Most mornings Raine was a reasonably affable baby, but that had not been the case on morning about a week after Duke rescued the woman that Nathan had been sure he would kill. It bothered Audrey a little that Nathan had believed this and hadn't been shy about telling her.

Thinking of that bothered her, but she had bigger problems. Or, perhaps a smaller one, one that flailed when she tried to hold it. Eventually she gave up. Maybe her own shot nerves were making the baby anxious, she thought, putting a clean onesie on her and wrapping her loosely in a light blanket.

"Maybe you'll be less fussy if you get to see Daddy," Audrey told her daughter as she carried her out of the apartment and down the stairs to the Gull. Raine had been irritable since she woke up, and Audrey was hoping that Duke wasn't too busy to look after her long enough for her to run to the store since she didn't really want to inflict a crying infant on everybody at Shaws.

When she entered Duke's establishment, she was surprised to see that Claire was sitting at the bar. The doctor wasn't drinking anything untoward for that time of day, unless there was some rum mixed in with the soda that sat in front of her next to a plate that contained a hamburger and french fries.

As Audrey walked towards the bar, she could hear Claire saying "I just think you should give it a chance, Duke."

A look of consternation flitted across his features. "And I'm telling you that I remember what happened that day."

"But you were eight," Claire protested. "Maybe you remember more than you think you did."

Duke shook his head. "Have to tell you, Doc, eight-year-old me wasn't the observant person that stands before you today." As he spoke Duke filled a pitcher of soda for a group of men who were obviously stopping for an early lunch before returning to a road construction crew.

"Oh?" Claire asked, giving him an intense look. Audrey could already see the gears working in her head, as she sought to label him with one thing or another.

"It's true," he insisted. "Somehow, the fact that Lucy was close to six months pregnant by the time she decided to kill me completely escaped my notice even those last couple of weeks. And I don't know if you've ever seen a picture of Lucy-"

"I have," Claire said, interrupting him.

This made him nod. "Then you have to know that she was as slender a woman as her daughter." He gave her a self-deprecating look. "So... If I managed to miss that at the time, I doubt that I noticed anything of use."

Audrey came up behind the other woman and placed a hand on her shoulder. As she expected, this made Claire jump and turned to look at her. "Claire? Why are you trying to convince my boyfriend to let you hypnotize him?"

"How did you know I wanted to hypnotize him?" Claire asked, looking astonished.

Although she was tempted to shrug, Audrey didn't. Raine had finally stopped whining, and she didn't want to make any sudden movements to disturb her. "It was the only thing that made sense in context. Considering you don't have a time turner or a TARDIS over in your apartment as far as I know."

"Oh, I guess you could figure it out from what we were saying."

Audrey shot Duke an apologetic look. "Well yeah. Why are you so intent on hypnotizing him anyway?"

Claire suddenly squirmed under the scrutiny. "I spent three whole days researching hypnosis on the internet. I don't want that to go to waste."

"The internet?" Duke asked, eyebrows raised high. "Seriously? I could've done that. You didn't learn hypnosis at your fancy college?"

"It was an elective," Claire said looking sheepish.

"Sorry, I'm not letting somebody with three whole days of internet research under their belt trying to make me remember the past that I already remember," Duke said firmly.

Claire looked crushed. It reminded Audrey of the look on Dwight's face whenever the baby reacted vocally to his poorly chosen name suggestions. Her unhappy expression didn't make Duke feel guilty, at least as best as Audrey could tell.

Audrey looked around the bar for a moment, and then back at Duke. The lunch rush technically wouldn't begin for an hour, so she felt safe asking "could you take her off my hands while I run to the grocery store?"

Duke's response was to hold out both hands for his daughter. "Sure."

Because Claire hadn't moved from the stool yet, Audrey gave her a look and asked, "Do you need to do any grocery shopping yourself?"

"Uh, I could."

"I see how it is," Duke grumbled, making both women look at him as he put the baby to his shoulder. "You two go off gallivanting, leaving me to stay with the unhappy baby."

Audrey gave him a slow, not particularly nice smile. "I could take the baby and leave Claire here," she suggested.

He instantly looked alarmed. "No, that's okay. I was just giving you a hard time."

"Uh-huh." She smirked at him, before saying to the doctor, "shall we?"

Somehow, as they walked out of the bar, Audrey had the sense that if she looked back at Duke she would see that he looked relieved. It said a lot that he thought fussy baby was less dangerous to him than a nosy psychiatrist.

A few minutes later, as they wandered the aisles of the only full-size grocery store in town, Audrey wondered if Duke hadn't gotten the better deal after all. Claire had spent the drive complaining about his lack of cooperation, and, as Audrey tried to pick out salad greens that would meet his exacting taste, Claire was now peppering her with questions instead.

