Charlie didn't know how long it had been since he'd slept, just that it was nineteen hours longer than however long they'd had him. He didn't know how long it had been since they'd poured that bucket of water over him, just that he'd have cheerfully killed any of them for a mouthful to drink. But he did know that he couldn't let them kill him before Don found him, so there were things Charlie couldn't say. He couldn't keep track of which things they were--he was beyond the hallucinatory sleep-deprivation of grad school, his consciousness going ragged, porous, fractal. He was teetering on some edge he didn't understand but feared profoundly (he was going to break, he was going to shatter like glass when he fell). His lips were cracked and bloody, his head pounding: dying of thirst was, yes, just like the hangover that finally killed you. There was no way he could keep track of what not to say, so he just didn't tell them anything, for all he said, and he knew the best way to sell a lie was to believe it.

He tried not to think about Don, because they hadn't mentioned Don yet--hadn't mentioned his family or his friends at all, and barely seemed to have any idea that he existed outside his work. It was like they thought he'd been spontaneously generated in the supercomputer room at CalSci and rented out to the FBI from there.

Charlie thought they might not know about Don, if they weren't using him to exert pressure. They might not know Don was coming. Charlie had an idea it might be better if no one knew Don was coming--they couldn't threaten him with things they didn't know, wouldn't guard against Don if they thought he wasn't coming. For all he wanted to be seven years old and yelling My brother will get you! he was a long way from the street he'd grown up on, and these men weren't neighborhood bullies.

When they started telling Charlie all about how they'd left no evidence, when they said, "No one's coming for you," he didn't tell them Don was coming. He was selling the lie, even to himself. When they said, "No one's coming for you," he believed them, and he'd have wept if he'd had enough water in his body to produce tears.

For a couple of days, they had too much tantalizing evidence, too many possibilities. Henne and Preston threw so much manpower at the various leads at CalSci and LAX and North Hollywood and Glendale that Don went back to work just so there would be someone in the office.

Terry and David were careful with him, watching him all the time, exchanging meaningful looks when they thought he couldn't see. Don did paperwork. In five-minute bursts the world seemed normal, and then he looked up, or breathed, or thought of Charlie, and the illusion shattered.

The team investigating Charlie's case had decamped from the house and set up in a conference room. Terry went over there to check on things every hour that day, coming back and updating Don each time. The next day she updated him six times. The day after that, the AD came down personally, holding a file, and Don said, "Whatcha got?" in a determinedly normal voice.

It was a murder case, a sixty-year-old woman, and they had a partial print at the scene and a witness statement. Don wondered whether they'd chosen the case on purpose, to be as different from Charlie's as possible, but he didn't care. It was something he could do.

He was cold, and naked, and there was something very painfully wrong with all the fingers of his left hand. His hand hurt less if he raised it higher than chest level--elevate injury above the heart, he knew that from somewhere, and it seemed like a good thing to know--so he curled up and rested his elbows on his knees, both hands spread over his head, which felt as cold and naked as any other part of him. His hair was a prickle against his palms, and the handcuffs joining his wrists were cold against his forehead. When he closed his eyes, he could see his pain as waves, sometimes as fractals; he knew the math to describe them, but he didn't know how he knew it. He didn't know his name.

He didn't know how long he'd been there. He didn't know why they were hurting him. When they asked him questions, even the ones he knew should be easy, he always answered, "I don't know," and he always told the truth.

Don turned around and a week had gone by. When he came to the house that night, Amita was sitting alone at the dining room table with a laptop and a stack of papers. For a moment he honestly expected Charlie to walk out of the kitchen and took a quick step toward the dining room, opening his mouth to call out, and then Amita looked up. Her face was strained and grave as he'd never seen it before, and Don knew Charlie wasn't in the kitchen. The recoil punched him hard, but he rode it out.

Amita stood, gesturing at the contents of the table, and said, hesitantly, "Charlie told me after my thesis defense that it gave him an idea, so I thought I should try to find--I thought, if he--if I could do something with it, it wouldn't get--"

Don nodded quickly, not wanting her to say that it shouldn't get lost like Charlie. Don looked down at Charlie's laptop, Charlie's notes, and felt sorry for Amita having to search out Charlie's half-formed thoughts in all of that. He remembered dimly that he'd left her crying with a police officer that first night, and he didn't think he'd seen her since.

