Chapter Text
"I know it's been a few years since I studied this—" Talbot folded her hands behind her back and looked down at the corpse whose murder she and Matthew had been sent to investigate, "—but I don't remember the statistics being so high on beheadings."
"No, no, you're correct," Matthew confirmed. "The primary method serial killers use is one that's hands on, like strangulation. Up close and personal. It's not enough to kill the victim; they also want to see her—and it usually is a 'her'—die."
Despite the statistics, the corpse belonged a white man. He wore cargo pants and a black t-shirt that stretched across heavily-muscled, heavily-tattooed upper arms — and he was definitely missing his head. This made it impossible to guess at much else about the victim. Most telling was his death: his neck had been severed with a single stroke.
There was no guarantee that this death had any connection to the others—a woman and two other men whose bodies had turned up a couple weeks prior—except that all their deaths involved a sharp, bladed object and all had occurred within the same abandoned industrial park. The local PD's had called in the FBI when this newest case landed on them, in part because of the nature of the homicide and in part because they'd received a tip that the homicide might be gang-related.
"Gang-related deaths," Talbot said, "typically involve guns, knives, or blunt objects." Tilting her head, she considered the corpse. "I'm going to guess that this doesn't fit the criteria for 'knife-related?"
The anonymous tipster who had reported this murder stated that he’d seen 'many' people moving around the industrial park, late at night and under the cloak of darkness.
"It has to be drugs, right?" he'd whispered into the receiver of the payphone from which he'd called. "What else could it be?" Then he'd slammed the receiver down and vanished into the night. For all the dispatcher knew, he was one of the people he'd reported seeing, snitching on the others for a reason to which they'd never have the answer.
Whatever was going on, four deaths all but guaranteed that their mysterious figures' actions weren't legal.
"I doubt any ME would classify it that way," Matthew agreed. His breath bloomed out in puffs in the cold air. "Beheading someone with a knife is considerably more difficult than most gang members, in most situations that would end in a homicide, would view as worth the effort."
He stepped carefully around the pool of blood that had spread out across the cement warehouse floor and went to inspect a pile of wooden boxes that had once been stacked along the wall. They'd crashed down, splintering open and spilling packing peanuts and boxes of makeup wipes and cotton balls everywhere. Some of the splintered edges looked dulled with age, while others had the white rawness of newly shattered wood.
But nothing was on fire and he saw no sign of fire damage, nor did the chilled air smell of anything more than the copper of blood underlain with damp.
In the pit of his stomach, a worry that he'd been trying to ignore began to metastasize. While the details didn't quite match his experience, they were close enough that he couldn't ignore the direction they pointed.
The warehouse was otherwise empty, only a few inlaid tracks remaining for the heavy equipment whose rumble would have once reverberated throughout. Nothing else gave evidence that could confirm his suspicion, until he caught the glint of shards of glass on the floor in the sunlight pouring through an open loading bay door, and he tracked his gaze upward to confirm that the overhead lights had all blown out and blown up.
He sighed, resigning himself to the obvious conclusion: He was looking at probable evidence of a Quickening. If it was one, then the Game had landed on his duty roster.
And now it was on Talbot's, as well.
He’d wanted to keep this part of his life from her. She was still coming to terms with the fact of his Immortality, and was deep in the thrall of its novelty. He didn’t blame her, no matter how how he wished he could go back to being merely her senior partner and cocooning in the security of being unremarkable.
Eventually, she’d have to learn all of it—but, he’d hoped to have much more time to ease her into it and to help her develop a deep understanding of why he sometimes had to fight. To kill. Like with Cain, an Immortal they'd investigated in New Orleans and who was now officially classified as a Missing Person.
"You're sounding like one of the people we've made it our career to stop." she’d told him, horrified, when he’d proposed the idea of killing a woman in order to trigger her Immortality.
He would have killed to save a life, and that was already too much for Talbot.
He didn't want to know how she'd react when his target wouldn't survive.
This case was too soon to find out.
