Subtropolis: Shadow Theatre - 10/13 (Original; ~30k words; 15+)
[ Full Headers | 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | E | Read on DW ]
"You looked for him?" Angelina asked, elbows on her desk, fingers steepled, her forefingers touching her lips when she leaned forward intently.
"There was blood in the shaft, and on the roof," Boston explained, "so we could follow him a little; but he kept falling down to the pavement and just jumping back up. We couldn't reach half the roofs. We lost him."
She considered this. "Will he run to the Common again?"
"You know about that?" Angelina gave him a look. "Right, everybody knows about that." Boston considered for a moment, and then shook his head. "He probably will, but he was locked out once, and I see no reason why he wouldn't be again."
"He's probably bad for business," Angelina said thoughtfully.
"Yeah," Boston agreed absently, rubbing at his eyes. Angelina was looking at him and he realised, startled, that he'd been silent for a couple of minutes; not lost to thoughts, just skipped exhaustedly straight through. "Sorry."
"Have you slept at all?" she asked. It sounded more wary than sympathetic, like he might snap at any moment.
"I grabbed a couple of hours after we gave up searching and Kenny went home." Boston shrugged a little. "I couldn't sleep."
"I don't think much of your 'friend'," Angelina said, sitting back in her chair.
"It wasn't his fault," Boston said. "The man -- the suspect -- probably just saw the gun and freaked out. I should have known it would happen."
He remembered the torn pillow, the cloud of feathers hanging in the air, like they had all the time in the world.
Angelina was saying something. "--coming after me?"
"I don't know," Boston admitted. "I don't think he will. I think he'll go somewhere familiar, old kills or haunts or to ground."
"Then, while I appreciate being kept informed, why are you really here?" Angelina looked him over, a calculating gleam in her eyes. "Do you need an attorney, Officer Craig? It doesn't sound like you've been following procedure."
"I'll blame all that on my boss," Boston said.
"How is Vincent?" she asked with far too deliberate casualness.
"Once he woke up, the same as ever: unhelpful, quiet, prone to vanishing. He and Katrina are off trying to find the guy again."
"And you, instead, came here. You want my help finding your suspect? I don't see why you think I'll be of any use."
"Look, I can't be absolutely certain there's a connection between the murders and the harassment you were talking about, but one of the things the guy said was 'make a mess, make them scared' and I know what that sounds like to me." He could see by her eyes that she thought the same. "And Mayor Stone said something about old crimes that -- well, okay, it might have been just philosophical, but there's a chance this guy has been doing this for a long while, and it's just that I don't know about it. No one wanted to talk to us."
"Do you blame them?" Angelina asked with a wry smile.
Boston shook his head. "No. But not talking is getting people hurt. If this has been going on a while, that someone must know something. This guy, he always attacks the same way, he always runs the same way; he's not smart. He's -- he's like a kid with a routine."
"A murderous routine," Angelina corrected. "You do understand that in order to do my work, I have to rely on a reputation of confidentiality and fairness? I can't interrogate people and then hand the information over to the police and still expect to be able to do my job afterwards."
"I appreciate that," Boston said. "I'm not looking for details of who knew what when. I don't care what they were doing or why. I just need to find this guy, that's all. Before he kills someone else."
"Are you sure he's not just lying dead in an alley somewhere? You said he got hit by a car, twice, and fell off a number of buildings," Angelina pointed out. "The first one of those would have stopped me; surely all together they'll stop your suspect."
"He's out there," Boston said with surety. "He's out there, and someone knows where he is, or where he's going."
Angelina sighed. It was only when she finally relaxed that Boston realised she, too, looked exhausted. He tried to imagine weeks of days like today, going all out and getting nothing for it, and winced in sympathy.
"Listen," he started, "you don't need to--"
She waved this off. "I'll do what I can. I can't promise anything, but I have contacts, people I can talk to, people who will do a bit of digging. Here, give me your number."
Angelina slid a pen and a card across the desk, and Boston wrote his name down, and the number of the phone Katrina gave him; as an after thought, he added Katrina's name and number as well. When he pushed the card back, she swapped it for one for her business instead, and he thanked her, putting it safely in his wallet.
