Chapter 10 – You did WHAT?

Shawn slept peacefully through the night. He did not wake up again, and in fact he didn't even remember that he had been awake before when he opened his eyes again the next morning.

The only thing he did remember as he slowly blinked the world into focus was that there had been something about his father. Something important, something really important. But what?

As the room around him slowly came into focus, Shawn didn't recognize his surroundings. A jolt of fear shot through him. Where was his Dad? It was important that he found his Dad. He knew that, even if he didn't know why. Shawn tried to sit up. He needed to get out of here, wherever he was, and he needed to find his Dad.

But as soon as he started to raise his upper body up, searing pain engulfed his whole right side and he could barely bring out a gasp of pain as his breath caught in his throat.

Gentle hands on his shoulders pressed him down again.

"Easy son, don't try to sit up. I'll call a nurse to give you something for the pain."

Shawn immediately recognized his father's voice and allowed his Dad to press him back into a lying position. But his Dad couldn't go and call a nurse. Shawn still didn't remember, but he knew that there had been something about his Dad. He only needed to remember it, it was on the tip of his tongue, but until he did he couldn't let his father leave.

And because he didn't trust his voice enough, and because he had no idea how to put those half-coherent thoughts into words, Shawn simply reached for one of his father's wrists and wrapped his hand tightly around it.

Henry didn't try to pull his wrist out of his son's grasp, and after a moment Shawn slowly mustered up enough strength to turn his head towards the side. His father was sitting next to his bed – how exactly had he ended up in a bed? – his right hand lying atop the mattress and blanket with his wrist encased in Shawn's death-grip, his left hand lying in his lap.

He looked tired, and Shawn quickly realised that he was still wearing the same clothes he had worn the last time he had seen him, back in the living room at Henry's house. There even were some traces of blood on his collar from the gash on his head where psycho had knocked him out.

Psycho!

Before he knew it, Shawn had was already halfway in an upright position again before a combination of agonizing pain and his father's hands on his shoulders stopped him again.

"Shawn, stop it. Don't try to sit up, you're hurt."

Panting from the pain, Shawn sank back into his pillows, but he never took his eyes away from his father.

"What happened?" He brought out after a few moments.

"You were shot, kiddo." Was Henry's rather dry reply.

Shawn closed his eyes for a moment. He remembered now. He remembered psycho losing it, and he remembered the gunshot. After that things went a little fuzzy. Shawn only remembered pain and voices and yelling before the world had turned dark.

"Are you all right?" Shawn asked a little worriedly, his eyes on the bandage that covered the wound on Henry's head.

Henry smiled knowingly, as if he had had this conversation before. "Yes, I'm all right. Just a few stitches, I've got a hard head. You on the other hand just went through surgery, so I don't want to see another attempt at sitting up again from you. I can order to have you restrained, you know?"

Shawn rolled his eyes but obediently remained lying on his back. Before either Spencer man could say anything else, a nurse came into the room. She checked the near-empty IV-bag that hung on the left side of Shawn's bed and flashed the younger man a smile.

"Good morning. I see you've finally decided to wake up. Any pain?"

"Only since I tried to sit up." Shawn admitted.

"Well, you're not supposed to do that. Let it be a lesson to you, you'll be lying on your back for a few days."

She pulled something out of a drawer and injected it into the IV-line that ran into the back of Shawn's left hand.

"That should take the edge off the pain in a few moments. The doctor will be by to check on the incision later on. I'll get you something light for breakfast, how does that sound?"

Shawn smiled. "Great, thanks."

As the nurse left the room, Henry chuckled. Shawn slowly turned his head. "What's so funny?"

"I doubt you'll share her definition of a light breakfast. As I said, you just went through surgery. Probably you'll get jell-o."

"For breakfast?" Shawn was positively scandalised at the idea, which only increased Henry's amusement.

"Yes, for breakfast. And no, I won't sneak any burritos in here, so spare yourself the need to ask. For once in your life, you'll do as you're told."

