Chapter 2

Sunday, 12:24pm

The moment she realized something was wrong was not accompanied by sirens and gunshots. Not even screams or sounds of destruction and chaos. Far from it. The Trojan horse had long crossed the city gate.

It was quiet at the station as most of her few colleagues had gone out, hidden under ludicrous amounts of woolen shawls, hats and muffs to find something for lunch that wouldn't freeze to their tongue. Hanson was sitting across from her on his own desk, feet on the edge of the table and speaking with an irritated tone to the person on the other side of the conversation.

It was only his second call but Jo feared already that it would take a while as today was obviously the "Let's assume the call from the nice Detective is a prank call anyway"-day.

"No, I don't want to know whether you do have safe deposit boxes because I know there are. I need you to tell me whether the locks to your storages boxes fit the description. The serial number on the- … No, I will definitely not come back tomorrow during office hours!" He almost yelled into the phone and his chair tilted dangerously. Jo smirked and Hanson sat up, leaning forward on his chair and actually pointed his finger at the receiver as if it was the nose of his dialog partner. "Look lady, this is not a prank call, I can assure you! I am a Detective with the NYPD and this is a murder investigation. Do you want me to spell it for you?…"

Someone entered the station and Jo looked up to find Abe standing at the entrance, stomping his boot-clad feet on the carpet to shake off dirty snow and pulling his furry hat from his head.

"Abe," she got up, honestly pleased by his arrival and walked over to him. "What are you doing here?"

The old man smiled warmly at her and she felt her stomach knot at the absurd fact that this was Henry's son. His old and wrinkly son who was born before World War II had even ended.

"Jo," he greeted her and looked around. "I've tried calling Henry but he didn't answer the phone. I," he looked around at the empty bullpen. "I wanted to know if it would be okay if we could get lunch together. There's this new French Restaurant just two blocks away he wanted to give a try for ages."

"Oh, I'm sure he can find a few minutes. He should be done by now. Come on, I'll get you downstairs." She took him by the arms and steered him towards the elevator when she passed the tech room and stopped in her tracks. An unknown sound came from behind the door, a steady beep, muffled by the usually open doors. But now, probably to spare heating the doors were closed. Jo looked through the blinds which weren't completely blocking her view.

"Hanson?" She called into the quiet precinct and Hanson – busy ranting about the incompetence of the regional traffic bureau – looked up. "Hanson, come over for a second, would you?"

She pushed the door open, frowning, and went in.

The tech room contained a number of screens, each of them connected to numerous security cams installed within and in close vicinity of the precinct. The screens were turned off but it wasn't security footage that had caught Jo's attention but a red light on one of the panels that was blinking in the very same rhythm as the warning tone.

"What is that?" Jo asked no one in particular.

"That's…" Hanson's head appeared in the door and had obviously heard her. His frown mirrored the one on his partners face. "That sounds like the alarm signal triggered in case of biological alarm."

"Biological alarm? Like the bird flu?" Abe jumped in, not quite sure what this was all about.

Questioningly, Jo looked at her partner, not quite grasping the fact.

"As long as I've been working here it had never been activated," Hanson explained and entered the room with a frown. Sitting down on the chair in front of the rows of screens Jo switched a button for the power supply and the screens flickered to life, showing various rooms and perspectives of the building, inside as well as outside. The scene changed every few seconds, jumping from one camera to the next.

"Any idea how such an alarm can be activated?" Jo asked, still concentrating intently on the controls and swearing mildly when the view stuck to the camera down in the garage. "And where the hell is the camera for Henrys office?"

"As far as I know it can only be activated directly in the morgue. So it must have been either Lucas or Henry who triggered it," Hanson said and tipped Jo on the shoulder. "Let me…," Quickly, she got up, knowing that he was much more acquainted with the handling of the technical equipment. His fingers scampered over the keys and he looked up at the outer left screen, his face falling with confusion and shock. "What the…"

The screen showed the morgue. Visible within the camera's range were four men of which one definitely didn't belong here. First, the body on the table. Then there was Lucas, sitting on the floor in the remote corner, legs stretched out under him and his head lolled to the side. Unconscious… or something else Jo didn't want to think about. The left side of his neck was as one could see in spite of the distance covered with blood. Henry looked unharmed and was standing in front of him in a strategically protecting position, the table with the dead body between him and yet another man whom they didn't recognize. He was standing with his back to the camera next to the victim and in his left hand was yielding a scalpel, probably taken from the tray that was positioned next to the autopsy table.

"Who is this guy? And…" Hanson leaned closer to the screen, taking a closer look at Lucas. "Is that blood?"

"We need to get down there," Jo said and was already halfway down the hallway before Hanson caught up with her.

"No, Jo, wait! There's nothing we can do right now."