"I checked with Forensics." Talbot appeared at his side, her long brown hair now tucked up in a bun to prevent it from falling into her face as she bent and stooped her way around the crime scene. She had her notebook out, pen tucked into the binding. "They've confirmed that there is no sign of the victim's head, nor did he have any identification on him. The ME will take fingerprints, of course, and the sketch artist and photographer are already working on getting accurate pictures of the tattoos. Hopefully that will turn up something."
Matthew nodded, attention still wrapped up in his analysis of the scene as he tried to determine one way or another if this victim had once been Immortal. No head meant no face Matthew could possibly recognize.
"What's with killers keeping victim's heads as trophies, anyway?" Talbot asked. "You'd think they could find a piece of jewelry or some other memento that didn't weigh seven pounds."
"There's no reason to think he kept it," Matthew pointed out. "All we know is that we haven't found it yet. Did Forensics say anything about the murder weapon?"
Talbot glanced down at the notebook. "Initial hypothesis is that it's a large knife, maybe some kind of hunting knife. They haven't—"
Matthew spotted a camera mounted above the door to the stairwell, and he brushed past Talbot with her sentence unfinished. The warehouse's electricity was off, as was its heat and water, based on the lack of water spraying from the overhead fire sprinklers. That didn't mean the camera didn't still work, though. They often had independent power supplies, specifically so that if someone cut the mains, it wouldn't knock out all the security.
He had to know for sure.
"McCormick?" Talbot called, scrambling to catch up to him. "What did you—?"
Matthew stopped under the camera. The lens looked black and dead and he saw no sign of a power light, though that didn't prove anything. "Where do you think that goes?" he asked.
"The camera? Is that why you … never mind. Good eye. I didn't see that until we were practically underneath it. I'll go tell Forensics—" She started to turn, her new objective in mind.
"Talbot, wait. Let's do that ourselves."
"Why?" Talbot frowned, then a beat later her brow cleared as she figured out the answer for herself. "You think it recorded something you want to keep secret? Is this related to—" She waved a hand through the air and lowered her voice, "—You know?"
Almost certainly, Matthew thought, at the same time as he said, "It's possible." He studied the camera, trying to figure out which direction the wires that fed it ran. "If it is, I'd like to get to it before anyone else."
"And … then what do you plan to do? You wouldn't—" Her voice lowered another step, and Matthew now had to strain to hear it over the echoing chatter and clatterings of the forensics teams processing the crime scene "—tamper with evidence?"
"Special Agent Matthew McCormick would never do such a thing," he responded. They'd talked about this and Matthew had thought she'd understood, but it bore emphasizing: There was a line he had to maintain between who he really was and the identity he currently inhabited, and sometimes which side of the line he stood on would change in a snap.
Talbot nodded her understanding, though the way she tightened in on herself signaled that she wasn't comfortable with the idea. She'd already shown that she was willing and able to lie for him in what amounted to a white lie when she'd told Diana that Matthew had suffered a panic attack, rather than revealing that he'd been shot in the leg.
Falsifying evidence, on the other hand, would only end in perjury. And that was a commitment neither of them were ready to make.
"I, um, think I'm going to stay here and take another look around. Can you handle this yourself?"
"I expect there won't be anything to handle," he answered, giving her more deniability, in case she needed it. "I doubt the camera's live; I'm just going to find out what kind of equipment Forensics will need to bring up, if any, to save them some time."
With a grateful nod, Talbot recognized and accepted the justification. As she returned to investigating the main floor, Matthew opened the door to the stairwell and descended into the warehouse's basement. His flashlight beam bloomed out into the darkness, revealing the damp-stained walls and cracked cement of a neglected building. The pungent scent of urine assaulted his nose, and he braced himself to endure it until his brain adjusted.
Matthew followed the corridor, noting the pipes mounted along the join of the wall and ceiling that likely protected wires. Emergency lights dotted the edge where the walls met the floor and that hadn't lit up. Despite the lack of power, then, people had been in this building. A lot.
At a guess, the gang they were probably looking for had claimed the warehouse as their territory, though he didn't see any of the food wrappers or bedding that indicated squatters or other long-term residents. Even signs of rodent scat and cobwebs were minimal; either they hadn’t had time to move in, or someone had cleaned up.
