Chapter 3: The Unmasking
The drive back to Austin was a five-hour stretch of fading light and silent introspection. The solved case—Larry Avila’s quiet, polished defeat—hung between them in the FBI car, a spectre that should have felt like victory but just felt like sediment settling at the bottom of a murky glass.
Teresa drove, her hands relaxed on the wheel now, the tense purpose of the morning dissolved into a weary autopilot. The flat Texas landscape blurred past, mesquite and scrub under an enormous sky bleeding orange at the edges. She was acutely aware of Patrick in the passenger seat, uncharacteristically quiet. He wasn’t sleeping. He was just… still.
For two years, she had trained herself not to wonder about him. He was in Venezuela. She had been in Washington State. The space was necessary, a surgical incision to separate what was professional from what was… something else. A thing she had never allowed to fully form, a sketch she kept erasing. Now he was back, crammed into her passenger seat, and the changes were subtle dislocations in her understanding of him. The pride in his eyes at the cemetery wasn’t for a trick well-pulled. It was for her. The fury he’d unleashed on Laskey wasn’t just for the sport of it. It was a shield.
It was terrifying.
She felt his gaze on her profile, a physical weight. A warm prickle traveled from her neck to her cheekbone. She waited, counting highway dashes, but he didn’t look away.
“What?” she finally asked, her voice sounding sharper than she intended in the quiet cabin.
“Just thinking,” he said, his tone easy.
“Is it necessary to stare at me while you’re thinking?”
He gave her a half-smile, the kind that softened his eyes. “No. But looking at you makes it more enjoyable.”
Heat flooded her cheeks. She forced a scowl, hoping it masked the involuntary reaction. It didn’t reach her eyes. “Find something else to look at.”
He dramaticaly sighed, a low, playful sound, and made a show of looking out his window at the passing emptiness, then at the roof of the car, then at his own hands. His eyes landed back on her, the blue of them clear and intent in the dashboard glow. “There isn’t anything more enjoyable to look at.”
Her breath caught. The silence that followed was thick, charged with everything they never said. She kept her eyes glued to the road, but she watched him from the corner of her vision. It felt like his gaze was a physical touch, tracing the line of her jaw, the curve of her cheek. A slow, unfamiliar warmth unspooled low in her stomach. She squirmed subtly in the leather seat, adjusting her grip on the wheel.
Patrick settled back into his seat and closed his eyes. He shook his head in mock disappointment. “I guess I’ll have to keep my eyes closed to remove the temptation.”
Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic, double-time rhythm that felt deafening in the small space. What was this? A new manipulation? An elaborate, casual joke? The Patrick of before would have deployed a line like that with a theatrical wink, a clear performance. This felt different. The delivery was too quiet, too simple. The air between them hadn’t snapped back to normal. It still hummed.
Was he serious?
The question looped in her mind for the remaining miles, unanswered.
The next day smelled of stale coffee and industrial cleaner. Interrogation Room Three was a ten-by-ten box designed to wear people down. The fluorescent light buzzed like an trapped insect. Teresa sat across from Ray Novak, a mid-level distributor for a pharmaceutical ring they were dismantling. He was all coiled aggression in a cheap tracksuit, tattoos crawling up his neck. Patrick leaned against the wall by the one-way mirror, a silent observer, arms crossed.
Novak had been playing dumb for forty minutes. Teresa was methodically boxing him in with logistics paperwork, witness statements. She was calm, relentless.
“The shipment landed at the Port of Houston on the 12th,” she stated, tapping a customs form. “Your signature is on the transfer manifest.”
“Lots of people have my name,” Novak sneered, leaning back, spreading his knees wide in a display of crude dominance. His eyes raked over her, dismissive and lingering. “You sure you wanna be spending your time on this, sweetheart? Seems like a waste. I know better ways you could work up a sweat.”
The comment hung in the air, vulgar and flat. Teresa didn’t flinch. Her expression cooled, her professional mask locking into place. “Just answer the question, Mr. Novak.”
But Novak, encouraged by her icy control, smirked. His eyes flicked to Patrick, who had gone very still by the mirror. “What about you, blondie? You just here to watch the show? You want me, is that it?”
Patrick pushed off the wall.
