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CHAPTER II

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"So, is our patient dead?" House asked his two shaken up lackeys, as they sat in front of him, Cameron nursing a cup of tea and Foreman drinking coffee. The white bandage above his eye made a harsh contrast with the rest of his face, like an intruder that didn't belonged in there.

"He was already in cardiac arrest by the time we managed to get near him, but we were able to bring him back," Cameron replied, her voice steady even as her hands shook around her red mug.

"We have no way of knowing how long he was deprived of oxygen, but my guess is that there was probable brain damage by then," Foreman said, meeting House's intense stare.

He knew what the older man was doing and for once, he appreciated it.

His body was still tingling from the amount of adrenaline still cursing through his arteries, but seating there, in the familiar environment of the Diagnostic's department, acting like this was just another day in the office, was doing more for his nervous system than the two hours he had spend explaining the police what had happened. This was normal. This was safe.

"And the killer?" House's natural curiosity was working overtime in face of such juicy events.

When he had first heard about the commotion, his stomach had turned against him for a couple of seconds. He figured it was either concern over his fellows or the chilly he had eaten last night.

It had taken him the best part of the last couple of hours to get some of the most-likely-to-be-real details from the hospital's gossip-net, before the police released Foreman and Cameron and he could hear it straight from their mouths.

Now that he was sure that they were in fact in one piece, he'd just whished he had been there to see Super Foreman crap his pants.

"Killed himself," Foreman answered with a deafening lack of emotion. "The police couldn't find any ID on him. They left an armed guard with Thomas, just in case someone returns to finish the job."

House's eyes narrowed.

"Thomas being?..."

"The patient."

"Ah!... And where was Chase during all of this?" House asked, noticing that the youngest lackey was no where to be seen.

"Oh God!" Cameron gasped, looking in panic at the two of them.

Both men looked at her, puzzled by her apparent overreaction, until they too understood the cause for her concern.

Foreman rubbed his eyebrow, annoyed that the bandage was starting to itch.

"He went to check the patient's house hours ago," he said for House' sake, although he suspected that the older man had already arrive to that conclusion on his own.

"Do you think the killer went there first?" Cameron asked, the fingers around her mug turning white from the deadly grip she had around it.

"Only if he was able of beaming himself up from place to place," House said acidly. "The patient's house is a good half an hour drive from here and Chase left about the same time as you guys did."

Who ever this Thomas was, he was obviously involved with the wrong type of people. Worst even, he seemed to have pissed in to kill him the wrong type of people.

Logic told House that there was no way Chase and the killer could've crossed paths, but logic also told him that they knew nothing about the killer's motives or even if he was working alone.

"Call Chase," he told Cameron. "Tell him that he can't hide from work all day long… Cudy doesn't like it."

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The first thing that Chase did whenever he opened his car door was to remind himself that he had to drive on the right side of the street, instead of the left.

Even though he'd been in the States for a couple of years now, all it took was one short trip down under for him to forget basic things like that on his daily routines.

After a couple of scares, when he had been driving home too tired or sleepy, he'd found out that a small self-remind was all he needed to avoid getting himself and others in to a car accident.

Getting the short straw had actually been welcomed by him this time around. He was getting bored stiff with all the waiting for a patient to fall on their collective laps routine.

So bored that even the late morning traffic that he had caught while driving there had been welcomed.

Someone had failed to hit the brakes on time and had bumped against the car in front somewhere upfront.

He hadn't seen or heard any ambulances drive by, which meant that the only thing coming out of it had been the traffic jam and probably a large bill at the auto-shop for one of the intervenients. For him, it meant that he could finally finish listening to that CD he'd bought two weeks ago. Maybe he should get an IPod like House…

Thomas Joyce, the patient, had rented a house just outside Princeton, nearly a year ago. From what they could tell from his papers, the man worked for a small factory of microprocessors, whose name none of them had ever heard of before.

His passport told them that Thomas travelled a lot from Australia to Japan to the States, on business, they assumed, and that he had a house on each of the three places.

What his papers didn't told them was Thomas previous conditions, what medications was he allergic to, if he had his shots up to date, what sort of life and what sort of man he was before collapsing on some public park and landing on their hands. The papers couldn't even tell them if there was a next of kind that they should be contacting.

Most of it they could find out by asking the patient directly. Chase hopped that by now Cameron already knew more than he did, but he also knew that the straights facts coming from the patient's mouth wouldn't be enough for House.

Sometimes he felt more like a detective than a doctor, snooping around other people's dirt and trying to find evidence to prove House's most common saying: 'everybody lies'. And the most annoying thing about it was that he was often right too.

With his life scattered across three different countries, Chase could understand why Thomas had chosen the suburbs for his home while on the States.

The two stories house spelled peace and quiet from its swinging wooden chair on the porch to the gravel beneath his feet, which seem to melt away at his passage with a soft grounding sound that strangely reminded Chase of home.

The grass had started to grow out of control and the bushes surrounding the property were starting to take over the place, confirming their guess that this guy wasn't around much. It also gave the house a wild look that made it stand out amongst the other well cared for gardens.