Shawn sighed dramatically and sank back into his pillows. "So what happened?"

"Well, that is actually something I'd really like to know from you. All I know so far is that some psychopath broke into my house and knocked me unconscious. And judged by the fact that you took my gun before you joined us, I'd say you were expecting him. So how about you tell me what happened, because the facts I have don't really make much sense."

"Maybe you should call Lassiter and Jules. That way I won't have to tell it over and over again. And maybe one of them will bring me some real breakfast."

"I'll make sure that they won't. For as long as I'm here, you'll follow the doctor's orders."

Henry got up from his chair. He got as far as to the door before Shawn's voice interrupted him. "Maybe you should go home and get some sleep!"

Shawn didn't see the eye-roll, but he knew it had been there. And now while his father was gone, all he needed to do was pick up the phone beside his bed and call Gus. His friend wouldn't leave him in such a lurch. Gus knew that Shawn's body was a fine-tuned machine that couldn't possibly run on jell-o for breakfast.

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Thirty minutes later, Shawn's hospital room was stuffed to full capacity. Lassiter and Juliet were sitting on two chairs on the left side of Shawn's bed. Gus was leaning against the wall near the foot end of the bed, and Shawn was glowering at his father who was once more sitting on the chair to Shawn's right. Henry did his best to ignore his son's pointed stares as he took a hefty bite out of the breakfast bagel he had confiscated from Gus a few moments earlier.

Shawn stopped glowering when he realized he was being ignored and stared listlessly at the tray with his own breakfast, courtesy of the hospital kitchen. A cup of thin camomile tea and a small bowl with yellow jell-o. There was no way he was going to eat that. The nurse had lifted the head of his bed up earlier so that he could sit upright for eating, so at least he wasn't lying prone on his back anymore. But whether sitting up or lying down, there was just no way he was going to eat that stuff.

Fortunately, Lassiter interrupted the silence in the room before Henry could remind his son about his so-called breakfast.

"All right Spencer, how about you tell us what happened yesterday?"

Shawn nodded. "Sure. Could somebody get my jacket?"

Henry tossed the wrapping of the bagel into the trash bin and shook his head. "Shawn, we talked about this. You won't leave until the doctors say you can."

Juliet's eyes widened. "You want to get yourself discharged?"

"When I came back to his room earlier he was just telling the nurse that he wanted to discharge himself AMA." Henry's voice was neutral, but there was something in his eyes that spoke volumes of what he thought about that particular plan.

Shawn only rolled his eyes. "You'd be disappointed if I hadn't even tried, Dad. And I don't want my jacket to try and outrun all four of you in an elaborate escape plan despite the searing pain in my side whenever I only move a little, I want my jacket because there's something I need for the explanation in it."

Henry didn't look as if he believed that explanation for a moment, but he got up from his chair and went over towards the closet. He handed the jacket to his son and sat down again.

Shawn turned the jacket over in his hands and was about to reach into the inner pocket when his eyes fell on the bullet hole. It was just a small hole on the front right side, but the hole in the back was quite a bit bigger. And frayed. And spattered with blood. After a moment, Shawn sighed.

"I guess I won't be wearing that anymore."

He reached into the inner pocket and withdrew all the clues he had collected the previous days and all the letters psycho had sent him. They had been in the left inside pocket and had been spared from the bullet.

"I got a call at four in the morning yesterday. It was a mechanically distorted voice telling me to check my mail. I didn't really want to, but there was an envelope on my doorstep. Inside was a set of rules for a game of 'Catch me if you can' as he called it. And that picture of my Dad." Shawn put the two sheets of paper down on the bed and stoically ignored the gazes of all other people in the room, but especially his father's. He saw that Henry reached for the picture of him in front of his house, but Shawn didn't watch his expression.

"What happened then?" Lassiter asked.

"That guy called again. He said he wanted to play a game, and now I had the rules. If I didn't follow the rules, he said he'd ki…he'd go after my father. I told him I didn't want to play any games with guys who called me up at four in the morning and hung up. About half an hour later I got a text message telling me to call my Dad."

