Liam's church didn't have the kind of population into which Henry could easily blend. Standing at the back of the nave, Jo surveyed the gathered crowd, searching for Henry's dark-haired head or Tommy's light-haired one. She saw no sign of them, yet she knew they had to be there. Liam's reaction had confirmed that-and a lot more.

The warmth of the day already filled the room, eased only by the fresh air that entered whenever someone opened the main door. In their seats, the parishioners shifted impatiently: the squeak of rubber soles against the stone floor, rustles of fabric against wooden pews, and the aggravated murmuring of people who were tired of waiting. Then the chime of bell rang through the open room and suddenly all attention shifted to the front.

Jo took this opportunity to slip out, only a step ahead of the twinge of guilt at leaving Mass before the service began. Next week she'd do her diligence, she promised herself. She'd make things right then. At least, some things.

She found Henry and Tommy less than a block away, on the far side of the parochial school. Tommy sat curled tight, his back pressed to the privacy wall, his arms wrapped tightly around his knees. Henry crouched across from him, as if to block rubberneckers in the passing traffic from seeing him. Or to be ready to catch him if he tried to run again. Jo pulled to a stop when she saw them and walked the rest of the way toward the duo slowly, taking care not to let the heels of her boots click against the cement.

"What's wrong?" She directed the question at Henry without taking her eyes off Tommy. She wasn't in the mood to chase him even farther across town, never mind having to explain to Reece how she had lost their witness.

"He's being reticent," Henry explained. "It seems that this outing may have been too taxing on top of all the other recent stressors." It was a perfectly reasonable explanation-or, should have been on any ordinary day with an ordinary child. But Tommy wasn't one of those, was he?

Except: How? He was a child, still a year or more away from starting puberty. He couldn't be a sword-wielding, serial killing, unaging Immortal as a child. She'd never bought into the myth of childhood innocence - if she had, the antics she and her brothers got up to would have cured that long before police work did - yet she still couldn't reconcile what she saw with what she knew.

"Perhaps now that we've had a moment to collect ourselves," Henry continued, "we can try again?" He pulled a crisply folded handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to Tommy, while he caught Jo's eyes with a hardened, beseeching look, willing her to follow his thought process as one parent might when surprised with the need to explain the truth about Santa.

"I'm not going," Tommy responded into his legs, taking no notice of either Henry's explanation or handkerchief, "and you can't make me."

Jo lowered herself to a crouch in front of Tommy. Though it was supposed to put her at the child's level, the position only left her feeling smaller and more off-balance. They were putting a show now: of normalcy, of ignorance. It wasn't a part she liked playing, but what they really needed to discuss couldn't be addressed in public. She pressed the tips of her fingers to the cracked sidewalk in a bid to find some stability and her words tasted bitter as she asked, "What are you afraid of? It's only church. Didn't your parents ever take you to church?"

Despite all the practice she'd had at controlling her emotions, directing the flow of the conversation, and-more recently-dealing with general weirdness, Tommy saw right through her questions. His face emerged from his pillowed arms. His eyes were swollen and red, and yet they showed no glimmer of moisture as they dared her to reveal what she knew.

Jo had wondered if Tommy would question the distance they'd traveled to come to this church, bypassing all the other Catholic options along the way. She'd wondered if he would question her insistence on arriving at the church a few minutes in advance of him and Henry.

And she had wondered if his sudden flight from the building was a coincidence, perhaps related to some as-to-yet undisclosed trauma. For all she knew, there was someone else in his congregation who was Immortal. It was a splinter of doubt, yet still enough to irritate the conclusions it was embedded in.

Without speaking a word, Tommy confirmed everything. All that remained was the act of saying it out loud.

"My parents are dead," he stated, instead, as if Jo had somehow failed to grasp this fact the last several times he'd mentioned it. One tear trickled down a grubby cheek and his bottom lip began to quiver. "Can we go back to the apartment now? I'm tired."

They did, with Jo kicking herself the whole way.

So, now she knew. Tommy was Immortal. No, Tommy was the Immortal who'd killed Drake. No one else had been there who could have done it.

No one else had been there.

That should have implicated him from the start.

Instead, this whole time she, Hanson, Reece, Henry, Rhonda, and every other person who'd seen Tommy at the crime scene that Tuesday had assumed he was an innocent bystander because he was a child.

Because he looked like a child.

With his tear-stained face and ragged clothing, he'd sold himself as helpless, just as he was doing now. Just as, Jo realized, he must have done any number of times before and had mastered. Through sobs, he'd claimed not to remember anything. He was homeless. He was terrified. He needed their protection. And every single adult had swallowed the story whole. God, she was such a fool. She had all the pieces and she'd been too blinded by her assumptions to put them together.