"What about dreams?" Claire asked, toying with a bunch of carrots. Audrey almost asked her if she was going to buy them, because it wasn't really very polite to the next person who was interested in them that she'd gotten her fingers all over them. But Claire stuffed them in her basket so she didn't have to. "Have you had any dreams about... stuff?"

She was pretty sure that Nathan was the one who had squealed to Claire about the Hunter. Or maybe he had told Dwight, who had in turn told her. Regardless, the big eyed woman seemed to know all about it, or at least as much as Audrey herself did. "You mean about the fact that I'm going to disappear?" she asked dryly.

If she thought this would encourage some tact in the other woman, she was to be sorely disappointed. "Exactly. Now, Duke not realizing your mom was pregnant aside, we usually take in a lot more details than our conscious mind is aware of. And, a lot of times those subconscious observations spill out into our dreams."

"How long did you research dreams on the internet?" Audrey asked, shooting for a casual tone, but it seemed to sound a little bit sarcastic even to herself.

"Actually, I used to belong to a group who studied dreams back at the sorority-"

"You were in a sorority?" Audrey asked, less shocked than when she found out that her brother had been in a fraternity.

"Yes... Anyway, dream anything interesting lately?"

"Well, there was one dream," Audrey admitted, and then began to explain how she had seen a woman who looked like her, but wasn't her or Lucy, walking towards a large structure.

"So, like a parking garage?" Claire asked, obviously trying to imagine how a parking garage might fit into Haven. Duke probably wouldn't get half as many parking tickets if there was actually municipal parking anywhere in town.

"No," Audrey said, shaking her head. "More like a big shed or something."

"Anything else?"

"I don't think so, no." But then she thought of something. "You know, at one point in the dream I was watching somebody else. Although, it was more like those first person shooter games that the kids to work for Duke like so much. Like I was looking through their eyes, or something."

Predictably, Claire's eyes widened. "And what did you see through their eyes?" she prompted.

Audrey shrugged. "An unconscious man. Light brown hair, and probably in his late 20s. Whoever I was in the dream, I seemed worried about him."

"You know that show, Bones?" Claire asked, and the non sequitur through Audrey for a moment.

"What about it? You think I need a forensic anthropologist on the case?"

"Nah, I just was going to ask you if that whole facial recognition software drawing thingy was real."

"Not to the extent that the show uses a 'facial recognition software drawing thingy' but some stations do have access to that sort of thing." It was hard not to resist teasing Claire for her extraordinarily imprecise language. "We don't have it here in Haven, though. Budgets you know."

"Oh. Well, that's disappointing."

"Why, you thought I should get a facial composite done of the imaginary man I saw passed out in my dream?"

"Yeah, or maybe you could have a sketch done."

This reminded her of when the Teagues had offered their skills to a case not long after she arrived in Haven. "You really think that it would do any good?"

"I don't think that it couldn't hurt," Claire said evasively.

Audrey drifted over to a stack of apples, and began to pick out ones that look good. It seemed like everyone was willing to grasp at straws lately, but she wasn't sure that she was. But still, it probably couldn't hurt to have somebody try to draw the man she saw in her dream.

Audrey was only gone twenty minutes before Duke found himself desperately wishing that Raine was old enough to distract or bribe - he would've gladly listened to pots and pans being pounded on or have baked her cookies with a smile. Either was theoretically better than having an infant loudly and angrily reject a bottle and disconsolately miss her mommy.

"Hey," Duke coaxed, sighing when she turned her face from the bottle's nipple. "Come on, sweetie. This is the good stuff, just like mom makes. Actually, she did make it..."

Glancing at the clock, he found himself worrying that Audrey wouldn't get back before noon. What if Claire had her cornered in the frozen food aisle and was holding her hostage until she provided a soliloquy about how she feels about her mother?

As time marched past 11:55 Duke scowled, making up his mind to try putting Raine down in the crib in the storeroom. He didn't much like the idea because Audrey's books had convinced him that she was too young to cry it out but he wasn't sure what other choice he'd have.

His back was to the door as he walked towards the made over store room, so when the door's bell jangled, he called, "Hey Audrey?" before turning around.

"Oh, hi," Duke said when he realized that the person who'd come into the Gull was an elderly man, not the blonde whose return he was pining for as much for as Raine was. By that point Raine was no longer shrieking but crying in a heartbroken way that was much quieter but somehow harder for her father to bear. Maybe he could stick the bottle into her mouth given she was no longer flailing around.

