, situations, etcetera) except my OCs.
Beta: The wonderful
fredbassett.
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Part 4: “Crime Trail”
After the India case, walking into Charlie’s office at CalSci was nothing like it used to be. It used to be exciting, breath-taking, heart beating hard. Now it was uncomfortable and weird and it didn’t feel exactly good.
Colby stopped right beside his lover’s door and didn’t take another step forward until David passed him by.
“You agreed to come; now fix things with Charlie, will you?” his partner said before entering the office.
Astonished by David’s attitude, flashes of the previous two hours came to Colby’s mind. He’d had an uncomfortable conversation with his friend a while ago…
“Hey, did you get Don’s call?” David had asked Colby as they’d thrown the empty bottles of vodka to the trash.
“Yeah.”
“So you’re answering your phone again, I’m glad.”
“It could be a case.”
“You didn’t get the boss’ call this morning.”
“I was drunk, remember?” Colby pointed out, using that as the obvious excuse for his lack of professionalism. “And you didn’t answer the door when Don came here, for the same reason…”
“No, not really.”
Yeah, David had lots of other reasons to want to send everything to hell, but still.
“Anyway, I’ll get the car,” David continued.
“I um…”
Colby could feel David’s voice near him. “Listen. Like you said, it could be a case. And we can get drunk together, but work is work and people need us.” He walked away and took his keys from the coffee table. “That’s all I have left and I don’t want to waste it.” Finally, he went towards Colby one more time and added, “And you have Charlie, I’ve told you this before. Don’t ruin it, or you’ll regret it forever.”
The green-eyed agent was speechless at the truth of those words. “Yeah, but…”
“Colby, man, let’s go. We’re partners, aren’t we? And partners always give each other a hand. Just think about my advice, all right?”
“All right,” Colby whispered after taking a deep breath. Then he decided that maybe David was right and he had to do something to fix things with Charlie.
Now, doing it was completely different. Standing beside the office door, Colby shook his head and decided that he’d do it when the right time came. He didn’t even know if Charlie wanted him back.
“Hey,” he said when he entered the office and recognized Ian, Don and Larry. The reunion wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be, until he saw the people who were standing beside the desk, looking at pictures. There was Charlie and someone else - someone that looked slightly familiar, but who Colby couldn’t tie to a name. “Who…?”
“That’s Dr. Christopher Farrow. Don’s getting him a security clearance so he can make his contribution to our current case,” Larry explained.
The name hit Colby’s system, as he remembered that he had seen that man on TV. “Oh,” he whispered. He was worried already, and he knew why - besides his suspicious story, Dr. Farrow and Charlie seemed to share the same code.
“There has to be some very particular reason for these people to bury the pieces and not try to hide them somewhere else, given the damage the ground makes to the artifacts,” the blue-eyed man was saying.
And of course, Charlie thoughtfully agreed. “I can run a search on out-of-law groups that are related to that exact M.O. I can also work on a probability approach…”
“I think that would be extremely helpful.”
“Good, then I’ll start right away.”
It wasn’t just jealously what Colby felt. It was also the fear of not being good enough for Charlie. What did he have to offer him? A nice talk? The mathematician probably found their conversations full of inconsistent words that didn’t trigger his curiosity.
Not now. It’s not the time. For now, Colby absolutely dropped the opportunity to talk to Charlie about their so-called “relationship.” “So, Egyptian statues?” he asked, trying to push away the bad feelings.
Don nodded. “Yeah. Charlie and Dr. Farrow are looking at them right now.” He dialed a number on his cell phone and asked them to excuse him for a minute. “It seems that a Consul is on the way here.”
“Well, it seems that things are going to get complicated,” David commented.
“Ah, the complexity of chaos…” Larry muttered, joining his palms and looking around the room. Then he approached Charlie and Dr. Farrow and the three of them continued talking.
As the physicist was busy and Don was making his call, Colby was left alone beside the door with Ian and David. Silence got a little bit hard to handle, but luckily, Ian wanted to share some details about the new case.
XxX
As Ian spoke to David and Colby, he knew exactly why they looked nervous and why the situation was getting awkward. They were aware that the sniper knew about Charlie and Colby being together. After all, Ian had taken a big part in the India case, he had even shot Amita himself.
And he had also heard David’s story about his old lover, and he had heard Amita talking about how Charlie had left her for Colby.
He wasn’t worried about the new couple, but he didn’t encourage it, either. He felt neutral about matters of the heart that belonged to others, as they weren’t any of his business; those were Colby and Charlie’s decisions, and Ian didn’t feel the need to add anything to the problems they must already have.
