CHAPTER 3
James Gordon parked his car in the parking lot between Collier Sporting Goods and Nate’s Title Pawn. He put it in park, and sat there with the engine running and the heat blasting. The day had started off unseasonably cold, and now that it was nighttime the temperature had dropped another five degrees at least. He fished in his dashboard for the gloves Barbara had bought him a couple years ago, and was just slipping them on when a pair of headlights reflected in his rearview mirror.
The black SUV with the tinted windows parked alongside his car, and he hopped out, reflexively checking for the pistol at his side, even though he shouldn’t need it tonight. The wind bit at his nose and ears. The moon was crescent overhead and the stars shined like the eyes of watchful gods.
“Good God!” said Sarah, shutting her door and locking her SUV remotely. “How did I ever survive Gotham in the winter time?” she asked, pulling her coat tightly to her.
Gordon’s trench coat flapped open in the gentlest yet most brutal of breezes. He pulled it close and buttoned it up to the collar. “Technically, it’s not winter yet,” he said, stepping over to her side to block some of the wind. It was an old habit of Jim Gordon’s to protect women around him from everything, even winds of inconvenience.
“Well, if this isn’t winter, I think I’ll take my vacation time through the months of December and January.” Sarah glanced at him as they approached the sporting goods store. “You been inside to see it yet?” Gordon nodded. “How bad is it?”
The commissioner shrugged. “I don’t know how to say it. It’s…well, it’s one o’ the worst I’ve seen.” And it was. More haunting than anything. Sure, no guts or intestines were spilled out—they had all been frozen and shattered on the floor, and the generators the killers had left were still running so they wouldn’t thaw anytime soon—but the insidiousness of it all, the notion that anyone could have thought to do something like this to not just one human being, but to several, including an infant, had made Gordon unable to think of anything else all day.
“How’s Barbara and the kids?” Sarah asked.
He shrugged again. “We’re getting along now. We’ve had more time together this year than probably any other time in the last ten.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Why’s that?”
Another shrugged. “Well, you guys have made it very easy to communicate. Linking everybody by Skype and phone has certainly sped things up. I can talk to Mayor Sharp every day no problem. And our mutual friend in the shadows has certainly been busy, and more informative than ever.” He shivered. “The Shukurs have all but packed up and left Gotham, that just leaves the remnants of the Suns and the Mob, and they’re not likely to regain much strength with Cobblepot and Nashton gone.”
“Yeah, well, don’t count the Penguin out yet,” Sarah said glumly, shivering as she tried to drive her hands deeper into her pockets and raised her shoulders to cover her ears. “He’s got a regular Dream Team of lawyers who’re finding ways of separating himself from Nashton’s work. Despite your testimony and mine, he might be out in a couple of years on good behavior.”
“You’re kidding!”
Sarah shook her head. “Not even a little, Jim. He’s turned state’s evidence, and there’s nothing I can do when the big boys wanna start cutting him a break. Not only that, but there’s really not much to connect him to anything besides smuggling drugs for Dreaded Sun and the Molehill Mob, and working as information broker and facilitator for the Falcones. Really, in the end, he was a middling mutt, with enough detachment from anything that he can claim ignorance on a lot of things, including Nashton’s cyber attack on ANGS.”
Sarah stopped talking when they got to the door of the sporting goods store, and shivered again. To Gordon, it seemed like she was shivering for a different reason now. Surely, someone had told her about the dead infant inside, frozen like a block of ice. Despite the usual protocol of removing bodies from the scene under great care, there was enough strangeness here for Sarah to order the building secured by a patrol of her own people and various security cameras set up all around, just until everyone on her task force could finish reviewing it. This, of course, meant giving Batman time to review it.
“Our friend’s meeting us tonight? You’re sure?”
“That was the message I got,” Gordon said.
“Well, maybe we should wait in my car,” she said. “It’s freezing out here and there’s no telling when he might show up.”
“I’m here,” said a voice.
It startled only Sarah, who spun and went reflexively for the pistol at her side. “Jesus! Approach like a normal human being sometime, would you?”
Gordon smiled briefly at the dark figure emerging from a shadow just out of the range of a streetlamp. “How’ve you been?” he asked.
Batman glanced at Sarah, then at Gordon. “How are your people coming with that last piece of information I gave you?” he said, by way of answer. Straight to business, as always.
Gordon sighed and scratched the back of his head. “Well, actually, two of my guys on GCPD happened to be putting some of it to good use a couple blocks from here, along with a surveillance team from Sarah’s end, when the call came in about this place,” said Gordon, pointing to the door, which was now absolutely bathed in the neon yellow CRIME SCENE tape. “They were at Greenhouse Apartments, looking for the buyers you described from Zucco’s crew. But no one ever went in, and no one came out.”
Sarah shivered, and nodded. “My people finally went up into the apartment, but it had been abandoned for weeks.”
“Then you’ve had another leak inside GCPD, or within your task force,” Batman said.
Sarah shook her head. “Nah, more than likely your informant was wrong.”
