All Nick brought with him was a few sets of clothes, his school work, a cell phone, the fake pa.s.sport and other forms of identification that Mizuno forged, the wallet with his real information and the money Strom bestowed him, toiletries, and his motorcycle. Nick kept everything he could in a duffel bag which sat at the foot of the bed he hadn't used. Nick sat in one of the chairs away from his bed with his head in his hands. He had dark marks under his eyes and as desperately as he wanted to sleep he doubted he'd find any relief in it.

Someone banged at his door and told him to open up. "I know you're in there Nick."

Nick's pulse raced slightly at the sudden interruption, but he calmed down when he realized it was only Mizuno. Nick walked over to the door, unlocked everything, and would have let him in had an obese man in a baby blue bathrobe from across the hall not stopped them.

"Would you two shut up?" the man barked. He took the 'Do Not Disturb' sign from off his door k.n.o.b, wagged it at them, and said, "This means that I'm sleeping, so keep it down."

Mizuno scowled and immediately berated him, "You weren't asleep you pig, you were in there doing lines of c.o.ke with your best friend's cow of a girlfriend." The overweight man paled when Mizuno revealed, with clarity, the activity he partook in. Mizuno continued by telling him that if the heavy man bothered them once more he'd take the straw the man used to snort his cocaine and jam it into his eye.

Nick watched as the porky fellow retreated into his room and locked the door without a word of protest.

"Don't worry about him Nick," Mizuno began while he pa.s.sed Nick and walked into the room, "The man's a coward and is too worried about anyone learning that he's banging his friend's girlfriend."

"You don't think he's going to retaliate at all?"

Mizuno shook his head. "Even if he did, I think you and I could deal with him."

"What if he comes to the door with a gun?"

Mizuno shrugged and said it wouldn't matter. "If he did try that, which he wouldn't as we're in a hotel filled with other people and security cameras in the halls, you're bulletproof and I'm too talented to let some fat-a.s.sed drug dealer kill or even wound me. If he did bother us again, I would do exactly what I said I'd do to him."

Nick locked the door anyway and took a seat on the bed while Mizuno took the chair Nick sat in earlier. Mizuno started by telling Nick that Bruce did an investigation into a few parts of the Winchester Corporation's headquarters. "He hasn't found anything substantial, aside from additional details about how Tony Winchester acted prior to his murder, though, as stated before, nothing noteworthy."

"Then we're still in the dark about all of this?"

Mizuno nodded.

"Are we ever going to make any progress and actually find the person who killed my brother?" Nick flatly asked.

Mizuno groaned, "Yes Nick, we will. I'm sorry I haven't apprehended our charlatan yet, but investigations take time when I can't walk up to the alleged criminal and determine if they are innocent or not. Whoever the killer is, they're able to blend in anywhere, so this will take time, unless one of us happens upon someone with a serpent tattoo on their arm." Nick glanced away and apologized. Mizuno rubbed his eyes and forgave him, "This is simply detective work, only with a bit of a science-fiction spin to it."

Nick kept his head down and ma.s.saged his temples and expected his mentor to continue, though there was a break. He peered up at Mizuno for a moment, though he found the man deep in thought and frantically scribbling notes into a small spiral bound pad of paper.

"What do you write in there that you can't remember on your own?"

Mizuno didn't offer a reply. He continued to jot notes and after a solid minute he flipped the cover over the pad and stored the paper and pen back in his coat.

There was a second knock at the door and Nick immediately created an army green and charcoal gray Walther P99. Mizuno stopped him and told Nick it was most likely the pizza delivery man. "I ordered before I came, as I a.s.sumed you hadn't eaten." Mizuno rose from his seat, opened the door far enough to retrieve the pizza without revealing the gun Nick still gripped tightly, took out a fifty dollar bill, paid the deliverer without the desire for change, handed the box to Nick, and shut the door. "I got half pepperoni and mushroom for you and half vegetarian for me, though you can have some of mine if you want it."

Nick let his weapon vanish into a cloud of smoke and thanked him. They each had a slice before Nick asked, "Do you have any idea who killed my brother?"

Mizuno admitted he had some speculation, but said he wanted to refrain from any revelation until he was certain. "But Bruce and I have managed to gather some information that has been quite useful. Basically, we learned that your brother, Tony Winchester, a man named Mark Ross, and a handful of others worked on a project known only as Regenesis."

Nick frowned, "What is that?"

Mizuno confessed that he only knew a few details. "Regenesis was a prototypal drug that, had it been successful, would have been able to cure various types of cancer."

"How did you discover that?"

"I've watched the security footage of the night Tony Winchester was murdered and he and the charlatan spoke of it, though briefly."

"Is that why Victor was killed?"

Mizuno only shrugged. "Until we find the one responsible, everything is speculation. However, I would a.s.sume it is the reason, considering that's why Mark Ross and Tony Winchester were murdered."