When he finished explaining what he had already told the other members of the team, he took a look at Dr. Farrow again. He hadn’t forgotten about him, and he had planned how much time he would have to research him; if there was something dirty about him, he was sure he’d find out about it.
“These are made of stone, although Egyptians made their sculptures with several different materials,” Dr. Farrow was saying. “It’s fascinating.”
A knock on the door made everyone including Ian lose their train of thought.
“The development of knowledge shouldn’t be interrupted in moments like these,” Larry stated, looking irritated. The knock persisted and became harder; noises of voices yelling “Move!” and “Open up!” outside filled the room. “I hope it’s not the students again. Although they must have heard about Amita by now…”
“Why’s that bad?” Dr. Farrow asked, and Ian noticed how his question and Larry’s words made Charlie, Colby and David look through the window or anywhere else as long as it was away from each other.
Awkwardly, keeping an eye on his friends, the physicist remained silent. He had obviously realized that he had pronounced the name everybody was trying to avoid.
In that moment, Don closed his phone and announced, “Hey guys, it’s positive - there’s a Consul coming from Egypt as we speak. I gotta go to the FBI.” He dialed another number as he went to open the door, but when he did, he almost dropped the device as flashes caught him by surprise and a lot of people started talking to him at the same time. There were microphones and cameras everywhere, too.
From inside the office, Ian realized what they meant - annoying reporters from trashy, sensationalist magazines. Confident, he went towards Don to help him make them go away, but the crowd was very big and the unstoppable mass of people got into the room.
When Ian turned to David, Colby and Charlie, they were hiding the books and the pictures of the statues that had been found. FBI matters weren’t the tabloids’ business.
Of course, Larry was trying to find a way to get Dr. Farrow, the centre of attention, out of the situation, but as the only other way out from the office was the window, he wasn’t being very successful.
“FBI! Calm down, calm down! Dr. Farrow is busy right now, do you understand me?” Don was yelling at the reporters as he held his badge up in the air, but they weren’t giving up on getting an interview with the famous archeologist.
“Don’t let them see anything,” the sniper told Colby, David and Charlie and they kept hiding the material they were using. “And how the hell did they get here? Isn’t CalSci supposed to get these people far away from…?”
He stopped talking when the voices and noises coming from the crowd started to disappear. “When he turned to the door, he saw Dr. Farrow encouraging reports to interview him outside instead of the office, as Don asked him not to.
“Yes, I’m going to be working in this wonderful university for an undefined period of time - luckily, a long one!” the archeologist was announcing, as he smiled widely.
Ian shook his head as he recognized the classic charming technique of celebrities to make everyone melt at their words, but it wasn’t the moment to pose for the press. “Hey,” he called Farrow, asking him to come back and keep discussing the FBI case. He’d lock the door this time.
Still, Dr. Farrow kept talking avidly with the journalists, and it wasn’t all that bad until he said, “And yes, I’m working on some projects here already. As you saw in that office, I had Dr. Charles Eppes and FBI Agent Don Eppes by my side - you caught us in the middle of an ongoing investigation.”
Celebrity and a damn showoff. “Hey! Hey!” Ian yelled, and when he didn’t get an answer, he decided to handle things his way. He went towards Dr. Farrow, grabbed him by his clothes and dragged him over to Charlie’s office.
Not looking surprised at all, the archeologist continued his charming act with the press. “I’m so sorry, my bodyguard is supposed to take care of my safety, he’s just doing his job,” he said before the office’s door was closed and locked. “What was that? I was talking to the press, they could have…” he wanted to know as the journalists continued to scream his name.
He was slammed against the wall by Ian, who felt already irritated about the guy. “Listen to me, because I’m going to say this once. You don’t discuss FBI matters with the press. This case is classified and it is an international issue, so keep your mouth shut, do you understand me?”
They looked into each other’s eyes; Ian’s first tightened against the laps of Dr. Farrow’s jacket.
“I said - Do you understand me?” Ian repeated. He really hated people who didn’t care if they hurt others by doing the wrong thing.
Dr. Farrow’s eyes wandered around his face, as if they were analyzing it, trying to catch the real feeling in Ian’s heart. “Of course I understand,” he responded, and when the sniper let him go, he snapped, “You are the one who doesn’t get it.”
Oh, so you want to play. “What did you just say?”
“I said that you don’t get it. I know the group that buried the pieces, I know how they work. Professor Eppes and I were organizing ourselves to get even more data from a mathematical approach.”
“So? Does that allow you t-?” Ian asked, but he was interrupted, and he didn’t like it one bit.