Chase smiled as he fished a set of keys from his jacket's pocket. If there had been one thing he had learned from Foreman was that preparing in advance and actually snatch the keys from the patient's things, before braking in, saved a lot of time.

He briefly wondered if the term 'breaking in' would still apply if he used a set of keys to get in. He figured it might, to the police, anyway.

There was a certain rush that came along with the notion that he was doing something wrong, something illegal. He often had to justify it to his consciousness that he was doing it for the sake of the patient, that this sort of privacy invasion, while wrong, could save a person's life on the long run.

They were all hollow justifications and he knew it, but they were the best he had to tell himself that it was ok to have fun doing it.

He carefully closed the door behind himself and slipped on a set of gloves, waiting while his eyes adjusted to the lack of light. The air smelled kind of mouldy and Chase thought if it wouldn't be safer to put on a mask as well. Maybe Thomas had a nasty case of toxic mould intoxication.

He thought better of it. None of the patient's symptoms had indicated any sort of contamination and judging from the pile of junk mail that he had stepped on his way in, the smell was probably from the place being closed for too long.

If that was the case, Chase doubted that he would find anything of use in there. But they knew little to nothing about this guy. Including what kind of medication he might have been taking.

The set of stairs to the left of the lobby gave access to the second floor, where he guessed the master bedroom was. Odds were that if there were any meds to be found, they would be either on the bedroom or the nearest bathroom up there.

The top floor was smaller, consisting only of three rooms, one on each end and a larger one on the center. Chase figured that would be the master bedroom. He wasn't wrong.

The sun light struggled to enter through the division's partly closed horizontal blinds. Chase decided to take a risk and clicked open the ceiling light, filling the room with a warm brightness that gave the painted walls an amber shade.

He wasted little time looking around the room, spartan as it was. One large bed, one nightstand and a large built in closed. A door to the right was semi-opened, revealing a bathtub.

Chase went straight for the night stand's drawer, hoping to find some answers there. The whole place seemed to have lost its serenity all of a sudden and he no longer felt like being there at all. The drawer was empty.

Chase clicked open the bathroom light. The faucet's tap was leaking, a soft plack, plack, plack noise each time a water drop fell. There was no wall medicine cabinet, just a mirror. He opened all the drawers of the sink's cabinet, finding nothing more revealing than the patient's brand of after-shave and what sort of razors he used.

Feeling a bit empty handed, Chase hopped that Cameron and Foreman were having better luck with this guy than he was, because as far a he could tell, a ghost lived here.

There had been no pictures in the lobby or the bedroom. The walls had few things hanging from them and the few he had noticed, he was sure he had seen them in some IKEA catalogue before.

The mail had all been junk, nothing personal, not even a bank extract, a phone bill, anything.

He turned the lights off, figuring that as long as he was there, he should check the rest of the place anyway, or else House would chew his ass off and spit it out for fun.

The room farther away from the stairs had been converted in to an office, complete with book shells, a sofa, a phone and a fax machine seating on top of a large wood desk. No computer in sight.

The desk drawers were filled with blank papers, blank CDs still inside their wrapper paper, pens and all sorts of office stuff that he'd expected to find but were of absolutely no use for him. There were no journals on the shells, no appointments book on the desk and the computer, wherever it was, it wasn't there.

He was about to open the door of the last room upstairs when the last sound he had wanted to hear reached his ears. Someone was fumbling with the front door's lock.

With his heart racing and the palms of his hands starting to sweat, Chase panicked, looking around for a place to hide.

The front door opened seconds after the door of the room to the left of the stairs closed.

Chase stood with his ear glued to the door, trying to listen to whoever had arrived. He wanted to bang his head against the door.

He should've thought this through better. Knowing almost nothing about a patient meant they didn't knew if he shared his place with anyone else, meant they didn't knew if the patient had a partner, a lover, a nosy neighbour, or was part of a freaking satanic cult!

He should've waited until Cameron had talked to the patient, he knew that he should've, but he'd been so anxious to get out that he hadn't even stopped to consider that his hastiness could result in him going to jail.

Maybe whoever it was would be sympathetic with his plight and understand his reasons to be where he wasn't supposed to be.

Maybe this was his lucky day and it was just the sweet, very blind and very deaf, unthreatening old lady from next door that had just come to water the non-existing plants and that would leave without ever noticing that a nosy doctor was behind this door, biting his nails.

Chase pressed his ear harder against the door, willing his heart to beat slower and quieter. Whoever it was that had come in, it wasn't an old lady.

He could hear male voices downstairs, two, maybe three. He couldn't understand what they were saying, but it didn't sound like English to him. The cadence was all wrong.

Something crashed downstairs. Dishes being smashed against the floor. It sounded like they were tearing the kitchen apart.

Chase looked at the room where he had taken refuge for the first time. It was a spare bedroom, almost an exact replica of the master bedroom, only smaller and without the adjoining bathroom.

