Author's note: I'd like to thank JediPanda22 for their review. I don't have anything that drastic planned. This chapter starts where the last one left off. Enjoy!

Chapter 3

Performing the autopsy had to wait until the body thawed, but they could still do an external exam while they waited. Doris was wearing an assistant manager's uniform that didn't appear to be torn in any way. There was bruising on her arms, but they seemed to line up with the various protrusions on the inside of the door. There weren't any scratches either. It looked like she wasn't attacked and shoved into the freezer, so the question remained; how did she get trapped in there?

A temporary freezer "door" had been found and the door that had been hanging there was brought to the lab to be thoroughly examined. Henry went to observe, and as the door was slowly taken apart and photographed, it became clear that the mechanism wasn't faulty at all. It was just a stiff door mechanism. Henry was perplexed. If the mechanism was just stiff, that shouldn't have prevented the door from opening. Something else was going on here.

He returned to the morgue and looked at Doris's body again. There had to be something he'd missed from the initial exam. He looked at the bruises again. She'd slammed herself against the door with enough force to leave behind bruises. Anyone who worked at that store had to know how to get out of the room, so how had she gotten stuck? Hanson said nothing had been blocking the freezer door. She must have been disoriented or maybe drugged to have not used the obvious mechanism.

Henry looked at Doris's skin. It was flushed, a sign of increased blood flow to the surface of her skin. The blood vessels had enlarged to compensate for something. Some could be explained by frostbite symptoms, but usually the redness would have gone away as the frostbite worsened. And it wasn't just localized, this redness was across her whole body. Perhaps the redness was from the drug that caused her confusion in the first place. Something that had given her hypercapnia.

Lucas walked in. "Hey, Doc. What're you thinking about?"

"I'm trying to figure out how she ended up stuck in the freezer. Have the photographs been developed yet?"

"Just grabbed them from the lab. You're thinking we missed something?"

"I'm not sure. Let's take a look."

They spread out the photos and looked for anything that seemed out of place. There were metal shelves against three walls that were loaded up with boxes of frozen food items. Pallets of even more boxes were tucked under the shelves and another two were in the center of the freezer. There was a refrigeration unit up along the top of the back wall and small icicles were hanging from the roof. Nothing really looked like it could have been easily altered.

Lucas stood up. "I'm not seeing anything odd. Could they have tampered with the cold source?"

"There's only one way to find out."

Eleven weeks ago…

Henry walked into the morgue to see Lucas getting his tools set up. "Thank you, Lucas, we'll get started shortly. I just need to set down my things."

"Actually, can we talk for a minute while you do that?" Lucas followed Henry into his office.

"What is it, Lucas?"

"Did I do okay at the crime scene? I was just so nervous about saying the wrong thing and I think Detective Hanson was getting suspicious."

"He wasn't suspicious of you." Henry hung up his coat and scarf. "Jo has asked that we take a bit of a break for some personal reasons. His suspicions were about me and Jo. If anything, Detective Hanson would have thought your nervousness was a reaction to that."

"Wait, you guys broke up? I'm sorry, man. What happened?"

"Lucas…"

"Right, you said personal reasons. Sorry, I'll butt out of it. Is there anything I can do?"

"No, Jo needs some time and space. We don't need to do anything if she doesn't ask for anything."

"Okay." Lucas turned to leave but turned back. "About your immortality. Anything I should keep in mind… you know, just for future reference."

"Just keep anything you reference to more current references. Or keep to the topic at hand; we are usually talking about the work."

"You don't think I'll mess things up?"

"Lucas, I trust your judgement. If I didn't, I wouldn't have told you."

"Why not tell Detective Hanson?"

Henry sighed, taking a moment to select his words carefully. "He's not as open minded to the supernatural. While I trust him as a good detective, I don't think he'd be willing to just believe me the way you did. He'd probably want to send me to a sanitarium."

"Why did you tell Jo?"

"Do you remember when Clark Walker left an autopsied victim to frame me?"

"Yes."

"Jo came to my home and saw me holding the murder weapon. Instead of arresting me on site, she let me explain about my stalker. She was willing to listen when all the evidence pointed directly at me. She could have easily thrown me into prison. When I finally decided to tell her, she was willing to listen."

"Okay. Thanks for sharing, Doc. I'll try not to be so awkward going forward."

Present day…

Lucas climbed down from the top of the freezer unit. "I don't see any tool marks on the machinery. I don't think there was anything toxic being pumped into the freezer."

"The lab didn't come up with anything unusual in their swabs either." Henry opened the temporary door and entered the freezer. "Let's look around. Perhaps the source was somewhere or something else."

"I feel like freezing to death would be a horrible way to go."

Henry smirked. He'd like to tell Lucas that it was, but there was a uniform standing guard outside. He looked around the room. Nothing on the racks or pallets looked to be the source of the drug. Jo had said that it was the supervisor's job to check the store before closing, so the reason behind why Doris had been in the freezer wasn't hard to guess. What she had come into contact with was a bit harder to guess. Henry looked into the corner where the two shelves met and, in the gap, he saw two buckets of frozen water.

"Lucas, I might have found something."

"Two buckets of ice?"

"Not just two buckets of ice. Two buckets of water that have become buckets of ice. And look," Henry pointed to a depression in the top of the ice, "it froze around something that is no longer there. This is the murder weapon."