“This particular informant’s never been wrong, he’s never lied or cheated me,” said Batman. “There has, however, been corruption in and around GCPD and the FBI.”
For a moment, the vigilante and the FBI agent just stared at one another. They weren’t angry, Gordon knew that much, but the two of them were certainly go-getters, and both were alpha-type personalities. Though they’d done surprisingly well working with one another, Gordon still felt the ice between them at times. Perhaps it was good for them, one keeping the other in check.
The information Batman had provided had been related to Anthony “Boss” Zucco’s supply of drugs in the city—apparently, he was making it in secret labs all over Gotham, they just moved rapidly from one apartment complex to another—as well as his extensive counterfeit ring, which the feds seemed to believe had so far spanned fourteen states in the U.S., and even a number of areas in Canada and Mexico. The Falcone crime family had all but fallen, and so had the gangs that had tried to rise in its place, as well as the slick information broker, the Penguin, who’d been like a liaison and strategist for most of them. With such a vacuum of power, the most ambitious of men could always find a way to take the reins dropped by others.
Tony Zucco was now in charge of a great deal of territories and operations. The power of organized crime had diminished in Gotham City recently, but there were signs that Zucco’s empire was just rising. He’d gone into hiding, of course, and some said he might not even be in Gotham City anymore, that he might be running things from his childhood home in Calabria. Whatever the case, Batman’s information over the last year had been the most beneficial in GCPD’s and Breaking Point’s crusade to end the rampant criminal organizations in Gotham, once and for all.
Batman said, “Is the crime scene still secured?”
“No one’s been in or out since nine o’clock,” Gordon answered.
Sarah shivered again. “Can we talk about this inside? It’s gotta be twenty degrees out here.”
“Hate to tell ya, Sarah, but it’s not any better inside. In fact, it’s worse.”
“Why isn’t there any power?” Batman asked, moving towards the door.
“We tried turning it back on, but this property and the stores around it all folded around the economic downturn,” Gordon said. “And in the riots, this area got hit pretty hard, and some Suns actually trashed two transformers. Everything around us got repaired pretty quick, but the link between the new transformers and this part of the city wasn’t a priority, since no one wants the property. So, with no one really complaining, it just never got done.”
“Are the generators and the air coolers still going?”
“Yeah,” Gordon said. “Everything’s been kept exactly as it was found. Well, for the most part anyway. When I got the call, I told everyone except for forensics to keep out, but by the time I arrived you can imagine how a couple o’ cops couldn’t help themselves and were traipsing about, claiming to be helping.” He shrugged. “There’s always one or two who wanna see the freak show and sell the details to the Gotham Informer.”
“Have these details leaked to the press yet?” Batman asked.
“No,” Gordon said, opening the door and raising the crime scene tape up so that the bat and Sarah could pass underneath. “But you can bet your ass it’s gonna be by tomorrow morning. Hard to keep the Informer outta our business. I swear, after getting rid of corruption in Gotham police and politics, our next target should be the media in this town.”
“Jesus Christ on a pogo stick!” Sarah said as soon as she stepped inside. He produced a flashlight from her pocket, and began shining it around. “You weren’t kidding, Jim. I bet it’s warmer in Alaska this time of year.”
Batman walked right past them. He seemed unfazed. It wouldn’t surprise Gordon at all if the bat had some kind of layer of insulation or an electrically-heated mesh inside his suit. He walked side by side with Jim, who pointed out that the closer they got to the double doors at the back of the store, the more condensation and then icing one could see collecting on the floor, the walls, the shelves, even around the doorframe. “The generators don’t just keep it cool, but they suck up all the air, take in the moisture from the air, and cool in before releasing it. They keep the air circulating and constantly cool. One of the women on Sarah’s task force already checked out the kinds of generators they are and the model numbers.”
Sarah’s teeth chattered. “Y-yeah, th-that was Agent Crocker. She said that the generators are used in c-cryogenic fueling systems, or in s-some kind of storage facility for cryogenic fuels, because th-they have to be kept at extremely l-low temperatures.”
There was the constant hum of the generators. Other than that, there was no sound, not even a car passing outside or a siren blocks away. Nothing.
Gordon took the lead, and pointed down at their feet, at the ice they had started walking on, crunching it with every step. Then, he opened the double doors, and stood to one side to let both the bat and Sarah step inside. Sarah stopped at the threshold, and aimed her flashlight around. Gordon didn’t think he’d ever seen her react like this. She was normally so businesslike, having walked a beat before tracking down serial killers for the FBI, and now she wouldn’t move inside. In fact, if he didn’t know any better, he’d think he just saw Sarah take a step back.
The commissioner expected Batman to move on in like he’d seen this kind of thing a million times before, but even he seemed fazed by this. The Dark Knight walked in slowly, and just stood there among the hanging, frozen bodies. Whatever horrors these people had been through, whatever they’d seen and experienced before their deaths, no one now lived who could tell the tale. Well, no one except the people that did this.
There was once terrible, horrific shouting in this room, Gordon thought. And now, it’s silent. We’re standing casually in the very place that nearly a dozen people probably thought was the mouth to hell.