It wasn’t a dramatic movement. It was a slow, deliberate uncoiling. He didn’t look at Teresa. His entire focus was on Novak, but the energy in the room warped, the air pressure dropping. The playful man from the car was gone. This was something older, sharper, forged in the aftermath of a different kind of loss.
He pulled out the empty chair beside Teresa and sat down. He rested his elbows on the table, steepling his fingers, his gaze locked on Novak. His smile was gone. His eyes were the color of winter sky.
“Ray,” Patrick said, his voice soft, almost conversational. “Can I call you Ray? Your left knuckle is scarred from a break that wasn’t set properly. Probably in your late teens, a fight you lost. The tattoo on your right wrist—a dagger through a rose—is covering up something else. Gang affiliation? A girlfriend’s name? You’re trying to look hard, but you picked a cliché. It tells me you’re a follower, not an innovator.”
Novak’s smirk faltered. “The hell are you talking about?”
“You’re sweating, Ray. Not from the heat. From the cheap steroid cycle you’re on. Your skin’s oily, you’ve got acne on your shoulders there under that shirt. The aggression, the impulsive vulgarity… side effects. You’re chemically insecure.” Patrick’s tone was clinical, a biologist dissecting a specimen. “You hit on Agent Lisbon because you saw a woman in authority and your shrunken, chemically-addled ego couldn’t handle it. You needed to try and reduce her to an object. It’s the oldest, saddest play in the book. It’s what small men do.”
“You think you’re so smart—” Novak began, his face flushing.
“I know I’m smart,” Patrick interrupted, his voice dropping even lower, gaining a lethal edge. “I know you live in a rented duplex in Pflugerville. I know you send $200 a month to your mother in El Paso because you feel guilty for being a disappointment. I know you’re terrified of the men you work for, which is why you’re sitting here trying to be a tough guy instead of just lawyering up. You’re a middleman, Ray. A fungus. You grow in the damp, dark spaces between real things.”
He leaned forward slightly. “And you looked at my partner and thought you could soil her with your words. You can’t. You don’t have the reach. All you did was show everyone in this room, and everyone watching behind that glass, exactly what a tiny, frightened, pathetic little boy you are.”
The silence was absolute. Novak looked like he’d been slapped. The bravado had evaporated, leaving behind a pallid, sweating man who suddenly seemed to shrink in his chair. His mouth opened, but no sound came out.
Patrick held his gaze for a beat longer, letting the vitriol settle like poison dust. Then he stood up, the chair legs scraping harshly on the linoleum. He didn’t look at Teresa. He just walked to the door, opened it, and left, pulling it shut with a soft, definitive click.
Teresa’s own heart was pounding. She kept her eyes on Novak, on the crumbling suspect, but her mind was reeling. That wasn’t for the case. That wasn’t a tactic to get a confession. That was pure, unadulterated fury. A protective, possessive fury that had been ignited not by a challenge to himself, but by a crude suggestion aimed at her.
She took a slow, steadying breath, the taste of her coffee now bitter on her tongue. “Now,” she said, her voice remarkably steady in the stunned quiet. “About that shipment on the 12th.”
But as she pressed on, securing the details she needed, a part of her was back in the car, feeling his gaze on her cheek, hearing his quiet words in the dark. There isn’t anything more enjoyable to look at.
The two Patricks—the one who murmured that and the one who had just eviscerated a man for disrespecting her—collided in her mind. The puzzle pieces, once familiar, no longer fit the old picture. They formed something new, something dangerous and deeply compelling.
And she had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
The confession came twenty minutes later, a dry, rustling sound like a dead leaf scraping concrete. Novak, stripped of his pathetic bravado, gave them names, dates, drop points. Teresa took it all down with a steady hand, her professional facade a perfect seal over the churning beneath. When she left the room, the processed air of the hallway felt like a pardon.
Back in the bullpen, the normalcy was jarring. Phones rang, keyboards clacked, Wylie was arguing with a tech about drone footage. The world had kept turning. Cho looked up from his desk as she approached, his dark eyes reading her face in that unnervingly efficient way he had.
“He rolled,” Cho stated.
“Like a marble down a hill,” she confirmed, dropping the file on her desk. She didn’t sit. Her body was still wired. “Where’d Jane go?”
