Janet Ruiz

Janet is the secretary at the private investigator office of Ben Reilly, the woman who keeps the books, answers the door, and watches the business slide further into the red with each passing day. She is sharp-tongued and practical, long past the point of patience with a boss who refuses to charge the people who walk through his door. When Ben lets a paying angle slip away, she begins packing up her desk, ready to give up on a sinking operation that can no longer cover her wages.

For all her exasperation, she does not leave. Rather, she urges Ben to use the photographs of Cat Hardy and the mayor as leverage rather than walk away empty-handed. She is the steady, grounded presence at the edge of Ben's spiraling world, loyal to him even when she has every reason to cut her losses and go.

Janet earns her keep at Ben Reilly's struggling investigation office, taking the legwork into her own hands when the search for Flint Marko begins. She visits the Bureau of Criminal Records and, seemingly not for the first time, wins over a clerk named Hank with a sack of food, coming away with Marko's file and bringing the news back to Ben: a record running from petty crime all the way up to enforcer work for the crime lord Silvermane.

Her loyalty is tested when Silvermane's men storm the office, tearing the place apart and holding a gun to her head to make her talk. She gives them nothing. When Ben returns, she has reached her limit. She tells him she waited five years for the old Ben to come back, and now that he has, she is going home for good. She cares for him deeply, she says, but not enough to die for him.

Janet is simply back at her now very shaky desk at Ben Reilly's office when the episode opens, returned as though her vow never to come back the night before had never happened, with no one remarking on it. She is folded right back into the work, sent by Ben to dig into the war records of Flint Marko, Jimmy Addison, and the man Robbie identifies as Lonnie Lincoln, since the segregated units of the day mean Lonnie could not have served alongside the other two directly.

Her digging turns up the thread that ties the powered men together. She finds that Marko, Addison, and Lonnie were all prisoners of war held in the same camp, the wartime photograph taken the very day they were rescued. She brings the discovery back to Ben and Robbie, a piece of the puzzle that points the investigation toward the source of the men's strange afflictions.

Janet is back at her desk at Ben Reilly's office, waiting with Robbie when the detective stumbles in still feeling the evening prior after his night with Silvermane. She fields a steady stream of calls from the mayor's office as the city's chaos grows, keeping the place running while Ben drags himself through the day.

Her steadiness pays off when Robbie brings the guarded Lonnie back to the office for answers. With Lonnie reluctant to talk, it is Janet who breaks the ice, pulling out a pack of playing cards whose easy rhythm loosens him up until he opens up about his time as a prisoner of war and points them toward Dr. Faber.

Janet keeps the investigation moving from Ben Reilly's office, working alongside Robbie to piece together how the powered men are connected. Their digging lands on the thread that ties everything together: every one of the affected men had been treated by the same physician; a doctor named Alethea Faber.

Later, when Ben takes her to breakfast to tell her he means to leave town, Janet quickly sees through him and realizes it is Cat Hardy behind the decision, hearing him out as he admits how sudden it all is but insists he owes it to himself to find out what the two of them might have.

Janet is at Ben Reilly's office when Cat Hardy comes looking for him, claiming he stood her up. Janet sees through it at once, recognizing that her boss did not simply fail to show but that something is genuinely wrong, and she calls Robbie to go searching for him while telling Cat she will send word if Ben turns up.

Her steadiness anchors the reunion that follows. When Ben returns and accidentally lets slip that he is the Spider, Janet reveals she has known all along, a montage laying bare how he confessed it to her again and again during his many drunken stupors. As Ben loads syringes with the antidote and insists he is curing the veterans only to be rid of his own power and responsibility, Janet tells him plainly that he is a good man, seeing the decency in him that he refuses to claim for himself.

Janet meets Cat with fury, slapping her twice for the betrayal that left Ben cut to pieces, then chooses to carry the plan forward all the same. Practical and fierce, she becomes the courier for the cure, the one willing to walk it into danger to give the dying men a chance.

The choice nearly costs her, as Silvermane's men, Perry and Pudge, catch her outside the Alcove with the cures in hand and drag her into the middle of the standoff. Even cornered, she stands with Ben through the worst of it, the same steadiness that has anchored his office now anchoring him.