"So that's how you knew when to call me."

Shawn nodded. "Yes. It was him who set fire to your kitchen, and he also rang the doorbell to wake you up before the fire spread through the entire house. He called me again and told me that I had to play along with his little game to stop anything else from happening. I wasn't to tell anybody of that game, and I wasn't allowed to warn my father, or Gus."

"He threatened Guster as well?" Lassiter asked.

"Yes, later. To make sure I knew what was at stake."

"But what was the game he wanted to play?" Juliet asked, her face creased in a frown.

"It seems that this psycho…"

"Roger Dorn." Lassiter interrupted. Seeing Shawn's puzzled expression, he shrugged. "That's his name. Roger Dorn."

Shawn sighed. "Whatever. Dorn committed a couple of crimes, three murders that I know of. He obviously fancied himself a genius serial killer. He left clues at the crime scene hoping that the police would pick them up during the investigation, but they didn't. Pissed him off pretty good, obviously. So he did a little research, stumbled across my track record and thought I'd be the perfect candidate to figure out what the police couldn't. So he sent me across the city to chase down the clues the police missed."

"But why didn't you tell anybody, Shawn?"

Shawn looked at Gus in exasperation. "Because he told me that he was watching me, Gus. I mean, by now I know that he was watching where my cell phone went, but I didn't know that. All I knew was that he always knew when I was where, when I left and who I talked to. One time Dad called me, and not even a minute later I get a call reminding me about his fucked up little rules. What was I supposed to think? I didn't know how he was watching me, but I knew that he was, so I didn't dare to talk to anybody."

"What crime scenes did he send you to? Do you know the names of the victims?"

"The names are Bergstrom, Hankinson and Schroeder. The clues he left were stupid. A Polaroid, a calling card and a playing card." Shawn tossed the clues onto the blanket for the others to see. "They didn't make any sense, though he kept on telling me that they were supposed to lead me to a meeting with him. No prints on them, by the way, I already checked. When I couldn't figure it out, he told me to go to another address. He said I'd find the key to solving the puzzle there. The address was Gus'."

Silence settled over the room. Gus was watching his friend with wide eyes, and Lassiter and Juliet shared a knowing look, as if they now finally pieced together Shawn's strange behaviour from the previous day.

"That's why you were acting so strange when you found us in Gus' apartment." Juliet said.

Shawn nodded. "At first I…well, I thought that the bastard had hurt Gus, too. But Gus was all right, only his apartment was thrashed. I needed to find that clue he had hidden there, so I needed to get you out of the apartment. I didn't know if he was still watching, and I couldn't be seen talking to the police. Not with what was at stake. So I threw you out the apartment." He looked up at Lassiter and Juliet. "I'm sorry for that. Gus won't have any trouble filing the report for the insurance, will he? I mean, he didn't throw you out, that was me. He wanted to file that report."

"Gus already filed the report, Shawn. It's all right."

Shawn sighed in relief and flashed Juliet a smile. "Good."

"So what was the clue he left?"

Shawn put the second Polaroid atop his blanket. The four other people in the room, including Gus who had already seen the picture, stared at it in puzzlement.

"What's that?" Lassiter finally asked.

"A lamp, Lassie. A floor lamp, to be precise. A stylish, yet functional and decorative addition to Gus' interior design, if I might say so."

"Shawn," Henry snapped in a warning tone.

Shawn rolled his eyes. "It was a clue to something he told me before. I should see things in the right light. I just didn't take it literally before. The clues as such don't make sense, but if you look at them under a black light, you'll see that he left the name of his next victim at each crime scene. He left the name of a guy called van Bruinen on his last clue, but when I looked at the picture I found in Gus' apartment, that name had been crossed out. And underneath he had written Henry Spencer."

Lassiter nodded thoughtfully while Juliet was scribbling in her notebook. Shawn didn't look at his father, but he heard how Henry drew in a deep breath. Not an intake of breath of the shocked kind, it was the exasperated kind of intake of breath, one that Shawn knew only too well. But he'd not get into that kind of argument with his father right now.

