The other Guy in the Holding Cell

When Shawn wakes up he knows at once, that he is not on his couch. But he should be there, he fell asleep there, so why is he not there? This place he is in, almost looks like the holding cell of the police station. But that doesn´t make any sense.

Maybe he´s still dreaming after all. But no. That dry air in his nose cannot be from any other place than the station´s holding cell. What leaves the most important question unanswered. Why is he here and not at home?

Slowly he sits up on the cot and his head feels as if he´s having the worst hangover since Tears for Fears went on that Concert through the states. He can´t even remember drinking something yesterday. Hell, he can´t remember anything from yesterday. Only that he and Gus had been sitting together over those yearbooks and after that … nothing. Only a faint image of a very very weird dream he only half remembers. What the hell is the matter with him?

He stands up, swaying a little, and walks to the bars of his cell.

"Hey, guys?" he calls out with a soar throat. "Guys! I´m awake now. You can come out and have your laugh at me. Do whatever you want … as long as you tell me how I got here." he finishes the line, mumbling to himself.

The door gets opened and he expects to see Lassie or his dad standing there, staring daggers at him for whatever reckless or silly thing he´s pulled off last night – because let´s be honest, it has to be something in that department or he wouldn´t be in here – but it´s not Lassie who comes in and it´s not his dad either. It´s Buzz and the way he looks at him, makes Shawn feel even stranger.

"Buzz." he greets. "Hey, buddy. What´s up? What is all this?"

The officer frowns, uncertain. "You don´t remember?" he asks and Shawn chuckles.

"No. What am I supposed to remember?"

Buzz shifts, uncomfortable, from one foot to the other. Eventually he steps aside to allow two people to walk in, a man and a woman. Shawn has never seen them before. No wait. He has seen them before. Back in the days when Lassie had been accused of having shot a prisoner.

"What´s this?" he wants to know.

"We´re ought to take some samples from you." the woman speaks. "For evidence."

Shawn pales, feeling sick, and looks at Buzz. What happened, he asks the officer without words, but Buzz only crouches and lowers his gaze.

"Sir." the woman speaks again, demanding his cooperation.

Shawn sighs and holds up his hands in the international gesture of surrender. For heaven´s sake.

"What do you need?"

...

The man behind this mirror is no murderer, Lassiter knows that. He´s an overgrown, silly, immature and reckless kid and he can annoy you at times to a point where you want to kill him, but he is not violent. Guster must have been mistaken about what he saw last night, Lassiter is sure of that. And still, when he looks at Gus now, still shaken and even panting as if he just came running up a long fleet of stairs, he´s not so sure anymore.

"Are you absolutely sure about this, Gus?" Juliet asks him once again.

"You think I would have called you, and watched him get arrested like that, if I wasn´t sure?" Gus snaps. After that outburst he needs to take a deep breath before he can go on. "God, I don´t believe he really did it." he says, looking at the guy behind the mirror.

"Maybe he didn´t." O´Hara keeps arguing. "Maybe you saw someone else. You said it was dark, and you were far away. You could have been mistaken. You have been mistaken, there´s just no other way."

"I wish it was that way. But there was no one else around but Shawn. Except for that girl he k…"

"I just …" O´Hara interrupts him just in time to keep him from saying the word that would condemn Spencer in all of their heads.

Lassiter sighs, glancing at the man in the interrogation room. He sits behind the table, shoulders crouching, hands wringing with each other, looking around unsure, so absolutely not like him. He´s scared. Scared because of guilt? But that is Spencer. McNab had said he´d claimed not to remember anything from last night. Could that be true?

"I´ll talk to him." he decides and wants to turn around. Only that Guster and O´Hara won´t just let him go.

"I´ll come with you." they cry almost simultaneously.

"No." he decides.

"He´s my best friend."

"And you´re not a police officer."

"But I am." O´Hara cries. "I´m detective and I´m coming with you."

"No." Lassiter repeats.

"But that´s Shawn."

"I know. And that´s exactly the reason why I´ll do this alone. From the three of us, I´m the only one who´s at least halfway objective about this case. You stay here."