The door to the security office had been painted over in layers of graffiti, yet appeared to still be closed and locked. Matthew examined it carefully, verifying the lack of booby-traps or other nasty surprises, then pulled out the set of lockpicks kept in his pocket—one of many tools he'd found enough use for over the years to justify including in his kit, along with a box of matches, a Swiss army knife, a mirrored compact, and a length of twine.
To his surprise, the security center, itself, was still up and running. A desk that was pushed against the wall held two large monitors, their screens active and subdivided to show the input of a half dozen different cameras. One of those inputs buzzed with the activity of an FBI Forensics teams examining a murder scene.
Closing his eyes for a moment, Matthew collected himself. He didn't dare voice the invective he wanted to, in case this room was also monitored. It would be hard to defend his presence here in court if he was on tape being upset about the surveillance, but he could hear his heartbeat thudding in his ears with how tightly he'd clenched his jaw.
His cases over the past few months had left behind mortals who knew what Matthew was. When he’d been abducted and tortured several weeks before, it turned out his abductor—Mason Lamar—already knew about Immortals, and had been killing people he thought fit the profile in search of an Immortal.
Now, Matthew was at a murder scene with a beheaded corpse, strong evidence of a Quickening, and a strangely advanced and functional security room in an otherwise derelict building. Was this related to Lamar? Had he found himself in the operation base for more mortals who wanted to kill or control Immortals?
He turned then, sweeping the room with his flashlight to identify the recording station. It was hard to miss. Besides a metal folding chair, the only other furniture was a metal bookshelf against the opposite wall, dominated by a hunk of technology that reminded Matthew of a stereo console.
It had a lot of buttons, dials, and little flashing lights that doubtlessly indicated what kind of functions it was running. What he didn't see was any place for a videotape to go in it. This wasn't a VCR. Further examination showed that it also didn't have any place for a microcassette, regular-sized cassette, or CD. This was a piece of hardware different than any he'd ever seen, and one that looked very, very expensive.
This had to be a place that the cameras recorded to, he thought, even as he reluctantly admitted that he didn't dare risk trying to verify that for himself. He was just as likely to push a button that would erase all the contents as he was to push one that would alert everyone in the building to his attempt to erase all the contents. No, for this he needed more knowledgeable help—someone who could help him determine if he needed to destroy the evidence, and whom would not leave Talbot culpable of either the knowledge or the decision.
He found that help in the evidence van parked outside the warehouse.
"Ms. Grant?"
The back doors were opened so that the various analysts transferring supplies out of the van and evidence into it wouldn't have to waste their time, but this meant that someone had to stay in the van to maintain the evidence custody.
Sam looked up from the laptop at which she was seated with her feet hooked over the bar of her stool. "Agent McCormick? How can I help you?" Her blonde hair was tucked back behind her ears, held in place with the arms of her reading glasses, which were perched on top of her head.
"Wouldn't it be easier to see the screen with your glasses on?" Matthew asked, his fatherly instincts briefly overriding his professional ones.
"Too much back and forth," Sam answered, tapping a file on the bench next to the laptop. "It's easier to squint a little than to have to keep cleaning fingerprints off my lenses." She frowned. "That's not what you wanted to ask, is it?"
Matthew glanced around, a quick check to see who else was in sight, then stepped into the van. He didn't pull the doors shut behind him because that would only draw attention to them. "There was a security camera pointed in the direction of the body. I cannot verify if it was recording, though the security center itself is functional and active."
"Thanks for letting me know. I'll pass—"
With a slash of his hand, Matthew cut her off. "I would appreciate if you were the one who examined the tape."
"I mean, I could," she said. "That's within my skill-set, though I'm not the one who usually handles video analysis." She cocked her head, suspicion setting in. Although Matthew had drawn some firm lines that boxed several topics off of discussion in the workplace, he'd never asked a professional favor of her. "Why?"
"Mere suspicion at this point," he answered. "Nevertheless, it is possible that there is evidence on that tape of a sensitive nature."