"So you drove to your father's house."

Shawn nodded at Lassiter's words. "Yes."

"Why didn't you call the police at that point?"

"I don't know Lassie, maybe I wasn't thinking too clearly when I saw my father's name on top of the list of people a homicidal maniac was about to kill! I was busy trying to get to my father's house. And I still didn't know how that bastard was watching me. I tried to call my Dad to warn him, but I didn't reach him."

"So you went there and tried to stop that guy all on your own?"

"I didn't exactly have a lot of time to figure out a plan! I knew where my Dad kept his gun, so I climbed up the garage roof and took it out of his bedroom before I went downstairs. And for that not being a plan, it worked out fine!"

"If you call having a bullet hole in your side 'fine' Spencer, then it was a great plan, yes. But had it not been for Guster's warning, the ambulance might not have arrived in time, did you ever think about that?"

"Yeah, and if that psycho Dorn had aimed a little further to the right, nobody would have gotten hurt at all. That's the wonderful thing about what ifs, there's just so many possibilities! Fact is Gus did warn you, for which I'm glad, and the ambulance did arrive in time. Could we just leave it at that, please?"

Lassiter rolled his eyes, but didn't protest against that suggestion. "What happened then?"

"I found that psycho Dorn and my Dad in the living room. He had knocked my father out and was waiting for me. We yelled at each other for a while, he accused me of breaking his stupid little rules, I tried to stop him from shooting my father. That kind of conversation, I think you know how it works."

"What did he say about his motivations?"

Shawn shrugged with his good left shoulder. His right side was starting to hurt again, and he didn't want to aggravate that by moving his shoulder. "He was pretty pissed that you didn't find his clues when he left them. Seems that Mr. Dorn wanted to become a cop himself, and when he fluked the psych evaluation, he decided that becoming a serial killer might just be the perfect way to show the police that he was far more clever than they are. It was a twisted bit of logic, but his main argument was that had he been able to become a cop, he wouldn't have missed those clues. He said the police forced him to cross over to the other side of the law. He wanted the police to chase him, and if the SBPD didn't do it maybe the FBI would. He figured if he killed my father and me, the police would investigate more closely. He even threatened to go to New Jersey next if they still didn't pick up on the clues after he killed my father and me."

Henry sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger. Gus muttered a small expletive under his breath, and only Lassiter and Juliet looked clueless.

"What is in New Jersey?" Juliet finally asked.

It was Henry who answered. "Shawn's mother lives in New Jersey."

"Oh."

"Anyway," Shawn interrupted before Juliet could ask any more questions. "I was looking for a chance to pull the gun on him, but he never took his own gun away from my father's head. In the end he lost his patience; he freaked and cocked the gun. I tried to pull my own gun, he saw me move and shot me. I don't really remember what happened afterwards, but I'm sure my father already told you."

Lassiter nodded and Juliet closed her notebook after she finished writing.

"All right everybody, that's been enough for now." Henry said. "Shawn needs rest, and I'm sure everything else can wait until tomorrow."

"Of course. We'll need both of your official statements, but that can wait a little. For now we've got all we need."

The two detectives got up from their chairs, and Lassiter pocketed the letters and clues Shawn had pulled from his pocket earlier.

"Get better soon, Shawn." Juliet said with a smile before she followed her partner out of the room. Gus pushed himself off the wall and took a few steps towards the bed.

"I'll be back later in the afternoon, all right? I've still got some tidying up to do."

"Sure thing, dude. I'll see you then."

Shawn only hoped that Gus would try again to sneak him some real food when he came back.

And Gus left. Now Shawn only wondered for how long exactly his Dad planned on staying. His side was aching fiercely now, and he really didn't fancy a discussion with his father right now.

He chanced a look at his Dad from the corner of his eye.

Darn.

He knew the expression on his father's face, knew it only too well, and it didn't bode well.

"All right Dad, what do you want to say?"