Don moved closer, opening his mouth to ask her if she was all right and shutting it again without speaking. Of course she wasn't, and she'd either have no answer for the stupid question, or she'd have one he wouldn't know how to listen to. Don reached out, instead, setting a hand on her shoulder and squeezing gently.

Amita looked up at him, but he couldn't hold her gaze for more than a split second; his eyes were on his shoes as her hand covered his, and he held on for another few seconds before he pulled away, shoving his hands into his pockets.

When he glanced up, Amita was running the back of her hand under her eyes, tucking her hair behind her ears.

"Have you eaten?" he asked quietly, though he couldn't remember the last time he'd been hungry himself. "Can I get you anything?"

Amita shrugged, looking down at the computer.

"Your dad just left to pick up some things," she said, and Don nodded and went into the kitchen. He checked the fridge automatically, and there was beer, and he wanted one worse than anything, all of a sudden. He hadn't let himself all week, feeling vaguely and constantly on-duty as he had in the months before his mother died. He took two without letting himself think further on that comparison, and set one down next to Charlie's laptop as he walked past the table. Amita's fingers went still on the keys, and then he heard the scrape of her chair pushing back.

She followed him into the living room and said, "Thanks," with a small shaky smile when he opened the bottle for her. They were on their seconds, sitting in the living room without lights or the TV, when his dad came back, having collected Larry somewhere along the way. There was homemade stir fry, sometime after that, and Don ate enough to keep his father from looking too worried at him. There was also a baseball game, and a disjointed discussion of baseball with Larry that involved much more physics than Don remembered being involved in swinging a bat. Don couldn't follow a word of it, but he liked the sound of Larry's voice, the occasional gentle interjection from Amita and the rumble of his father's questions, so he found another game when the first one ended and stumbled to the kitchen for more beer.

No one left that night: Amita slept in the guest room, and Larry on the couch. Don slept in his own old room, and Charlie's bed stayed empty.

They closed the murder case. David and Terry took over most of the responsibility for interrogations after Don nearly blew the whole case by attacking their prime suspect. He worked twelve-hour days on their next three cases--armed robbery, triple murder, four rapes in Santa Monica--and they caught that guy before he got to a fifth because he didn't move out of the hot zone before they got there. This time it was Amita running the numbers, and David who leaned over her shoulder as she worked. Don just stayed the hell out of the way, waiting for somebody to point him at a suspect.

He saw Cash and Abrams around, working a string of murders downtown. He never saw Henne and Preston anymore, but Terry still went over there and got the status report every day or so. Every time she came back from that side of the building she told him that they were chasing this lead or that lead, but Don knew how to interpret interim reports like that. What they really meant was, 'We have no fucking clue.'

Don carefully avoided that entire side of the building, and he hit the gym, or the firing range, at least once a day, putting in some quality time with the heavy bag, or the human silhouettes. Getting himself thrown out of the Bureau for going after Henne wouldn't help anything, not that Don was any use to Charlie at this point anyway.

He couldn't put in too much mindless time, though. He'd start to remember the blood on Charlie's Why Yes, I Am A Rocket Scientist t-shirt ("Technically not true," Charlie had admitted, "but I think it's more about the spirit of the thing,") and it wasn't a lot of blood, just enough for a nosebleed or a badly split lip--even a tooth knocked out would have been more, and they hadn't found a tooth. Or he'd find himself thinking of that bag of curly hair (Charlie's head must be all stubble, like when he was six and tried to cut his own hair with safety scissors and wound up with an involuntary buzz cut--he'd cried the whole time at the barber's, no matter how hard Don tried to distract him, and all Don could think about anymore was that he'd been mostly embarrassed by the noise Charlie was making, not sorry his brother was scared and crying).

On nights when there was nothing to be done at work, he went to the house and was soundly beaten at chess by his father. Sometimes Larry was around, and he would play Don instead; they were strangely well-matched, and a game could last half the night, with his father going back and forth between them, kibbitzing and pre-empting their worst mistakes. The house was bad, too--Charlie's absence was everywhere--but easier, because at the house Don was the brave one, and he could function better when he focused on being strong and calm and competent for his dad, or Larry, or whoever else was around.

He'd been questioned by a lot of people, but his favorite was the new one standing over him now, holding a gun to his head as he lay flat on his back on the floor. This one seemed saner around the eyes than some of the others, despite the gun. When he said, "Give me one reason not to kill you, Know-Nothing," he seemed honestly willing to hear an answer.