She pushed the button for the elevator and seemed to think twice before she headed towards the staircase, when the doors did not immediately slid open.

"What do you mean Nothing we can do? We are cops. This is a police station. And someone obviously attacked our Medical Examiners right under our noses. We can do a lot. At first we need to get them out of there."

Two, three steps in a row.

"No, I mean, we can't get in." Hanson sounded out of breath. "Think about it, Jo. What's going to happen when we storm down there and startle this guy who's holding Henry at knife point?"

Well, he's probably not going to be able to kill him… Well, for long at least. She thought but stopped anyway when Hanson grabbed her arm.

"Jo, we can't get in! The biological alarm was triggered which means the morgue is hermetically sealed. Seriously, what do you think is going to happen when you storm down there with a gun when there's still a bullet-proof wall between us and Dr. Morgan with an armed guy?"

Jo finally stopped in her tracks, her hand inches away from the door latch. "Then we need someone with a– a key or something."

"Jo, we need to make calls first. We need to get our shit together. This is bigger than us." His leaned closer, his voice now an intense whisper and suddenly Jo was happy that Mike was here and still thinking straight. "We need back-up. Also, we can't just override the safety controls for biological alarms. That's CDC's territory. They're the only ones with the security codes to lift the seal."

Jo visibly deflated, leaned against the door and tried to calm down. She took a deep breath and pushed her hair out of her face, flattening it against the top of her head. "You're right. Reece first. And we somehow need to get in contact with Henry. And the CDC. Ambulance too." She added as an afterthought and nodded her head into the general direction of the morgue. "And we need to find out who this guy is."

"Yeah," Hanson nodded and Jo pulled away from the door. Throwing one last glance at the closed door to the hallway she followed her partner back up into the precinct where Abe was waiting. "I'll get on with the phone calls," Hanson exclaimed matter-of-factly and walked straight to his desk.

"Abe," Jo mentioned for the older man to follow her to the tech. "You said you tried to call him. Did you call him in the office?"

"Uuh, yes," Abe replied and nervously kneaded his furry hat in his hands, hurrying to keep up with the Detective as she strode towards her desk. "What is going on here?"

"We don't know yet but we're going to find out." A task. A mission. She could do that. Even if it was just a phone call. They walked back into the tech-room and after a quick look at the screen showing the morgue she saw with a certain relief that the scene hadn't changed. Yet.

Henry, his hands still raised up to his shoulder was talking, his face a nervous mask of suppressed anger and intense frustration. It was only now that she found him looking at the camera for the blink of an eye. He did it again, a little longer now and the knot in her stomach tightened as she realized that she had no idea how long he was trying to get their attention. When had the guy managed to sneak in? Distantly her memory replayed the moment when she and Hanson had taken the stairs up to the precinct about half an hour ago. Hadn't there been the swooshing sound of the elevator doors closing? Had they missed the intruder by seconds? If they had taken the elevator instead, they would have met him, could have stopped him. His looks would have made them suspicious, no doubt, and they would have asked him where he was going.

With mildly shaking fingers she typed in the four-digit number for Henrys office. A look at the screen gave her the confirmation that the phone was indeed ringing and Henry could hear it. His monitor ego turned around, took a quick look at his office and said something to the intruder, gesturing behind his back. The stranger shook his head violently, walked up and down, back and forth. Aimlessly. His hands kept holding his hands and Jo had the macabre thought that he'd gouge his own eyes out sooner or later.

She took a few seconds to observe the man. Another homeless from the looks of it. A woolen hat, a jacket the was too short for his gangly limbs as the sleeves didn't even reach his wrists. Under it, he wore a knitted cardigan that looked more like a skirt from Jo's perspective. Shabby jeans completed the jumbled style. When he moved towards the camera at ceiling height his face was mostly hidden behind hair that stuck out from under the hat. The only thing discernible in his gaunt face was a large nose.

What was he doing down there and what was he looking for? The way he kept prancing the room only to come to a halt next to the body, staring at it, it was clear he had known the victim, was maybe even responsible for his death. But then why would he come here? Ignoring Abe, she strode towards the box that contained the meager belongings of the victim and looked through it again. Nothing of value except for the key. The key that probably locked something the intruder was willing to kill for.

And now Henry and Lucas were alone with him.

"Hanson, we need to know about this key," She stressed and Hanson, talking on the phone with their boss, looked up. He nodded his understanding.

ooo

During the last 200 years of his life Henry Morgan had been in a lot of dangerous and compromising situations and could write whole books about it. Did write books about it, actually. He'd had a lot of time to go through all of them or at least most of them but he did make the experience that hostage situations were the worst. Besides worrying about dying another painful, inconvenient and absolutely avoidable death he now had to worry about being watched and recorded on glorious digital hardware while doing so.

Screw technical advance.