Her only consolation was that Drake had make the same mistake.

And he'd gotten killed for it.

It's all part of the Game, she thought bitterly. For whatever consolation that was. It's all part of that goddamn Game that kept landing in her jurisdiction. A year ago, she hadn't any inkling that Immortals existed, and now she could hardly walk a block without tripping over another one-all of them with murder on their minds.

Abruptly, she recalled Richie's reaction to the photos. He'd been horrified at what he'd seen in them. "He didn't die as part of the Game," he'd said. He didn't explain how he'd come to that conclusion, and Jo had never thought to question him, because all she'd heard was his sudden vow to avenge Drake's death-an event he had shown no interest in at all until he saw the second picture.

She looked anew at Tommy. If he was Immortal, and Drake had been Immortal, then what made this decapitation different?

An answer floated into her consciousness: Tommy had cheated.

If he could-if he would-do that, what else was he capable of?

"How would you like to approach confronting him?" Henry asked, in one of the few moments they managed to grab out of Tommy's earshot on the return walk. He had his pocket watch out and was rubbing a thumb over the etched surface like he did sometimes when he was deep in thought.

"I don't think we should." Jo heard her response before she realized she'd made one. Tilting her head, she listened to herself, and then decided she was making sense. No matter how strange the second part sounded when it came out. "I think we need to talk to Richie first. You trust him." She couldn't admit that she did, too; she wasn't there yet. Given all the opportunity and motive, he'd still never lied to her. In her book, that was invaluable.

With a nod, Henry hummed his agreement. "It's always wise to gather all the information before rushing to action." He looked at Tommy, clomping down the steps to the subway in his worn out sneakers, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his hoodie. "In this case, I believe discretion and wisdom go hand-in-hand. While we're practicing those, what shall we do for lunch? There's a new Indian takeout near the shop. Do you think our young ward would be interested in sampling curry?"

Returning Tommy to Rhonda's care Monday morning wasn't the relief Jo thought it'd be. Rhonda had asserted from the beginning that Tommy was deeply traumatized. PTSD, she said. Abandonment issues. Issues with authority, with trust. She advised committing Tommy to a full time psychiatric institution so he could get round the clock care. She insisted that the instability of the foster care system would only damage him further, if that was possible. She'd put his name on a waiting list and called in some favors to get it bumped up.

But it wouldn't matter because Tommy wasn't a child. All his little digs at how everyone expected him to act made sense now. He'd been a child too long—however long it had been—and he resented everyone who wouldn't let him grow up. He was the ultimate Lost Boy who was tired of waiting for Peter Pan to come for him.

She pinched her eyes and leaned into the elbow she'd planted for support on her desk the next morning. Paper crinkled ominously. In all her years on the force, Jo had seen her share of cases that started cold and never had a chance of being anything else. Putting some effort into those had never bothered her because she could at least take pride in having tried. Not this time. She'd solved the case, yet even if she found enough evidence to make the case stick against Tommy, there'd never be a trial. There could never be a trial.

"What I can't believe," Hanson stated, "is how only one person saw anything." He rolled his chair over to her desk and leaned back in it, resting his coffee mug on his stomach. "There's eight million people in this city. You'd think more than one would be at a park on a spring afternoon. No one remembers that natty suit checking into or out of their hotel. None of the regular dog-walkers or joggers remembers seeing him. It's like he popped into existence on that park bench and forgot to bring his head with him. What kind of yahoo does that?" He crossed his feet at the ankle, settling in like they were in a living room and not the middle of the bullpen. Around them hummed the noise of the other officers and detectives talking on theirs phones, clicking on their keyboards, rustling as they stood up and sat down. "I'll tell you what kind," Hanson continued. "The kind that doesn't play by Earth logic."

Jo blinked against the pressure of her fingertips. Sparks of color burst behind her eyelids. "Are you seriously suggesting that this is supernatural?" she asked. She kept her head down so Hanson couldn't read her expression. Bad enough that they were dealing with something supernatural. For Hanson to have figured that out was…more than she could handle, really. He was the most grounded person she knew, the one who succeeded as a detective because he assumed that every problem had a simple solution and he wasn't afraid to put in the leg work until he found it.

"Nah."

"Then what are you saying?" Jo finally allowed herself to look at her partner. They weren't far enough into the day for his suit and shirt to have gathered wrinkles along with the minutes. The tie had been an early sacrifice, though. It hung unknotted around his neck, and looked to be on the verge of slithering off.

"I think we're going about this all wrong. We've been missing something. I'd say it shoulda been obvious, 'cept no one's mentioned it. Not even Morgan." He spoke as if it were completely unbelievable for Henry to let a detail slip by unremarked. "We've got a vic with no head and no identity and a witness with no memory." Jo nodded, confirming the summation. What she'd learned since then was off the books. "So what else don't we have that we should?"