"I'm a mathematician," he said, quickly considering and rejecting provisional adoption of the title Know-Nothing. He did know things. He knew a lot of numbers, for instance; in any quiet moment he was given they scrolled constantly across the backs of his eyelids. He seemed to be able to do a lot of things with them.

"You'd be surprised what you can do with math, especially if you're as good at it as I am."

The man behind the gun raised an eyebrow, though the gun didn't move. "So you know you're a genius," the man said quietly, thoughtfully.

"Yes," he replied firmly. He did know that. He just had time to think And apparently so do you before everything went starry-bright and then abruptly dark.

Don had dreams of finding Charlie's body.

He was at the beach, and Charlie's body washed up on shore, naked and battered and waterlogged. Or he was running, and saw familiar fingers peeping out from under a bush, a foot protruding from a culvert, a tarp-wrapped shape in a ditch. Or he walked down the stairs at the house one morning and Charlie was lying on the floor, back in his t-shirt and jeans, now liberally soaked with blood, curly head smashed or neck broken. There were a thousand variations, but he always woke up still feeling terribly, disgustingly relieved.

If Charlie was dead--if Don found him--then it would all be over, and the truth was that nothing was over yet. Don lay in the dark with the certainty, gut-deep and heavy as lead, that Charlie was out there somewhere, waiting to be found. He swung wildly between hating Henne and Preston so much he couldn't think straight--why hadn't they fucking found Charlie yet?--and being so sickeningly grateful to them for looking that he could hardly breathe.

No matter how he felt, he was too tired to feel it for long, and sank back into sleep just to dream again.

Terry came back from the other side of the building, late one night when nearly everyone else was gone, and Don knew as soon as he saw her face. He was on his feet and running before he had time to think, hands curling into fists. Terry bolted to intercept him, took him down with an expert trip and shoved him over onto his ass. He sat propped against a cubicle wall, gasping for breath that tasted faintly bitter.

"Shut up, Don," she said fiercely, bending over him, before he could even think of forming words. "Shut up. I know what you're going to say, and you know there's nothing they can do."

"They can't stop, they haven't found him yet," Don snarled. Inside he was screaming, because as long as somebody was looking it was okay if it wasn't him. He was doing his part by staying out of the way, as long as there was somebody on the case to stay out of the way of. If nobody was looking Charlie wouldn't get found, and Charlie was out there waiting--

"Sometimes people don't get found," Terry said ruthlessly, and when Don tried to push up she planted one hand in the middle of his chest with all her weight behind it. "Don, you know that and I know that. If it was a matter of wanting it badly enough, we'd find every single one, but sometimes we don't. It's been twenty-six days, and it's been eight since they had anything like a fresh lead. They're not closing the case, but there are other people out there who need finding, and we have to devote our people to the ones we have the best chances of getting to."

Don looked away, shut his eyes, forced himself to breathe. Terry was telling him the truth and he knew it, but Charlie wasn't dead. Charlie was out there, and if Don couldn't find him yet, well, that didn't mean he wouldn't. Charlie had left those fingerprints, holding on. He'd keep holding on, and sooner or later he'd leave another mark, something Don could use. Don would find him, but he needed the Bureau's resources to do it, and that meant he had to play like a good boy for a little while. He let his breath go out, let his chin drop, rubbed his face with one hand.

"He's my brother," Don said softly, and he didn't have to fake the tremor in his voice.

Terry's hand shifted up to his shoulder. He felt like an asshole selling her this bullshit surrender, but if she didn't believe it no one would.

"I know," she said softly. "Don, I know. I love Charlie too, we all do. And the minute there's a lead, we'll be doing everything we can to find him. But for right now..."

Don nodded and stayed quiet a minute, showing her how calm he could be before he said, "I could use dinner."

"You could use a stiff drink," Terry said, straightening up. "But dinner's not a bad chaser."

Alan stood at the stove, stirring slowly, and watched his son from the corner of his eye. Don was chopping vegetables with the same intense concentration he'd used the very first time he was allowed to stand on a chair and wield a paring knife. His eldest. Don had been their only for more than five years, before Charlie had come along, and now, after thirty-five years, his family was down to two again. It was all wrong this way, Margaret and Charlie leaving them behind, but what could he do? Don was all he had left now.

He watched Don's fingers and the knife, blade flashing steadily, and waited until Don had finished what he was doing and looked up.

