It was only a matter of time now.

He'd made sure everything was perfect: the timing, the placement, the setting.

She'd been so fascinated. So very very fascinated.

As the dusk began to settle, so did her fate. She seemed to suddenly come down with a terrible cold...

Why not stay at my apartment tonight? he offered.

I promise I'll take care of you.

You really don't want to have to fend for yourself in this condition.

You couldn't even get home, sick as you are.

He was right. She was never going home. And he was never returning to this apartment. Good thing it hadn't been his to begin with...

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

"Who do we have here today, Lucas?"

Henry strode into the morgue with the joy and confidence only he could exude in the chamber of the dead on a Monday morning.

"Morning, Doc," Lucas offered with a quick glance up from the clipboard in his hands, then looked back down at the list of newcomers. "NY11-15-2-336 and 37, Traffic accident on 25th, should be pretty cut-and-dry."

Lucas began walking the autopsy suite, motioning to each covered corpse as he rattled off their case number. 336 and 337 both appeared to be males over six feet in height, one of average build, one slightly overweight, and the thinner man's right arm was askew from an injury likely occurring postmortem. And this was Henry's examination before uncovering the corpses.

"11-15-2-338, found by some beat cops in an alley off of 49th,"

Shorter, female, thin but not dangerously thin. Longer legs suggested flexibility and dexterity. If she wasn't a dancer, she should have been.

"They suspect drugs," Lucas continued, adding, "but you'll probably say murder," as a mumbled afterthought.

"And one for you to have fun with, Doc." Lucas declared at the fourth and final occupied slab in the morgue. Henry studied the shape of the body from how it affected the sheet covering it. The corpse also appeared to be female, a larger woman by the standards of Hollywood and the red carpet, but an average body-type to most humans. Her hair was likely thick and curly, the sheet settled about her head suggested so. Nothing physically damaging was visible through the shape of the covering.

Henry gave Lucas a skeptical look.

"11-15-2-339. Found in an apartment in the Lower East Side. No evidence of foul play at first glance. The CSU guys have nothing. She's all yours, Doc."

Lucas flourished his hands toward the corpse, giving Henry a pleading smile. He wanted to see Henry do some medical magic, and Henry could see just that. And as much as he tried to keep Lucas on neutral ground in his life, as he did with everyone, Henry was finding himself growing fond of the boy. Which made it all the more fun to watch him squirm with excitement as they got closer and closer to revealing the cause of death of the perplexing case labeled NY11-15-2-339.

"Why don't we start with 36 and 37? You said it seems quite 'cut-and-dry,' it shan't take us a copious amount of time."

Henry waited not for his assistant's approval or denial of the plan, and began uncovering the corpse assigned 11-15-2-336, who was, as he'd deduced, a six-foot-two male just a twinge on that side of overweight. Various fractures were much more visible with simply the removal of the sheet.

"From the positioning of the neck, it appeared that broken vertebrae had sliced or squeezed the spinal cord, causing interference from the brain to the nervous system, leading to paralysis and a fairly instantaneous death. Lucas, the victim's clothes, if you will?"

Snapping open the scissors, Lucas obediently sliced through the dead man's dressings and slipped the shredded shirt from the corpse's shoulders. As Henry worked on his examination, Lucas worked on the thicker material of the man's heavy denim jeans.

Within thirty minutes, Henry had thoroughly examined the body and remained unmoved from his original diagnosis. He'd unearthed various other bodily damages sustained due to the wreck, and the tox reports were filed for the stomach bile that smelled as equally of acid as it did of liquor.

The other two bodies were a simple cases as had been the first. Death by trauma induced from a motor vehicle crash, high levels of alcohol related to said accident for 337, and intravenous lethal injection of narcotics for 338. Suicide, as evidenced by the victim's fingerprints, and their precise placement around the needle's puncture wound.

"Anyone attempting to make murder appear to be suicide would not have placed the fingers as far apart. A murderer tends to forget that their victim would only have one hand with which to inject themselves, and therefore overcompensate fingerprints as if one hand pulled the skin while the other injected. Of course, there are instances..."

