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Donald Ressler is not a man often surprised. That being said, when he steps past Keen and sees the wreckage of her townhouse he has a rare moment of being completely flabbergasted. And then he remembers the time that Keen stabbed Reddington in the neck with a pen and he imagines that whatever damage her husband did, Elizabeth Keen probably delivered a decent beating of her own.
Still, he can’t quite help himself and he whistles. “Remind me not to piss you off.”
Keen drops her keys on a still-upright end table. “I have a temper.” She pauses. “And he said shitty things.”
Donald thinks about all the shitty things that men say to women and about all the shitty things that a husband like Keen’s could have come up with and he decides that taking Tom Keen alive isn’t strictly necessary. They have Reddington; that’s a win as far as he’s concerned.
Keen hasn’t looked at him once since they entered the townhouse. “Everything look about as you left it?” he asks.
She slants him a look before walking through the destroyed mess of her living room into the kitchen to check the back door. She flips the lock and pulls the door open partway. When she turns around, he can see her pull something off her index finger. “Yes. I left a sliver of tape on both doors. Still there.”
“Windows?” he asks.
“I broke his right thumb. Even set, I don’t think climbing through windows would have been a high priority.” But she glances around, not like she’s really looking for signs that the windows have been lifted recently but like these windows are a strange predator she’s not sure how to avoid.
His toe nudges an overturned magazine rack. Her voice surprises him, “I should’ve have let you rough him up.”
He smirks, he can’t help it. Not everyone could manage humor right now. “Listen, I can’t vouch for how Cooper or the Bureau may react to this, but this…Tom? You’re doing the right thing here Liz.”
When she tells him she’s going to break her husband, whoever he is, into pieces, he can’t help but offer to help.
“You ready?” He waits for her to look at him.
“Yes.”
Donald pulls out his phone and calls it in.
*
Despite what others might think, Donald loathes being debriefed. In Ressler’s opinion the windowless room always takes more from you than you wanted and everything he wanted to say is in his fucking report. Which is why he watched Keen’s debrief. This has already made a clusterfuck out of her life, there’s no need to add to her humiliation by asking her how many times she and her husband screwed a week. That’s what he tells himself. But even as he’s cursing and reaching for the door into the windowless room, she’s answering.
“This week? Or on average?” She’s quiet and matter-of-fact. There’s nothing of rage he saw in the destroyed townhouse. Her face is the most placid he’s ever seen it. He lets the doorknob slip from his grasp.
The interviewer says, “Both.”
“We had sex the night before he left, he initiated it. Before, maybe twice a week. More before I joined the task force here. We were…” She hesitates. “We were normal. Happy. Our sex life was good.”
The interview makes a note. “And the night before he left, when he initiated it, did he indicate that he knew you were suspicious of him?”
For the first time since she’s sat down at the table, there’s a look of disgust on her face. “I don’t know. I believe so. I believe that’s why he did it. To distract me.”
Silently Donald pleads with the interviewer not to ask his next question, knowing it’s as inevitable as the questions previous.
“Did you respond because you hoped to keep him unaware of your investigation?”
Keen is quiet for a long moment. Long enough for the reviewer to ask again. “Agent Keen—”
“Yes. Yes, I had sex with him so he wouldn’t suspect.” She doesn’t say she feels dirty. She doesn’t say this conversation is none of his fucking business. She doesn’t say she needs a break but Donald is done letting the windowless room take things from the only partner he has left.
The interviewer is asking another question when Donald opens the door, “We need Agent Keen upstairs.”
The interviewer sputters, “Agent Ressler, this debriefing is not—”
“This debriefing is not more important than the locations of ten escaped criminals. It can wait. This can’t.” He knows Keen is looking at him as he continues to hold open the door and stare at the interviewer.
When the door shuts behind them, he turns to face her and begins to relay the lead that was new when he got in this morning and found out she was already in debrief. She makes no comment about the questioning he interrupted and instead asks whether the newly one-handed guard is awake from surgery.
*
He gets the news that Tom Keen’s body is missing while he’s sitting with Cooper.
“Does Agent Keen know?”
“Yes. She came in when we were unable to locate the body.”
“Is she still there?” The last thing Keen needs is to find the dead body of her own making. On second thought, he thinks, finding the corpse of her coward husband might actually be the only thing she needs.
“No. She ordered the canvas perimeter extended and asked to be notified of any updates.” The agent on the other end of the phone sounds like he would also rather be notified than canvassing for a supposedly dead traitor.
Sucks to be him. Donald needs to find Keen – he seriously doubts she went back to townhouse. “Fine. Notify me as well.” Hanging up, Donald wonders what he would do in Keen’s place and decides that getting drunk makes the top of the list. He’ll start with the bars.
*
Keen might actually be sleeping less than he is and Donald both wonders at that and tries in earnest to keep the concern off his face. Elizabeth Keen is an FBI Agent and a big girl with more than one termination under her belt; the last thing she needs from her partner is the Dr. Phil shtick.
Donald is fairly confident that Tom Keen is dead. You don’t take three to the gut from an FBI issue and then get up and walk yourself to the nearest unlicensed hack for patch-up. He’s also been to the range with her and the only way she could have been a better shot was if she’d put a fourth round through her husband’s forehead. Tom Keen is dead. But Tom Keen’s widow isn’t sleeping in the same place more than two nights in a row and Donald’s been seeing a variation of the same four pantsuits for the last four weeks, so he knows she’s living out of a suitcase.
He wishes she’d get over it but he can already see the changes. In addition to the mild paranoia, the way she can’t seem to stop looking over her shoulder, she’s got the shoot-first, ask-later edge that he discovered after Audrey. And really, it’s not like he’s board certified. So he’ll stick to bringing her coffee when he meets her at whichever corner she’s designated safe for the morning. And if he has Amir checking the hotels every other night to see where she is under whatever alias she’s used, that’s his business. She’s his partner and like he already told her, whatever she’s gotta do, he’s there.