"Dad?" he said, with a small troubled frown, the kind he used to wear when he was a little boy, when it was Alan's job to break bad news to Don, and not the other way around.

"Don," he said gently, because there were some things that always had to travel from a father to his son. "I spoke to Terry. She told me about Charlie's case."

Don looked away, set down the knife without a sound. "Dad, I--"

I'm sorry, Don would say, yet again, if Alan let him.

"Hush, Donnie, and listen to your father." Don looked up again, his eyes dark and shining. He and Charlie had just the same eyes. Alan swallowed hard. "Don, I want you to know that whatever you think you did wrong, whatever you think you did that makes you responsible for this--"

"He's my brother," Don said, looking down at his restless hands, "I'm responsible--"

"But that doesn't mean it's your fault," Alan said sharply. "And even if it were--"

Don looked up quickly at that, pale and wide-eyed, and Alan said, "Don, whatever you think, whatever you're telling yourself, I want you to know that if you think you need my forgiveness, you have it. And you would have Charlie's, too, if he knew you needed it."

Don stood there, frozen, and Alan moved toward him, set his hand on his son's face. When Don still didn't move, Alan stepped in and kissed his cheek. "I can't lose you both, Don. I can't."

Don whispered, "Dad," in so small a voice that Alan would not have heard it if he'd stepped back. Alan tried not to think that Don's was the only voice he would ever hear saying that word to him again, and closed his eyes tightly against the tears that threatened. He was a father; it was his job to be brave for his sons.

Charlie had been missing a month when Terry brought Don a kidnapping case.

"We don't have to," she said. "But I wasn't going to assume you couldn't."

"I'm good," Don promised her, and he was, he was good, he didn't throttle anyone, didn't throw up at the crime scene. They found the kid in just under twenty-seven hours, brought him home to his mom and dad wrapped in a complimentary FBI jacket.

They went out for drinks afterward, Don and Terry and David and a few other agents who'd been involved in the hunt. David made a phone call on the way over, and Amita met them at the bar. She sat close to David's side until the two of them wandered off to play darts. Don felt weirdly bereft, but glad that Amita had somebody to lean against. He wondered if she and Charlie had ever played darts. Probably not. Charlie would have gotten distracted and sat scribbling on napkins half the night, and at that moment Don missed his brother so powerfully he couldn't breathe, couldn't move. He sat staring blindly down at the table until the worst of it passed, downed his drink and poured another from the pitcher on the table, only slopping a little over his hand.

Henne and Preston stopped by after Don was well-insulated with alcohol. Henne bought a round, but kept a few people between him and Don at all times. Don could feel Terry watching him, and he knew what he had to do. He walked over to Henne, who was brave enough to stand his ground when he saw Don coming, and said, "I know you did what you could."

Henne shook his head. "I'm fucking sorry, man. Listen, we're keeping an eye on things, watching for more--" and Don just shook his head, even as he made a mental note to find some way to insert himself into that particular information loop.

"You did what you could," Don repeated, and held out his hand.

Henne took it in a firm grip, meeting his eyes steadily, intently, and said, "Yeah, I did. I swear to you I did."

It was quiet. Insidious. There was no announcement, no moment, but Don could feel everyone around him giving up. They talked about Charlie in the past tense--not so overtly as Charlie was, but they only told stories about what he used to do. No one talked about him being found, about him coming home. Don could see it: they all thought Charlie was dead. Everyone but Don, the last holdout. The statistical term, Don had known before Charlie ever told him, was outlier.

Don had learned the statistics back at Quantico. Forty-eight hours was the critical period. Likelihood of successful recovery declined at such a rate every six or twelve or twenty-four hours under textbook conditions. Thirty-four days out with no contact, the statistics said Charlie was dead.

Charlie had said that to him once. "Statistically, you're dead now." But Don had been alive to hear it.

So Charlie was dead, statistically speaking; well, so was Don. All that meant was that neither of them had anything left to lose, going by the numbers.

Don didn't bother trying to get access to Henne's files. Too much risk, too little reward. He needed to go on giving every appearance of being on an even keel. He couldn't draw attention to himself. They'd expect him to go after Henne's files, but he didn't think that Terry had lied to him, or that Henne was incompetent. If the break was there to be made, they'd have made it.

