The night passes in tense silence.
Amenadiel takes the couch but doesn't sleep; he sits with a rigid back against the leather cushions and stares out the window to the clouded sky above. Lucifer is similarly restless: beside him, in the plush confines of satin sheets and down-feathered duvets, Chloe's breathing is soft and even, and she lies with her back to him and her hands wrapped in the silk robe he had offered her.
Maze and Eve have yet to return, and Lucifer's phone teeters anxiously on the edge of the nightstand as if it, too, is lying in predatory wait for a message to bathe the darkened bedroom in a blue-screened glow. He's debating throwing himself from the bed and going after them, contributing his LAPD-consultant-skills to their man — or woman — hunt if only to spare himself the anxiety of waiting, but his better senses flit to Amenadiel, out in the living room and Chloe, resting peacefully by his side. He settles and turns the phone onto its face, so as not to distract her with its incessant glow, and slides back down into bed with a contented hum. He traces a finger down her back, trailing across black silk, careful not to wake her but smiling as she responds with a low, sleepy murmur to his light touch.
He watches her stretch and splay against him, lips parted in a satisfied smile, and eventually he drapes a possessive arm across her chest as his own eyes drift shut, lulled into sleep by the heavy sigh of her breaths against his palm.
The morning comes quickly and abruptly, and brings with it utter commotion. The soft flame of sleep that had fanned peacefully across the penthouse is extinguished with unique brutality as Amenadiel clatters about like a bull in a china shop, rushing up the steps to the bedroom and shaking Lucifer awake with violent preoccupation.
"Luci! Wake up. We have a problem."
"What—" Lucifer stirs, and Chloe wakes beside him with a fevered start. He stares at his brother through narrowed, sleepy eyes. "Not this again," he mutters, drawing the sheets up to his chin and looking defensively at Amenadiel's looming figure. "Do you always have to…barge in?"
"There's no time for this," Amenadiel says, tearing the sheet away and forcing Lucifer to rise with grumbling dissatisfaction. "Come downstairs. Now." He's careful to avoid Chloe's gaze, but his words are enough to jog her into action; as soon as his hulking form disappears from the bedroom she stands, quickly, and smoothes her hair in a nervous rush.
They don't even bother to dress; such is the insistence of Amenadiel's tone and the urgency of his frenetic pacing as he waits for them to join him by the elevator. When they do appear, draped in hurriedly-sashed robes and standing on bare feet, he ushers them both in and breathes out on a long, whistling exhale as the elevator begins its agonizing descent.
The detective in her wants to ask what's wrong; to question Amenadiel before the doors can even slide open and allow them entry into the empty club. But the look of bewildered anxiety scrawled across Lucifer's face and Amenadiel's stony scowl are enough to shroud her in quietude until they reach their destination, until Amenadiel leads them out of the opening doors. He turns to them then, shielding the first floor from view as he stands in front of the balcony's railing and grips the iron bars with tense insistence.
"He was here this morning, Luci," Amenadiel says, his voice quiet in the sudden, stark emptiness of the sun-drenched nightclub. "When I woke up. I checked, to see if he was…" he swallows. "See for yourself."
He moves, then, out of the way of the railing and of the staircase, and Lucifer stalks forward with mediated curiosity. Chloe follows beside him, that familiar muddling of intrigue and dread that paves the road to every crime scene bubbling up within her and steeling her gaze as their eyes follow the spiral of the staircase and land on the dance floor below.
Lux always seems smaller in the daylight; without the throngs of riotous partygoers and the throbbing pulse of the music to rattle the bottles on the wall, the space beneath her seems stripped of all its wicked grandeur. Free of the blur of flashing lights and the shadowed obscurity that favors Lux after dark, Chloe can see quite clearly the corpse that awaits them at the bottom of the stairs, sitting on a plain chair in the center of the lonely dance floor with its head lolling forward and arms drooping at its sides.
"Lucifer," she mutters, and his eyes follow hers and narrow at the sight. He pads wordlessly down the stairs, one step ahead of her, bare feet hollow against the floor still sticky from last night's revelry. Behind them, Amenadiel stands with arms crossed and an impassable expression on his taut face.