“Yes,” Dr. Farrow stated. He arranged his wrinkled clothes and walked around the room. “Don’t you see? Those people already know that someone has what they hid. Finding them is pretty much impossible, so why can’t we give them a trail and make them come to us? They’ll get the message or at least will try to find out what we have. Besides, I didn’t tell the press enough for them to know what we’re really doing here.”
“You were going to.”
“Maybe if we calm down, we can continue with…” Charlie said, but he was interrupted, too. Ian wasn’t done with his conversation with the already annoying Dr. Farrow.
“You were going to spread the news - and don’t give me that arrogant face, I can guarantee that the consequences won’t be good for you.”
Looking tired of fighting, the archeologist waved his hands and snapped, “Then fine, do whatever you want, because I’m not taking part in this case anymore. But don’t beg me to help you when you can’t find your criminals, Agent Edgerton. Remember that.”
Again, silence filled the room. There were no sounds of eager journalists around anymore.
“That was one hell of a security clearance,” David whispered to Colby, who nodded slowly. Ian could hear it all, since his senses were very awake from the adrenaline that had suddenly reached his body.
Charlie came to the centre of the office with a worried look on his face and turned to Ian and Dr. Farrow. “Gentlemen.”
Ian took a deep breath as he saw a request in the mathematician’s eyes - it was, “Let’s stay focused.” He recognized that he was right, so the sniper turned to the others to ask a question about the Egyptian pieces of art. However, a little detail disturbed him. “Where’s Don?”
Everybody looked around, and Don wasn’t anywhere.
“Oh, yeah, I remember I saw him walking through the crowd before you… brought Dr. Farrow back,” Charlie explained.
Larry agreed. “He told us he needed to go to the FBI as soon as possible.”
Again, Ian took a deep breath and shook his head. Just stop that Consul from making this harder than it is already, Don.
XxX
As Don drove to the FBI, he tried to catch his breath. “Could you repeat that, Megan?”
“Yeah,” she said on the other side of the line. “I’m at the office and everyone’s saying that the tapes of Ami… The India case... have been recovered.”
“What?” Don snapped, almost losing control over the vehicle. The India case records had all the conversations that had taken place during Amita’s kidnapping. “Are you sure?”
“I am. And that’s not everything. You don’t even want to hear who’s got them and is at your house right now.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Megan’s silence didn’t surprise him. He knew what she was going to say. “What do you mean, ‘I’ll take care of it?’ Don, it’s not something you can fix. That data is way up your head now.”
“Just trust me, OK? I’m on my way to the house, can you cover me there if the Consul arrives?”
“Sure, but be careful.” There was a hint in Megan’s voice, meaning that she was still having doubts about Don’s possible behavior.
However, he didn’t give her any more explanations; he closed his phone and drove to the house where his father and his brother used to live before Amita made everything a living hell. He had to see who had the tapes of the case and try to find a way to recover them or make them lose their relevance because if someone heard them, the team would get in big trouble - trouble that giving the already stressing situation, wasn’t exactly welcome.
As he drove by the corner of the house’s street, he could see FBI techs gathering data from the place. It was the same scene he was been seeing for the last three days.
He got out of his car, trying to figure out who was in charge of the operation and who was the person Megan had been talking about. It shouldn’t be that bad…
His heart jumped inside his chest when he heard footsteps coming towards him. He caught his breath when he turned around and the confident smile of a well-known man welcomed him. “Carl?”
“Don.” Agent Carl McGowan said, not even intending to greet Don formally. He never shook anyone’s hand - at least not the hand of someone who could turn out to be a suspect. “This case that has taken place at your house… I need you to answer some questions about it. You understand that what has happened here is not exactly a standard procedure.”
“Yeah, yeah, of course. I’ll help as much as I can.” Don didn’t even know how he got the energy to speak. “I’ve heard that someone recovered the tapes, which is great,” he lied.
“Yes, it is. And we are working hard on finding out who made them disappear.”
Don forced himself to smile. “Could you tell me who’s got them? I really need to talk to that person. I don’t want anyone to compromise the evidence again.”
Carl looked deeply into Don’s eyes and said, “Don’t worry about that. The tapes are in my hands now, and you can be sure Don, that no one will touch them.” As soon as finished talking, he started walking towards the house. “Tomorrow at six o’clock, I want you in my office.”
As he licked his lips, Don felt almost incapable of talking. He swallowed in concern, being aware that his heart was beating harder and harder with every second. He could only nod as Carl walked away and asked the techs how the research was going.
He’s going to find out about them. About David’s past…Damn, he’s going to find out about Charlie and Colby.