The Truth Lies Beneath - Part Two

[mangacat201]

Part One

The door fell closed behind the two guards, though one of them could be clearly seen through the door, ready to intervene should the necessity arise, and for a few beats no one moved. Gillian didn’t know if waiting him out in silence would get this Dean Winchester to talk, but Cal needed to push his limits before he could find the buttons he needed to press to make it hurt. Either way, this was going to be a battle of wills from this moment. The silence dragged out to the point where Gillian could feel Saunders start to shift next to her.

“Isn’t he going to start interrogating Winchester anytime soon?”

Gillian kept her eyes fixed on the two men in the room while she answered.

“Lightman wants him to make the first move to be able to gauge reaction to pressure. Some people start talking to fill the void, some become agitated, others petulant or competitive in their silence. Whatever they do, each reaction reveals something. He’ll only engage Winchester if he sees absolutely no chance to get anything out of him first.”

Saunders turned back to look at the prisoner, but her frown showed that she wasn’t happy with the explanation. Gillian decided that the woman had about as much sense as field of cabbage and was about equally qualified to supervise this whole endeavour. She stifled a sigh and concentrated on Winchester. He was sitting calmly and upright, staring ahead, which put his eyes just above her navel, but while she was sure that he was well aware that someone was going to be behind the glass, Gillian didn’t get the impression that he was at all interested in engaging them in any way. John Winchester as a well trained veteran and seasoned survivalist had obviously raised his children in a disciplined paramilitary fashion, and his erratic movement pattern over the years suggested an unhealthy sense of paranoid delusion at least. She wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had shown them how to withstand an interrogation as well as how to conduct one in a way that could make them pass as federal agents.

Not unlikely, but indubitably dangerous.

After a couple more minutes, Gillian noticed a slight shift in Winchester’s stance a split second before his eyes snapped up to look directly at her. Then he spoke:

“If you people feel the need to keep me around for this ordeal, can a guy at least get some water?”

Winchester had indeed made the first move, but he had also rigged the game in his favour. He’d ignored Cal as the obvious authority in the room and still posed a request that was straightforward enough that there was no reason not to grant it. Gillian only took a cursory glance at Cal’s raised eyebrows before she stepped out to ask the guard to bring a cup of water.

“So, he cracked and made his first move, that’s points for us, right?”

“Not really, Ms. Saunders. Yes, he opened communication which is good, but he also manipulated us into giving way in our first counter. He made the calculated decision to speak, undoubtedly with a specific goal in mind. Lightman will have to work a lot harder to unbalance him than with just a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, but he’d known that from the beginning. Winchester is not an ordinary opponent, or your office wouldn’t have gotten the best in this job, despite our recent history.”

Saunders looked put upon – as if she had almost deciphered the veiled insult – but before she could decide whether to answer or not, the door opened and a guard stepped through to put a plastic cup filled with water next to Winchester on the table.

The man reached for it with his right hand, chains clinking against the bolt and dragged it over to his other side. Winchester kept his fingers spread around the rim of the cup, but didn’t actually make a move to drink it. Instead, Gillian saw lips move slightly, muttering words under his breath that were so faint they were unintelligible. She watched fascinated as he fell silent and opened his eyes to look at Cal directly for the first time since he’d entered the room before he pushed the cup over the table in Lightman’s direction as far as the shackles would let him reach. Only when he lifted his hand away did she realize that something had been dangling in the water – a rosary that was wrapped tightly around his wrist.

Lightman eyed first the prisoner and then the water with a calculating gaze before dragging the chair halfway out of the corner to reach for the cup. Next to Gillian, Saunders moved forward.

“Wait, he shouldn’t be endorsing Winchester’s delusions like this.”

“He has no choice. This is obviously a test and a show of good faith. Winchester grew up within a rigid power structure based on discipline and respect, but for outsiders, that respect needs to be earned. There are obvious ritualistic elements to his crimes, so it’s not surprising that he would choose consecrated water as a test. Besides, Lightman is not here to treat these delusions, but to find out whether they’re genuine or not. And he’s going to do everything he needs to do to determine that.”