“How many bodies in all?” Batman said, walking over to the center of the room. Surprisingly, he didn’t inspect any of the hanging bodies at all, which Gordon felt were the most exceptional-looking things in the room. Instead, the bat knelt and started examining the frost on the floor.
“So far, we’ve confirmed these six hanging, and at least two more in the frozen shattered remains over in the corner at the far side of the room,” Gordon said. “Looks like seven males and one female. But it’s hard to say, because the pieces are all over. Forensics collected most of what could be stepped on and are checking it for…well, for anything, really. So far, they’ve found trace tetrodotoxin and we just got the ID of two of the bodies about an hour ago, right?” he said, looking at Sarah.
Sarah was still at the threshold, and seemed to remember that she was with a pair of men and didn’t want to look too squeamish, like they might expect a woman to, and so she ambled on inside with them. “Right,” she said. “One is Donald Hargrave. He is a…was a p-principle at Brentwood Academy right here in Gotham. He’s been missing for a month. The other one w-we know is Lois Walker, a retired doctor, a geneticist and occasional lecturer at Berkeley. Sh-she’s been missing since last Tuesday.”
Batman turned his head. “Berkeley?”
“Yeah.”
“Walker lived in California?”
“She did.”
“But she’s here, in this room?”
Gordon answered. “Yeah. Uh, that’s her…hanging in the back there.”
Batman looked up at the body indicated, the long hair that flowed over the breasts was frozen as solid as the rest of the torso, the flesh cracked and split from the intense freezing. Gordon watched him, and wondered what the bat was thinking as he glanced back down at the floor. There was mostly ice all over, which had made it slippery for the first forensics team to show up, but here and there were bare sections of floor with only light frost on it. Specks of ice floated here and there in the beam of their flashlights. Batman had no flashlight, and Gordon assumed he was using some other imaging tool, perhaps a visor inside his mask. Gordon couldn’t tell, because the bat’s back was now turned to him.
Finally, Batman stood up, and took a few steps back, taking it all in. “This is someone’s revenge,” he said.
“You d-don’t think it’s the Falcones, sending a message?” Sarah asked, her hands buried in her pockets, seeking warmth. “Maybe the S-Suns? Molehill Mob? The J-Joker?”
Batman shook his head. “The Falcones and the Suns just put a bullet in your head. The Molehill Mob doesn’t have the imagination for this. The Joker…maybe, but I doubt it.” That had been a sore spot between all three of them over the last year. Sarah’s task force had been cleaning up fast, and Gordon had acted as a liaison so that Batman and her Breaking Point could collaborate more closely, exchanging information. The Joker had been one of their primary targets since his escape, but so far, to everyone’s amazement, he'd been uncharacteristically quiet, and there was no sign of his girl Harley Quinn, either. Nobody in the streets had heard from them, and none of Batman’s informants had even a single rumor to go on. It was like they’d both just vanished off the face of the earth.
“This area was used for receiving,” Gordon said, stepping carefully around any piece that looked like it might’ve belonged to someone, because his mother had always taught him it was both rude and bad luck to step over any part of a corpse. “But there was nothing else back here, no pallets or forklifts, just what you see here. Back there they kept some empty saline pouches, and some blood pressure systems with adrenaline injectors in a large cabinet.” He shook his head. “It’s like someone set up a little torture laboratory.”
“Did your people wear their slick-soled shoes?” Batman asked.
Gordon and Sarah exchanged glances. “Forensics teams usually do," Gordan said. "Why?”
“Because there's a boot print here. Actually, there’s three of them, but it’s hard to see without pattern enhancers.”
Sarah stepped up behind him. “I’m assuming th-that means you have a pattern enhancer in your g-gear.”
Batman held up a hand, and waved her back. “Don’t spoil the prints,” he said, and took out something from a pocket of his belt. It looked like a smartphone, but it had an interactive screen that Gordon had never seen, and after a few seconds of running through a few images of what looked like various kinds of soles, Batman shook his head. “I’ll take these images back with me, review them some more, but right now I’m not seeing a match with any known casual or formal footwear. I’ll send the images to your people the usual way later,” he said, standing up.
Sarah nodded. “Th-thanks. Anything else?”
“I’m going to take some samples, if you don’t mind.”
“Samples of what?”
“The bodies.” Batman said nothing else, his tone nullified any attempt at debate and he walked away, stepping over to the vat of clear, freezing liquid where the small infant lay looking perfectly unharmed. Generators on either side of the tub had also kept it cool. Gordon thought he saw the bat’s right hand clench in a fist, but it might’ve just been an innocent flex. He moved about the room, passing between the rest of the bodies, taking a hair sample of the woman, Lois Walker, the hair breaking into pieces as he tried to scoop as much as he could into a vial that he placed back in his utility belt. He found a couple of pieces on the ground that appeared to have been missed by the forensics team. That was understandable, the floor had been covered, and was still covered, in what looked like shards of glass.