The FBI hadn't found Charlie; therefore, the FBI didn't have the information Don needed in order to find Charlie. It was out there somewhere, wherever Charlie was. Don started watching every regional and local information source he could get his hands on, waiting for the next hint to show up, the next set of fingerprints, the next clue to Charlie's whereabouts. Never at night, never when he was alone in the office. Never secretive, because no one else knew that the fine print of the Des Moines field office's monthly report had anything to do with Charlie and mostly, so far, it didn't. But Don was watching.

He started preparing in other ways, too, dusting off every little trick he'd picked up working fugitive recovery--half of them he'd used, and half had been used against him. It was delicate, secret work, but he worked in a building full of secrets; if you knew the system, you could camouflage your own with everyone else's. You could hide whole lives as long as they were paper-thin, whole people who were just pieces of plastic. Nobody was supposed to know, and the system could work to your advantage if you knew just how to use it. If you were willing to cheat.

Don could feel the line blurring like it had in the old days, between thinking like the bad guys and being like them. It had always gotten the job done, though, and that was all Don cared about now.

Forty days was traditionally meaningful, but Don didn't really want to get into a religious discussion with his dad by bringing that up. On the night after the fortieth day, Don went out alone to a bar he'd never been to with Charlie or anyone else he knew.

A woman with shiny blonde hair and a quiet smile bought his second drink; he bought her third. She seemed to like his silence--probably thought he was romantic and soulful, or something other than a hair away from completely losing his mind--so Don didn't exert himself to be charming. He let her tow him to a cab, later, though they'd hardly exchanged more words than drinks. He lost himself for a while, in her mouth and her hands and the soft wetness of her, but when she kissed him goodbye and left him lying in a rumpled motel bed, he thought that lost wasn't really what he'd needed to get.

He thought about going to his dad's, or his own apartment, but his fortieth night wasn't over yet, so Don rolled over and went to sleep instead.

He was backed into a corner with Charlie in front of him, and Don couldn't talk for the sudden swelling joy in his chest at the sight of Charlie, alive and whole and right there within arm's reach. But when Don smiled Charlie frowned, and when Don reached for him Charlie stepped in close but shrugged away the touch, shoving something hard against his stomach.

"Charlie," Don said, puzzled and pinned to the wall, still trying to reach for Charlie, to kiss Charlie's cheek as his father had kissed his, "Charlie?"

But Charlie wouldn't let Don touch him; Charlie was furious.

"If you really loved me you'd have found me by now," Charlie said, and then Don knew it was a dream, and that hurt almost as much as the realization that the hard thing against his stomach was a gun, that Charlie was holding a gun on him. Charlie tilted his head, giving him a clinically curious look as he pulled the trigger, and Don felt the bullet punch his insides out, right through a gaping hole beside his spine. He fell to the floor as Charlie backed away from him, and he knew he had to wake up before he bled to death or he'd die in the dream and out of it, but he didn't want to wake up while he could still see Charlie.

"Charlie," he whispered, and the word was a stabbing pain in his gut and a bubble of blood on his lips, "Charlie."

Charlie was still watching him with nothing but the most academic of interest, still just out of reach. Don raised a hand, trying to touch him, multiplying the pain, bringing forth another gush of blood, and his vision of Charlie darkened and darkened until Charlie was gone, and Don was blinking at the darkness of a dingy motel room, his arms clutched to his stomach as he gasped for breath.

He was undercover in his own life, and so far his cover was holding. It was easy in any long-term job undercover to forget the bigger goal, to think that just getting through each day undetected was an accomplishment. He felt flickers of that false pride from time to time, when he'd reviewed half a dozen potential sources and every one had come up empty, but he also hadn't gotten caught.

Charlie was still out there somewhere, and Don still didn't know where. Flying under the radar wouldn't do him any good if he never went anywhere, and it was time--maybe past time--to reconsider his approach. There was one place he hadn't looked yet, and on the fifty-third day he cracked and asked Henne to let him look at the files.

Henne agreed immediately, set Don up in a quiet conference room with boxes and boxes of stuff, and that more than anything told Don this was an active case in nothing more than name. If they'd had a damn thing they'd never leave the victim's brother alone with the case files, but Henne just said, "I'm sure you'll know what you're looking at. Holler if you see anything."

Most of it Don already knew in summary, so he got a kind of déjà vu seeing the raw form. Some of it he'd imagined but never seen, like an 8 by 10 closeup of Charlie's fingerprints on a car window, rimmed in gray dust.