And with that he walks away and enters the room, before she can discuss again. Spencer flinches when he hears the door, and turns toward him. God, he does look scared.

"Lassie." he exclaims, gladly. "Finally. I´m going crazy if no one tells me what´s going on."

Lassiter squints, trying to figure him out. Is he honest with that? Or is it an act?

"Maybe you already went crazy." he comments and makes Spencer frown.

"What?"

"Do you remember driving to Blassay Park on your motorcycle last night?"

The frown deepens. "No."

Lassiter intensifies his efforts to read the face before him. It looks real. "So you didn´t leave your house, yesterday night." he demands a clarification.

Shawn chuckles. "No." he cries. "After Gus left, I put in Secret Window and … fell asleep on my couch." He frowns again, thinking deeply for a moment, as if he just remembered something strange. But then he blinks and shakes his head. "I wasn´t out anymore." he repeats.

Lassiter leans back, trying to think. He knows this man, knows him for years, and what Guster told them about last night is something he just can´t believe. But the evidence is strong and Guster is not a witness who is likely to be doubted. Usually his statements are accurate and more reliable than anyone else´s. So where´s the mistake in this picture?

"Was there ever any case of sleep walking in your life?" he hears himself ask, making Shawn raise his brows in surprise. "Did you ever stand up at nights and walked around the house when you were a kid or something?" Lassiter specifies his question but Shawn shakes his head.

Dammit. Drugs maybe? "Show me your arms." he demands. "The crooks."

Shawn does, not understanding the question, and Lassiter inspects the skin. But there are no puncture wounds. Of course someone could have injected him elsewhere too, but Lassiter just refuses to check the whole guy right now. If there had been anything the like the people who checked him in the holding cell, would have said something anyway.

"What´s the matter, Lassie?" Shawn asks, and his voice is almost pleading, so not like the Shawn he knows. Shawn´s never that insecure, that scared.

"Last night, Guster saw you leaving your house." he starts telling him. "He says you took your motorcycle and drove down to Blassay Park. When he followed you inside, he saw … he saw you murdering a young woman. You slit her throat, Spencer. From behind."

He watches Spencer´s eyes grow wide with confusion at this tale. If that is an act it´s the best he´s ever seen.

"This …" Shawn stutters. "This is ridiculous. Did he even see my face?"

"He says he did. And that you followed him after he screamed in shock over what he saw. He says that you chased him into a dark allay. In there he could see you very clearly. So did the police officers who came running after they heard his screams. They say they interrupted you just in time before you would have killed him."

Shawn sits there and stares, not saying a single word, unable to speak. Lassiter reaches under the table, taking the bag he´d brought in with him and had placed beside his chair so far. He reaches in and gets the evidence out, laying it on the table before Spencer. A shovel and a broom.

"Recognize this?" he asks. "That´s yours. Your fingerprints are all over them. We found some of Guster´s too. He said he found them in your closet yesterday. Any explanation?"

Shawn seems rather lost and only shrugs.

"We found them next to the dead woman." Lassiter clarifies.

In any other interrogation this would be the moment when the culprit slips into defensive mode, trying to explain himself out of it. But this is not a normal interrogation and no normal culprit sitting before him. It´s Spencer. And Spencer falls silent, looking down on the tools before him as if they were hypnotizing him.

Lassiter doesn´t know what to do anymore. He´s not getting any answers here, that much he can see. Eventually he gets up and leaves the room. Spencer stays behind, still silent, like a grave.

...

"Maybe he got hypnotized by someone." Gus blurs, before Lassiter can even say anything. "The real killer who wants him to get blamed for his crimes. I know at least half a dozen drugs that can make people do what another one demands and make them forget what happened afterward. It´s quite possible."

Lassiter looks at the two-way mirror, thoughtfully. Spencer is still silent, sitting on the table as if he has fallen asleep with open eyes. He has arrested a lot of drug addicts over the years but that is not quite how it used to look. But Guster´s idea sounds at least more likely than the idea of Spencer mutating into a bloodthirsty serial killer.