Lucas tapped the table in front of Henry, bringing him out of his esoteric little world of expatiation upon death. The assistant pointed behind him and mouthed something, and as Henry turned to see what exactly had Lucas' attention, his eyes were met with the visual of two detectives entering the glass doors of the morgue.

"Detective Hanson, Detective Martinez, good morning," Henry nodded. Jo took a swig of the coffee held in her right hand, giving the doctor her most annoyed "it's Monday and I don't want to be awake" glare. Henry, his gaze fixed on the cup in her hand, took a step toward her and opened his mouth to reprimand her.

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Jo scoffed, licking coffee residue off of her upper lip. "No food or drink, it'll contaminate the bodies."

She reluctantly set the tumbler on a side shelf that looked fairly unimportant, sneaking in another swig of her caffeinated bean delight as Hanson began to ask about the bodies that had come in overnight.

"Especially that one from the apartment by your place, Doc. Lieu wants that cleared up fast as possible, preferably wrapped with a neatly-tied bow."

Hanson leaned his elbow on the corner of the slab, motioning to the covered corpse. Henry looked dubiously to Hanson, then Lucas, then to Jo.

"The landlord's one of the higher ups. Not too great of a reflection on our own, having a suspicious death on our own property. So you see why she's pushing an open-and-shut here, right Doc?"

"Indeed," Henry muttered. "But she should know that I work for truth, not convenience."

"That means it's murder," Jo muttered, finally leaving her coffee and returning to the conversation. She sidled up to Hanson, her eyes fixed on the covered corpse.

"That's what I said about the suicide over there, and it wasn't. Maybe it's our lucky day?" shrugged Lucas.

"Death is not a joking matter," Henry reprimanded. Turning back to Jo and Hanson, he continued, "And as for this case, I haven't even begun my autopsy. With the introduction Lucas gave me and the pressures added by our Lieutenant, I will inevitably be spending at least a few hours on her, perhaps more. Now, if you want this done as quickly as possible, I suggest you leave and allow Lucas and I to begin our work."

The detectives really couldn't argue with that. Three cases with expected results, coming from Henry, were already beyond their expectations. Add in the ME duo getting ready to examine the hottest case in the last three months, it was a recipe for a good Monday. That, and more coffee. Jo grabbed the tumbler as she left and took another swig as soon as the morgue doors closed behind them.

{•*•*•*•*•}

Lucas and Henry stared into the chest cavity, dumbfounded by what stared back at them.

"Did... Did she have a..."

"Yes, Lucas. It appears our victim was victim of a myocardial infarction."

Lucas looked at his mentor, confusion crossing his features.

"Heart attack. What do they teach in medical school these days?" Henry sighed, his hands now deep in the victim's chest as he carefully removed the damaged organ.

"Now, Lucas, what do you know about myocardial infarctions, or in laymans terms, the heart attack?"

Henry held the woman's heart triumphantly in his hand, his blue latex glove covered in blood and other bodily fluids. Lucas shirked back at his boss's casual handling of the organ.

"Um, they're more common in older people... Usually men, so the fact that we have a woman in her twenties here is pretty odd..."

"False." Henry declared, slicing into the cardiac muscles. "Women are in fact more likely to experience myocardial infarctions, and age, though a factor, is irrelevant overall. It is very possible that a young woman such as our victim could have experienced this. What I was getting at were the physical inconsistencies."

"Physical inconsistencies?"

"Her muscular tissue. It shows excessive breakdown, suggesting a muscular disorder. Quite inconsistent with the amount of muscle tissue she appears to have had, thus ruled out. Leaving us with the improbable but not impossible conclusion of poison."

Henry pulled a small syringe from his lab coat and drew a vial of blood from the body. "Send this to toxicology. I believe their answer will give us our murder weapon."

{•*•*•*•*•}

"Coral!"

Jo looked up from her paperwork to see Henry standing triumphantly beside her desk, a completed medical examiner's report in his hands. She gave him a deadpan stare.

"Coral?"

"Coral! Our victim was murdered with a hyper-toxic species of coral!"

"Really, Henry? Coral? You can kill someone with that?"

