Deeks lay back in the hospital room sedated as his injuries were re-bandaged and cleaned as Callen, Sam, Jeff and Hetty stood outside.
"Does one of you two want to tell us what the HELL that was?" Sam growled.
Jeff nodded and Hetty looked deflated as they glanced over at Deeks lying in the bed.
"He'll be out a few hours if you want to take a break." The nurse said as she adjusted his IV.
Hetty nodded and motioned for the others to follow.
Sitting in the cafeteria Hetty took a sip of her tea, grimaced at the paper she could taste and started talking.
"You have I take it heard Mr. Deeks speak of Max Gentry." She started.
"His undercover alias, the one he doesn't like using?" Callen asked, "Yeah why?"
"That was Max Gentry," Hetty said.
"Why would Deeks use an undercover persona to escape from hospital and why threaten Eric?" Sam asked realizing his gut was right there was a reason he shouldn't trust Deeks.
"It isn't an undercover alias." Jeff Deeks said.
The two men looked at him interested. "You know I take it that Gordon Brandel was shot when Deeks was 11, it was Max that shot him…maybe I'm jumping ahead of myself. Max first appeared when Deeks was small, from the reports we could gather Deeks would turn up at school insist on being called Max all day and would be completely different to the Martin Brandel the teachers were teaching, it was noticed that those days coincided with the days the school would notice new bruising on the boy. Max was tougher than Marty and would always be rougher around people, where Marty was a shy kid who likes to help. It was noted in his record, but Brandel never took him to get tested." Jeff took a breath and a sip of his coffee and continued, "When Brandel was shot it wasn't Marty the police found, it was Max, he was standing over his mother, holding a gun snarling obscenities and protecting his mother's corpse. Brandel had disappeared by then but neighbors attested to the fact that Marty hadn't shot his mother. He was processed as Max as that was the only name he'd use. A doctor saw him and gave him a sedative, but instead of going to sleep his personality changed and Martin Brandel came out, terrified and calling for his mother."
Hetty held her breath, this she hadn't heard before.
"I was due to pick up this Max Gentry talk to him as we couldn't find any records of him when the doctor told us his 'new name'. Needless to say we ran it and Brandel's rap sheet came up, little Marty was inconsolable as we had to tell him his mom died, but we were looking for his family."
"Did you find anyone…apart from Brandel?" Callen asked.
"We found his mother in the system, she was 25 when she died, she had been fourteen when Marty was born, her name was Allison Johansson and she had been kidnapped from her family when she was twelve, it was a cold case and we were surprised she had lived that long. We contacted her parents to tell them we had found their daughter but she had died and to tell them about her son." Deeks clenched his fists and took another deep breath.
"Why didn't they take him in?" Sam asked.
Deeks thought back to that night.
Little Marty Brandel was sitting on a bench in the Reseda county sheriff's office wrapped in an officers jacket holding a mug of hot chocolate staring terrified at the wall. One moment he had been with his mother having his weekly hour's visit his father allowed and then he was there, he had been told his mother had been killed in a drive by shooting and his father was missing, he was covered in blood and bruising. For him coming too and finding missing time and himself covered in new and painful bruises was not an unusual occurrence but being somewhere other than his room or the basement was. He couldn't figure out how his mom was outside when she was shot, she never went outside her room?