Nick fell silent while he ate another slice of the pepperoni and mushroom pizza. He then asked, "What did you mean last night when you were talking about me?"

"About how you're only colorblind in your left eye?" Mizuno asked while he wiped his mouth off with the back of his gloved hand. Nick nodded and waited to take another slice until he heard what the j.a.panese man had to say. "You were three when this all happened, so that's why you don't remember anything about it. Paul was laid off from his job and as such he drank far more than he normally did and one night he came home p.i.s.sed off and drunk as h.e.l.l. Your mother was out at the time and you were irritating Paul because you cried over some broken toy. He tried to shut you up by shouting at you, but that of course only made you cry more, and that only made him angrier." Mizuno paused for a moment before he reminded Nick that Paul always tried to curb his anger and that it was the first time he'd ever physically a.s.saulted either Nick or his brother. "He nearly killed you though," Mizuno whispered. "Victor was asleep in the back of the house, woke up when he heard the commotion, and found you bleeding from your eye and Paul pa.s.sed out on the floor beside you."

Nick's gaze fell to the floor. "I didn't know that."

"I never met your mother, but I a.s.sume she wanted to keep it from you so you wouldn't look at Paul in such a bad light," Mizuno told him.

"What happened though?"

"Victor called an ambulance, they managed to get you to the hospital and patched up before you lost too much blood, stabilized you, and one of your neighbors called your mother and alerted her to the incident."

"How do I have two eyes though?" Nick stopped him. "I thought it was impossible to replace eyes."

Mizuno wasn't sure how to answer him. "It should be, by all means. There are thousands of things you'd have to accomplish to replace a single eye and if even one of those thousands of necessary measures failed you'd be left blind."

"What happened then?"

Mizuno let out a breath and told him about a doctor named Avis Willows who performed the surgery. "She worked on a theoretical procedure to replace damaged human eyes with other human eyes, there was an extenuating circ.u.mstance where another child near your age had died in a car accident on the same night, and Doctor Willows wanted to take the risk to replace your lost eye. She received permission to salvage the organ from the dead boy's parents and once your mother gave her consent, Doctor Willows operated and managed to have the first successful complete eye replacement in history. You're only colorblind in your right eye because you were born that way. That's also why the iris in your eyes are slightly different."

Nick took a breath and asked how he could have lived his whole life and never known. "If I'm the only person to ever have a successful"

"Let me stop you Nick," Mizuno cut in. "Firstly, you are not the only successful transplant patient, and secondly aside from someone in the field of medicine no one would know that off handedly because it's such an obscure fact. Can you even name the first successful heart transplant patient?" He gave Nick a moment to admit his ignorance in the matter before Mizuno filled him in, "Louis Washkansky, in December of nineteen-sixty-seven."

"How many other people have had successful surgeries like this?"

Mizuno told him there were only a few others.

"Then if the doctor managed to replicate the surgery more than once, why isn't the surgery more common?" Nick asked.

"For starters, the surgeries weren't all performed by her, which makes cross examining the various methods confusing and nearly impossible to figure out exactly how it worked once or even more than once. There have been many attempts to replicate it, even by successful doctors, but nearly every case resulted in failure." Mizuno told Nick he wouldn't bore him with the medical talk and simplified it, "Basically the surgeries wouldn't have been successful without external aid."

"What do you mean?"

"This is just a theory I have, but I believe there was someone akin to a healer involved in your surgery as well as the others," Mizuno told him. "Beyond that I don't think it's possible."

Nick rubbed his eyes and asked another question, "Do you know why my mother stayed with Paul if he nearly killed me?"

Mizuno shook his head. "I don't. I would a.s.sume it had something to do with his ability to work more than she could as well as the fact that it was his house and had she left with you and Victor you all would have been without a home." He admitted that he was unsure of the reason she stayed. Mizuno took another piece of pizza and changed the subject, "I know you want to go out with Amy later on, so we need to finish eating and head out. I need Strom to teach you a few more things and you need more practice with your ability. He's also going to add a few dozen firearms to your a.r.s.enal too. Afterward I'm going to teach you how to hold your own in a typical bar fight and then how to drive a stick shift, so we need to get moving."

Nick didn't argue. He nodded, ate some more, and thought about what Mizuno told him. Mizuno on the other hand ate, retrieved his notepad from his coat pocket, and studied and added to his notes.

3:15 PM.

Baltimore, Maryland Murdock, Felton, and Maguire sat in Sage's old office with case notes they'd received from another pair of detectives from another region in Baltimore. A man named Joaquin Hernandez was impaled by a forklift at his job in a department store in the Eastwood area of Baltimore. Sergeant Murdock heard about the death and requested information, which they hadn't received, aside from the name.

"They're not going to send anything over," Detective Felton murmured. "They probably think we're out to snake the case from them."

"We are though," Murdock reminded him. "If Hernandez is the fourteenth victim then he's a part of the investigation."

"And if he's not then we don't need to worry about their case."