"I hope you find this man," she said.
"Me too," Boston agreed standing.
"And bring him properly to justice," Angelina finished as if he hadn't spoken. "Something you might find much easier if you don't allow your 'friend' to accompany you."
Boston frowned at her. "Is there something outside of his usual misogyny I should be being told here? I don't deny the guy's an asshole, but I'm pretty sure he's not going to shoot a suspect just for the hell of it."
"I'd be more reassured if you hadn't felt the need to qualify your certainty," Angelina said dryly. "I'll contact you when I know something."
"Thank you." Boston nodded, and they said their goodbyes as he headed out.
He'd had this sort of weird half-expectation that he'd come back down the stairs to find either the suspect or Katrina waiting for him. There was no-one there, of course. It was the start of another warm day, heavy, with the promise of a storm to come. Soon, hopefully, to clear the mugginess away, though maybe part of that was his lack of sleep; just the thought had him yawning the rest of the way up the block.
Murder the murderers, he remembered himself saying, and Kenny chiming in with rape the rapists. An eye for an eye. Things people had said kept sliding into his thoughts, but he couldn't find a reason for them, couldn't put them together. They just blew this way and that, catching on things and falling away, like feathers from a ripped open pillow.
How had the pillow ended up torn, anyway?
The suspect had woken up, seen Kenny, reacted badly. The pillow would have been under him, surely? Stop thinking about the damn pillow, Boston told himself. You've got a suspect to catch. Come on, what do you know about him? He's got be local, at least. Knows the area well. Knows the Common. Does that help?
It didn't. Nothing did. It felt like there was a whole other investigation he should have done, which would suddenly make all the pieces fall together.
And the harassment. That had to be connected, but how? The man was a killer, not a, a, a-- Was harasser as word? A harasser.
"I've worked this sort of case before," Boston heard himself say. Kenny had said that, at the scene, with the last of Matthias's remains still being picked off the ground behind them. Worked this sort of case before.
He changed direction abruptly, ignoring the blaring of horns as he dodged across the lines of traffic, and took the road towards the station house.
*
His credentials still worked on the local network, allowing him to log in to the electronic records. It wasn't as detailed as actually going downtown to the records office and going through the files by hand, but it was significantly faster and had the added advantage that, if there was nothing to find, no-one would know he had been looking. Probably.
Kenny wouldn't know, was the point. Not the most computer literate of people. Boston had always been the one to use the terminal in the car, although that was mostly because Kenny always drove. In fact, he had a ridiculously large number of hours logged, which was rubbish for a start, though Boston couldn't care less about expenses fiddling.
There were a number of citations on the record, two of which were actually for merit to Boston's surprise. Most were for inappropriate behaviour, internal complaints by female officers about Kenny being way too hands-on in his work. Boston's stomach churned. He'd known the guy was an asshole, but he hadn't thought it extended to out-right physical sexual harassment.
Still, even reading between the lines, there was nothing there more than minor crap that earned the barest of official warnings. Nothing actually went anywhere. Incidents they'd both attended were logged mostly as Boston recalled them, with the differences being easily attributable to lazy reporting instead of anything else. After the first dozen, he skipped the rest, going back to cases before they were made partners. Three years, four, five, six, nothing caught his eye. Nothing, nothing, and more nothing.
It would have helped if he knew what exactly he was looking for. Open cases with the same MO would have been flagged up immediately; people being torn to pieces wasn't something easily forgotten. No matter how young and pathetic the villain had looked while half-unconscious and possibly delirious.
Boston tried sorting the cases by location, then by type, and then the deaths by occupation. Nothing stood out. Nothing said, here is the first crime of a guy who is going to devolve into an incredibly bloody and yet strangely organised serial killer. After a long moment of staring blankly at the list (and, damn but there were a lot of crimes in this city) he idly paged back to the citations again, and opened the ones for merit.
They were both 'above and beyond the call of duty' notices, both old, ten years at least. Kenny would have been a rookie himself in those days. The oldest was for the Barstown Riots; it was kind of weird to think that while Boston's junior high-school class had been taking a business studies trip around Sunday Tower, Kenny had been just a couple of miles over, dragging people away from Molotov cocktails.