They moved about the room for another fifteen minutes, the commissioner and the FBI agent carefully maneuvering out of the way of the bodies while taking in a scene unlike any they had ever seen, and were unlikely to ever see again. Hopefully, Gordon thought. Meanwhile, the bat touched things lightly, inspecting them with yet another gadget that Gordon couldn’t identify, but it looked like nothing more than an electric shaver.
Sarah’s teeth chattered, the only other sound besides the hum of the generators. Her hair and the tops of her ears had also collected a small bit of frost in her short time in here. Come to think of it, they all had this cold, wet frost on them, now that Gordon looked. Batman’s dark-blue cowl and antennas were coated, and frost clung to Gordon’s mustache.
The Dark Knight knelt in front of one of six large, silvery barrels at the back of the room. “The HAZMAT teams confirmed those were used to carry the liquid nitrogen in here,” Gordon said. Batman used a hand to wipe away some of the frost, and found that the side had an engraving on it: UN1977. UN numbers were the four-digit numbers used universally to identify hazardous materials for international transport.
“So,” Batman said, standing up, “he’s technically proficient, not just brutal. And he has a source for gaining hazardous materials.”
“Looks th-that way,” said Essen, looking up at the icicles hanging from the ceiling. She moved out of the way, like she thought one of them might fall and impale her.
Batman moved about the room like any detective, infinitely inquisitive and asking simple questions and only ever intrigued when the answers weren’t just as simple. “Who owns this property?” he asked.
“A couple bought it from the old owners just at the downturn,” Gordon said. “The husband thought he could flip it fast, but he couldn’t and he got stuck with it. Had some potential buyers, but they found cockroaches and wanted them good and gone, the whole place treated, before they’d sign anything.”
Essen shivered to herself in a corner. “I h-haven’t seen a cockroach yet.”
“It’s colder in here than it is outside,” Batman said, walking around another frozen body, this one missing its head completely. The forensics team had picked up the shattered remains earlier that day. “Someone moved in here fast. Faster than it took the owners to call in an exterminator. They got to work quickly, bringing in all of this equipment. Normally I would say that in this kind of thing, nobody worked alone, but so far all I’ve seen indicates only a single perpetrator.”
“H-how can you be so sure?”
“I found two more boot prints over there,” he said, gesturing to where a pile of frozen body parts had been shoved into a corner, as though none of them were important any longer. “They match the other three, and they’re all the same size shoe: ten-and-a-half. They also overpronate, especially on the left foot.” He pointed to a pair of the hanging bodies. “When the arms and legs were frozen, they were hacked and pried apart. Look at the angles of each swing. This is more than likely a hatchet of some kind, and someone taking a left-handed batter’s stance to get the right angle. Left-handed people tend to overpronate more on their left foot.” Batman looked at Sarah. “It’s not conclusive, but so far I only see evidence of one man, weighing about two hundred thirty pounds, maybe a bit more.” He added, “And he’s had practice. Probably a doctor of some kind.”
Gordon stepped over to him, avoiding the frightening dead gaze of Lois Walker. “Why do you think he’s a doctor?”
“It may look like these people were simply hacked, but the exactitude of the cut on the femur on this man here,” he said, pointing to one, “and the separation of the shoulder here from the rotator cuff, it’s all got the look of someone who is knowledgeable about the anatomy of these joints. You could’ve hit it with a hammer once it was thoroughly frozen, but that would’ve been messier—even messier than what we see here—and he knew that freezing them could still mean the blood in their bodies stayed plenty warm, and there would’ve been even more of a mess once the blood started spilling, so he made sure they were completely frozen. Doctors know all about controlling blood flow so that you have an easier time working. The bloodier it gets, the more confusing the scene, the floor gets slippery, it squirts and gets in your eyes and on your tools, all that. Mafia hitmen can be very professional, but I don’t think they’d think of that."
Batman thought for a moment, mulling something over.
“But this man was working on a timeframe, so he sped it up, got a little more brutal. Maybe he knew exterminators were coming, or that the property was about to be sold, and his window was closing for having a private, secluded place like this,” he went on. “Our killer made sure that he still froze them thoroughly, but it went from surgical to hacking really fast. In other words, it began as something cold and disconnected, then..."
"His rage built," Gordon said.
"Yes. I believe so."
Gordon and Essen just stood there looking at him, knowing he was right. Gordon had worked with Batman for so many years, he knew that the man was a true detective. He was a profiler, forensic examiner, ballistics specialist, laboratory expert and investigator all rolled into one. “Anything else?”
Batman thought for a moment, then said, “An observation. All the eyelids are missing.” Gordon blinked, then looked around at the bodies who still had heads, and realized with astonishment that the bat was, once again, correct. “You said your forensics people found blood-pressure and adrenaline-pumping systems?” Essen and Gordon both nodded. “It makes sense, then. He kept them awake throughout their torture, made it so they couldn’t pass out, couldn't close their eyes, and, one by one, disassembled them. He either froze off or cut off their eyelids—probably froze them, to keep blood out of their eyes, so that they could see what he did to them and to the others. If he froze them, that means he’s very proficient with the freezing of small human parts, very exact with the tools and the process so that he doesn’t get the whole eyeball.”