Here, standing level with the dance floor and quickly closing the distance between themselves and the corpse, what had been a formless figure from the balcony now takes quick and striking shape. It's a man — greasy haired, fat, his wide forehead riddled with scars in various stages of healing now eternally stunted. His hands and ankles are tied to the chair, if only to keep him from slumping over, and his fingers and throat are mottled purple and tinged with a nauseating green. Amenadiel glances briefly away — the second look is proving no easier than the first — but Chloe and Lucifer both stare with an odd, searching interest. It's not their first murder, and certainly not their grisliest, but there's something behind the bulging eyes and the strained throat that's drawing both of them imperceptibly closer to the corpse as Amenadiel shrinks away.
He's in some kind of uniform: a set of dirty, bloodstained scrubs now grey with wear where Chloe assumes they had once been white. Pinned to his chest, a yellow post-it note flutters with ardent intensity, attempting to burst free from its place atop the dead man's still heart. Smudged black sharpie is scrawled across the post-it and is bleeding into the scrubs beneath. You're welcome.
"Mm," Chloe says, reading the words with a squinting gaze. "'You're welcome'?"
Lucifer murmurs in acknowledgement, distracted as he hovers inches above the scrawled letters. He's still drawing his eyes across the note, and across faint, dried spots of blood on the unwashed scrubs. He's so close, lingering with wolfish intensity over the victim, that he can't see it right away — can't see why Chloe steps back in audible surprise or why she yanks suddenly and violently at his arm.
"Lucifer," she says, and this time his name is flat and vacant on her tongue as she issues the summons in a haze. "I know him. We know him."
Lucifer pulls back in surprise, his gaze flicking to Chloe's before landing once more on the crumpled body before them. There's a beat, and then recognition floods his gaze and crowds his throat and his dark eyes meet a glassy, unending stare. Chloe is rubbing unconsciously at the knot in her shoulder that had never quite healed, where the bullet hole had scarred over and left a dapple of red against alabaster skin.
"Detective," Lucifer whispers, his voice hesitant, turning back to face her with a stare void of its usual mocking assurance, "This is Jimmy Barnes."
"You know this man?"
Amenadiel forgoes his prior disgust and joins Chloe and Lucifer beside the folded, discolored body of Jimmy Barnes. Once the name is in the air, floating through the quiet space and settling about their shoulders, there's no mistaking him. He's not the same Jimmy that had inflicted the wound Chloe now rubbed so gingerly on her shoulder — he's older now, gaunt despite his paunchy belly, and the pornstar-chic goatee he paraded around Hollywood had vanished in the midst of patchy, silver-grey stubble. Lucifer takes an involuntary step forward, coming to stand between the sagging corpse and Chloe, and she's reminded of when he had come between them so many years before — looming over her as she lay sprawled and bleeding on the ground and barring the barrel of Jimmy Barnes' gun from facing her further.
"I…" For once, Lucifer seems at a loss for words. He's staring at Chloe, helplessly and hopelessly perplexed, and for a brief moment the only sound in the eerily well-lit club is the incessant flapping of the wayward post-it. You're welcome.
"He was our first case," Chloe explains, shaking her head and kneeling beside the body. "Lucifer and I's. He—" she straightens, and faces Amenadiel and Lucifer with a tight-lipped countenance. "He was institutionalized. I don't understand. I went and saw him, after we arrested him. He was….locked up, constant surveillance, reinforced glass, the whole nine yards. For life."
"You think he escaped?" Amenadiel peers over both of their shoulders, casting a tentative look at the corpse.
"I'm afraid you won't be making detective any time soon," Lucifer mutters, and rubs at his temples with a sigh of malcontent. "He didn't escape. Look at him. You think he freed himself from a maximum security institution, called an Uber to Lux, tied himself to this chair, killed himself, and left us with a lovely note to say 'You're welcome' for kicking off? Please, brother, a bit more credit to the criminally insane. It's a stretch, even for them. He didn't escape." The searing sting of his mockery fades, and hesitation darkens his brow. "Someone broke him out."
"Lucifer, this can't be a coincidence. The night after we stage a sting and send bounty hunters after a potential celestial psychopath, this shows up, here, at your club? The very first criminal, from our very first case? Whoever this is, whoever did this, they have to know about you, about…us. This is a message, Lucifer. For you. Someone broke Jimmy Barnes out of a maximum security prison just to bring him here. It has to be whatever — whoever — Eve saw last night, at the club. She knows we're on her tail, she knows we're after her, and now…this is her response."