"Palythoa, commonly known as limu make o Hana in its indigenous Hawai'i, emits one of the most poisonous zootoxins on the planet. Our victim's blood was ripe with the toxin, so ripe it had to have been given intravenously."

Jo ripped the report from his hands. She couldn't take his utter excitement about obscure forms of death, or death at all for that matter. It was too early for this.

"Wait, what victim?" She asked, scanning Henry's reports. He watched on, rocking on the balls of his feet, like a proud child waiting for approval of the hard work he'd done just for her.

"Oh, God, Henry, tell me this isn't the east side apartment case," she whined, even though she knew as soon as she'd seen the file number that this was indeed the case. She held her head in her right hand, and spun the paper back at the doctor with her left.

"What would you think, Detective, of a visit to the aquarium?"

{•*•*•*•}

Within half an hour, Jo and Henry were walking through the doors of the New York Aquarium. Situated in the walls were small fish tanks of various shapes and sizes, and an even greater variety of marine life filled their waters. Henry observed the fish as the wove in and out of the plants and corals that provided landscape for their watery world, while Jo immediately made her way to the receptionist's desk.

"Good afternoon, ma'am," the college-age girl behind the desk chirped. "How can I help you?"

"Hello, yes, would it be possible for my colleague and I to meet with the, um, the keeper?" Jo asked, quickly recovering from her failure to know the proper name for an aquarium keeper (which is an aquarist, by the way). The receptionist immediately became profusely apologetic.

"I'm sorry, but Dr. Jordan doesn't take visitors. But I'm sure one of our tank-tastic tour guides can answer any questions you have." she said with a slathered-on sarcastic smile.

"How much do they pay you to say that?" Jo asked in a sarcastic yet sympathetic manner. As the receptionist replied with a confused quirk of her brow, the detective pulled out her badge.

"Detective Martinez, NYPD. Your Dr. Jordan's expertise may be critical in solving a homicide."

The girl's eyes grew wide, her mouth formed an O of surprise. She blinked rapidly, her words as erratic as her eyelashes. "I... I'll ring him up. Right away."

"Thank you," obsequiously smiled the detective. She then turned around to see Henry still immersed in watching the immersed worlds of marine life.

He ran his hand along the glass. A curious clownfish swam forward and followed his finger as it traced along the panes separating his life from his mechanism of return to it.

Henry smiled to himself as a memory of decades ago flooded his mind.

"Daddy, look at the fishies!"

Abe toddled over to the large tank filled with swimming creatures great and small. He slammed his little hands on the glass and watched the fish swim all around him. A school of minnows shimmered past, mesmerizing the little boy and leaving him with a sheer expression of awe on his youthful face.

From behind, Henry swooped his arm around the three-year-old and held him on his hip. Abe wrapped an arm around his father's neck and reached forward with the other to point to the minnows.

"Fishies!"

"Yes, Abraham," Henry laughed along with his son, "those fish are called minnows."

"Min-no!" The boy sounded out, smiling triumphantly at his father. Abe reached forward again, pulling against Henry's hold as he strained for the fish. Henry conceded to his little boy's desires and held him closer to the glass and the frolicking fishies.

"Henry?"

Jo looked over her shoulder at him, waving him forward to follow her. "C'mon."

Henry took one last quick look around the lobby, then began to follow Jo. They made their way into an employees-only office space, down a few corridors, or rather, through cubicle-formed corridors, until reaching a much more permanent office space with a placard declaring its possession by the marine biologist.

As Jo raised her hand to knock, the door swung open and a man introduced himself as Dr. Jordan and kindly welcomed the two into the space. He was in his mid fifties, so suggested by his almost all-gray hair and his skin's faint wrinkled canvas. His large palms were marred with a few scars.

Jo and Henry settled in the two chairs across from his desk, and Jordan returned to his elite workstation. Folding his hands in a businesslike manner, he asked, "What can I do for you today, detectives?"