Two hours later…

Jo walked into the morgue. "Do we have a cause of death?"

"Carbon Dioxide poisoning."

Jo looked confused. "How?"

Henry handed Jo a photo of the bucket. "Someone placed four buckets of warm water into the freezer and put dry ice in the buckets. Warm water evaporates the dry ice faster and also helps to freeze the water in the bucket faster. When first put in the bucket, the dry ice sinks, but as the dry ice evaporates, it eventually floats. That's what left the depression on the top of the ice. It then evaporated completely, leaving no trace behind."

"How could dry ice be deadly?"

"The small space of the freezer filled up with the evaporated dry ice and she inhaled too much. Doris would have become disoriented, confused. She forgot to use the release mechanism and threw herself into the door. But it didn't open."

"She lost consciousness and then died right on the floor." Lucas handed a folder to Henry. "The results for the syringe came back."

"I was able to extract a sample of air from Doris's lungs." He glanced at the folder. "As expected, full of carbon dioxide."

Jo was impressed. "This killer went to a lot of trouble to make it look accidental. Guess Hanson and I need to figure out who put the buckets in there."

Hanson pulled up the security footage for the whole day prior to Doris's death and watched it, looking for anyone to put buckets inside. Three hours before Doris entered the freezer, the deli refrigerator door opened and blocked the view of the freezer door. It stayed that way for ten minutes and then the door closed, but no one was seen opening the door until Doris went to check on the freezer. Jo was frustrated. This killer was very careful.

Hanson stopped the playback. "Does the camera angle seem a bit off to you?"

Jo turned. "What do you mean?"

"There's only one camera in the back room. Seems like we should be able to see more of the room than we do. I'm gonna check with the manager and see if that's the way it's supposed to be."

"Good call."

Hanson looked at his phone. "I'll do that in the morning. It's a bit late tonight. How'd talking to the therapist go?"

"It's too soon to tell, but I think I'll keep seeing her for a bit."

"Good. Well, goodnight, Jo."

"Night."

That night…

Jo stood in her room looking at herself in a full-length mirror, examining her scars. Any she had acquired before her death were still present, but she was looking at the ones she'd acquired that night. They were like Henry's; larger than the ones she'd been able to have a surgeon operate on. She traced the one on her chest, feeling the bumpy surface. It was hard to imagine that she would forever be marred by these two scars.

Jo closed her eyes. Bang! She remembered the feeling of her gun getting hit by a bullet and almost completely losing her grip on it. Bang! She remembered turning toward the first shot and having a bullet tear through her stomach. Bang! Doubling over the second shot and a third ripping through her chest. Falling backward and seeing Henry's shocked face as she fell, reaching for her with her name on his lips.

Jo sighed and opened her eyes. Every night for eleven weeks, she'd been plagued by the memory of her first death. How was she supposed to get over the trauma of that death? By dying a lot like Anneliese suggested? By cutting herself off from life the way Henry had prior to becoming friends with her? Neither option sounded appealing. She pulled on a shirt and headed back downstairs. She needed to take her mind off of the trauma.

As she reached the bottom of the stairs, the doorbell rang. "Henry? What are you doing here?"

"I hope I'm not intruding. May I come in?"

"Sure." Jo moved out of the way and closed the door behind him. "Did you need something?"

"I understand that I may be overstepping, but I've been wanting to check on you and I didn't want to do so at work. Are you doing alright?"

"Is it really so obvious?" She headed for the living room.

"Not to Detective Hanson maybe, but I've been worried about you."

"Henry, I still just need some space. Immortality isn't the easiest thing to adjust to."

Henry draped his coat over a chair. "I was actually thinking about your first death itself. I've been thinking that the trauma of how you died is something you haven't been able to discuss with anyone."

Bang! Jo's head filled with the sound of a shot and she shuddered. "I… yes, I've been struggling with that."

"Do you want to talk about it with me?"

"Not really. Not yet at least." She grabbed a beer from the fridge. "How did you get over your first death."

"Well, my first death happened at sea. It took me a year to get back home again and I died two more times during that journey. But after that I was in the sanitarium and subjected to hydrotherapy, so that first death quickly faded into the background."

"Hydrotherapy?"

"It's called waterboarding today."

Jo was disgusted. "Waterboarding started out as a therapy?"

Henry nodded. "The Hippocratic Oath of 'do no harm' wasn't always so strictly adhered to as it is now. I don't think I ever actually dealt with the trauma of my first death. There was always something worse on the horizon. Nora's betrayal, waterboarding, fear of never getting out of the slums; I never let myself deal with the trauma. Eventually the initial death just didn't bother me, though seeing the items from that ship on exhibit brought it back a bit. Perhaps that's why I've always been a little stuck in the past."

Jo sat at the table. "I'm sorry I've been staying so distant with you."

Henry sat across from her. "Jo, I understand. You've been an independent woman for a long time and felt that I couldn't be objective while you adjusted to this life. You don't have to apologize to me. I just want you to be happy, no matter how long that takes. What do you need from me?"

"I'm not ready to get back together. But I need to be honest with you about what I'm dealing with. You're one of the only people in the world to understand my situation."

"I'm here for whatever you need. All you have to do is ask."

Jo smiled. "Thank you."

A/N: Stay tuned!