He wondered about the odds of this place being robbed while he was there, but then he figured that bad luck knew no limits, so the odds were apparently pretty high. Either way, if these guys were in the mood to go through the whole place with the same vengeance as they were downstairs, he needed to get out of there fast.

He looked longingly at the bedroom's window, hoping that there was a tree or a pipe near it that he could use to climb down. He peeked outside, stomach falling to his feet. There was nothing remotely safe for him to use to get down, and the free fall looked like a neck breaker to him.

The wrack downstairs seemed to be quietening down, which meant that his time was running short.

Chase considered hiding under the bed, but the bed had only a mattress still in its factory wrapper and no covers. It wouldn't do.

The only place he could go was the closet. He opened the double doors and closed himself inside.

In the dark, surrounded by clothes that smelled like something straight from the eighteen century, Chase found himself praying.

He hadn't done a lot of that lately, not for himself anyway, but then again, he hadn't been this scare in a long time.

He prayed to God for the thieves to be satisfied with the rest of the house and leave this room alone; he prayed to God for at least one of the neighbours to have seen something and call the police; he prayed to God to let him live, because he wasn't ready to die just yet.

He stopped breathing when he heard the door of the room being kicked opened. There were footsteps inside and Chase, inside the closet, refrained from even swallow the spit inside his mouth, afraid that the slightest sound would alert the others to his presence.

He heard the sound of the ceiling light button being pressed, followed by two rapid words in what sounded like angry Japanese to him. The amount of light coming from underneath the closet's doors hadn't changed, so Chase figured that the lights in this room weren't working.

He pressed himself farther in to the clothes, willing his body to shrink in to nothingness. There was something digging uncomfortably against the small of his back, but it didn't register then.

What did register was the door of the closet opening.

Chase stood paralysed, his eyes round and wide as he looked directly in to the face of an Asian young man, waiting to be caught at any second. The man, however, was either ignoring him or unable to see him.

The Asian man fumbled with the hanging clothes in front of Chase for a brief moment before turning his back, uninterested in whatever was there.

Between the dark lit room and the own darkness of the closet, Chase realized that it was too dark for the man to actually see him in the corner of the closet where he had hidden himself. He couldn't believe his luck.

His starving lungs were stinging, reminding him that it was alright to breathe again. Chase aloud himself a shaky inspiration.

His forehead was sticky with sweat and he could feel his legs shaking from the tension they'd been in for far too long. This was why he'd gone in to medicine and not a life of crime. He wasn't cut out for it.

Chase forced himself to calm down and listen. He had to be on alert, in case one of them decided to return to this room to have a better look or in case, as he hoped, they would leave.

Time seemed to move as slowly as a hundred years old man. Chase looked at the glowing numbers in his watch, but not knowing what time it had been when he arrived there, he had no way of knowing how much time had passed.

The house had been silent for awhile when Chase finally decided that he needed to venture out.

More than once he had grabbed the cell phone in his pocket to call the police, but always decided against it.

The thieves could still be around and the fear that they could hear him speak had been one of the reasons to stop his fingers from hitting 911. The other was his lack of a reasonable explanation to be there when the police arrived.

He decided that he would call the police, as soon as he was out of there. An anonymous call, made by a concern citizen, nothing more.

Carefully stepping out of the closet, Chase made his way out of the room, feeling like the cliché blonde on horror movies, the one that always walked straight in to trouble.

The house was eerie silent and with his senses on high alert, every small noise sounded larger than life and would send his heart racing.

The sound of his own phone ringing inside his pocket made Chase jumped in the air and almost race to the door. In a gesture born out of habit, he grabbed the noisy thing and answered it, just to make the loud sound go away. He didn't even bother to look at the dialler's ID.

"What!?" He half whispered, half shouted in to the phone. His eyes were franticly looking around, weary that someone might've jump out of thin air before he forced himself to believe that the thieves were really gone.

It took him a few seconds to realize that Cameron was talking to him. "Come again?"

"Where are you?" She asked once more. "And why are you whispering?"

Was that concern that he had detected in her voice?

"I'm at the patient's house," he told her as he came down the stairs. The place looked like a hurricane had drove by and his footsteps sounded too loud to his ears as he stepped on broken glass. "Look I can't really talk righ…"

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"Chase?... Chase?"

Cameron dropped the phone from her hands and used them instead to cover her mouth. Her grey eyes froze, growing wider behind her glasses. "Oh God!"

"What?" Both Foreman and House asked in choir as they saw their co-worker's face grow paler by the minute.

"Get her a glass of water," House grimly ordered, as he manoeuvred a shocked Cameron to seat on a chair before she fell to the floor. "What did he say?"

"He stopped talking," she slowly said, accepting the glass from Foreman but forgetting to drink it. She was talking to them, but her mind was far away. "He was at the house… and then there was this loud noise and…"

Foreman forced the glass to her lips, seeing that she wouldn't do it by herself. There were tears sliding down her face, but she didn't seem to notice them either.

She looked directly at House, remembering where she had heard that noise before.

"It was a gunshot… I think that Chase was shot!"

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