Cho nodded towards the main doors. “Out.”
After leaving interrogation, Patrick had walked briskly through the bullpen. “Out for a walk.” He called to Wylie, waving to the young agent on his way to the elevator.
It had been quite some time since he had been overwhelmed by the need to punish someone the way he had in the interrogation room. He hoped that he had not made Teresa angry. She did not like anyone trying to protect her.
But, he had to admit to himself, he hadn’t done it to protect her. He had been watching a worm of a man attempt to sully the most precious thing in the world to him. He had been enraged.
The Texas heat hit him like a wall, a dense, dry blanket after the building’s artificial chill. He walked without a destination, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, his stride eating up the concrete paths that wound through the landscaped grounds of the FBI compound. The fury was still there, a hot coal in his gut, but it was cooling into a dull, shame-adjacent ache. He had lost control. Not completely, but enough. Enough for her to see it.
A small pond with a fountain in the centre had been set in the centre of four intersecting sidewalks. He stopped, trying to recollect himself.
The water was a murky green, littered with coins wishing for things simpler than his current predicament. The fountain bubbled weakly, a repetitive splash and gurgle that did nothing to soothe him. He watched the water instead, the patterns it made, the way the light fractured on the surface.
A dime, lodged in the algae, winked at him. A nickel lay beside it, dulled. His conman’s mind automatically calculated the take from this pathetic wishing well. It was a useless, habitual assessment. A distraction. He focused past the coins, to the distortion of the water. His own reflection wobbled back at him, fractured by the ripples.
He saw the man from the interrogation room. The cold eyes, the sharp words. He also saw the man from the car, who had told a woman she was the most enjoyable thing to look at in all of Texas. They were the same man. That was the disconcerting part. The separation he had maintained for years—the performer and the private self—was crumbling, and the catalyst was standing back in an office building, probably filing a report on his unprofessional conduct.
The separation he had maintained for years—the performer and the private self—was crumbling, and the catalyst was standing back in an office building, probably filing a report on his unprofessional conduct. He dragged a hand through his hair, the humid breeze offering no relief. He watched a water strider skate across the pond’s surface, its path chaotic and pointless.
It didn’t take Teresa long to find him.
The FBI grounds were well-landscaped, but not large. She saw him standing in front of the small fountain, apparently studying the water. His shoulders were set with a tension she recognized; it was the same line of his back she’d seen after he’d visited his family’s graves. She felt a familiar twist in her chest, part concern, part something warmer and more disquieting.
She approached him slowly, until she was next to him and able to see her reflection next to his in the water. Their images wobbled side-by-side in the murky green, distorted by the ripples. For a moment, they just watched the fractured versions of themselves.
“Patrick.”
He tensed but did not respond right away. His eyes remained fixed on the water, on the place where their reflections blurred together. A droplet landed on the surface between them, erasing both their faces for an instant.
Teresa stood and waited. She knew this silence. It was the quiet before a truth, not a trick.
Eventually, he spoke, his voice rough. “I owe you an apology. For my behaviour in there. It was…” He searched for the word, finally settling on, “Excessive.”
“You were angry,” she observed, keeping her tone neutral. She watched his profile, the tight line of his jaw.
“Yes.” He nodded slowly, still not looking at her. “But I wasn’t trying to protect you.” He finally turned his head, meeting her gaze directly. His eyes were solemn, stripped of their usual playful glimmer. “I know you could do that for yourself. I was just furious that he treated you that way.”
The fountain burbled between them. The sound was incongruously cheerful. Teresa studied him, this man who had once pretended to know everything and now seemed genuinely puzzled by his own reactions.
“Why?” The question left her lips before she could filter it. It was too broad, too dangerous.
Patrick turned fully to look at her, his movement deliberate. His eyes were intense, the blue of them stark in the daylight. He held her gaze, letting the weight of her question settle between them. He seemed to be deciding on the precise shape of a difficult truth.
“Because,” he said, the word measured and solid. “He was trying to drag something precious through the dirt.” He paused, his gaze unwavering. “And I couldn’t just stand there and watch it happen.”