A sword, Jo thought. Henry had declared the murder weapon to be a 'long knife,' which might be his way of keeping the two beheadings from being connected. Different weapons likely meant different culprits. Then again, it could have been a long knife. Jo wasn't clear on when a blade stopped being a knife and became a sword, nor did that detail seem to be important right now. No one had found the murder weapon. They also hadn't found the sword that Jo knew Drake carried. He'd had one with him in the diner and he was wearing the same jacket at the park. He could have been beheaded with his own sword, though it was more likely that the killer had supplied his own. So where were they? Certainly someone would have come forward if they'd seen a person running through the park carrying a severed head and a bloody sword, New York City's famed cynicism, be damned.

"I don't know," she answered, instead. "What else?"

Hanson slapped a hand down on his thigh; the coffee cup jumped, though nothing spilled. "Blood."

"Blood," Jo repeated. There'd been blood. She definitely remembered blood. She stared at her partner, and he stared back, a satisfied smirk tugging his mouth into a shape she wasn't used to seeing. What was he getting at?

"Aw, come on, Jo," Hanson weedled. "You've seen decapitations before. You've seen people with slit throats and head wounds. What's the one thing they all have in common? Blood. Lots and lots of blood."

Diving into the pile on her desk, she yanked out the folder with the crime scene photos. The one of the body alone wasn't useful; any gore would have been cleaned up before the picture was taken. The wider shot of Drake still sitting on the park bench told a more accurate story: peanuts on the ground, a few drops of water glistening on the grass from the surprise rain storm that had lasted long enough to clear the park, a few darker splatters on the bench. The storm could have washed the blood away, she supposed. Except Drake's clothes were dry. He'd died after the storm swept through—and there wasn't enough blood.

How had she missed seeing it? Is that what Richie had noticed, too? Something told her it wasn't.

"The one in February didn't have a lot of blood," she stated. That's how the detail had slipped by her, slipped by Henry. They both knew that Immortal beheadings were relatively clean affairs, and they'd brought that knowledge to Drake's crime scene. Jo's esteem for her abilities dropped. Knowing the truth about what was going on had prevented her from seeing the case as she was expected to, as she needed to, if she was going to solve it from a police perspective.

Hanson scratched his head, brow creasing into a deep line. "Maybe it did, maybe it didn't. It was dark. There was all that vandalism. Besides, we got that one solved without having to worry about a few pints of O negative." He took a sip of his coffee and mentally put that case back in the closed drawer. "The new guy, he was obviously moved. Instead of trying to figure out who he was, let's—Lieutenant?" He looked up, and Jo became aware that Reece had drawn up behind her.

"Good thinking, Detective," Reece spoke, with a nod toward Hanson first, and then Jo. Her arms were crossed low on her stomach, lips pressed into a thin line. "Why don't you two step into my office and I'll finish solving the case for you. You're not going to like this one."

Sparing only a glance at one another to see if either had any idea what this summons was going to reveal—neither did—Jo and Hanson rose from their chairs. Hanson set his cup down on the corner of Jo's desk, pushing aside her keyboard to make enough room. She had a feeling they were both going to forget it was there.

Reece shut the door behind them, though she didn't bother to draw the shades this time. Jo let out a small breath; whatever news was coming wouldn't involve a trip to HR.

"First of all, I want to commend both of you for your diligence on this case. I know how difficult it is to conduct an investigation when all the channels for getting information are closed." Reece leaned against the front edge of her desk, though the fact that her arms were still crossed undercut the show of informality. The office was chilly today; air-conditioning that barely affected the heat in the rest of the building was instead putting all its effort into this space. Where everyone else had ditched their jackets or blazers, Reece had kept hers on and buttoned it up. Jo shivered, wishing she had thought to grab hers on the way in.

"What's going on?" Hanson asked. He appeared unaffected by the temperature, though Jo suspected that his mood might be offsetting the cold.

Reece smiled grimly. "We received an anonymous call this morning from someone who claimed that our John Doe wasn't murdered; he was merely misplaced."

"I'm sorry, what?" Jo asked, unable to hold her question in. "Did they mean his head was misplaced?"

"That was my first thought, too," Reece answered. "The caller claimed that a body was taken from the NYU medical school. Some kind of prank. The caller did not give names, and the call was placed from what is probably the only functioning pay phone on the campus. I sent someone to check it out in case the call itself was a prank; it wouldn't be the first one."

Jo and Hanson both nodded at that. People liked sensationalism, and they especially liked stirring the pot from afar if they felt the story wasn't sensational enough on its own.