The newer of the two was a murder case. A young woman, new in town and in a rough neighbourhood, killed in her home while her son watched from hiding. Kenny had apparently been the first on the scene, found the kid, talked him out of his spot, calmed him down, and kept him calm until social services had processed him. Boston tried to imagine Kenny being good with kids. He could sort of see it, in that 'the crazy uncle your parents don't really like but don't know how to get rid of either' way. The mother had been strangled, not torn apart. She seemed to be a secretary of some kind, not a dancer or street worker. It felt important, but it didn't fit with anything either. Nothing fitted with anything.
He'd dialled Kenny before he'd even really noticed he'd picked the phone.
"Yeah, what?" Kenny snapped down the line at him.
Boston opened his mouth to say hello and heard himself instead ask, "How did the pillow end up ripped?"
"How -- what? Boston, is that you? Man, you need to go to bed, you're talking rubbish. I gotta go; I got pulled on guard duty. Get some sleep, dumb-ass."
The line went dead. Boston stared at it for a long moment.
*
Guard duty, it turned out, meant watching the crowd for latest of Councillor Cole's apparently never-ending press conferences. It was easy enough to find out where it was being held. and Boston dithered for all of a second before heading down there. He knew it was pretty stupid and he honestly had no idea what he was going to say or do when he arrived, but there he was going.
Having given up being surprised by sudden appearances, he just said thanks to Katrina when she pulled up beside him, accepting the lift across town. They ended up having to park away from the town hall due to the gathered crowds.
"I honestly don't get what people see in this guy," Katrina complained.
"He makes them feel good about being scared of their neighbours," Boston said absently, scanning the area. "There he is."
"Cole?"
"No, Kenny," said Boston. He turned back to tell her to stay with the car, only to spot an entirely unwelcome face in the crowd: the missing suspect. "Damn it!"
Ignoring Katrina's confused question -- which he would no doubt pay for later -- Boston darted forward, pushing his way through the crowds. They parted slowly and with much grumbling, even when he started yelling "Police!"
He lost the man rapidly, but saw Kenny through a gap and jumped up to yell "He's here!" over the crowd.
"What?" Kenny yelled back. "Hey, let him through!"
The uniform did what Boston's shouting hadn't, giving him a gap to wriggle through. "The guy from the train; he's here!"
Kenny's face went pale, then red as he swore. There were cries around them as he drew his gun.
Boston quickly pushed the weapon down. "You'll start a riot! Come on, we have to stop the press conference."
"Right, right." Kenny nodded, and they pushed away from the crowd.
While Kenny radioed his new partner, Boston scanned the area, muttering "Come on" to himself. Where had the guy gone? He jumps to attack. He always--
"Look up!" Boston yelled, swinging around to check the roof above them.
It was too late. Even as Kenny was lifting his weapon again, the man came plunging down. The gun roared. Both men roared in pain, Kenny crashing down the steps, blood splattering the podium steps. The man fell back, clutching his own chest, blood pumping out around his fingers. Boston found his gun in his hand, raised it, yelled, "Freeze! Police!"
People were coming out above, heading for the podium. Boston saw Cole, his politician's smile just starting to fade; he saw a secretary's mouth open wide; he saw the man twist, crouch to spring; he tried to yell again but there was no time. No time at all.
The man leaped. Boston fired, one-two.
Nylar came out of nowhere, shoving Cole and the secretary out of the way. The man crashed back to the ground where they had been, outstretched claws scrabbling uselessly against the marble steps. Boston darted up after him, yelling, "Someone get a medic!"
Claws swiped at him, but he knocked them away. "Let me help! Let me--" They came at him again, and he grabbed the man's shoulders, pushing him back down. The man went limp instantly under him, calm as if Boston had hit a switch. "Yeah, that's it. Just stay with me, buddy; everything's going to be okay. Everything's--"
The man coughed once, a wet rasp of a thing, jerked sharply, and lay still, eyes open and perfectly empty.
