The week passed thoroughly uneventfully. Unless you could count the department's (including Jo and Hanson, of course) mounting frustrations with Lucas' autopsy work, or lack thereof, as eventful. With the major backups in the lab, Jo began dabbling in some cold cases, hoping maybe she could do something productive with those.
Lucas was a sweet guy, really, and he was a great mortician (though that may not be the most sought-after compliment), he just wasn't Henry. He took more time to find the minuscule details that seemed to jump out at Henry like a quality scarf. She'd gotten so used to the fast-paced results of a Henry Morgan-run lab that she'd forgotten how tediously slow the average mortician was at completing them.
But even with the cold cases, Jo couldn't concentrate on her work. She was too preoccupied, much too preoccupied, with thoughts of Henry dancing in her head.
He probably would be a good dancer. Ballroom, obviously. He'd know a waltz or two.
Damn it, Jo, concentrate. Amelia Hayes. You're reading the case file for Amelia Hayes. 36-year-old mother of two from Greenwich Village.
Another voice, with a more refined accent, began to whisper in her mind.
Greenwich Village was, and still is, the place to be for rising artists. Whether acting, painting, or writing, all desired to be denizens of this quaint part of our great city.
Now she was giving herself Henry-lectures in her head. Jo didn't think she'd miss them so much; she'd always gotten annoyed when he went on his overly detailed rants. They were almost like reminiscing, come to think of it.
Jo found she didn't have to fight the strange Henry-lecturing part of her mind for long. A very excited Lucas had just appeared at her desk.
"Guess who just finished the autopsy of Rose Haverford?"
Jo quickly reached for a pen and her notepad. She poised the ballpoint ink device over the processed tree bark and looked back up at Lucas, who began tumbling out the details before she had to ask.
"The neck bruising was standard with a strangling, a little more intense because the vic was old. A few bruises on her arm likely from defending herself as well. Checked for prints on those and got a couple hits; they were all partials. Internally, as healthy as can be expected for an octogenarian. All in all, looks to me like exactly what Hen-what was described on-scene."
Lucas caught himself before saying Henry's name in front of the detective. They'd all been taking his absence hard, and it was understandable that she would be more so. He had, after all, shot someone in order to, as he claimed, protect her.
"Thanks for the update. And that suspect list," she nodded to the database info on the fingerprint semi-matches. "Hanson and I'll be right on it."
"Gotcha." Lucas nodded, biting his lower lip. "Hey, if there's anything else you need me to do, stakeouts, questioning, investigating suspects-"
"Thank you, Lucas." Jo said emphatically, dismissing him with a small flick of her hand and a condescending look. The doctor hung his head in defeat and skulked away to his aseptic-white dungeon, the morgue.
Of course he'd ask to join the investigation. Jo had noticed, in fact the whole homicide division had noticed, that Lucas was almost trying too hard to be Henry. A few days ago, he'd come in wearing a paisley scarf. The pattern was much too gaudy for Henry to even consider wearing it, and it just made Lucas look even geekier than he was. No one had dared to say anything to him, though. The subject of their ME "on leave," as the Lieutenant had euphemistically phrased it, was probably the touchiest subject in the department.
Everyone knew that Henry was really under some sort of house arrest. And if they didn't, if they passed by Jo's desk and paid attention to the tabs open on her screen, they would.
She flicked back to that damning tab and various graphs, along with a radar-esque map, appeared on the screen. A little dot moved about the radar in a not-quite circular pattern. Reading the other graphs, Jo could see that the dot had been, more or less, travelling along the same path for the last hour.
That dot was Henry. Or rather, Henry's tracker anklet.
{*.*.*.*}
"You gonna be okay here on your own?"
"I have survived two world wars, Abraham. I think I will be alright."
"Ya sure?"
"Abraham."
"I'm going, I'm going." Abe sighed, shrugging into his coat. He turned back to Henry and said pointedly, "You know, most fathers aren't begging their sons to go out on a date."
"I'm not most fathers," Henry shrugged. "Now. You have a lovely evening with Fawn. Do not, under any circumstances, check up on me, or you will be grounded. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Dad."
"Very good." Henry walked across the shop to open the door for his aging son. A sharp wind, portending of the oncoming winter blustered through the door, casting a chill over father and son. Abe's collar was askew, and Henry couldn't help but fix it as his son passed through the doorway. Abe rolled his eyes.
"Don't do anything I wouldn't do," Henry offered as last minute advice before shutting the door. He had closed it and blocked in the warmth before he could hear Abe's reply, "Says the man under house arrest for suspected murder."
With Abe gone, Henry flipped the CLOSED sign on the front door, locked it, and made his way down to the lab. He hadn't anything else to do for the week, being placed on forced leave from work, and having this leave respected by his fellow officers, so he'd been analyzing the data of the last 200 years. Deaths, emergences, manner of death, time of death, other environmental factors, etcetera. He had formatted another hypothesis and was currently analyzing whether death in a group situation, like the subway crash, various WWII ambushes, and both World Trade center tragedies, kept him dead longer. The data was working out that indeed they did.
He wouldn't let himself think about Adam. After he'd disclosed to Abe that Adam had been bent on killing him and those he loved for presumably his whole life, he'd dropped the subject completely. The remorse was cutting him like a freshly sharpened blade, a blade never used before.
Even if the man was threatening him, even if he had threatened the safety of his son and his partner, even if he did send Henry evidence that he had taken Abigail all that time ago, that still gave Henry no real reason to kill. He should have just brought it up with Jo. Handling stalkers was a police matter, not something he could control himself. Sometimes, Henry noticed, he let his immortality begin to seem like invincibility.
That was exactly where Adam wanted him, wasn't it? A feeling of such invincibility that he would do anything and expect to get away with it.
And so Henry saw that, in trying to save others from the clutches of the ruthless immortal, he himself had begun to fall into them.