His rich, full voice came as a surprise to Jo, but not to Henry. He had looked familiar from somewhere, and at the moment Jordan spoke, Henry had his answer. His voice was very similar to that of a fellow doctor the immortal had once known about a century earlier. Likely this Jordan was a descendant of that Jordan, but asking so would be futile and utterly pointless.

"We are investigating a homicide, and the victim appears to have been murdered with some sort of biological toxin." Jo explained. "We were wondering if you could tell us more about it, perhaps whether or not the species is on display here, or if there is anywhere that the average person could get their hands on... What was it again, Henry?"

"Limu make o Hana," Henry offered, in almost an offhand way. His focus was on studying the diplomas behind the doctor's desk, trying to shed some light on whether or not the man was his former colleague's descendant.

Jordan's eyes lit up. "Ah, the Seaweed of Death from Hana. A very interesting coral. Hawaiian legends states that the species was a curse brought upon the village of Hana after a fisherman failed to make a catch. It resembles seaweed if washed up on shore and its toxin, palytoxin, is potent enough to cause death within twelve hours."

"It attacks the muscular tissues," Henry continued, a faraway look in his eyes. "Breaking them down very rapidly, causing leakage of cellular contents and the bloodstream, leading to myocardial infarction, better known as a heart attack,"

Jo and Jordan looked at Henry with dumbfounded expressions; wondering why the detective and the doctor had needed to come to Jordan for confirmation when they had Henry's knowledge at their disposal.

"Yes..." Jordan said slowly, nodding along with Henry's explanation. Turning back to Jo, "It seems you already have your expert, Detective."

Henry repositioned himself in the chair, crossing his legs in the shape of the number 4, so he more comfortably faced the aquarist. "I may know the power of palytoxin, but what I do not know is the availability of it. Where could someone come across this coral and collect its venom is what the detective and I are here to discover."

Henry continued to lean forward, prodding Jordan to respond merely by his forward posture. Jo quickly joined Henry in the slightly inquisitive lean. Jordan tapped his fingertips on the surface of his mahogany desk, very methodically and deliberately.

"We do have Palythoa on exhibit here in the aquarium. Direct access to them is strictly patrolled due to their potency, only myself and a handful of our most senior aquarists are authorized to handle them and their tank. I could get you a list of those people," Jordan offered, lilting the last syllable as if he were asking a question.

"That would be great, thank you." Jo replied. Before she'd even agreed to take the list, Jordan was opening a file on his computer screen and typing up the names. The document came out of the printer, still warm and the ink still drying on the sheet.

"I can't believe that any of my employees would do something so unethical and criminal as murder." Jordan mused as he handed the list to Jo.

"It wouldn't necessarily have to be one of your own, Dr. Jordan, if there is another market in which our killer could have obtained the coral."

"See, that's the thing. Palythoa are quite commonly available in the home market, but Palythoa that have grown to the size necessary to provide enough toxin to kill a human being would have to have been raised by someone with a marine educational background or a reefing hobbyist. Your killer, whoever it is, has to be well-versed in reefkeeping."

{•*•*•*•*•}

After their successful trip to the aquarium, Jo and Henry parted ways; she to the computer and databases of information and he to the morgue and Lucas' secondary examination of the body. In the earlier autopsy, Henry had indeed determined that the toxin had been given intravenously, but had not pinpointed the injection site.

"Hey, Doc, check out what I found on Jenny!"

Lucas ran up to Henry before he'd even had a chance to close the morgue's doors. His eyes sparkled with the excitement of discovery and the pride of finding something his mentor and hero had not.

Henry pushed the door shut and pulled his scarf from where it had been caught in the crack. He looked up at Lucas, confusion crossing his features.

"Jenny? Who is Jenny, Lucas?"

"The coral girl. Her name's Jennifer Welsh." He explained, rushing his words. "C'mon, Doc, you have to see this!"

Lucas grabbed Henry's arm and pulled him across the room to the autopsy table. Jenny's body lied atop the slab, only her right hand and head out from under the covering. Her springy caramel-colored hair floated around her head like some sort of providential halo, making it seem all the more that she was asleep rather than deceased. Lucas lifted her right hand and placed it in Henry's own.