[ Full Headers | 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | E | Read on DW ]
"You looked for him?" Angelina asked, elbows on her desk, fingers steepled, her forefingers touching her lips when she leaned forward intently.
"There was blood in the shaft, and on the roof," Boston explained, "so we could follow him a little; but he kept falling down to the pavement and just jumping back up. We couldn't reach half the roofs. We lost him."
She considered this. "Will he run to the Common again?"
"You know about that?" Angelina gave him a look. "Right, everybody knows about that." Boston considered for a moment, and then shook his head. "He probably will, but he was locked out once, and I see no reason why he wouldn't be again."
"He's probably bad for business," Angelina said thoughtfully.
"Yeah," Boston agreed absently, rubbing at his eyes. Angelina was looking at him and he realised, startled, that he'd been silent for a couple of minutes; not lost to thoughts, just skipped exhaustedly straight through. "Sorry."
"Have you slept at all?" she asked. It sounded more wary than sympathetic, like he might snap at any moment.
"I grabbed a couple of hours after we gave up searching and Kenny went home." Boston shrugged a little. "I couldn't sleep."
"I don't think much of your 'friend'," Angelina said, sitting back in her chair.
"It wasn't his fault," Boston said. "The man -- the suspect -- probably just saw the gun and freaked out. I should have known it would happen."
He remembered the torn pillow, the cloud of feathers hanging in the air, like they had all the time in the world.
Angelina was saying something. "--coming after me?"
"I don't know," Boston admitted. "I don't think he will. I think he'll go somewhere familiar, old kills or haunts or to ground."
"Then, while I appreciate being kept informed, why are you really here?" Angelina looked him over, a calculating gleam in her eyes. "Do you need an attorney, Officer Craig? It doesn't sound like you've been following procedure."
"I'll blame all that on my boss," Boston said.
"How is Vincent?" she asked with far too deliberate casualness.
"Once he woke up, the same as ever: unhelpful, quiet, prone to vanishing. He and Katrina are off trying to find the guy again."
"And you, instead, came here. You want my help finding your suspect? I don't see why you think I'll be of any use."
"Look, I can't be absolutely certain there's a connection between the murders and the harassment you were talking about, but one of the things the guy said was 'make a mess, make them scared' and I know what that sounds like to me." He could see by her eyes that she thought the same. "And Mayor Stone said something about old crimes that -- well, okay, it might have been just philosophical, but there's a chance this guy has been doing this for a long while, and it's just that I don't know about it. No one wanted to talk to us."
"Do you blame them?" Angelina asked with a wry smile.
Boston shook his head. "No. But not talking is getting people hurt. If this has been going on a while, that someone must know something. This guy, he always attacks the same way, he always runs the same way; he's not smart. He's -- he's like a kid with a routine."
"A murderous routine," Angelina corrected. "You do understand that in order to do my work, I have to rely on a reputation of confidentiality and fairness? I can't interrogate people and then hand the information over to the police and still expect to be able to do my job afterwards."
"I appreciate that," Boston said. "I'm not looking for details of who knew what when. I don't care what they were doing or why. I just need to find this guy, that's all. Before he kills someone else."
"Are you sure he's not just lying dead in an alley somewhere? You said he got hit by a car, twice, and fell off a number of buildings," Angelina pointed out. "The first one of those would have stopped me; surely all together they'll stop your suspect."
"He's out there," Boston said with surety. "He's out there, and someone knows where he is, or where he's going."
Angelina sighed. It was only when she finally relaxed that Boston realised she, too, looked exhausted. He tried to imagine weeks of days like today, going all out and getting nothing for it, and winced in sympathy.
"Listen," he started, "you don't need to--"
She waved this off. "I'll do what I can. I can't promise anything, but I have contacts, people I can talk to, people who will do a bit of digging. Here, give me your number."
Angelina slid a pen and a card across the desk, and Boston wrote his name down, and the number of the phone Katrina gave him; as an after thought, he added Katrina's name and number as well. When he pushed the card back, she swapped it for one for her business instead, and he thanked her, putting it safely in his wallet.
