Hanson came awake when Jo pulled the door handle of the car. He'd locked the door while he was sleeping, which left Jo impatiently standing on the street next to a police car while he rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, blearily looked around, and finally captured enough coherence to hit the unlock button. Next time she was taking the keys with her when she left him alone. The neighborhood Richie had chosen to live and work in was not the kind that welcomed a police presence, which Jo keenly felt in the suspicious stares being leveled at her from people who had all vanished from sight when the police car pulled up. Since she had more-than-one childhood memory of pressing her nose to a window while blue and red lights swirled below, waiting to see whose turn it was to get escorted into the vehicle, and understood the attitude. She'd only come here for information, though, so she ignored the stares and pulled the car door open, shaking her head in fond exasperation at her partner.
"D'you have a good nap?" she asked dryly. A blast of cold air hit as she slid into the passenger seat. In deference to the outside temperature, and the desire to not cook to death in his own vehicle, Hanson had left the engine on with the air conditioning turned up full. Jo shivered and adjusted the controls, then gave up and rolled down the window. She definitely wasn't leaving him alone with the keys in the future, if she ever had to come back here on the job. He could wait in the hallway. She was sure that would go over well with him.
Oblivious to the reason for the grin that she suddenly had to fight back, Hanson squinted at her with reddened eyes. "When you get to be my age," he said, "every nap is a good nap. Wouldn't've said no to another 10 minutes, though. You weren't in there very long."
Hadn't she been? She felt like hours had passed, but a quick check of the dashboard clock against her watch confirmed that Hanson was right.
"It was long enough. I found out what I needed to know." She leaned an elbow on the top of the door and looked toward the dojo. The glass windows lining the front were protected by a metal security screen that made it hard to see inside. She caught the shadow of the large punching bag and a human-like shadow she figured had to be one of the dummies. There was no movement. Richie was either still in his office or he'd slipped out right after she did. She knew which one it was. Anyone else would be running around panicked after a visit like that; Richie was just getting on his with day. Was he really innocent, or merely confident in his ability to lie? He was tricky: at times charming, at times arrogant, and at times wildly insecure. As much as a part of her wanted to have nothing to do with him or his world, a bigger part was fascinated by this person who managed to live in it and stay so likable. And as a resource for his kind of Immortal, he was invaluable. Like it or not, she was going to have to keep an eye on him. But, not today.
"We're done here," she said, and patted the dashboard like she was encouraging a horse to get moving.
Hanson gave his eyes a final rub and started back toward the station. At each light or turn he shot her a sideways glance and drew a short breath as if to ask a question. He didn't know about Immortals, didn't know whom Jo had gone to interview or what she'd hoped to learn. The curiosity was clearly eating at him. He got several turns into the route before saying, "Well, you gonna fill me in? You drag me to go tearing off to talk to your snitch, there's gotta be something you thought he'd be able to shed light on."
"I didn't drag you," Jo countered. She was turning Richie's words and reactions over in her mind, searching for the misstep or the half-truth. Instead, all she found was more reason to be worried. He hadn't shown any concern for Drake's death until he saw the picture, and then he'd turned so serious—so deadly serious—that she didn't recognize him. It was a frightening transformation, made more so by the fact that she'd provided the catalyst for it. He didn't know who killed Drake. "But if I find out, I'm going to kill him," he'd sworn. The undertone in his words echoed through her mind, so she was talking on autopilot when she said, "You insisted on coming along."
"Because you don't go anywhere without your partner."
Jo flinched and dragged her attention back to the person next to her. Hanson was right and they both knew it. The only reason she'd ever considered going alone was because of the nature of the meeting; Jo saw no reason knowing about Immortals would improve his life, so she wanted to keep him out of it. Though, on consideration, she'd pay a lot of money to have someone secretly record Hanson's reactions to one of her conversations with Richie or Liam—if she could delete his memory of it afterward. He could learn about them. But not Henry. She never wanted him to know about Henry. That seemed way too personal.
"Admit it," she teased, hoping to trick herself into a lighter mood, "you only came along because you wanted to catch some z's while on the clock."