Henry who must have arrived while Lassiter talked to Spencer, doesn´t say a word the whole time. He is quiet and retrieved into his own thoughts, strangely looking like his son in the other room. Only that Lassiter can see in his eyes that he is still there, thinking all of this through, trying to find an explanation for something that doesn´t seem to be explainable.

"I go in there." O´Hara decides when she can´t stand the silence any longer. "I need to talk to him. He needs to know that we believe him." Gus nods, following her out of the door. Lassiter reaches them just in time to keep them from entering the interrogation room.

"Carlton, move." Juliet demands and his hand releases the door handle before he even knows he´s doing it.

But even though it´s Juliet he crouches away from, it´s Henry who enters the interrogation room first.

This time Spencer doesn´t flinch when the door opens. He doesn´t even look up. His eyes seem to be too heavy for that, as if he really fell asleep in that chair. But he´s awake, Lassiter can see that. He just refuses to react to them, as if that way he can block out the consequences of his situation. But this is not a favor they can do him.

Eventually, when they all stand around him, like a group of judges examining their culprit, he moves again, raising his head to look at them.

His face is strangely calm, Lassiter notices, he even seems to smile, subtly, but it´s there. So far Lassiter thought Shawn was in shock, too shaken up by the revelation he´d broken down to him before. But now that he sees him closely, he realizes that this is not the case. Quite the contrary, he seems not a bit concerned anymore.

His eyes sweep over all of them, briefly, and eventually remain on Guster.

"Gus." he greets him. "Nice to see you, buddy. You all right? Sorry for scaring you so much last night."

For a moment they all are too much taken by surprise, not even Henry knows what to say.

"Shawn." Gus speaks at last, his eyes jumping over to the others for support. "I´m sorry." he says and Shawn smiles.

"Don´t be. It´s not your fault."

Again they all exchange uncertain glances, until it´s once again O´Hara who breaks the silence, by taking Shawn´s hands, hunching down before him.

"Shawn." she says, looking him in the eyes. "We all believe you, that you didn´t do anything wrong. You are not a killer. Someone did this to you, tries to frame you, we´re sure of it. And we will find out who it was."

She squeezes his hands, looking into a face, and the whole time he´s listened to her outburst with placid calmness. A calmness that starts to freak out even Lassiter. Shawn smiles at her.

"That´s good to know." he says and squeezes her hands back, laying one of his over both of hers. "I´m so glad you believe in me." and he leans forward, to kiss her. Not briefly though, like someone who´d underline words of gratitude, but long and almost possessively.

Juliet allows it only until he starts to cup her cheeks, not intending to stop any time soon. He even deepens the kiss.

Eventually she breaks it, startled, and jumps up, stumbling a little to find her balance.

"Shawn, this …" she clears her throat, uncomfortable, scratching her neck. "This is kinda inappropriate right now."

"You are aware of the fact that you´re accused of having killed a woman?" Gus asks his friend.

"Several women." Lassiter adds, watching the fake psychic closely.

"I trust you to prove it wasn´t me." he replies. "Besides. So far you only can connect me to this one victim, not to the others." he glances at them, waiting. "Right?"

Henry leans forward at last. "Shawn." he faces his son intently. "Do you remember what happened last night?"

Shawn holds his father´s gaze and breaks into a smile. "The human lie detector?" he asks and then shrugs. "Yes, I remember a few things." He turns to the others but Henry won´t allow him to turn away from him.

"Shawn, look at me." he demands. "Did you go out last night? To Blassay Park? Do you remember …" he needs to gulp before he can finish. "Do you remember killing that girl?"

Out of all of them Henry is probably the only one who would have ever found the nerves to actually speak out those words in such a way. And now he has done it.

Again, Shawn smiles at him, for a while, until his smile falls, suddenly and Henry´s eyes flicker, uncertain. And then Shawn lunges forward, barking at his father – actually barking, like a dog. Only once, only so briefly, but it´s enough to startle Henry into a jump.

His expression is shaken, when Shawn leans back in his chair, snickering amused.