"I hope you find this man," she said.
"Me too," Boston agreed standing.
"And bring him properly to justice," Angelina finished as if he hadn't spoken. "Something you might find much easier if you don't allow your 'friend' to accompany you."
Boston frowned at her. "Is there something outside of his usual misogyny I should be being told here? I don't deny the guy's an asshole, but I'm pretty sure he's not going to shoot a suspect just for the hell of it."
"I'd be more reassured if you hadn't felt the need to qualify your certainty," Angelina said dryly. "I'll contact you when I know something."
"Thank you." Boston nodded, and they said their goodbyes as he headed out.
He'd had this sort of weird half-expectation that he'd come back down the stairs to find either the suspect or Katrina waiting for him. There was no-one there, of course. It was the start of another warm day, heavy, with the promise of a storm to come. Soon, hopefully, to clear the mugginess away, though maybe part of that was his lack of sleep; just the thought had him yawning the rest of the way up the block.
Murder the murderers, he remembered himself saying, and Kenny chiming in with rape the rapists. An eye for an eye. Things people had said kept sliding into his thoughts, but he couldn't find a reason for them, couldn't put them together. They just blew this way and that, catching on things and falling away, like feathers from a ripped open pillow.
How had the pillow ended up torn, anyway?
The suspect had woken up, seen Kenny, reacted badly. The pillow would have been under him, surely? Stop thinking about the damn pillow, Boston told himself. You've got a suspect to catch. Come on, what do you know about him? He's got be local, at least. Knows the area well. Knows the Common. Does that help?
It didn't. Nothing did. It felt like there was a whole other investigation he should have done, which would suddenly make all the pieces fall together.
And the harassment. That had to be connected, but how? The man was a killer, not a, a, a-- Was harasser as word? A harasser.
"I've worked this sort of case before," Boston heard himself say. Kenny had said that, at the scene, with the last of Matthias's remains still being picked off the ground behind them. Worked this sort of case before.
He changed direction abruptly, ignoring the blaring of horns as he dodged across the lines of traffic, and took the road towards the station house.
*
His credentials still worked on the local network, allowing him to log in to the electronic records. It wasn't as detailed as actually going downtown to the records office and going through the files by hand, but it was significantly faster and had the added advantage that, if there was nothing to find, no-one would know he had been looking. Probably.
Kenny wouldn't know, was the point. Not the most computer literate of people. Boston had always been the one to use the terminal in the car, although that was mostly because Kenny always drove. In fact, he had a ridiculously large number of hours logged, which was rubbish for a start, though Boston couldn't care less about expenses fiddling.
There were a number of citations on the record, two of which were actually for merit to Boston's surprise. Most were for inappropriate behaviour, internal complaints by female officers about Kenny being way too hands-on in his work. Boston's stomach churned. He'd known the guy was an asshole, but he hadn't thought it extended to out-right physical sexual harassment.
Still, even reading between the lines, there was nothing there more than minor crap that earned the barest of official warnings. Nothing actually went anywhere. Incidents they'd both attended were logged mostly as Boston recalled them, with the differences being easily attributable to lazy reporting instead of anything else. After the first dozen, he skipped the rest, going back to cases before they were made partners. Three years, four, five, six, nothing caught his eye. Nothing, nothing, and more nothing.
It would have helped if he knew what exactly he was looking for. Open cases with the same MO would have been flagged up immediately; people being torn to pieces wasn't something easily forgotten. No matter how young and pathetic the villain had looked while half-unconscious and possibly delirious.
Boston tried sorting the cases by location, then by type, and then the deaths by occupation. Nothing stood out. Nothing said, here is the first crime of a guy who is going to devolve into an incredibly bloody and yet strangely organised serial killer. After a long moment of staring blankly at the list (and, damn but there were a lot of crimes in this city) he idly paged back to the citations again, and opened the ones for merit.
They were both 'above and beyond the call of duty' notices, both old, ten years at least. Kenny would have been a rookie himself in those days. The oldest was for the Barstown Riots; it was kind of weird to think that while Boston's junior high-school class had been taking a business studies trip around Sunday Tower, Kenny had been just a couple of miles over, dragging people away from Molotov cocktails.