"What gives you the idea that I want to say anything?"

Shawn smiled. "Oh come on. Your face says you're just waiting to spit it all out, so we might as well get it over and done with."

Henry crossed his arms in front of his chest. "You know very well what I want to say."

"Just pretend I'm stupid."

"What you did certainly was."

"What, playing along to some sick psychopath's rules? Yes, that I think we can agree on. It was stupid. But I didn't have any other choice, Dad. The first time I refused to play along, that bastard nearly burned you alive, so don't try to tell me that I should have done something different! I know that it's probably hard for you to believe, but I was worried about you, all right? I was scared that he'd make good on his threat. There, is that what you wanted to hear? I was worried, I admit it. So I'm sorry if not even something I've done out of concern for your safety is a good thing in your eyes, but that's just the way it is."

"I'm not talking about the fact that he forced you to play along with his little game, Shawn. I'm talking about what you did in my living room, right before he shot you. You were baiting him, you were goading him even though you knew that he was unstable. What did you want to achieve with that, did you want him to shoot you?"

"I didn't want him to shoot you!" Shawn snapped back. "In case you hadn't noticed, he had a gun pressed to your head for the entire conversation. Nothing I said or did ever brought him to point it away from you. So yes, I wanted to provoke him. I wanted to throw him off track so that I might get the chance to pull my gun. I'm sorry if that seems stupid to you, but I just didn't want that psychopath to shoot you."

Henry closed his eyes and drew a deep breath. "He shot you, Shawn. Had he aimed just a little to the left you'd be dead now."

"And if I hadn't tried to pull the gun, he'd have shot you and you'd be dead now!"

"That's not the point!" Henry yelled.

"Yes, it is!" Shawn yelled right back, but raising his voice to that level was too much of a strain. He sank back into his pillow with a small, pained sigh. The expression on Henry's face immediately softened.

"Are you in pain?"

Shawn nodded wordlessly.

"Why didn't you say anything?"

"Lassie and Jules needed to know what happened."
"You've been in pain for the entire interview and didn't say anything?" Henry placed a hand on Shawn's forehead. "Your temperature has gone up. I'm going to get a nurse."

Henry made move to withdraw his hand, but again Shawn reached for his wrist and stopped him.

"Shawn, this is really not the right time to pull one of your "I don't need any pain meds-acts."

Shawn shook his head. "It's not that. Something for the pain actually sounds good right now. But I need you to understand that I couldn't let him shoot you."

Henry closed his eyes for a moment and bit his lip. When he opened his eyes again, it took a moment until he met Shawn's eyes again. "He'd have either shot me or you. If the alternative to me getting shot is that you're shot in my stead, I'd prefer it if you just let him shoot me."

Shawn shook his head slightly. "No can do, Dad. You should know better than to ask something like that from me."

Henry shook his head and ran a hand over his face. After a moment, he slowly pulled his hand out of Shawn's grasp and straightened up.

"I'm going to get a nurse now. That shot against the pain will probably knock you out pretty quickly."

"Go home and get some sleep." Shawn said.

Henry nodded. "Yes, I'm going to do that. I'll come back in the afternoon, and I'll bring you something to eat." He eyed the tray with the uneaten jell-o. "Something more substantial than that, but if you dare to touch any of that crap Gus is going to try and smuggle in here, I'm going to let them feed you intravenously from now on."

Shawn smiled tiredly and nodded. "All right."

"Good. I'll be back in a moment."

Fifteen minutes later, the nurse had administered a shot of pain medication and Shawn was fast asleep. Henry waited until he was sure that his son wouldn't wake up for the next few hours, then he got up from his chair and left the hospital room. He had a couple of hours of sleep to catch up on, and he needed to be back here in the afternoon to make sure that Shawn stuck to the doctor's orders.

He knew how his son was when it came to following medical advice. It was always better to keep a close eye on him. Especially if Shawn tried to pull Gus into it as well. Henry would probably have to thwart at least two escape plans until the day was over, it would be better if he got some sleep before that.