"Wait a moment, Lucas," the doctor commanded, setting Jenny's hand back on the slab. "How did you discover this woman's identity?"

"Oh. While you and Jo were at the aquarium, Hanson went to some reefkeeping stores and showed her picture around. The one owner recognized her, said she was Jenny Welsh, and she went in there all the time. Hanson ran the name and brought up her drivers license and stuff, then called the ID down here to me, well actually, to you, but you weren't back yet, so I told him I'd just tell you. Now please just look at her hand!"

Lucas put the hand back in Henry's palms. He stretched the fingers just a little more beyond the position they'd frozen in a few hours after her death, pulling the skin of her palm taut against the hand's inner workings.

"If you look right below her ring finger, you'll see your entry point for the toxin. Not an injection..."

"A papercut." Henry finished, observing the deadly dermal damage. "The placement makes sense. I thought the swelling on her ring finger was a reaction to this clearly cheap gold-substitute ring, but it is explained by the toxin's proximity. The nearest extremity to the entry point would have swelled a bit from the sheer amount of toxin it was exposed to."

Henry set the hand back on the slab and turned to his assistant. "Brilliant work, Lucas."

Lucas waited until Henry had turned away to allow his grateful smile to completely fill his face. And only when the doctor returned to his office did Lucas allow himself the luxury of a victory dance across the morgue.

{•*•*•*•*•}

Jo had narrowed the list of suspects to six people. Then again, the list Jordan had provided included only six names, including his own.

This was hopeless. None of the suspects had a tie to the apartment or the victim, of whose name she had been informed as soon as she re-entered the homicide division.

She had spent the majority of the past few hours scanning through the legal documents concerning her suspects. All upstanding citizens, graduates from prestigious universities who had earned prestigious titles, a home, a family, a couple cars to their names. The worst offense committed by any of the six involved either speeding or parking tickets. Petty traffic violations that dotted almost everyone's records, nothing to pinpoint a possible murderer.

Jo was just about to shut down her computer and call it a day when the phone on her desk began to ring.

"Martinez," she quipped, wondering who was even in the office this late to have called her from the inter-office system.

"You're investigating the Jenny Welsh case, right?"

"Yeah..." She replied cautiously. The voice on the other end was completely unfamiliar. Definitely masculine, a bit gravelly, the pronunciations of the r's just a little too forced, as if he were disguising an accent. "Who is this?"

"You don't have the killer on your suspect list, Jo."

Jo grasped the receiver even tighter, fear and apprehension coursing through her veins. The only people who had seen that list besides herself were Henry, Hanson, and Dr. Jordan. Jordan had no access to inter-office, Hanson had left hours earlier for his son's Cub Scout meeting, and Henry was way too serious to even allow a prank call to cross his mind.

Jo pulled the phone's cord as she strained toward the wall, to the light switch. The phone's base slid across her desk, but she was able to reach the switch and illuminate the room. Discovering that she was indeed completely alone in the room brought no comfort, only more worry.

"I'm going to ask you again, who are you and how do you know the suspect list?"

Her tone was no-nonsense, sharp as a knife and more demanding than a drill sergeant.

"That, my dear, is entirely inconsequential. Suffice it to say that a little birdie, whether that be myself or not, will guide you to you killer. As for me, I am what I am: a simple anonymous caller."

The line went dead.

hello everyone! This is a new approach to Forever fics for me; I hope you all like it! My plan is for it to be in a format more like an actual episode of the show, centered around a case, flashbacks here and there, and what's Forever without an anonymous caller? This will be a three-case series, not necessarily three parts, probably two or three parts to a case, and they are going to build on each other. I had a lot of fun, and am still having fun, doing the research for this as well!

1)Palythoa and palytoxin is a real thing. The idea for the murder came from a firsthand experience of an aquarium keeper who came close to dying after getting the toxin in a small cut on her hand.

2)I felt really smart discovering the official scientific name for a heart attack. And yes, women are actually more likely to die from a heart attack than men, mainly because doctors can recognize a heart attack better in males than in females.

Thank you all for joining me on this new journey; where it will lead us still I don't know! (So don't expect another installment for a while.)