For once Saunders looked properly chastised and Gillian hoped she would consider keeping her opinions to herself for a while so she could concentrate on the task at hand instead of providing running commentary for the would-be experts. Thankfully she didn’t miss Winchester’s reaction to Lightman taking a sip of water – he looked vaguely expectant for a heartbeat and then relaxed marginally when nothing out of the ordinary happened.

“So, did I pass the test?”

Winchester didn’t answer, but a cynical grin stretched his lips and he inclined his head a little as if to congratulate Cal for stating the obvious. Gillian could tell that he was still convinced that refusing to communicate was going to be the best way to derail this interrogation into a disaster of frustration. It didn’t mesh well with the cocky, aggressive attitude they had seen him display in earlier encounters and it made Gillian wonder what might have happened between 2008 and now to change his demeanour so drastically, but it was still a very effective method of evasion. With any other person on the opposite side he probably would have had the advantage by now. Not with Cal Lightman however.

“You’re still not going to talk to me, are you?”

Winchester didn’t move a muscle. Lightman leaned back with one elbow hanging casually over the back of the chair before he opened the file he had dropped on the table earlier.

“I didn’t think so. Funny thing is, I don’t need you to. If you allow me to introduce myself, I’m Dr. Cal Lightman and my job is to find the truth beneath people’s lies. I do that by observing what they can’t control. Their faces, their body language, their expression – they tell me everything I need to know. So I’ll talk for a minute and you listen. Oh and feel free to try and keep a straight face.”

Winchester answered with a slight sneer that clearly took up the challenge and seemed to say ‘Be my guest.’

“You’re mother died in a house fire when you were four, traumatizing your father into dragging the family around on a never-ending road trip for the next couple of decades, yadda yadda. Now, that’s a fun way to grow up, isn’t it? Your file must have been Social Services’ perfect nightmare, longest steady school enrolment a couple of months, residential addresses a string of seedy motels and scrapes and bruises on a regular basis and always a handy excuse for your continued absences. No wonder they thought you were a textbook case of parental abuse – no, you can relax, I don’t think daddy was knocking you around – he took it out on something else, didn’t he?”

Cal gave the impression of nonchalantly recounting the contents of the file, but Gillian knew very well that he was watching Winchester like a hawk, eyes jumping all over the place, registering even the slightest muscle movement.

“And in the process, he seems to have left you with a foot and a half rap sheet of petty crime, B&E’s and a curious penchant for digging up dead people. That one might make me worry about your proclivities in the bedroom if they weren’t largely brittle old bone bags with entirely too many holes in them and too little holding them together as well as the fact that you seem to like carving up live and struggling young women a lot more.”

Winchester’s only reaction was a raised eyebrow.

Cal leaned back for a moment to process the reaction he had gotten from Winchester.

“Hmm, interesting… outright disgust at the suggestion of necrophilia, and guilt and regret for the living and breathing ones, but not a shred of arousal for either one of them. So you really did not attack those girls in St. Louis, did you?”

Gillian didn’t miss the widening of Winchester’s eyes which indicated that Lightman’s assessment had taken him by surprise, but her concentration was broken when Saunders bristled:

“What is he doing, he’s not supposed to take our case against Winchester apart; you have to stop him, NOW!”

Gillian turned around, aggravated to the point of raising her voice.

“Excuse me when I say it again, but Lightman is in there, doing his job. He finds the truth as it is presented to him … one moment, I’m not done … but that doesn’t mean that he has to tell the truth all the time. He needs to establish himself and his skills, or Winchester is never going to take him seriously. And I would really prefer it if you would finally take on your appointed role and be an observer instead of jeopardizing our analysis by butting in with your less than expert opinion – you might learn something. And by the way, Lightman is not the only member of the team essential for a successful assessment, you know?”

For a moment, Gillian was taken aback by of her own volatile reaction, and thought about apologizing for this unprofessional behaviour, but Saunders finally looked at a loss for words and complied with a feeble nod. Gillian turned back to their quarry and hoped she hadn’t missed anything vital. After all, she needed to concentrate on collecting valuable information that Lightman couldn’t bother with in his current situation.