Maybe Lucas being out cold was doing him a favor in this situation though he dared to assume that the young man would say otherwise.

And so, ironically enough, it was the camera that was making him worry the most as it mercilessly recorded everything that happened in this room. Potential death and vanishing acts included.

Sitting on his desk with his back to the door he had heard Lucas yelling a high-pitched sound of surprise – one that, given the opportunity, Henry would love to tease he young man with once they had managed to survive this disaster - followed by a loud thump, breaking glass and a body falling.

The first thing he had noted after rushing back into the morgue was Lucas' still body, lying prone on the floor with his legs spread before him and head lolling to his side and blood running down his neck, indicating a bleeding wound at the back of his head.

Above him on the wall the glazed box with the emergency button within was splintered, some shards still hanging on a few threads. The rotating flashing beacon next to it silently announced trouble that Henry so far only had read about in the

morgue emergency plan. He knew what it meant: automatically sealed doors, windows and ventilation system. And no way to get out of here without a tremendous effort by bureaucratic pencil pushers and a critical amount of time. Time that Lucas might not have. Time that bore the risk of exposure for Henry. Exposure to a scalpel-yielding crazy man, a rolling camera and in its wake impending footage that might change the world as well as shatter his.

Instinctively Henry backed away, lifting his arms in a non-threatening gesture.

"Where is it? Where is the list?" The stranger wanted to know and Henry would've loved to roll his eyes but managed to refrain from it. Why couldn't anything go by the books just for once?

ooo

It was a rare occurrence that Abraham Morgan felt out of place. After all, he was no pimpled adolescent anymore who was looking for a place in the world. He was Abraham Morgan, established business-man, soldier-man, self-made man and – not to forget – ladies-man. He was 70 years old for heaven's sake. He hadn't felt that out of place since prom night when Maria Dolores had stood him up to dance with dimwitted George Bassket.

He coughed in his hat and tried to restrain his fingers from kneading his hat. His knuckles already hurt from the constant tension. There was something going on and Abraham was anything but stupid. He'd seen enough to know that his father as well as his young assistant Lucas were in trouble.

He stood quietly, watching over Jo's back at the screen. The resolution was good enough that he could read his father's face. He seemed calm, self-conscious and for the untrained eye steady as a rock. After all, he had nothing to fear besides taxes.

But Abe knew he was worried. Worried about the hurt young man that he surely felt responsible for. Because his father felt responsible for everyone. After all everyone was mortal and had much more to lose than his father. On the other hand, his father had things to gain no one else could possibly want to experience. Starting with a never-ending story of life and loss and more losses up to a close acquaintance with Death that was so utterly bittersweet in its reliability that his father thought about it more like a curse than a gift. A very painful one at that… both metaphorically and literally.

And the cramping in his stomach as well as the look out the window at the cold, frozen world told Abraham that this time dying was not an option due to outer circumstances that he wasn't sure his father was aware of.

"Detective…! Jo…" He tried to get the Detectives attention as she was speaking on the phone. Sounded like she was trying to get information on who was able to lift the seal of the morgue. According to her agitation it was more complicated than it sounded. Their eyes met and she held her hand up in "wait a second" gesture.

"When can he be here?" She asked into the phone, nodding while she listened, then scribbled something in the notebook.

"Thanks." Putting down the device she turned towards Abe and gave him a small smile that was probably supposed to calm him. "Abe, we're doing our best to get Henry out of there."

"I know, I know," He replied hastily. "I don't doubt your ability to handle the situation and the last thing on my mind is to complicate matters but…" His eyes found his father's figure on the screen, hands still stretched out to the sides, just below his shoulders, appearing non-threatening and calm. The attacker was walking nervously around the morgue. A caged tiger about to attack his prey. A tragedy in one act. "Jo…" He swallowed and Jo narrowed her eyes looking worried.

"Abe, everything's going to be alright." She touched his shoulder slightly. A friendly attempt to calm his nerves. He didn't feel it through his three layers of clothes. On the contrary. Goosebumps traveled over his skin, crawling along his spine and the sensation of an icy breeze on his neck made him shudder involuntarily. She lowered her voice. "I know what you're worried about." A quick glance at the monitors and he knew what she meant. "We're going to deal with that when it comes to that."

Bemusedly Abraham huffed. "That's Henry's least problem, I'd think."

"Then what…?"

Abraham swallowed. "The lake. It's frozen, Jo. There's no coming through. Not even shipping traffic. If Henry dies in there…" he pointed at the monitor. "If he dies in there, there will be many deaths to follow. I'm not sure he will be able to survive this emotionally speaking."

Jo's face paled as she became aware of the implications.

"You mean…?" Her nostrils flared as she asked, her voice strained. "Is Henry aware of that?"

"I'm not sure." Abraham answered truthfully. "I…I just don't know."