He was only willing to go along with it so far. "Yeah, yeah. So, what'd you get? A name? Tell me you got a name?"
Jo'd planned on saying that she hadn't learned anything because, really, confirmation that Drake had been murdered would only get her teased. In the absence of an ill-timed sheet of falling glass or a spinning boat propeller, a beheading couldn't be anything else. Now she saw an opportunity she hadn't imagined. "I did get a name," she said. She never had to mention that she already knew it. "Franklin Drake."
Hanson let out a low whistle. The offering of solid information did more for his mood than any friendly teasing. "Of the West Side Drakes? That would explain the fancy duds and…who in the hell names their kid Franklin? What's wrong with Frank? Good solid name. Frank. Not a name I've heard much recently, though. I bet it's some kind of shared name. What'd'ya wanna bet he was Franklin Drake the third." He said the last in a faux-English accent that Jo belatedly realized had to be Hanson's idea of what Henry sounded like.
"I guess we'll find out when we run it. Somehow, I think he was a loner." The temperature in the car had stabilized, so Jo pulled her arm in and rolled the window back up. The noise from outside dimmed and without the competition, the rest of what Hanson had said sunk in. "Who're the West Side Drakes?" She thought she knew all the big name families in the City, but this was one she hadn't encountered.
A quick shake of his head and Hanson admitted, "I made 'em up. Name like that has to belong to someone hoity-toity. You sure your snitch wasn't pulling your leg?"
"Pretty sure," she stated with a confirming nod. She'd heard Drake speak his name herself, not that Hanson would ever know how she could be so certain. "Are you jealous that I learned something useful before you did?"
"Me?" He slapped a hand over his chest. "I don't get jealous. Solving a case is a team effort. But, hey, if you want to do all the work, be my guest. You know where to find me when it's time to dish out the credit."
"If you're sleeping, I'll be sure to wake you up. If I hafta do all the work, what's a little nudge…or a glass of cold water on your face?" She flashed him a grin, and couldn't miss that he was grinning too. They hadn't teased each other like this in a long time. The reason for his true insistence on coming along suddenly made sense to her. Ever since February, Jo had been so caught up in making sense of what these Immortals were and why they were suddenly all over New York City that she'd inadvertently distanced Hanson. He was worried about her. She smiled again, softer, and touched his arm in reassurance. "Speaking of doing all the work, I'm going to call the name in and get dispatch on it."
Hanson nodded in approval. "Good idea. Partner."
Jo barely had the call in when her cell phone rang.
"I have good news and bad news," the speaker stated as her greeting. Though the ID stated that the caller was private, the roughened voice like that of a long-time chain smoker identified her as Rhonda Syzmanski, a friend of Jo's from her school days and now a specialist with the police department who worked exclusively with child witnesses whose needs demanded them to be kept out of the general welfare system. Currently, she was in charge of Tommy, the witness to Drake's killing.
"I'm fine," Jo responded. "Doing great. Thanks for asking. How are you?"
Rhonda only chuckled, not at all repentant about skipping pleasantries to get right to work; she'd always been like that.
Jo didn't cross paths with Rhonda much, either personally or professionally. Every time they did, they both wondered why they didn't get together more, and both swore to make a greater effort. The effort never quite panned out. "I'd tell you which news I wanted to hear first, but I'm going to guess it doesn't matter." Jo put the phone on speaker and held it where Hanson could hear. "You're talking to both of us, now. What've ya got?"
"Good news first, then," Rhonda said. "Let's get it out of the way. Tommy's finally decided to talk, though he doesn't have much to say. He's sullen and distrusting of me, you, the guy running the hotdog stand, and pretty much the universe in general. In summary, I'd say he's doing remarkably well."
"That sounds like great news," Hanson replied. Instantly suspicious, he asked, "What's the catch?"
"Well, he claims he can't remember his name, where he's from, who his parents are, what he was doing in the park, or what he saw there."
"Oh, is that all?" Hanson murmured.