He swallows, short and hard and tinged with worry. "Unfortunately, I think you might be right, Detective," he says. He brushes a tentative finger across the tittering post-it, if only to quell its persistent struggle, and his eyes land once again on the scribbled words. "But I don't understand," he murmurs. "If this is some kind of message from our evasive, really hot woman — Eve's words, Detective, not mine — why "You're welcome', like she's done me a favor? Believe me, Detective, I'll be the first to say I'm thrilled to see Jimmy Barnes where he finally belongs. The man was a cockroach. But why the offering? Why the 'You're welcome', if she's planning on running me through with a piece of glorified wood?"
Chloe shakes her head, lips pursed and eyes darting between tiles on the ground. "I don't know," she says, finally, and it annoys her to say, annoys her that she can't slip on a pair of gloves, can't assemble a team, can't regroup in the precinct with her thoughts spread before her in a series of case files. All she has is the man who shot her strapped to a chair, in the middle of God's nightclub, offered up with a post-it stuck to his chest like a sad, rapidly decaying party favor. She throws her hands up in surrender.
"We have to call the police." Chloe says. "I know," she hurries, at the sight of Lucifer's face turning quickly to face her — "I know you don't want to involve the LAPD, I know that this above their pay grade, but…" she gestures around, to the very well-paid bartender who has been cleaning glasses in total silence and with his head plunged to the ground for the entirety of their conversation, and to the bouncer who stands in the doorway of Lux's entrance, eyes averted with professional courtesy from the scene of macabre horror before him — "We can't keep this a secret. Someone — whoever that was — broke Jimmy Barnes out of a maximum security institution for the criminally insane, Lucifer. It's not something that goes unnoticed. Who knows what kind of trail your really hot woman left behind? How do you know the police won't turn up here before we can call them? Maybe that's what she meant by 'You're welcome'. A threat."
He sighs; that stilted, stuttering sigh that concedes victory to her. "Very well," he says, leaning forward and plucking the post-it from Jimmy Barnes' chest before Chloe can intervene. He interrupts before she can chastise him — "Some things are better left unsaid," he says, folding the note into a neat crease. He relents and explains further at her withering gaze — she is still the Detective, after all, and tampering with evidence is a difficult pet peeve to shake, with or without the badge on her hip. "Think, Detective. If you were on this case, if you didn't know what you know…you'd walk in here and see the man who shot newly ex-Detective Decker, tied to a chair, ostensibly murdered here, in her devilishly handsome boyfriend's notoriously sinful nightclub, with a giant 'You're welcome' scrawled across his chest. As much as I respect your capacity for ingenious deductions, Detective, I suspect it wouldn't take much of a leap to solve this one."
"Of course," she breathes, "They'll suspect you." Realization dawns on her face and she halts in her crusade for the post-it, letting him crumple it in his fist and shove it deep into the pockets of his robe. "Lucifer, maybe we shouldn't call the police. Maybe this was the plan along. To set us up, to set you up, to distract you—"
"Relax, Detective." He wets a finger with his tongue and runs it along Jimmy Barnes' sharpie-smudged, standard-issue asylum scrubs, blotting out the last of the cryptic hint from the scene of the crime. "I have this entirely under control."
Amenadiel pipes up behind them. "Or, maybe this is exactly what she wanted us to do. To stand here, deliberating, until the police show up on their own. Chloe, you said yourself a fugitive on the run will be a priority for the LAPD. Maybe she intends to create enough confusion until the police find us on their own. Giving her time to disappear, before we can confess to not committing a murder."
Before Chloe can respond, the frantic energy between them growing more frenetic with each proposed hypothetical of what if and maybe, Lucifer is tapping away with a languorous finger at his cell phone and holding the receiver to his ear as he leans a hand against Jimmy Barnes' chair.
Chloe and Amenadiel go silent as the line connects, their ramblings screeching to an abrupt halt.
911, What's your emergency?
Lucifer smiles loosely and shoots a thumbs up to where Amenadiel and Chloe stand blinking in the corner.
"Yes, hi," he drones, "I'd like to report a murder."