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Ethan was blank-eyed and unresponsive.
Good.
That will make this easy.
Scott had figured that the man couldn’t have gone too far from the park. He hadn’t left Shaun unattended deliberately, had had no motivation to get as far away as quickly as he could. And in this weather, there weren’t many people just shuffling down the street so purposelessly.
Dead inside. He looks dead inside.
And maybe he was.
Scott tipped his head to the side, observing Ethan carefully. It occurred to him that this was a very dangerous risk he was taking: He knew little of Ethan’s official, by-the-books diagnosis, and was not completely certain that the man was completely incapable of seeing or hearing him right now. It could be all over if he did this: Scott would have to run, go underground and watch Ethan’s trials from a distance.
Or not.
Ethan didn’t know him, and what were the odds that the police would believe him later? The story would be outlandish; they would suspect that he was fabricating it to avoid harder questions about his son’s disappearance.
Scott told the story to himself, the way Ethan would likely tell it, and relaxed.
There was no way they would believe him.
And he probably can’t see or hear me.
If he could, he wouldn’t have left his son.
And so Scott approached Ethan, reaching into his pocket; Ethan stopped walking, but was otherwise unresponsive. Scott did not touch him, but instead focused on creasing and folding and twisting the paper in his hands to his needs. This particular figure had become second-nature from the time he was very young, had been his go-to throughout the years whenever he’d found a suitable piece of paper and enough idle time to work with it.
Sometimes, it was how he lured the children in.
The young ones always seemed so fascinated by how he could create an animal from just a small piece of paper.
Scott finished in record time, careful to keep his head bent over his hands to stop the rain from damaging the paper; it’s a little tougher than normal paper, but not by much, and he didn’t want it disintegrating before Ethan came to his senses. He reached out and carefully took Ethan’s hand, all the while keeping their gazes locked. Ethan’s gaze remained cloudy, disconnected even as Scott touched him, even as he pressed the paper into his hand and closed his fingers around it.
Mission accomplished.
Scott quickly turned and walked off, hurrying back to his car. He had no intention of sticking around, not when he had already taken far too much risk in this venture of his. This, he hoped, would be the last time, the last boy, the last father, and now was the time to plan for the future.
And Ethan, of course, was an integral part of that.
When he eventually woke, he would find in his hand an origami dog.
Soon after, he would realize that his son was missing.
Assuming that Ethan did not somehow remember Scott, did not remember how he had obtained the dog, he would soon be confronted with the fact that his young son was missing in a city currently plagued by a ‘serial killer’ (Scott sniffed; he did not kill the boys, their fathers did with their inaction) notorious for leaving origami figures on the bodies of their victims.
And in the absence of any other reasonable explanation, Ethan would be forced to conclude that he had made the origami dog.
This would unleash a series of events that, if unfolded correctly, would allow Scott to gracefully bow out of the city with this final set of trials. Ethan would succeed and save his son, or he would fail; and regardless of whether he succeeded or failed, he would be uncertain until the end about whether or not he had been the one that had taken his son, whether or not he had somehow been responsible for the deaths of the other Origami Killer victims.
And if Ethan wasn’t certain of his innocence, the police surely wouldn’t be certain about it either.
If everything unfolded correctly, Scott would clean up any and all traces of his complicity in the deaths, wipe them away without a trace. He would leave the city, move on to other things, and know soon enough if Ethan had succeeded or failed.
And if Scott was lucky, even Ethan himself would never know if he was innocent or guilty.
-End