“Now, that’s a bloody bind that is. You see, the people who hired me to find out whether you’re a special kind of crazy or a special kind of murderous don’t really cotton to me pulling their case out from under them.”

“It’s hardly my fault that I didn’t commit the crimes they’re pinning on me.”

Gillian leaned forward at the unexpected reply. She wouldn’t have thought that Winchester would open his mouth so early in the game. But then they had profiled him as cocky and overly confident, and she suspected that he also had an extremely strong sense of righteousness that would goad him into defending himself and his mission at some point.

“Ah, but you did commit crimes.”

A cocky smile stretched Winchester’s lips.

“No comment.”

“Hilarious”, Lightman answered with a grin of his own before his expression smoothed out in the fraction of a second. “But you did kill people, didn’t you? No, no need to say anything, I can see it all over your face.”

“Really? Ok, I’ll bite, what else does my face tell you then, about the people you think I killed?”

“Oh, it doesn’t tell me anything about them, except what YOU feel about it. Guilt, regret, resignation. Like any soldier, in any war.”

This time Winchester actually barked out a salvo of cynical laughter.

“You really have no idea.”

“Oh trust me, I know a veteran when I see one, this isn’t my first rodeo either.”

Gillian knew that the paramilitary element of his upbringing would open Winchester up to relate to experiences with combat situations, and she expected him to jump right in and elaborate on the ideology that the Winchester’s had developed to justify their actions. For that reason she was even more surprised when Winchester leaned forward and answered with a hostility that made the atmosphere turn icy in a heartbeat.

“I told you, you have not even got the slightest idea. Your battles and mine, they’re not in the same league, in fact, they’re not even in the same universe. You’d do well to understand that.”

Lightman reacted with a mock shiver and his patented shark smile.

“Oh, is that a threat?”

“Let’s call it a friendly piece of advice. Actually, I’d make sure that I didn’t stay around these parts for too long.”

“Oh, that does sound like a threat.”

“You really don’t get it, do you? I’ll spell it out for you normal people one more time. I’m on the shitlist of a whole host of very powerful and dangerous people, and, flattering as it is, that media shit storm you guys created will have done nothing if not tell them exactly where to find me. And they’ll be really, really happy to rip me to shreds with little regard for who they need to go through to get to me.”

Lightman slowly leaned forward, tension rising in his body and Gillian knew they had seen the same thing.

“Now that last bit,… that was interesting. Since you really believe that’s the truth. Care to elaborate?”

Winchester sat back with an air of nonchalance and a sense of superiority about him.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Oh, you’re so sure about that? Try me.”

Winchester scoffed before answering:

”It wouldn’t change a thing. I could tell you every little detail about shifters and vampires and ghosts and djinn that I know to be true, but I’d still be sitting here in this hole, waiting for whichever bastard finds me first. The only difference would be that I’d have a shrink jabbering at me about my psychotic, narcissistic personality disorder, coupled with delusional religious vigilantism and how they can fix me if I only try. They don’t get that there’s nothing to fix.”

Gillian felt once again like she couldn’t get a hold of Winchester. He did a great job diagnosing himself, and yet there was the underlying belief in the mythological world on which he based his actions that just didn’t fit the profile of a psychotic killer with a backup plan.

Lightman raised an eyebrow:

“Oi, you think so? If I were your shrink, I’d start with that nasty case of PTSD of yours. Oh, don’t give me that frowny face, sure you have it.”

“If you want to believe that.”

“Oh, you hide it well, underneath that discipline that daddy drilled into your head, be a good soldier, be a man, Winchesters don’t cry, they don’t break…”

Now Lightman was slowly getting under Winchester’s skin, Gillian could feel how the young man was getting unbalanced as every one of the words hit closer to home.

”…and that attitude of yours, that cock-sure bravado that I bet is a riot with the ladies, and years ago maybe that much was true to your character, but now?” Lightman leaned forward and fixed Winchester with an unyielding stare, “Now you’re phoning it in, you’re faking it, because deep down you’re just scared, and raw and done with all of it.”