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Gordon put his hands in his pockets and looked around at those hanging, frozen faces. He could just imagine this killer, or killers, walking around the room, freezing this piece or that piece, picking off one section of their bodies at a time, making sure they all saw what was being done to them, even if they were so frozen they couldn’t feel it. The horror of seeing one’s body peeled away, methodically and coldly disassembled, it must’ve been something straight out of a nightmare. An absolute nightmare.
“Hemorrhaging, too,” Batman was now saying, just as he’d seemed ready to leave. He looked at the body of Lois Walker, at her neck. “Just below these superficial wounds here—cuts and scrapes, probably from a struggle. You can see just below the frost here, what appear to be ligature marks.”
Essen nodded. “Our people s-s-saw that, too,” she said, her breath coming out in great tufts of white cloud. “Strangulation?” she asked.
“No,” Batman said. “He brought them all here to torture them. Still, that’s a wide bruise, not a rope or anything like that. A hand?”
“That’d be one powerful hand,” Gordon put it.
Batman nodded in agreement. “You have to appreciate the strength of this person,” he said. “There’s a lot here at this scene to take in, and that’s one thing you’ll miss if you let the macabre of it distract you. His strength.” He went quiet, and Gordon didn’t think he would say anything else, but then he added, “Even frozen, these limbs can be hard remove. That is, they become solid blocks of mass, not necessarily brittle. Hacking, pulling and cutting them off would take some time. Not to mention subduing these people to bring them here to begin with would mean this person has power, and determination.”
“The tetrodotoxin is a paralyzing agent, from the pufferfish or something,” Gordon said, running a finger over his mustache, feeling the cold condensation. “That’s probably how he got ’em all.”
“But he had to lug them all around. They come from different places—Berkeley and Brentwood, and the others probably just as random. This place was being sold soon, so he had to round them up quickly, or else keep them subdued someplace else.” Batman looked around the room, as though admiring the work this time. “This person has will.”
Gordon and Sarah both just nodded their silent agreement.
As they started walking out, Sarah already looked better, and had far more pep in her step than when she’d gone into the torture room. The three of them emerged back onto the dark and empty street. Despite the recent upgrades across Gotham, through both governmental work and generous donations from people like Tobias Gracie and Bruce Wayne, this section of the city still hadn’t seen much repair since the so-called “Riddler Riots.” The buildings up and down the street were mostly empty. He had a lot of alone time with his victims here, Gordon thought.
“I trust you’re tracing the sale of the liquid nitrogen?” Batman asked once they were outside.
“Trying to,” Gordon said. “Such large quantities can only have come from industrial use. Of course, it might not have been sold, it might’ve been stolen, which could actually make it even easier to trace it to a source, but not to the thief himself.”
“I want to hear the results on the autopsies immediately,” Batman said. “Especially the infant in there.”
Sarah nodded. “Not a problem. I’ll t-tell Jim immediately, and he c-can update you.”
“There’s something significant about that. They’re all adults except for that one. They all did something to offend the killer, but a baby couldn’t. Which means it probably belongs to one of them. And…”
Gordon nodded. “Right. The baby was probably the child of one of the victims,” he said. “Our perp made the parent watch while he dipped the baby into the liquid nitrogen. Son of a bitch.” He shook his head.
“This person is serious about sharing his pain,” Batman said. “If he’s finished, then it’s over. But if he isn’t finished, or if he’s got something else he wants to say, we need to know. Because it's just getting started."
“So, y-your take is he’s just a l-lone psycho?” Sarah shivered, still trying to hide her ears from the cold by raising her shoulders. “Not a mob hit?”
“Can’t be sure of anything at this stage, but that’s how it feels.”
Gordon had learned to listen to the bat’s instincts. If he “felt” something, then it tended to be correct, or at least close enough that there was little difference. He said, “I guess that’s all we have for you right now, friend. I had them leave the scene as is for you, though it cost me an earful from the coroners.” Jim stuck his hand out, a habit of his whenever he and Batman had gone a while without doing it. It was a friendly reminder that they were still in this thing together, despite all this Breaking Point business, despite everything.
Batman took his hand. Sarah never offered hers, she only kept them buried in her pockets. She said, “I need some warm air.”
They separated, Batman dissolving into the darkness in the alley behind the parking lot. The commissioner said a brief goodbye to Sarah, who looked just as anxious to leave the crime scene as she was to feel heat again. I wonder what bothered her so much about the scene, he thought. Gordon hadn’t seen her shaken up like that, not ever. This was a woman he’d once seen serve a search warrant with on a guy who had two dead children strung up in his basement. Sarah had followed the smell once inside, and had made the discovery.
Was it just the atmosphere of the place that had frightened her, the darkness and the cold and everything? Gordon would give her a few days, and then ask her. If it was something terribly personal, he didn’t want to push it so soon. He knew she’d gone through a lot of changes since their shootout at the Iceberg Lounge, where the Penguin had nearly killed her. Who knew what psychological changes that did to a person? And now with the added responsibility of managing the task force in charge of helping General Kinnear and his U.S. National Guard forces secure Gotham against more homegrown terrorists, and it was easy to see how the stress might get to even the toughest fed.