"We really only need to know if he had a scar though, don't we?" Bryce asked them.

"Yes, but we'd then need to follow up and dig into Hernandez's life to find out who the next person could be."

"There won't be time though," Murdock told them. He brought out a small calendar Bryce had drawn up and showed them the date of the next death. "It's tomorrow, which means that unless we knew right now that Joaquin Hernandez is the fourteenth victim and started searching for the fifteenth as soon as possible, there isn't any way for us to figure out who it could be."

"And the odds aren't in our favor to find them anyway," Felton sighed.

Bryce scowled and asked if there was anything they could do besides wait. Neither man said there was much they could do.

"Where's Officer Hendricks?"

"It was her day off today," Felton told Bryce, "So we could always drop by her place and let her know of the possible update, or we could always just wait until tomorrow, considering it won't make much of a difference at this point anyway."

Bryce asked where she lived anyway. "I can't sit here and twiddle my thumbs until we actually find something."

"What good is it going to do by telling her we might know who the next victim is?" Murdock asked him. "This isn't some regular case Maguire. Yes we have to take a lot of long shot guesses because of the nature of this whole thing, but this one area, who each victim is, that's the one unchanging variable we have to work with, which means we need to make d.a.m.n sure we're right before he head off in the wrong direction."

Bryce conceded, slumped forward in his seat, and asked what else they could do in the meantime.

3:50 PM.

Seattle, Washington "What do you think?" Rachel asked Vladimir.

"I like it, but I thought we were going to take photos of the city," he said.

They stopped off at the Seattle Art Museum after wandering throughout the city all day. Rachel wouldn't admit it, but Vladimir guessed she wanted a slight removal from the sweltering afternoon. She also claimed she wanted to show him some of her favorite paintings, (though Vladimir wasn't familiar with any of the works of art or the artists).

Rachel obviously wanted to linger in the museum rather than continue to trek through the blazing streets of the emerald city. She evaded his question and led him to a section of the museum with aboriginal art from Australia. Vladimir didn't pay too much attention to the items though; he wanted everything to move along rather than stall where they were.

"I gather Jordan turned your offer down?" he started up their conversation again.

"He said he'd be working today, so I didn't pressure him about it."

"Did you mention that I was going to accompany you?"

She didn't look at him, "Ah, no, I just asked."

"Are you going to tell him?"

"Why bother?"

Vladimir didn't reply.

They wandered through the exhibit with a small separation between them. Rachel acted interested in the pieces while Vladimir was more than aware of the awkward air between them. He didn't want to be alone with her and he knew just as well that he shouldn't have been there beside her without her boyfriend's knowledge of their afternoon together. They only planned on busing to Seattle, walking around for pictures, and returning home. Rachel turned it into something Vladimir knew was on the verge of becoming something beyond two friends sharing a pleasant afternoon with one another.

"Hey," she called out to him in a hushed tone, "Come look at this one."

He stopped her though and asked, "What are we doing here?"

Rachel looked at him oddly and asked what he meant.

"I mean why did you bring me here?"

"I wanted to show you how great this place is."

"And why did you neglect to tell Jordan about this?" he asked. "There is no way he would appreciate being kept in the dark about our afternoon alone with each other."

"Who cares?" Rachel flatly said. "It's not like I planned this Vladimir. We were just in the area and I thought you'd enjoy it. Now come on and see this with me."

She took his hand and led him to a large mask. He hardly looked at it though. Rachel didn't say anything else; she only held onto his hand while they stood there. Vladimir searched for an excuse to get away and tried to find another place of interest, yet Rachel followed closely on his heels. They ended up in a twentieth century American modern art exhibit.

Vladimir put some distance between them when he pulled his hand away from her. They stood only arm's length away from each other and he knew she was aware of what bothered him.

"What do you think you are going to draw for the art project?" Vladimir asked her to break the silence.

"I'm not too sure yet," she admitted.

"I think I might paint the view of the city we had when we rode up over that bridge into the city, where we could see the s.p.a.ce Needle, the lake, and the cityscape very well."

"That sounds nice," he agreed with her and walked on to the next painting.

"Are you hungry?" Rachel suddenly asked him.

"No, not really," he blatantly told her.

"Oh."

Vladimir walked away from her. He needed something to distract her from him. It wasn't entertaining anymore, he knew something was off and that they were overstepping their bounds and all he wanted was to walk away and let her be. A small booth soliciting an up-and-coming event where the museum would house the work of Vincent Van Gogh caught his eye and he immediately drew her attention there. "Look at this."

Rachel did and read the brief advertis.e.m.e.nt about the event. She smiled and remarked at how unique of an opportunity it would be. "I don't think these works will be collected like this again for a long time. And it says here that they're giving away pa.s.ses to the event as part of a drawing."

"Well then you should enter."

"Yeah, maybe. Why don't you though?"

He stepped away and told her that he wasn't eligible because he wasn't a resident of the state or even a citizen of the United States. "You should enter though."