So, yeah. This had absolutely nothing to do with the episode. Be aware, I wrote about four drafts where Bosco overheard Jane's downer of a conversation with the widow, and if you'd like, I can post one of them. But none of them felt real or right. I hope this will suffice, despite venturing entirely off screen.
Bosco had been warming to Jane. He would never admit to it, but Bosco had watched the Serious Crimes unit burn through several cases in record time, and Jane had made some brilliant catches. Bosco didn't want to see Jane as anything more than the emotionally closed off rogue who was going to get the team killed, but he was getting there.
When you have Jane standing there, being brilliantly devious, and putting child molesters and cop killers in prison, it's almost impossible to loathe him. But Bosco did try. He held onto the reality that Jane was a dangerous man for as long as he could, but then he did a follow-up interview with the paramedics on hand for the Hardy incident, and Bosco couldn't hate Jane anymore.
She was a junior paramedic, being trained by the guy who had examined Hardy while he was cuffed to the stretcher. She was a kid, barely out of school, and though she'd seen some terrible things in her time on duty, she'd never seen a bullet rip through a man before; just the aftermath.
She had trouble looking up from Bosco's desk when she talked about it, a sure sign that she was still struggling to accept the sight of a living being slipping to a dead one. She knew what the living looked like, and she knew what the dying looked like. But to live with the knowledge that all those battered and dying people she dealt with had once been just regular living beings, was too much for her. She'd compartmentalized to deal with her job, pretended that there was the living and the dying, and those two paths never crossed. Hardy's death had burst that wall all to hell.
She narrated the events with as much clarity and as little emotion as possible. Her testimony had been tainted by a psychiatrist who had tried to teach her to deal with the pain by ignoring it, but Bosco would still be able to get what he needed. The girl calmly told him all about the proper procedure her supervisor had taken regarding Sheriff Hardy, and Bosco consoled her by assuring that they knew the paramedics had done everything they could. She wasn't here for that.
At that revelation the young paramedic looked up from the spot on Bosco's desk she'd fixed her gaze on since sitting down. "Really?"
"Really. You both did exactly what was asked of you, and no one could fault the two of you for what happened with Hardy. And if they do, they're an idiot."
She cracked a small grin, and gently asked, "My boss said you guys were just looking for somebody to blame."
"We blame Red John, hon, not the people there trying to save some lives."
She fidgeted slightly under Bosco's gaze, uncomfortable with being told she could let her guilt go. "So sir, why am I here?"
"You just keep telling me about what happened that night." And she did. Once she knew she was safe, she opened right up and told Bosco more details than he ever wanted to know. He didn't interrupt. He knew the part of the story he was looking for, and the part he was supposed to be looking for. He'd ask a few well-placed questions when the time came, and then the nice girl could spend the rest of her life pretending like that night never happened.
His team questioned why he went to the trouble to re-interview everyone he could, but Bosco explained that he liked to hear every testimony for himself, and get his own read on witnesses, unfiltered by anyone else. He also thought it would be good for the Red John witnesses and victims to see the new lead agent, develop a relationship with him, and know that any information they may find wasn't to be passed to Patrick Jane.
Eventually the girl got to the shooting, which was the real point of this meeting. It was still difficult for her to talk about, but she told Bosco exactly what he needed to hear. Lisbon had been with the victim, Hardy had broken loose, he shot another sheriff, turned the gun on Lisbon, and Jane took him down. But Bosco caught a twinge of something beyond the regular horror at seeing a human life taken, and he knew there was something the girl hadn't said for the books.
So Bosco laid a bit of himself out on the table, just enough for the girl to know what her information meant to him. Enough to make her guilt come crashing back down if she didn't share. Bosco told the girl about young Lisbon, about the first time she'd gotten shot on his watch. How he sat next to her three younger brothers in the hospital while the doctors stitched her back together. "I made a promise to her brother's that night, and it's a promise I intend to keep. She doesn't talk about that night, doesn't like to admit she put her partner in that sort of a situation, but I need to know if you know something I don't."
The girl stared at Bosco long and hard, struggling for the right words to tell the story. She drew a deep breath and muttered, "He was scary. I've never seen that look in a man's eyes before. I thought it was supposed to look like the cops on tv, and it didn't."
"Hardy?"
"No. Mr. Jane."
"Jane?"
"I saw him grab the gun and shoot. He shot completely wrong, and he knew he had no idea what he was doing, but he did it anyway. There's supposed to be this calm when somebody shoots. They've been trained, they've done it before, and they're doing their duty. It wasn't his job, nobody forced him to pick up the gun, and he did it anyway. Cops are supposed to be acting on instinct, like it's just what you're supposed to do when you see a gun drawn. This wasn't that. It was a choice. He chose to pick up that gun, he chose to fire, and he chose to kill a man.
"He decided to end a life. This wasn't training, it was a decision. And I've never seen anybody decide to kill before."
Bosco asked the girl a few more questions, then let her go. It had been a long time since Bosco had heard a just killing told from the eyes of someone fresh to the fight. That moment where Jane had no walls up, no game to play, and absolutely everything to lose; that told Bosco more about Jane than he probably ever wanted Bosco to know.
Jane had chosen to kill a man to protect Lisbon. Try as he might, Bosco couldn't keep hating Jane after hearing that. Jane was Lisbon's partner, he'd killed to protect her, and he'd die to protect her. Damn boy probably didn't even realize he still had it in him to care like that.
Bosco could think better of Jane. He was sure he could.
At least, he was sure right up until he had his office swept for bugs that afternoon.