"Sensitive? Like, what? Sex? Nudity?" She frowned, correctly assessing that neither of those would faze the FBI enough to warrant special attention by themselves. Then she straightened up fast enough for her back to crack. "The vic was beheaded," she stated. "Do you think …. ?"
Mercifully, she trailed off before finishing the thought, and just as one of the Forensics' team walked past the open doors.
After his abduction and torture, Matthew had finally told Sam about the one major flaw in his Immortality—how beheading would kill him permanently—and that he wasn't the only Immortal out in the world.
Matthew's lips spread in a thin smile, though he gave a tight nod in acknowledgment that she was on the right track. "That is not a topic that I'm at liberty to speculate on at this point. I am much obliged to you handling this task." Ducking, he stepped out of the van. His foot hit the cracked asphalt on the parking lot and another thought occurred to him. Catching Sam's attention, he added, "I would also appreciate you keeping this strictly between us."
"Of course," she answered, attention already narrowing inward as she thought through her approach. "Who else would I—" Her gaze snapped back.
Matthew still had his hand on the frame of the doorway, and he let it drop. The folds of his coat fell into place, and Matthew straightened, emphasizing his position: He had to straddle a line between his FBI life and his Immortal life, and right now, he stood on the Immortal side — the side Talbot was still not fully allowed on.
Realization dawned on Sam's expression. "Oh. I see."
"I'll let you know if anything changes," he promised her. "Until then…"
Sam nodded. "I get it. Your life, your rules." She flashed a smile to show there were no hard feelings. "Don't worry; I can handle this."
With that, Matthew returned to the crime scene to seek out Talbot and see what she had learned. He couldn't do anything further about the security tape—if there even was one. All he could do now was pray that if there had been a Quickening in the building, it had destroyed the camera and its signal before it could record anything incriminating.
By the time Matthew and Talbot returned to the office, the evening rush hour traffic had grown so heavy that there was no point in either of them hurrying to get back out the door.
Matthew grabbed a couple bottles of water out of the staff fridge and handed one to Talbot with a sigh of relief. While they still had paperwork to handle, they could at least take a few minutes to relax in the climate controlled warmth first. They made their way back to said office, acknowledging the waves and greetings from those of their colleagues who were on-site, most bearing the hunched look of people who'd spent all day bent over a desk, looking at a computer screen.
As soon as they had the door closed, Talbot turned to him. "Are you going to tell me what's going on now?" She popped the lid on the bottle and took a swig, then crossed her arms, the condensation from the bottle dripping onto her hand.
So much for relaxing, Matthew thought. He settled against the edge of his desk, working to keep his body language and the space between him and this partner as open as he could. He was going to have to answer for his earlier behavior.
"What would you like to know?"
Talbot's eyes narrowed, the question getting the kind of deliberation she brought when addressing suspects, as if she only had a few turns and needed to choose carefully how to use them. "He's like you, isn't he?"
Being in the middle of FBI headquarters and surrounded by FBI agents made their office one of the safest places to speak freely—as long as they kept their voices down.
Once again, she'd leapt for a question he'd not anticipated. "I don't know," he answered, honestly. "I don't have enough information yet to verify that."
"You can't, um, sense it, like you did with Melissa?"
She asked the question with the same tone as if she were inquiring about his ability to choose the right healing crystals at a New Age store, like she believed that he believed in their power, yet wasn't fully convinced of it herself.
Matthew shifted uncomfortably, then took a slow sip of his own water to buy time to collect his thoughts. In their previous case, the young woman they'd gone to save had turned out to be someone who had the potential for Immortality. He'd tried to intentionally use the ability of one Immortal to sense another to find her. He still didn't know if the sense had any bearing on their success.
What he did know was that the current victim did not have a head, which also meant the victim was no longer Immortal. Explaining that detail to Talbot, though, was a giant step closer to telling her everything. And, yet, there was no way to avoid it.
"There is nothing to sense," he answered. "He was dead."
"Sure," Talbot said, her assuredness returning, "because his head is missing."