Before Gordon hopped in his car, he went back to the old Collier Sporting Goods building and made sure he’d remembered to close the door. One of Sarah’s undercover units patrolled by with the window rolled down, and gave a wave to the commissioner, who waved back. A few seconds later, the car was gone, and Gordon was left standing alone in front of the building. He wondered at what all had gone on inside, at the conversations the killer probably had with his victims, at the unholy screams that must’ve come from each of them as they watched pieces of the others come free, and then pieces of themselves. And what must they have thought when they saw the baby put into the liquid nitrogen? he thought. Surely, they knew then that they were all going to die. For when a man does something like that, you know he’s out of the reach of reason.
Gordon shivered, pulled his coat tight to his body, and jogged back to his car. His phone buzzed at his side. No doubt it was his wife. He yearned not only for the warmth of his car, but for Barbara’s, too, and for the look on his children’s faces, and the feeling he knew he would get when he reminded himself that they were okay, they were all right, no harm was coming to them like had come to those inside the building behind him.
* * *
THE NIGHTS WERE colder, true, but it didn’t keep him away from the streets, from the alleys, and from the rooftops. However, cold weather did make his job more difficult in that the really bad people weren’t doing their dangerous deeds out in the open. Rather, they retreated inside, where it was warm and cozy.
The scum of Gotham’s underbelly knew the score when it came to the weather, too. They had started to refer to springtime and summertime as the Season of the Bat, because that’s when everyone wanted to step outside. Conversely, they referred to fall and winter as Hide and Seek. He’d heard them say it, something to the effect of, “Gettin’ cold. Time for Hide an’ Seek.” The unspoken, and unnecessary, part of that expression was just who they were playing Hide and Seek with. It hadn’t been the cops or the feds—at least, not until recently.
The bat sat on his perch, his right foot on the head of the gargoyle, his left foot on the gargoyle’s snarling muzzle. He touched his ear to get a better listen of the radio chatter, and adjusted the volume via the control pad on his left gauntlet. “—units please respond to a two-eight-eight on the Lexington exit of Harvey Dent Highway.” A 288. Lewd conduct. Too minor, and too far away to be his concern. On Pike Street, a military jeep was responding to the 288. The military personnel inside Gotham City were mostly here to augment the police forces. As far as martial law went, it was so far pretty reasonable.
He listened to other channels, picked up a 390—a drunk—and a 459S, which was a silent burglar alarm going off, but that was nineteen blocks away and he heard dispatch say that there were already two cop cars in the area, the new ones with the beefed up engines, better armor and better steering that Wayne Enterprises had donated eight months ago, so he was hardly needed.
So far, Mayor Sharp had proven receptive to both Bruce Wayne’s and Commissioner Gordon’s ideas on control, a stark contrast to the way things were done under the previous administration. Marcellus Walden had been manipulated by forces greater than his understanding, he’d been corrupted and used like a toy without him even realizing the full scope of his crimes, right up until he’d been assassinated by a monster that most people believed was the Joker and Dr. Harleen Quinzel, the “Harley Quinn.”
Things were looking so much better now than they had just a year ago. Sarah Essen had spoken with General Kinnear, and Batman was now unofficially allowed to roam free over the skies of Gotham City, swooping down from the blackness, completely silent thanks to the upgraded Bat Hawk Mk. II, and he could infiltrate virtually anywhere in the city without fear of retribution from the police or feds—that is, unless he did something overt, showing an egregious use of his new long leash.
Criminals were scared, which was good. Many of the gangs had had hundreds of members arrested in the Riddler Riots and were still standing trial for crimes committed a year ago. As Blackgate saw its number of inmates swell, more funding was needed to expand the penitentiary’s size. Bruce Wayne had donated almost four million dollars to this end, but overcrowding was still an issue.
Progress, he thought. For the first time since before the Joker killings. Real, inarguable progress.
But the Batman couldn’t relax, couldn’t let his guard down for anything. His visit to Alexis Street earlier tonight with Gordon and Essen proved that. That child, he thought, thinking of the frozen angel in the tub. She didn’t experience progress. No fairness, no chance at all to survive, only the randomness of who she was born to, and what monster’s hands she ended up in. Batman thought about that, and realized his old friend Harvey might’ve had something to say about that. A flip of a coin, a chance encounter, something her father or mother said to the wrong person, and she was frozen alive as punishment to the parent.
“All units in the vicinity of Grant Park, please respond to a two-four-two on the north end of the park,” said the woman from dispatch. “Caller has identified two males engaged in conflict with a young man who is on the ground but is no longer moving.”
A 242 was assault and battery.
Batman flung himself from the gargoyle, and used his gloves to send the necessary electrical charge through his cape. The SMPs (shape-memory polymers) expanded outward as enough electrical current was poured into the cape to create the necessary heat to solidify the wings. They fanned out, creating the brief but hard jerk that slowed his descent, and then came that second of perceived weightlessness before he finally eased into a steady hang glide.