Gillian was surprised that she hadn’t seen it until now, but it was suddenly clear as a day. The sense of something that made this man stand apart from his younger recorded self that she had observed over and over, the apathetic reaction to just about every provocation that Cal had played till now, the fatalistic choice of words that wasn’t directed as a threat towards the people around him, but against himself…

Winchester’s face turned blank and stony as he took it all in, but his eyes spoke louder than ever.

“You know what? I owe you nothing. Don’t think I haven’t dealt with the likes of you. So smug and arrogant because they think they know something about how the world works. Let me guess, you’ve been in combat before.”

Lightman nodded with an offhand gesture.

“But it wasn’t one of the clean operations, it was dirty business, wasn’t it? Blood, and carnage and innocent people dying along the way that you could barely wrap your conscience around until it got all drowned out by the screams of the dying that you can’t erase from your mind any more than you could save them.”

Winchester had leaned forward as far as his chains would allow it, and Gillian tensed at his precise, barbed words that didn’t only betray personal experience, but would also hit Lightman in one of the very few places where his armour of bravado and calculating provocation was thin and pliable. She knew that Cal had dealt with his experiences during his work for the Pentagon in his own way, but for a dangerous sociopath to hit so close to home with barely any information to go on … it worried her more than she was ready to admit. Martin Walker had gotten Cal’s hackles up with his unapologetic certainty that nobody would be able to crack the outer shell that hid his psychopathic and murderous nature, not even the lion in the den. But this one, he was dangerous because he didn’t seem to be at all invested in playing the game. In fact, the most truthful statement he had uttered up to now was the assessment that they were not even playing in the same league, and that was dangerous, very dangerous.

“I thought so. But let me tell you, whatever you thought you saw in whatever hellhole you spent time in, it’s absolutely nothing compared to the real thing. You want to know what real pain tastes like? Then you need to know how it feels to have your spine ripped out of your back, at a leisurely pace, so you can feel the skin on your back stretch and rip like paper, snapping back from vertebra after vertebra, while all the nerves stay taut, and tight and whole, so you don’t miss a single shred of sensation until the delicate strands unravel and tear. It can take a whole day if done right…. before it starts all over again. And trust me, nothing’s worse than the sound of your spinal cord snapping like a tendon, amplified by a thousand in your own ears.”

The sharp words turned Gillian’s blood to ice, not so much because of the disturbingly graphic description, but because of what played out on Winchester’s face while he spoke them. She had seen those emotions and expressions before – on survivors. But it wasn’t possible. There was just no way for something like Winchester was describing to happen to happen to a person and them surviving the ordeal, and that left one possibility for Dean Winchester to be able to describe it in such vivid detail…

“Is that a confession? Because I’ve got to say, you look pretty agile for a guy who knows this kind of torture from personal experience.”

Winchester threw his head back and laughed in response – a grating and harsh sound – before he looked straight back at Lightman with a vicious grin stretching his lips.

“Trust me, there are places that work with no regards for the rules concerning the fragile human body, but they’re no less real.”

“Interesting, and what do you call this place where they can supposedly rip people apart over and over again?”

Winchester answered with an expression that displayed deadly seriousness and not a shred of the clouded judgement of a deluded mind.

“Hell.”

It shouldn’t feel that way, but still it was like the utterance of the word conjured up a shadow of blood, and bone and screams. The sudden change in atmosphere was enhanced by the flicker of the single neon light that dimmed for the blink of an eye, casting harsh shadows on the thunderous expression on Winchester’s face. Gillian shuddered from an imagined chill, because suddenly the man on the other end of the room looked like the shackles were not fit to hold him here a second longer than he was allowing them to. That he was only held by his own resignation and apathy.

“Now that was an impressive performance, but I’ve got to say that I don’t buy you trying to convince me of the existence of an imaginary place to justify your actions one bit.”

Gillian knew that wasn’t true, since Cal had to have seen how Winchester perceived his version of hell and it was a risky play to pitch such a lie to an opponent who was obviously as adept at reading people as he was at fooling them. And true to his track record, Winchester threw them a curveball again. He threw a look around the room as if he was suddenly distracted by something before turning back to Cal and smirking, apparently not at all offended by the way Lightman had just belittled his trauma and his world view all in one.