The world seemed to narrow to the space between them, to the earnest gravity in his eyes. The hum of distant traffic faded. There was no playful deflection, no charming smirk. This was the man from the car, from the cemetery, laid bare. The performer was gone.
Teresa’s breath caught in her throat. The word ‘precious’ echoed in the quiet. It wasn’t flowery or grandiose. It was specific. It was a fact he was stating, simple and devastating.
He didn’t look away. He was waiting, she realized, for her to do something with it. To confirm it, to reject it, to define it.
She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Her mind, usually so swift to categorize and analyze, went blank. All she could see was the clear, unguarded certainty in his expression. It was more intimidating than any suspect’s glare.
A loud crackle from her shoulder radio shattered the moment. Abbott’s voice, tinny and urgent, sliced through the tension. “Lisbon, Jane, get back to the conference room. Now. We’ve got another one.”
The spell broke. Patrick blinked, and a shutter seemed to click down behind his eyes, the raw intensity replaced by focused alertness. Teresa turned slightly, pressing the button on her radio. “Copy. On our way.”
She looked back at him. The vulnerability was gone, tucked away, but the echo of his words remained, hanging in the humid air between them like a physical thing. The case was calling, the professional membrane re-forming. But it felt thinner now, stretched taut over the new, undeniable shape of what lay beneath.
“Well,” Patrick said, his voice regaining a fraction of its old lightness, though it sounded strained. “Duty calls.”
He gestured for her to lead the way. As she turned, she felt the warmth of his hand, a ghost of a touch, barely there, on the small of her back. It was a guiding pressure, familiar and yet completely new. It lasted only a second before he withdrew it.
They walked back toward the building in a silence that was no longer awkward, but thick with everything that had just been said and everything that remained suspended. The ground felt different under her feet. The sun seemed brighter, the shadows sharper. She walked beside him, hyper-aware of the space his body occupied, of the memory of his reflection merging with hers in the dark water.
She walked beside him, hyper-aware of the space his body occupied, of the memory of his reflection merging with hers in the dark water. The word ‘precious’ seemed to have physical mass, a warmth in the center of her chest that pulsed with each step. She focused on the automatic doors of the FBI building ahead, a destination that promised the sterile clarity of work, and tried to anchor herself there.
Inside, the climate-controlled air was a shock. It smelled of recycled oxygen and lemon-scented cleaner. Abbott was waiting in the conference room, a new case board already half-filled with photos that looked like they’d been printed in a hurry. The team was assembling, Cho sliding into a chair, Wylie fumbling with a tablet.
“Sit,” Abbott said, not looking up from a file. “This came in from Sheriff’s deputies in Travis County forty minutes ago. They thought it was an animal attack at first glance. It’s not.”
Patrick held a chair for Teresa, a simple pull of the leather-backed seat beside his usual spot. He didn’t make a show of it. He just did it, then took his own seat, leaning back with an attentive quietness that was new. He didn’t immediately scan the board for the puzzle, the weakness, the thread to pull. He watched Abbott, then glanced at Teresa, letting her absorb the information first.
“Victim is Leo Vance, twenty-eight,” Abbott continued, tapping a photo of a smiling man holding a fishing rod. “Found this morning by a jogger in the greenbelt near Barton Springs. The scene is… messy.”
He put up the scene photos. Teresa’s professional mind compartmentalized the visceral horror: deep, ragged lacerations across the torso and throat, the dark spill of blood stark against grey limestone. The wounds were savage, uncontrolled. “Defensive wounds on the hands and forearms,” she noted, her voice steady.
“He fought hard,” Cho said, studying the images.
“Any weapon recovered?” Teresa asked.
“No. And the medical examiner on scene noted the wound patterns aren’t consistent with a blade. They’re irregular. Jagged.” Abbott put up a close-up shot. The torn flesh looked gruesome. “The preliminary thought is some kind of tool. Maybe a saw, or a homemade weapon with serrated edges.”
Patrick finally spoke, but it was a question, not a declaration. “Were there drag marks? Or was the body positioned?”
Abbott pointed to another photo showing the crumpled form at the base of a tree. “No drag marks. He was attacked right there. It looks like he was waiting for someone, or maybe just taking a break on the trail.”