The transparent lenses of his mask had advanced OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes) controlled by a chip in his helmet’s frame that gave the appearance of 3D images about two feet in front of him. On his HUD (heads-up display), he saw his variometer, which he required to understand his climb and sink rate while gliding.
Grant Park was eight blocks away, and he could make it there even faster by coordinating with the Mk. II. Batman’s transparent visor had a more advanced NUI tech (natural user interface technology), so that he could have an eye-motion controlled screen, allowing him to call upon the helicopter, which these days he kept gliding never too far away. The Mk. II’s own collision-avoidance system ensured that it never slammed into buildings or other aircraft.
A military helicopter patrolled in the east, and another one did the same in the west. Batman spotted a pair of APCs, or armored personnel carriers, moving down Summit Street, which was utterly empty.
Batman didn’t even need to get into the copter, all he had to do was get it low enough so that he could pull out his GTEM gun (Grapnel, Taser and Electromagnetic), switch it to the magnetic grapnel setting, and basically get towed behind the copter, which was on autopilot. He covered the eight blocks in less than two minutes. When he came to the north side of Grant Park, he switched off the magnetic setting and plummeted.
Less than a mile off the ground, the earth was rising up to meet him. He activated his cape again and swooped around to the west, moving from west to north in a parabola. With the flick of an eye, he switched on thermal-imaging, and started scanning. This late at night, and with martial law still demanding a curfew of eleven o’clock in most districts in the city, there weren’t many people out at the park, and it wasn’t difficult at all to locate two red-orange shapes in his lens, both of them standing over another red-orange human-shaped thing on the ground.
Batman rolled his body slightly, banking to the right, correcting his course before flapping his cape behind him and dive-bombing for the earth. Seconds before impact, he activated his cape again, slowing his descent. His audio enhancers locked onto the conversation between the two assailants.
“Yeah, punk! That’s right! Dreaded Sun, ya feel me! Remember us?” one thug was saying.
The second thug was laughing, walking around the downed man, who was trying to crawl with one hand, his other obviously broken. The second thug spit on the victim, who looked like an elderly man. He cackled, “Thought it was safe to go out at night again, huh? Bet ya feel stupid now! Ha-ha!”
“Grant Park ain’t fuh you no more, gramps. You gotta—” Batman put his feet out directly in front of him, and collided with the punk’s spine. The punk had had some kind of club in his hand, but he dropped it as he landed face first on the ground. The bat spun to look at the other thug, who’d drawn a gun fast, like he’d had training, and fired three times at Batman.
He raised his arm to cover his face, and peeked over the arm as the first two bullets that would’ve entered his face first impacted against the Tango armor’s inner plates, which closed the circuit to discharge the suit’s capacitors, dumping incredible energy into the impactor and vaporized almost all of the bullets and turned the rest into a plasma, diffusing the attack to a level that Batman barely even felt it.
The other bullet hit the Dark Knight in the abdomen, but the batsuit also ignored this impactor and the bat rushed forward to grab at the pistol and snatched the slide loose before delivering an elbow to split the thug’s nose. Behind him, he heard the first thug stirring. Batman performed a donkey kick from the Keysi Fighting Method, putting it right in the punk’s chest before turning and landing a pensataq on his chest, putting him back on the ground.
The second thug was back again, and grabbed hold of Batman’s cape, which was a mistake. Batman used the cape like a sarong from the fighting art of Indonesian silat, tugging it hard and wrapping it around the man’s hands, effectively handcuffing him while he head-butted him twice in his already broken nose. Then, with the thug’s hands just coming free from his cape, Batman performed a hip throw, slamming the man against the pavement just beside the victim, who was now mumbling feebly from a mouth oozing blood.
Enraged at the sight of the old man’s plight, Batman spun quickly as he heard the first thug attempting to stand, and side-kicked him in the knee. A loud crunch! signaled the end for the thug, as his leg bent slightly backwards at the joint and he fell over, screaming. His hand went out, looking for the club he’d dropped when the Batman first landed. His fingers had just touched the club when the bat’s right boot landed on his hand, smashing the fingers.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaggghhhhhhhhh!” the punk cried out. Batman produced a pair of handcuffs from his utility belt, and went about snapping them onto the wrists of the two punks before he walked over and surveyed the damage done to the old man.
Sirens. Both ambulances and police cars. They were still far off, but getting closer.
The old man tried to move, tried to say something, but Batman touched him gently on his chest and said, “Try not to move. You’re badly hurt. An ambulance is on the way.” The man’s lips moved, but nothing came out but blood and white air. He was freezing. His face was smashed, teeth were missing, and both eyes were nearly swollen shut as blood cascaded from his forehead, lips, and cheeks.
Batman realized the old man’s hand was reaching for something. He took the man’s hand and squeezed it gently. “I’m not leaving you. And no one is ever going to hurt you like this again. If they try, or if anyone ever harms your family, just find James Gordon. He’ll find me, and that’ll be that.”