"It appears that the tip was accurate." Reaching behind her, Reece selected a file on her desk without looking and handed it over to Jo. Hanson shifted closer so he could see it. They were holding a photocopy of the forms used for donating a body to science. The information on the upper right was obscured by a picture of the man Jo had met, the image of the paperclip bisecting his face. "In life, our John Doe was known as David Franks." Jo's brows jumped at the name, so similar to the one he'd introduced himself as, yet enough unlike it that if she had come across it in her search, she'd have skipped right over it. Richie and Liam both kept their first names when they switched identities. Henry, as far as she knew, kept his whole name. She'd somehow expected that Drake would do the same.

Reece continued, "He was forty-five when he died from an aneurysm. His family donated his body, and his head was removed post-mortem for a dedicated study."

"No blood," Hanson grumbled.

Jo let Hanson take the file so he could look at it closer, if he wanted. She did not.

Reece had explanations for everything. Worse, she had signed paperwork from Dr. Washington, the Chief Medical Examiner, stating that Drake's—sorry, Franks'sbody—had been refrigerator-cold when it was found and not body temperature, as Henry had noted, as Jo had noted. Between that and the intake paperwork featuring Franks's description, officially the bases were covered. No one had stepped forward to claim participation in the "prank," though such a claim would undoubtedly lead to expulsion, so no admissions were expected. That was the only thing missing.

Jo locked her hands behind her back while she listened to her case be pulled out from under her with her heart pounding ever louder in her ears, her teeth grinding. How was anyone not questioning this new information?

She managed to wait until she got back to her desk before blurting out her true thoughts: "That's bullshit!" She slammed her hand on the wooden surface; paper, pens, the keyboard, and the coffee mug all rattled from the force.

Hanson grabbed for his mug before she could knock it off the desk. "Problem, Martinez?" he asked.

"Yeah, there's a problem." She leaned closer to her partner so that her voice wouldn't carry back to Reece's office. "We already have a stunning lack of witnesses. Are we really supposed to believe that no one saw anyone carrying a headless corpse across town? No one?" There was no way. The logistics of getting a body out of one building, over to the park, and set up on the bench were too complicated to have left no witnesses. Not in the middle of the day. Plus, the scenario Drake's body had been found in would've taken time to set up.

She was tempted to pull Hanson aside and try to explain what she really knew. She had the right answer, and now she was looking at a complete fabrication that didn't fit anything she knew to be true. She'd heard about cover-ups before, but had never expected to be caught in one. So, this was how the Immortals managed to stay hidden. Funny how none of them had bothered to mention this political machinery to her. Still, she wanted to assert the real story to someone, to know that she and her partner were on the same page. They had to work together, which meant they had to trust each other. How could she trust him if she thought he was so easily deceived?

Hanson met her question with a level gaze—and Jo saw in the set of his mouth that he was simply being pragmatic. "You really wanna push this?" he asked. "We were spinning our wheels on this case and you know it. Unless that kid was going to sing, we had nothing to go on. Now it's not our problem anymore." His chin jutted out with an afterthought. "And we don't hafta bank on a witness whose testimony had no chance of holding up in court."

Jo blinked; she hadn't thought of that. Assuming that Rhonda even signed off on Tommy delivering a testimony, the sheer number of diagnoses on him all but guaranteed he'd have no credibility. A sharp pain stabbed behind her eyes and Jo dropped into her seat. Hanson perched himself on now-vacant corner of her desk, still cradling his mug. "We might have found something," she protested. She did have a name to research. She had options she could have pursued. When Kostya was in town, Henry had told Jo about the Watchers. He said all the Immortals had them, so Drake must have had one. Jo could have found the Watcher and—

She shook her head. It didn't matter. The case was gone. She'd wasted a week of her life working on it instead of her other cases and she'd lost a weekend alone with Henry, and it didn't matter. There was nothing left to investigate. Cover-up or no, Tommy would have ended up right back on the streets. She couldn't stop him, and now she didn't have to try. She suddenly felt relieved that she hadn't confronted Tommy about his Immortality and hadn't had time to contact Richie. Now she didn't have to do either, nor figure out how to deal with the consequences of what she learned.

"You're right," she said. The pain vanished; the tension ebbed out of her body. "It's not our problem." She and Henry still had 10 days left; that was plenty of time for a tryst. It was almost like a Honeymoon, and she had every intention of treating their time as such.

"Knew you'd see it my way," Hanson replied. "So, how 'bout we go top up our cups, take a few minutes to refocus, and then look through those interviews for the Wisniewski case." He stood up, taking point on the expedition to the lounge. "I've got a good feeling about that one."

Jo followed, feeling more relaxed and confident than she had in a week-yet unable to shake the feeling that she was still missing something.