"Is that possible?" Jo wondered, loud enough for Rhonda to hear the question. She'd seen that kind of amnesia depicted often enough on TV shows and in the movies; in all her years of policing, she'd never seen it in reality without a substantial head injury involved—even then, she could point to only a handful of examples, and most of those weren't cases she had personally worked.
Rhonda sighed and Jo could easily imagine the grimace on her face from being asked a question that had no easy answer. There was silence, then the faint pop of Rhonda clicking her tongue. "At this stage, I'd say it doesn't matter. Whether he can't talk or whether he won't talk, the result is the same for us."
"Yeah." Jo glanced out the window, at the busses and yellow cabs that now dominated the streets and the streams of people churning down the sidewalk. So many people she'd vowed to protect and serve. She couldn't allow her efforts to be dependent on what this single child might have to say.
Immortals had a vested interest in keeping their activities away from police attention. She didn't know everything they did to keep themselves hidden, but she could guess a lot of it. Growing up in a city where mob activity was treated with a sense of awe, in both its historical and modern meanings, it was hard to not absorb the tales and myths that formed its mystique. Every New Yorker had a theory about what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, after all. She'd already noted one similarity between the mob and how the Immortals engaged with each other, and there were doubtless many others. Hell, maybe Jimmy Hoffa had been Immortal.
Drake's body hadn't been abandoned where it fell, the way the first Immortal victim she'd investigated had been. Drake's death had looked staged. It had looked, she thought, like someone wanted it to be investigated. For people who put so much effort into being unnoticed, instigating an investigation raised even more questions than any normal homicide. In the back of her mind, the idea began to niggle that this was a test. Detective Josephine Martinez knew about Immortals. Were they checking to see whose side she was on?
She squelched the thought as soon as she became aware of it. The mob was well-known for having the police in its pocket. What she was doing wasn't equivalent. She was going to do this investigation as close to procedure as she could.
Only the obvious leads had been removed. Fortunately, she had one the killer hadn't counted on. And if the kid came through, then she and Hanson had a good chance at closing this apparently unsolvable case.
And closing it was all she wanted to do. Apprehending the killer didn't matter; nothing she did would stop him. What she needed to get the mayor off the department's back and shut the media up before they discovered a pattern. The city had hundreds of reported homicides every year. She couldn't do her job for those victims and their loved ones if she had to put on a show of chasing those cases that didn't need to be solved.
Please let the kid get his memory back, she thought.
"…your job, Mike," Rhonda was saying. "While Tommy's with you, pay attention to what he talks about. Don't force him, and don't try to trick him. He needs to know he can trust us."
"He's staying with you?" Jo asked, frowning. This was the first she'd heard of overnight plans.
"Reece's idea. He needs to be in protective custody when he's not with the doctors and I have boys his age at home."
"No, yeah," she answered. "That makes a lot of sense. You're all set up to take on a kid. Better you than me. I hope you can get through to him." Hanson's eyebrows waggled in a silent 'me too.' To Rhonda she asked, "Do you really think the kid has amnesia?"
Rhonda clicked her tongue again. "Ya know, ask me again tomorrow. There's something about this kid that isn't sitting right. I'm going to need some more time with him before I start making official diagnoses. In the meantime, I hope you have other leads to follow up on."
Jo was very happy to assure her that they did. She ended the call as Hanson pulled into the station lot and parked.
"Ready to start digging through the phone book?" he asked. Modern detecting was more updated than that, but the process often felt just as grinding.
It was good to have a lead in this case. A real lead. One she could trust because it came directly from the source.
For once, she could honestly answer, "Let's get to it."
Jo's enthusiasm took a hit when she got to her desk and discovered that the answer to "who in the hell names their kid Franklin Drake" was "almost no one."
She scanned the list that had been sent over with a rapidly sinking feeling in her stomach; their lead had smashed into a dead end. The list held a dozen names. Across the entire United States, there were only a dozen currently- or recently-living people with the name Jo knew belonged to their John Doe. The researcher had thoughtfully appended a separate, and much longer, list of Frank Drakes which Hanson took to winnow to a more manageable size.
