"Hanson. Go down to civil and get the names of all the streakers from the last two hours."
"We're looking for a dead body, Martinez."
"Yeah, well, Henry says the guy was here and for some odd reason I'm still believing him." Jo sighed. "It's not like we have any better choice."
"Already going," Hanson called over his shoulder right as he turned to leave. He followed the path of the man Henry had seen toward the civil affairsdepartment. When Hanson had disappeared from their sight, another, much older, man appeared from the other side.
Abe came over to Jo and Reece, holding out the clothes on his arms.
"He probably needs these."
"No I don't, Abraham."
Henry was somehow leaning further out the door than before. It looked as if he were perfectly positioned and quite comfortably sitting, the chair even able to rock back on its two back legs.
"Henry, did you move the table?" Jo uttered with incredulity and a bit of disappointment. Confusion and worry crossed her face.
"...perhaps?" He offered her. He then continued conversing with Abraham, quite casual in his demeanor.
"I'll explain everything when we get out of here."
Jo stepped back in the doorway, blocking Abe and Henry's view of each other. "This is an interrogation in a criminal case. No more visiting. Kapiche?" She gave a stern look to both of the Morgan men, then closed the door and pulled her chair over to where Henry had moved the table.
"Seriously, how did you move this? You're handcuffed to it, for God's sake."
"The little bowl there where the handcuffs attach works as a handle, see?" He grabbed the small metal bar and the chainattached to his left wrist and, with his right hand under the tabletop, pulled the metal plateau an inch closer to himself. Jo sighed for the umpteenth time that day.
"Guess we'll be investing in more secure tables."
Henry smiled. Jo glared back, tapping her pen on the table next to her very thin case file. He put his free hand up in surrender.
"Let's keep going, shall we?"
Jo nodded and reopened the manila folder, pulling out a blank sheet, and clicked her pen off the tabletop. She poised her right hand over the parchment, then looked up at Henry.
"All right. What led you to believe that this man, whoever he is, was a threat to me?"
He wished he could give a straightforward answer, but the whole truth would only pose more questions. The question became, to Henry, not if to tell the truth, but how to tell the truth without having to bring up his own immortality. He had thought about this a small bit over the last few weeks, after he'd received the letter and the phone call. The threats had been escalating, appearing more and more places. Though he'd identified the voyeur at long last, Henry still didn't know how he got into all these places or where he was going to be next.
If only Adam wasn't such a textbook psychopath…
{*.*.*.*}
"I've decided to be nice and warn you this time."
"Warn me about what?" Henry said with a fearful tone.
"This week. One of them. Choose your battle wisely."
The line went dead before Henry had a chance to reply to Adam's threat. He slowly put the phone back in its cradle, but otherwise did not move a muscle. As much as he didn't want to admit it to himself, he knew exactly what his stalker was up to.
He'd been sending threats for weeks now. Always ambiguous, never signed, never tracked. They seemed to lean toward one of the two, then suddenly swerved to the other, keeping Henry on edge as to who and when he needed to watch out for.
The last one, that had almost made him pass out. He slowly went back down to the laboratory to look at it again, remind himself of the severity of the battle before him.
It lied on the lab table, the more disturbing side facedown. He knew it was pork, the DNA analysis he'd done in the lab had confirmed it, but he couldn't get the awful image of some maniac doing that to his son out of his head.
Henry flipped over the raw pork and let the image flood his brain again. Chills crept up his spine as he read the small line of blacknumbers and letters. A line identical to Abe's tattoo.
When he'd received the package at work, he'd immediately rushed back to the apartment, afraid of what he would find. Relief coursed through his body when he opened the door to see a very alive Abe at work in the kitchen. With no explanation to his son whatsoever, Henry wrapped his arms around Abe's neck, then, as he let go, traced the inked brand the Nazis had given him, and left as abruptly as he appeared.
Henry stayed late at work that night, examining the macabre meat, and along with it the curious locks of hair that he hadn't noticed before in his sheer panic over Abe's well-being. He sent these through the DNA test, though he had a feeling who they were from.
Hoping against hope she would've actually clocked out at five like the rest of the detectives, Henry scurried upstairs to Jo's desk. Luckwas indeed on his side, for not only was she gone, but he discovered she kept a spare brush in er desk. Not surprising, considering.
He pulled just a few strands from the brush, then put everything back exactly as he had left it and returned to the morgue.
When the DNA results came back on the mystery hair and the detective's hair, they were one and the same.
Adam had had to have gotten close enough to Abe to perfectly copy the tattoo, and close enough to Jo to snip a lock of her hair. And that scared the heck out of Henry. How could he protect them from the monster? He wasn't omnipresent, nor omnipotent, and neither was Adam, but the mysterious man seemed to be so from the way he orchestrated the chaos in Henry's world so perfectly.
The question was, now, how could Henry save them both?