"I'll be with you in a minute, okay, buddy?" he asked, shifting his grip on Raine and raising the bottle, trying not to grimace when warm milk dripped down his wrist; apparently it'd gotten shaken up enough to leak when he'd tried to give it to her earlier.

He was on the verge of success, and almost cheering when Raine's mouth finally closed around the bottle's nipple, when he became aware of movement. He only just had time to glance up before the old man was charging at him. "Hey!"

At first he thought the man was going to grab at Raine but he clumsily ran right into him instead. "What the hell are you doing?" Duke demanded to know, trying to keep one eye on the old guy while checking to make sure Raine was okay.

She cried out, making him drop his gaze, and the second he did, the old man slammed into him again. Finally speaking, he panted out "you mad yet?" sounding winded from the exertion.

"Yeah, I'm mad. Do you not notice I'm holding a tiny baby, here?" he demanded to know. He'd already lost hope of figuring out why the old man was mistaking him for the tackling dummy over at the high school.

"Yeah, I notice," the man surprised him by saying. "That's why I'm doin' it."

"That's why-" Duke's look turned incredulous when the guy backed up a few feet and charged at him again. "God damn it, what the hell is wrong with you?" Duke yelled, shifting Raine so she wouldn't take a direct hit.

As the man was about to run into him a third time, Duke shoved him away. He'd heard of people being bullheaded, but this was ridiculous. The old guy stumbled back and Duke finally got a good look at him. "Syd?" he asked, thinking it might be somebody that his father had been friends with back in the day. If it was, he been ridden hard and put away wet.

"Oh, so you remember me finally."

"I guess." Duke paused, putting Raine against his shoulder, and patting her back to try to get her to stop freaking out. Syd's attack on them had understandably frightened her. "Are you going to explain why the hell you've been trying to tackle me?"

"I'm not trying to tackle you," he looked frustrated as he spoke. "I'm trying to piss you off."

"Well, you're doing a pretty good job of that. I just don't get why."

"So you'll stab me or something." Syd turned, and realized that they were both pretty far away from any sharp objects. He sighed. "I... I didn't really work out all of the details."

"You want me to stab you?" Duke asked in disbelief. Something slithered in the bottom of his belly, when he realized that the man before him was probably troubled. And if he wanted him to stab him, there was really only one reason for that.

"Look, your dad told me about your family. How you can end the troubles," Syd said, making Duke wonder when this little bit of information had come the old man's way. Had it been back when Simon was hunting Lucy or before then? Or had he only told him as a ghost? Either way, Duke was beginning to feel a little bit better. He'd always worried that an old person would come around asking for a... release... from their troubles, but at least this guy hadn't heard through rumor. Unaware of Duke's rapid train of thought, Syd went on. "So, I want you to do me the way you did that boy who brought back the ghosts."

"You're troubled?" Duke asked, mostly for time. Must have been that he'd been there that day because no one in town had been talking about it or he would have heard about it by then. Neither officer Stan nor any of the rest of Haven's finest (who weren't there) had hauled him in, which they would've rather than simply allowing the statement that Audrey and Nathan had taken stand.

"Yeah! I've got this damn trouble where...Well it's not important what my trouble is. It's just important that it dies with me."

Duke was torn between feeling relieved that his father's old drinking buddy wasn't going to fess up about what his trouble was, and intrigued. Or, at least the part of him that wasn't completely horrified that the guy expected him to kill him was intrigued and relieved.

"It's going to." Duke narrowed his eyes at him. "You don't have any kids, so how the hell could it continue?"

For the first time, Syd looked affronted. "You don't know that. Not for sure. Your pop wasn't the only ladies' man who came from Haven. I could have a kid or two out there, you don't know."

"Uh..." Syd had never been an attractive man. When he was young used to look like somebody had tried to flatten his face with a shovel, but that was tempered now by more wrinkles than a Shar-Pei usually had. When Duke thought back to the fact that as a kid he had never seen the man when he wasn't chain-smoking, the horrible condition of his skin made sense.

Taking advantage of the fact that the guy seemed to be feeling sorry for himself, or maybe imagining a few pitiful encounters that could've passed along his DNA but probably didn't, Duke brought Raine into the storeroom, and put her in her crib. Fortunately, she seemed to decide that it was a good place to be, may be in comparison to where the old man was out in the bar, so she didn't squall.

"So, you going to kill me?" Syd asked when Duke exited the storeroom and carefully shut the door behind him.

"No!"

"Oh, you're gonna," Syd insisted, backing up to charge at him again.

This time, because he was ridiculously predictable, Duke knew what he was going to do and put out his hands, pushing him away hard. As one would expect, Syd bounced off the bar.