Her own list had a clear divide: about half the names belonged to men over the age of 60 and the other half belonged to men younger than 35. She thought about the man she'd met in the diner and called Henry.
"Could Drake have passed for 60?" she asked.
Over the phone line, Jo heard the sound of Henry's desk chair being pushed back, then the thunk of the door to his office closing. She hadn't thought the question would need privacy to answer.
"It's extremely unlikely," Henry answered, his voice low enough that Jo knew she really had stumbled onto a sensitive topic. "Certainly not on a day-in and day-out basis. With hair dye, careful application of makeup, and the addition of glasses he might have been able to pass for 60 in short encounters." He paused again, thinking. Jo cupped her phone closer to her ear out of some misplaced instinct to keep anyone on her end from overhearing his half of the conversation. "The issue with longer encounters is not strictly gray hair and wrinkles as, in the modern world, a number of cosmetic and surgical procedures can reduce or eliminate their appearance. The issue is the bevy of other changes the human body goes through as it ages: fat distributions, epidermal thickness, bone density, and muscle strength, to name a few. The older someone claims to be, the more noticeable these changes are, especially in their absence."
Jo was nodding before he finished. "Drake looked like a healthy man in his early 40s," she stated. Undoubtedly the tailoring of his suit hid the muscles he'd have needed to have to wield the sword he'd carried. Despite that, she'd caught nothing in his posture or movements that hinted at any age beyond the one she saw.
"Precisely. Without his head to examine, I cannot make a full analysis; however, I would imagine that he had a range of roughly 15 years in which he could reasonably exist—at which point he would need to conclude his life and and start a new one."
"Fifteen years," Jo echoed. Fifteen years. That was how long she'd had with Sean, give or take. And then his life had ended and hers had to start over without him in it. She was the same person, only changed in every way that had mattered because of one person who had left her life. How different was it when you were the one person who had to leave? Drake had been Immortal, capable of living forever, but he could only do so in fifteen years increments. She'd never thought of immortality that way. It was like some kind of warped reincarnation, and the person she was talking to had been through it over and over for two hundred years. "Henry, how long do you get?"
She hunched deeper over the phone, cradling it, protecting it. A finger began to trace the coiled wire that connected base to handset while around her the constant roar of a working bullpen faded to nothingness. All she saw was the red light on the phone base that indicated an open line, and all she heard was the dim static of a person taking too long to answer.
"Before I have to leave? Barring any unfortunate accidents, perhaps ten more years." Henry swallowed, then added, "I will need to consider Abraham's health, as well."
Of course he would. After learning that Abe was Henry's son, she'd assumed Henry would prioritize that relationship over any new one. She hadn't considered that Henry might not be able to be present for the rest of Abe's life.
Or the rest of hers.
How many nights had she lain awake after Sean died berating herself for the time they'd wasted: the trip to Rome they'd meant to take and never gotten around to, the standing Friday night dinner date that one or the other them canceled more often than not for work, the family they'd talked about starting.
"Jo?" Henry asked.
She jumped, throwing a furtive glance around the bullpen to see if anyone had noticed her attention slip. Business chugged along, with no one the wiser as to how loudly the clock had started ticking.
"I'm here. I was just thinking." She pushed out a breath and tugged her finger out of the coil of phone wire she'd wrapped it in. "Drake's real name is a dead end. No pun intended. He must have been using a pseudonym in this life." The stolen wallet meant there was no way to know what that name was, either. Just because Richie and Liam had both kept their given first names didn't mean every Immortal did. Dammit. She thought they'd had a real lead, and it turned out the information she'd been so desperate to share was useless.
"That makes sense." A professionalism dropped over his tone that Jo recognized immediately as Henry trying not to sound disappointed. "It has become far more difficult to maintain one's name than it used to be, especially when that name is unusual. I need to be returning to work. Is there anything else I can assist you with?"
"There is one more thing I'd like to know." Another breath out that riffled the corners of the sheets of Franklin Drakes. "Is your offer still open? Two weeks living with you sounds like an excellent idea."