For the next hour, the team dissected the known facts. Patrick listened. He offered observations only when they pertained directly to questions Teresa or Abbott asked. The victim’s watch is on his right wrist but the band is worn left-justified; he was likely left-handed and switched it after buying it. His hiking boots are new, expensive, but the soles are clean of the red clay prevalent on the northern trails; he stayed on the main paved paths. Each point was delivered cleanly, a piece of data for her to use, not a performance designed to demonstrate his cleverness.
It was unnerving. And, Teresa had to admit, oddly calming. The usual chaotic energy he radiated in meetings was banked, leaving a focused heat that warmed the space around her without demanding her direct attention. She found her own thoughts flowing clearer, unimpeded by the need to manage or challenge him.
Later, as Wylie rambled about traffic camera logistics, she felt a gentle nudge against her ankle. Patrick had subtly slid a small, foil-wrapped package towards her foot under the table. A dark chocolate espresso bean, her favorite brand for late nights. She hadn’t even known he’d noticed. She glanced at him. He was looking at Wylie, his expression one of polite interest, but the corner of his mouth twitched.
The case consumed the week. It was grueling, a maze of dead ends. Leo Vance was a junior architect, recently engaged, no criminal ties, no angry ex-clients. The ‘why’ was a black hole. Patrick worked his contacts, floated theories, but for the first time Teresa could remember, he voiced doubt aloud, and only to her.
They were in the evidence room late on Thursday, surrounded by photographs of the horrific wounds. “It feels personal,” he said, running a hand through his hair in a gesture of genuine frustration. “The violence is too… intimate. But there’s no connection. No thread. What if I’m wrong? What if it’s just random, a monster who picked the wrong trail at the wrong time?”
He was leaning against a steel cabinet, his shoulders slumped not in defeat, but in the fatigue of honest intellectual struggle. He wasn’t the infallible consultant in that moment. He was a man confronted by a void his skills couldn’t immediately illuminate, and he was letting her see his uncertainty. It was a quiet admission that felt more significant than any confident proclamation.
Friday night found the bullpen deserted, a cavern of shadows and the lonely glow of her desk lamp. Case files were spread before her, a mosaic of violence and normalcy that refused to coalesce. Her neck was a solid knot of tension, a dull ache radiating into her shoulders from hours of tilting her head at photos and reports.
Behind her, on the red couch he’d claimed his first day back, Patrick was a silent presence. He wasn’t sleeping. He was just there, reading a book on Venezuelan folk art, the quiet turn of a page the only regular sound in the room. His company had become a constant these late nights, a quiet anchoring she hadn’t realized she’d missed until he resumed it.
She rolled her head, a sharp crick protesting in her cervical spine. A low groan escaped her before she could stop it.
The rustle of fabric. The soft pad of his footsteps on the carpet. He came around to the side of her desk, his book abandoned. “You’re turning to stone,” he observed, his voice soft in the quiet room.
“It’s just tight,” she said, rotating her shoulder with another wince.
“I could help with that.” He said it simply. “The knots. In your neck and shoulders.”
Teresa looked up at him, surprised. His expression was open, concerned, with no trace of his usual teasing agenda. “Since when do you give massages?”
“Since I spent two years in a place where a good sobador was worth more than a doctor.” He gave a small shrug. “I paid attention.”
She hesitated. It felt like crossing a line, but the ache was insistent, and his offer seemed genuine. Not a gambit. A practical solution offered by someone who was just… there. “Okay,” she said, the word feeling oddly weighted. “But nothing weird. Just… the shoulders.”
A faint smile touched his lips. “Define ‘weird.’”
“You know exactly what I mean,” she said, a playful warning in her tone as she turned her chair away from the desk, giving him access to her back. She braced herself for a quippy, good-natured retort about her lack of trust or his impeccable intentions.
She felt him step closer, the warmth of his body a new presence behind her. His hands came to rest, light and tentative, on the curve of her shoulders. She felt the heat of his palms through the cotton of her blouse. He leaned down, his breath a warm disturbance of the air beside her ear.
His voice was a low murmur, a vibration she felt as much as heard. It was stripped of all performance, raw with a honesty that made her breath catch.
“I can’t promise that,” he whispered. “I’m only a man, after all.”