Panting, he looked up at Duke. "You really ain't going to kill me?"

"I'm really not."

"You'll be sorry," Syd promised.

"I'm sure I will be," Duke said, humoring him.

It would take until the police arrived and told him that he was being arrested on an assault charge before he actually agreed with Syd.

"Just think about it," Claire insisted as they made their way towards the front of the grocery store. "How great would it be if a simple drawing was able to give you the identity of the Colorado Kid?"

"Claire. I don't know if you realize this, but I have more pressing concerns then solving a twenty-nine-year-old mystery. You know, like not dying or disappearing." She pursed her lips, giving the psychiatrist a narrow-eyed look.

Claire looked confused. "You don't think that the Colorado Kid is related to the Hunter?"

This made her blink. Were the two things related? Or were they just multiple unneeded complications?

Before she could articulate any sort of answer that wouldn't just be stammering some random combinations of vowels and the letters h and m, her phone rang. She welcomed the reprieve, until she realized that it was a text from Nathan, asking her to come to a crime scene. Smiling at Claire, she said "well, this has been a lot of fun but Nathan needs me to come see him though, now. Somebody's eyes got torn out."

The other woman shuddered. "Ew." Claire recovered quickly, however. "I didn't think that your maternity leave was over for a couple more weeks."

"It's not..."

"But you're hoping that being willing and eager to help out will smooth things over between the two of you," Claire suggested. "Since he's concerned that you're just going to roll over and let what happens happen."

"Stop that!" Audrey snapped.

"What?" Claire asked innocently.

"You know!"

"It's not like I can turn it off being a psychiatrist, Audrey."

"Try harder."

Claire did seem to try a little bit harder, and didn't press as Audrey hurried to the register and checked out. She even offered to drop off Audrey's purchases with Duke before she went home herself. Surprised, and worried about how she would pay for the favor later, Audrey reluctantly took her up on it. Nathan's texts did have an urgent care about them.

Nathan was already in the middle of examining the crime scene when Audrey walked in. It surprised her little bit about how awkward it felt, and she couldn't tell if she didn't feel like she belonged because she wasn't supposed to be back at work yet, or because Nathan was immediately all business.

Any notion that she had that the man whose eyes had been removed had been an upstanding citizen, were quickly disabused when Nathan explained that he was a pervert, the sort of man who got off on taking pictures of women's skirts.

"I don't think this is related to the bolt gun killer," Nathan grumbled as he examined the man's computer. "It's too messy."

"So it's another, unrelated atrocity," Audrey said with a sigh. She hated dead ends like that. Multiplying problems in town too.

Nathan's expression as much as told her as he didn't consider pervert having his eyes taken to be all that atrocious. But then he startled her by saying, "The bolt gun killer has the same tattoo."

"How do you know that?" Audrey asked. She didn't like the look on his face, like he was feeling bad about something he didn't want to talk about.

Not looking her in eye, he said, "I've found out a lot more about the tattoo."

Which tattoo, of course needed no explanation. He obviously meant the one that was on his own arm as well. That didn't explain his closed off expression, though. "How did you find that out?"

He no longer even attempted to look her in the eye. "The tattoo is a mark of a group who is trying to keep the Troubled hidden, cleaning up as much of the mess as they can."

"Leaving the rest of it for us to deal with," Audrey said sourly. "How'd you find all that out?"

"Dwight set me up with a contact."

"What's his name?"

"Jordan." After a beat he added, "Her name is Jordan."

Audrey gave him a hard stare, and he looked away. That didn't leave her feeling any better, but she decided to leave off interrogating him about her suspicion for the moment. "What does she get out of associating with you?"

"She said she'd vouch for me if I could get a prisoner transferred for her." He held up a hand, probably to ward off the objections he anticipated. "Guy's got cancer, and they're hoping that if he's here instead of at Shawshank his wife might be able to talk him into treatment."

"That's all she wants from you?" Audrey asked sharply. There was something about his demeanor that had her concerned.

"She seems to like me," he finally admitted.

"Nathan! What about Jess?"

He shot her an irritable look. "I said she liked me. I didn't say that anything was going to happen. What do you take me for?"

"So you're just going to manipulate this poor girl?" Audrey demanded to know. That didn't seem like him. "So you can get the dirt on this group?"

"They call themselves the Guard. And she's not some naive waif, Audrey. She's older than you and hasn't been spending her time going to a weekly mass, if you know what I mean."

She did, but she still didn't think that made it okay. "Still..."

No longer looking even faintly guilty, Nathan said, ''I'm going to do whatever it takes to get this killer, Audrey."