In a box labeled LECTURES there was the original memo from the AD giving Charlie permission to speak and write about his work, provided he didn't discuss cases still under prosecution, changed all names and identifying details, refrained from giving enough information to spark copy-cats, and strictly avoided mentioning which FBI agents he worked with, or even that he regularly worked with the same ones. It had sounded logical at the time, but now it made Don sick to think that the AD had been worried about drawing attention to him.

They'd done a lot of brute-force work with that, trying to track down the people who'd attended Charlie's lectures, who might have learned from there what he was doing. All they'd figured out was that anybody who read English and had access to the internet could have found out the general content of Charlie's talks, to say nothing of when and where they were held, where he worked, and when he taught.

Don had meant to go to the lectures himself, but something had come up and kept him from the first one, and the second had been scheduled against the FBI baseball team's game against the LAFD. They couldn't spare Don against the firefighters, so he'd met Charlie and his dad afterward for drinks, and Charlie had been bright-eyed and enthusiastic, babbling on, still half in lecture mode. Their father, as Don recalled, had been more excited about the number of young women who'd stayed after the lecture to ask questions than about anything Charlie had said.

There were interviews and background checks on a dozen pretty young co-eds in the file box. What there wasn't was a scrap of evidence that any of them were in league with the person or persons unknown who'd snatched Charlie, killed two potential witnesses, and left no DNA or fingerprint evidence in the process.

The next box had a picture of Charlie on top of the folders, blown up from the photo already in Charlie's FBI file, the one from his--as it turned out, totally unnecessary--visitor's pass. Don had been there when they took it; it had been him, standing off to one side of the photographer, who Charlie had been squinting at uncertainly when the picture was taken. He remembered how excited he'd been, about Charlie's breakthrough, about solving that case. He and Charlie had saved a hell of a lot of lives together.

They just hadn't saved Charlie's. Yet.

The next folder, substantial but not overflowing, had Don's name scrawled on it. He sat down on the edge of the table as he opened it up, realizing even before he saw the words what it must be. It had never crossed his mind until then.

Most of the file was handwritten; there was nothing more formal than a few memos to and from the AD, and that was obscurely reassuring. Henne and Preston hadn't wanted to take it seriously either, though they hadn't overlooked the possibility. The first checklist was on a torn sheet of notebook paper in Preston's handwriting--he'd probably done it right at the crime scene, certainly before the sun came up the next morning.

DE--

MOT.
???

MET.
Trained, professional, no evidence, efficient kills
Could easily lure/overpower CE

OPP.
No alibi
Knew CE's habits, movements

Don remembered when he'd told Preston he didn't have an alibi, though Preston hadn't asked him for one and Don hadn't even thought of it in those terms--but he'd said that night that he'd left the office close to midnight, gone home to bed, and come back in at eight, hours after Charlie had been taken. He slept alone. He couldn't account for his whereabouts. He was a close family member with an intense and sometimes rocky relationship to the victim. He was more than capable of committing the crime. Don had held other people's grief-stricken family members for questioning with less cause.

He supposed they hadn't needed to haul him in. He'd been subdued and cooperative, and there had been enough agents around those first few days to effectively constitute house arrest. He remembered Terry showing up the first morning, telling him not to come to work--AD's orders. He flipped through the pages and found Preston's handwritten notes from an interview with Terry. Six o'clock the first morning, barely twenty-four hours after. Calm. Understands procedural necessity. Supports informal observation of DE. Says no fight/friction btw. DE-CE. Says DE genuinely shocked/hurt. Says she led DE to phone, DE did not appear to know it would be there. Says DE not involved.

He had to look away for a minute, out through the windows into the activity of the cubicles. He could almost see Henne's desk from here. Preston didn't seem to be around. For just a second, Don let himself actually think of Charlie, of the sheer crazy joy of solving crimes with his help, of all the time they'd spent together in the months Charlie had worked with them, and he wanted to hit whoever thought that all of that boiled down to no fight/friction btw. DE-CE.

But it did, for the purposes of the investigation. And Don, at least now that he'd had fifty-three days to calm the fuck down, understood procedural necessity as well as Terry did. He took a breath and continued through the folder for the sake of thoroughness, though he didn't think the fact that they'd cleared him would yield up any useful clues about Charlie's actual kidnappers.