The newer of the two was a murder case. A young woman, new in town and in a rough neighbourhood, killed in her home while her son watched from hiding. Kenny had apparently been the first on the scene, found the kid, talked him out of his spot, calmed him down, and kept him calm until social services had processed him. Boston tried to imagine Kenny being good with kids. He could sort of see it, in that 'the crazy uncle your parents don't really like but don't know how to get rid of either' way. The mother had been strangled, not torn apart. She seemed to be a secretary of some kind, not a dancer or street worker. It felt important, but it didn't fit with anything either. Nothing fitted with anything.
He'd dialled Kenny before he'd even really noticed he'd picked the phone.
"Yeah, what?" Kenny snapped down the line at him.
Boston opened his mouth to say hello and heard himself instead ask, "How did the pillow end up ripped?"
"How -- what? Boston, is that you? Man, you need to go to bed, you're talking rubbish. I gotta go; I got pulled on guard duty. Get some sleep, dumb-ass."
The line went dead. Boston stared at it for a long moment.
*
Guard duty, it turned out, meant watching the crowd for latest of Councillor Cole's apparently never-ending press conferences. It was easy enough to find out where it was being held. and Boston dithered for all of a second before heading down there. He knew it was pretty stupid and he honestly had no idea what he was going to say or do when he arrived, but there he was going.
Having given up being surprised by sudden appearances, he just said thanks to Katrina when she pulled up beside him, accepting the lift across town. They ended up having to park away from the town hall due to the gathered crowds.
"I honestly don't get what people see in this guy," Katrina complained.
"He makes them feel good about being scared of their neighbours," Boston said absently, scanning the area. "There he is."
"Cole?"
"No, Kenny," said Boston. He turned back to tell her to stay with the car, only to spot an entirely unwelcome face in the crowd: the missing suspect. "Damn it!"
Ignoring Katrina's confused question -- which he would no doubt pay for later -- Boston darted forward, pushing his way through the crowds. They parted slowly and with much grumbling, even when he started yelling "Police!"
He lost the man rapidly, but saw Kenny through a gap and jumped up to yell "He's here!" over the crowd.
"What?" Kenny yelled back. "Hey, let him through!"
The uniform did what Boston's shouting hadn't, giving him a gap to wriggle through. "The guy from the train; he's here!"
Kenny's face went pale, then red as he swore. There were cries around them as he drew his gun.
Boston quickly pushed the weapon down. "You'll start a riot! Come on, we have to stop the press conference."
"Right, right." Kenny nodded, and they pushed away from the crowd.
While Kenny radioed his new partner, Boston scanned the area, muttering "Come on" to himself. Where had the guy gone? He jumps to attack. He always--
"Look up!" Boston yelled, swinging around to check the roof above them.
It was too late. Even as Kenny was lifting his weapon again, the man came plunging down. The gun roared. Both men roared in pain, Kenny crashing down the steps, blood splattering the podium steps. The man fell back, clutching his own chest, blood pumping out around his fingers. Boston found his gun in his hand, raised it, yelled, "Freeze! Police!"
People were coming out above, heading for the podium. Boston saw Cole, his politician's smile just starting to fade; he saw a secretary's mouth open wide; he saw the man twist, crouch to spring; he tried to yell again but there was no time. No time at all.
The man leaped. Boston fired, one-two.
Nylar came out of nowhere, shoving Cole and the secretary out of the way. The man crashed back to the ground where they had been, outstretched claws scrabbling uselessly against the marble steps. Boston darted up after him, yelling, "Someone get a medic!"
Claws swiped at him, but he knocked them away. "Let me help! Let me--" They came at him again, and he grabbed the man's shoulders, pushing him back down. The man went limp instantly under him, calm as if Boston had hit a switch. "Yeah, that's it. Just stay with me, buddy; everything's going to be okay. Everything's--"
The man coughed once, a wet rasp of a thing, jerked sharply, and lay still, eyes open and perfectly empty.
[ Full Headers | 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12 | E | Read on DW ]