His reassurance that he would do anything it took in order to accomplish this should have made her feel better, but somehow it didn't. Despite his insistence that he wouldn't let anything happen with his source, she couldn't help but worry about what it could cost him and Jess.

She didn't get to express her concern about any of this before another officer pulled an image off of the victim's hard drive, proving that the person who had pulled out the not-so-innocent victim's eyes was a woman. Which didn't fit the profile bolt gun killer all.

Audrey looked at the picture, wondering if there was any possible way that would seem to be a thin woman could possibly have been mistaken for a man in the photo that Nathan had seen. She had known some women with really hairy arms, and she thought she had caught a glimpse of that tattoo on Julia more than once.

The photograph was still in her hands when her phone rang, breaking her train of thought. It was Claire. Since she knew that Claire would keep calling until she answered, she did answer, but began talking quickly. "Sorry Claire this is a bad time-" but she shut up immediately when she heard what Claire was trying to tell her.

"Hmmm. Okay. I'll go see..." Audrey hung up after that, not really able to express what she was thinking.

"What did she want?" Nathan asked.

"Duke got arrested for assault," she said, cringingly. "Claire said that they were putting the cuffs on him when she got to the Gull so they'll probably get here soon."

She waited for Nathan to take the opportunity to badmouth him. But all he did was roll his eyes and say "wonderful."

That Night

During one of his frequent phone calls with Jess, Nathan got so sick of everything that was going on at the time that he blurted out what he was thinking. "I should fly up and see you."

Jess didn't say anything for a moment, so he feared that her next words were going to be to reject that idea. But she cautiously asked, "Do you think you can? I know that Audrey's still on maternity leave..."

He realized then that he'd probably spent too much time their last few calls complaining about not having anyone else to help him with cases involving troubles while she was out. Deep down he realized that these complaints have just been a way of venting without admitting to her that he was worried that come October 31st he was going to find himself an only child again, for real this time. Telling Jess just wasn't something he could deal with then: he was afraid that talking about it with her would make the awful possibilities too real to cope with. "I think I could, for a couple of days, anyway."

"No one's acting overly... troubly?" Jess asked.

This amused him, but he tried not to let it show. "I think it'll be standard police work for the present. No overt signs of anyone's troubles acting up," he explained, hoping he hadn't just cursed himself by saying that. "Laverne knows to call Dwight if anything gets sticky. And if he needs Audrey's help, she'll suck it up and deal."

"Has Audrey done something to upset you?" Jess sounded concerned. "You sounded unusually unsympathetic just then."

Nathan was momentarily tempted to tell her everything, but Jess had enough on her own plate to worry about. No doubt part of the reason he sounded bitter was because Audrey'd asked him for so little help, and still hadn't seemed to grasp the fact that she was the real reason he'd gotten mixed up with the Guard. Sure, he'd insisted it was because of the bolt gun killer case, but didn't she know him better than that? "No," he claimed. "I just meant that having a baby hasn't changed her opinions about what she sees as her duty towards the troubled."

Jess let a pause stretch out for a moment. "And you think it should have?"

Did he? He had no doubts in his mind that his niece was well-loved by both her parents, but maybe it would have come as a relief to hear Audrey break down and insist that she couldn't cope with the needs of the troubled anymore. But no, she had to be so damn stoic about everything, still trying to help others even as her own life flew to pieces. Her 'stay calm and carry on' attitude only really began to make sense to him once he'd learned that she was a New England native too. Although, on the other hand, the mess after she'd killed the Rev didn't make him eager to revisit what she could be like when pushed far enough... "I really don't know," he admitted. "But I'm sure she won't begrudge me a couple of days to visit you even if it becomes work for her."

"Good," she said, making him smile. "I should be glad to see you."

All at once he felt himself getting excited about the prospect of really seeing her. It would be good to wrap his arms around her, and just hold onto her until she got sick of it and made him let go. Somehow he felt that seeing her would be just what he needed to de-stress. "How's next weekend?" he asked. "If I got flights for Friday and Sunday nights, I wouldn't need to try to get anyone to cover for me."

"Sounds good. If it seems like your flight is delayed, I can get a visiting nurse to come stay with Marie, though she's probably okay for up to a couple of hours on her own."

"Do you think she's up to any tourist-y things?" he asked, remembering that it'd be rude to completely ignore the injured woman. "Maybe the two of you could show me the sights-"

"On Sunday," Jess said firmly. He made a curious sound, and she laughed. "I want you all to myself on Saturday."

"Well, if that's what you want."

"That's what I want."

He felt better than he had in days by the time they hung up.