A deep sip of beer and Barry was able to relax, it had been a stressful week. Patty was still not back in the office, there had been a string of robberies and other such activity and now three more husks had turned up but there were no bodies as of yet. As he puts his beer down, Barry looks at Eddie and asks. "What do you think is doing this? It can't be something human. Yet nothing we've tried has brought anything up."

Eddie fiddles with the label on his beer bottle, thinking about the latest crime scene, there had been no blood, there had been nothing but a simple white husk, the third one of the week. "I'm not sure Barr. I've thought about it long and hard, but nothing comes up. I don't know and it worries me." He thinks about what he and Iris had talked about, and he says. "It might be some sort of shape shifter? I'm not sure, I know there was a case of that in Bludhaven, but there were a group of metas to deal with that."

"Yeah." Barry says, remembering the exhilaration he had felt reading about Nightwing and Starfire and Raven, all metas he had read about as a child in his comic books. "I don't know what it could be, things are getting really complicated." He pauses, chances a look at Joe who seems to be staring into space. "Joe? Are you alright?"

Joe blinks. "Huh?"

"Are you alright, you seem a bit out there." Barry asks. His foster father blinks again before responding.

Joe takes a deep breath. "I spoke to Patty's folks today." He sees both Barry and Eddie straighten up, his heart feels heavy now. "They haven't seen her since she came home for Christmas a couple of months ago. They haven't heard anything from her for about three weeks now."

Barry swallows. "So, what do you think that means?"

Joe sighs. "I do not know. All I know is that she's been gone for a long time now, and no one has heard from her. I think the time has come for us to mount a full search. Wherever she is, she needs to be found."

"I agree. We need to speak to everyone who last saw her and we need to put out a missing person's report." Eddie says, thinking of the last thing Patty had said to him. "I know she was heading out somewhere the last time I saw her, but I never saw her again."

"When was this?" Barry asks, instinctively his mind goes through all the worst case scenarios. Scenarios he desperately hopes are not true, though he has a sinking feeling that they might be.

"This was around three weeks ago, before you came back from your holiday. She said she needed to get some stuff from somewhere and that she'd be back. I had to run point on a homicide so I didn't have the chance to think about where she might've been. Julian said she'd come back and gone out again when I spoke to him the next day and I bought that." Eddie says.

Joe notices the way his son in law says the word bought and finds himself forced to ask. "What do you mean you bought that? Do you not believe Julian now?"

Eddie takes a deep breath. "I've had a long time to think about this, and I know we joke about it, but there is definitely something off with Julian. He has this look about him sometimes as if he is assessing you for potential vulnerabilities. It's similar to how Eobard used to look at us all, and it freaks me out."

"I can see what you mean. Still he doesn't seem like a killer, does he?" Joe asks.

"Neither did Eobard." Barry points out. "He was a wheel chair bound scientist until we found out the truth about him. And that was by pure luck. Julian, is smarter than Eobard was in that sense. I think if there is something about him that is off, he would've gone to a lot to hide it, and hide it well."

"So, how are we supposed to find that out?" Eddie asks. "It's not as if we can simply go up to him and ask him out right, now is it?"

"No, but you forget, we've got the time vault in the grounds of Star Labs. It would be easy enough to run a name test on him there and see what we find. If it's something bad, then we can work from there. Same with Patty. I'm sure that thing would know what had changed and what hadn't." Barry says.

"But isn't that thing merely showing what happened in Eobard Thawne's time, not our current time?" Joe asks, he still has difficult wrapping his head around all of this business sometimes.

"Sometimes yes, other times not so much. If we say the right things and search for the right things it could help us massively." Barry replies, feeling better now that he knows just what he needs to do to actually solve this problem and find Patty.

Cisco who has been tinkering with the footage from the latest crime scene finally speaks. "Guys, I think I might have found something that could be of use to you." He puts the laptop down on the table and presses play. "Look at the footage." He watches each of their faces and sees them exhale. "Did you see the figure in the background? The one with the hood and the mask?"

"Yes." Barry says, looking at the footage. "Play it again." They watch as the man from the scene today walks along oblivious, and then stops his essence being sucked out of him as a figure, a grainy figure, but a figure nonetheless stands before him doing the deed. "Who and what is that?"

"I think we've just found the thing responsible for the husks. Now we need to run a test on the face." Cisco says.

"Yeah, and make sure no one else sees this Cisco." Joe says, at the inquisitive look he gets he says. "I think I might have an idea."