There were a lot of elaborations on the theme of Don's theoretical ability to commit the crime, a lot of negative observations on his behavior--no sign of guilt, no sign of prior knowledge of case developments, no evidence of contact with theoretical conspirators, no movement of large sums of money. The file was finished out with a flurry of memos between Henne and Preston and the AD, dated the day before Don had come back to work, in which the agents assured the AD that Don was not under suspicion, had never been under suspicion on more than procedural grounds, and was perfectly safe to have working for the FBI without formal investigation.

All things considered, Don thought he probably owed them both at least a drink. They could have made those first few days worse for everyone--he didn't even want to think about how his father would have taken Don being arrested for Charlie's kidnapping or murder--and they hadn't.

Still, that folder left a bad taste in Don's mouth, an edgy, itchy restlessness creeping down his spine. He tucked the file back into its box and headed to the break room for coffee. He stayed in there for the first few sips, until the caffeine hit and the warmth sunk in, and he felt a little steadier. When he walked back to the conference room, Henne was standing in a cubicle aisle talking to another agent. He caught Don's eye as he passed, and Don raised his coffee slightly in salute.

He looked quickly through the rest of that box. There were folders for everybody--their dad, Larry, Amita, the entire CalSci Math Department, even Terry and David, complete with some rivalry-motive speculations that would have been kind of funny if Don didn't know Henne and Preston had been considering them in all seriousness as the reason Charlie might be missing or dead.

There was a box for each of the shooting victims, too, and Don felt faintly guilty for not having given them more thought; their murders remained as unsolved as Charlie's disappearance, though their deaths were entirely final. This was why he'd had to stay the hell away from the case while it was actually being investigated, this was exactly what no perspective meant, forgetting two murder victims in favor of the one more nebulously missing. But Henne and Preston hadn't forgotten. They'd investigated every possible angle and concluded, as Don had always assumed, that Casey Perez and Derek Albright had been killed because of Charlie, because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, so they had nothing to tell him either.

The only bright spot Don could find, after sixteen straight hours glutting himself on reams of mostly negative findings, was that there had never been a ransom demand, and there had never been any suggestion--even in the glare of hindsight--that anybody was stalking Charlie. That meant no frustrated kidnappers, and no personally obsessed nutjob. That meant whoever had taken Charlie had wanted Charlie, had wanted Dr. Charles Eppes, and Charlie, Don knew from professional experience, was worth keeping around. Charlie was more useful than 99.99% of kidnapping victims and that was why Charlie would still be alive when Don found him.

Charles' office was naturally kept locked in his absence. The departmental secretary had a key, but Larry had his CalSci ID, which worked just as well if you knew how to use it. Larry liked to keep in practice. He'd done it for Charles once, when he'd locked himself out for the third time in a week and couldn't bear asking the formidable Sarah Gantry to let him in again: after that Larry had considered that he had tacit permission to let himself in, present circumstances notwithstanding.

The dull roar of the first week of classes--which somehow penetrated even into the hallowed precincts of the Mathematics Department--was muffled as Larry locked the door behind him. He hadn't come here often since Charles had disappeared--had been abducted--but it was, oddly, a soothing place. Apart from a faint layer of dust, the office gave every impression that Charles had just stepped out and would be back any moment. His chalkboards had been left untouched, without even the protection of a Do not erase note, which alone suggested that he'd been gone only minutes or hours, not months.

Larry looked around for a moment, enjoying the peace, and then sat down at the worktable, resting his head on his crossed arms and staring at Charles' desk, still as cluttered as ever. When Larry had been a young physicist--drunk, sleep-deprived, and/or manic in the company of other young physicists--they had often joked about putting Schroedinger's paradox to an empirical test. It had only ever been a ridiculous idea: a thought experiment upon a thought experiment. They had all accepted, implicitly, that one could not (potentially) kill a cat to test an unprovable point of quantum theory. It would be cruel to the cat.

He had never before thought about what it would have been like if they had tried it: not for the poor cat, but for himself, standing outside that sealed container, not knowing whether the cat lived or died at any given moment, attempting to accept the quantum reality of the cat's dead-alive state while knowing that eventually they would open the box and discover either a feline corpse or the same cat they had last seen, safe and sound and prepared to spring out of the box and resume its cat routine.

Somewhere, under the-universe-only-knew what conditions, what odds of survival, Charles was Schroedinger's Mathematician: both dead and alive, so long as he remained unobserved. Larry closed his eyes on the cluttered desk, holding to his faith in quantum physics and observing nothing.