“And there we are full circle, I told you, you wouldn’t believe me if I tried. Not that it really matters to me either way, it’s not like just because you think a place or a thing is imaginary that they can’t touch you, believe me, I’ve learned THAT lesson well enough in my life. Question is though, does that get you any closer to figuring out what makes me tick, Doc?”

“Is he going to go anywhere with this, except in circles?”

Gillian kept a sigh and a scream inside after Saunders apparently had recovered enough to threaten her concentration again with her inane comments.

“Lightman is walking a psychological tightrope in there. He needs to be provocative enough to draw Winchester out and keep him talking so he can get as many varied physical cues from him as possible to make his read more accurate. At the same time, he is up against a man who knows a lot of tricks – and not by studying for years and years but from natural talent and experience – and is therefore going to be extremely difficult to unbalance. Lightman needs Winchester to lose his cool and elicit an uncontrolled emotional response if he wants to get to the bottom of things.”

She hadn’t taken her eyes off Winchester in the meantime, but it didn’t need a high profile psychologist to detect the petulant and immature pout that was curling Saunders’ lips in her reflection as she looked back inside the interrogation room. How that woman had made to the position of a trusted ADA was anyone’s guess, but her control on her personal feelings couldn’t have been one of the decisive factors. Gillian ignored the woman once more and watched Cal get ready for a low blow instead.

“Oh, believe me I have a quite thorough idea of what makes you tick, even though you exhibit the most paradoxical set of reactions that I’ve ever had the chance to read.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Lightman leaned back with his elbow on the backrest of his chair and circled his forefinger, pointing at Winchester’s forehead.

“It sure is, however, that doesn’t mean I don’t have an inkling about what goes on in that seriously – and I mean seriously – screwed up noggin’ of yours.”

Winchester reacted by instinctively trying to cross his arms, a motion forcefully aborted by the handcuffs around his wrists. Lightman used the minute flinch of humiliation to press on with his next move.

“Here’s what I think, which is just about the only way to explain your impossibly weird mixture of psychological trauma, indoctrination, delusion and survivor’s guilt.”

Gillian thought for a moment that she heard Winchester mutter ‘apart from the actual truth’ under his breath. Cal gestured dismissively with his free hand as he delivered his profile.

“I think, Daddy went a bit off the rails on his rampage for revenge against some untouchable foe and it left you holding the family together by the skin of your teeth, be a good boy, do as you’re told, take care of Sammy, protect your brother with all that you have…”

She could see that the assessment hit its mark by how considerably Winchester tensed up the closer Cal got to the wild card – the little brother.

“Now, nobody can blame you for not being up for the job, what with being only a kid yourself, but you do your best, because family comes before everything, isn’t that so Dean?”

Winchester didn’t answer verbally, but the muscle jumping in his jaw indicating the gritted teeth and the deepening of the lines between his brows was all the answer Cal needed.

“So when I looked through your files – and even though your rap sheet is twice my arm’s length I’m sure that those record’s have more holes than Swiss cheese concerning what you’ve actually been up to – I couldn’t help but wonder. You’re cocky and know your way around a con and you’ve certainly got no scruples ripping off people for whatever gain you see fit, but apart from a bit of brawling there’s little evidence of excessive violence on your records.”

It was something that Gillian had noted when reviewing the files as well, the way Dean Winchester’s profile bounced around with no apparent pattern that would fit any particular profile.

“But then you show up in Palo Alto, pluck your brother out of his dandy college life that’s just gone to hell in a hand basket and suddenly the Winchesters are all over the place, torturing people, robbing banks, blowing up sheriff stations, racking up a body count that’s nearly unprecedented, disaster always riding their coattails. And that gets me thinking, what if – since you’re the nurturer of the family after all – this isn’t you wreaking havoc just because you can or because the voices tell you to, what if this is just you cleaning up yet another mess little brother’s made, because it’s Sammy who’s the devil incarnate.”

Part Three