She wouldn't make such an obvious statement unless there was another layer to it. Matthew's brows drew together as he tried to parse her meaning.
"Is that what you think is on the tape?" she asked, jumping in before he could request clarification. "Are you worried that someone will find the head before you do, and will see what happens when it's placed on the body in the morgue?"
Matthew carefully set his water bottle down on the desk, out of reach of any accidental tippage, then gripped the edge of the desk itself. While she'd had some outlandish hypotheses about his nature, this one made too much sense. It was also the kind of wrong that needed to be corrected. "That's not … Talbot, beheading is final for us. There is no coming back from that."
"Final? As in …?"
"Exactly what the word means."
Talbot blinked at him, like she was trying to figure out why he would say something so obvious unless there was a hidden layer. "I thought you said you were immortal?"
"I am."
"But you die? Permanently, that is. I know you can die." She shuddered, and Matthew saw her eyes briefly slip out of focus, the look of a memory surfacing. She caught herself and brought her attention back to the current conversation, but it was going to be a long time before the trauma of his death in her arms stopped pulling her.
All Matthew could do now was to help her make as much sense of it all as he could.
"Beheading will kill me as completely as it will kill you," he explained. "That—and, I suppose anything that completely disintegrated my body would also be pretty final, although I have no desire to test that." The thought had crossed his mind once or twice since the discoveries of nuclear power and space travel, from both of which he intended to avoid any up-close relationships.
"No, I'd guess not. So—just to be clear—he's not going to come back?"
"He is completely dead," Matthew confirmed.
Talbot chewed on her lower lip a minute, slotting this new information into her understanding. Matthew's grip tightened while he waited to see where her conclusions took her; it was only a short step from understanding that beheading killed Immortals permanently to recognizing that someone might have beheaded their John Doe in order to kill him permanently.
As he should have anticipated, she stepped a different direction. "Then why do you care about the security footage?"
"It's hard to explain," he said. In truth, it was virtually impossible to explain. The scale and effect of a Quickening did not translate into words, Matthew had found, because mortals had no frame of reference to understand it. "This is more of a precaution than anything else right now."
"A precaution. That's what someone says when they don't want to let on how worried they are." She considered, her brown eyes narrowing. "You think someone killed him because he was like you?"
Matthew sighed, face squeezing in a grimace. Somehow, in taking her own indirect approach, Talbot's inquiries had sneaked up on him, even when there was only one place they could go. "I think it's a possibility," he admitted. He snagged the water bottle and downed half of it, his throat suddenly dry.
"Someone like Lamar?" she asked.
Lamar had unfortunately been shot and killed during Matthew's rescue, rendering it impossible for Matthew to return the favor of asking him some pointed questions.
"I … had considered that," Matthew answered, slumping back onto the desk. He rubbed his mouth; his lips were still chilled and wet from the water. "I still don't know how he knew about me. That there could be other people out there …"
No doubt plenty of mortals in the world knew about Immortals, as most Immortals eventually shared the information with those closest to them, like Joe Dawson and Reverend Bell, whom Matthew had met within the last year. Within his own circle, Matthew now counted his ex-wife, his daughter, and now his partner. Though, knowledge of Immortals-in-general didn't automatically translate to knowledge that he, Matthew, was one of them.
"Do you think that's what happened?"
"I don't know. Maybe." Matthew shook his head. "To the best of my knowledge we're only dealing with some gang member who has chosen a knife as his preferred weapon. On the chance it’s not…"
Talbot braced herself, arms crossing low over her stomach.
“I’ll handle the recording,” he said. “The less you know—“
A knock at their office door interrupted them before he could finish the statement, and before Talbot could press further. Matthew had never been so grateful. He freed his hands from the desk and issued a wave. The door cracked open, and Diana stuck her head in.
"When you two have a moment, I'd like to see you in my office. There's been a development I need to brief you on."
Without waiting for an answer, she pulled the door shut, and Matthew and Talbot both straightened up, putting away their discussion of stealing evidence and insider knowledge, and tucking themselves fully back into their FBI roles.