He didn’t know why he said that. Maybe it was because the old man’s eyes had started tearing up. Maybe it was because he felt that the old fellow just needed to feel completely and utterly safe. Or, maybe it was the obvious reason, that he, Batman, had witnessed a terrible atrocity earlier tonight, the likes of which he hadn’t seen in years. He’d given the old man this message for the same reason he’d smashed the thug’s hand unnecessarily.
Because it felt good, he thought, nervous about his own realization. Have I been doing this too long? Did that single frozen angel affect me that much?
The sirens were louder now. Finally, the flashing lights appeared at the north end to the park, and they started rushing around with their flashlights bobbing up and down. Batman reached around to the back of his utility belt and grabbed the flare gun, and fired it once into the air. They came running towards him instantly.
Next, using his HUD, Batman called up the Mk. II, which was hovering silently about a hundred feet in the air. The only effect it had on the environment was the wind from the propellers, which pushed the trees about in a gentle breeze.
Just as the cops were within shouting distance, Batman took the GTEM gun from his utility belt and aimed it directly up, into nothing but darkness. He looked down at the old man, and finally let go of his hand. “You’re in good hands now.” He released the trigger, which retracted the cable and pulled him up into the darkness. The cops approaching, and to the old man looking up at him, it must’ve looked as though the bat disappeared into another dimension.
Perhaps they saw the shadow of the Bat Hawk Mk. II up in the sky, its shape blotting out a star or two in the dark sky, but more than likely they saw and heard nothing else as the helicopter gained altitude and turned east.
Batman now sat in the pilot’s seat, inspecting the minor dents in his batsuit where the bullets had practically disintegrated. The thugs had claimed to be part of Dreaded Sun, but there were only two of them, and the Suns had once hunted in large packs. Progress? he wondered. It would have to do.
Thinking of progress made him think of Mayor Quincy Sharp. That had been his one-word campaign slogan: Progress. The former warden of Arkham Asylum had emerged as General Kinnear’s primary candidate for new mayor of Gotham City, after James Gordon had turned him down. An election had been held two months after Walden’s assassination, and Sharp, who’d once wardened Blackgate Penitentiary, as well, was the kind of honorable hardass that Kinnear, and the President of the United States, liked in dire situations such as the one Gotham had suffered through.
With the Mk. II taking him home on autopilot, Batman shut his eyes and indulged in more associative thinking. He hadn’t met General Laurence Foster Kinnear yet, at least, not as Batman. Bruce Wayne had met Kinnear twice, both times during emergency fundraisers for fallen GCPD officers and the families of those that suffered through the riots. Kinnear was a large, stout, barrel-chested man who’d commanded numerous battles in war, had earned himself two Silver Stars, a Purple Heart, and a special seat with Homeland Security for a time. He’d helped bring order to Gothan during the Riddler Riots. Now, he was a liaison between HS, FBI, CIA, NSA and the POTUS himself.
Kinnear was one stoic individual, not the sort to bark orders, but the type to order them coolly, with an ease that garnered respect from those around him, even if they weren’t under his command. He spoke very little, and the general’s handshake had nearly equaled Bruce Wayne’s formidable own when he briefly thanked the billionaire for his contributions. When Bruce Wayne had said, “Not a problem,” Kinnear had turned at once and left the party.
The second time he’d met with Kinnear had been at Wayne Manor, during another charity event held in the ballroom, and this time Dick had been there. The boy had been dressed in the best clothes money could buy, and a couple of teenage girls who’d come with their parents obviously thought they’d met their soul mate, judging by the way they’d looked at him. Dick had tried to mingle, but had drifted over to General Kinnear and Bruce when they’d started talking.
Kinnear had just been discussing the troop withdrawals promised by the President, and Bruce had been about to ask what the set dates were for the withdrawals when Dick had walked up and asked, “Weren’t you guys supposed to be gone before now?”
The general had turned slowly to look at the youth, eyed him coldly for a moment, and then said, “It won’t be long now, son.”
“What’re you waiting for?”
“It’s…complicated. We can’t just leave Gotham City wide open for infection from the crime syndicates like it was before.”
“Like Boss Zucco?”
“Who?”
When Bruce had seen the troubled look on Dick’s face when he realized that General Kinnear didn’t have the foggiest clue who he was talking about, the billionaire had cleared his throat and excused himself, pulling Dick by the shoulder and guiding him away from the general.
“Let me go talk to him!” Dick had argued.
“About what, Dick? Huh? For god’s sakes, he’s a general, he sees the major plays not the pawns.”
“Tony Zucco’s not a pawn, Bruce! He’s a crime lord taking over where Falcone, Maroni, Nashton, Cobblepot, and all the others left off! He killed my—!”
“I know what he did, Dick. You don’t have to remind me.”
“You said we were gonna do something about it!”
“I am. I have…resources.”
“What resources? Tell me.” But Bruce hadn’t. He couldn’t. Which left Dick feeling like he had been lied to. The bulk of the information he’d been gathering over the last year pertained to operations Zucco was running, yet he was proving as elusive as the Riddler had been.
He’s a boy, Batman reminded himself. A smart one, but he still thinks the world can drop everything and attend his need for…
Well, there was no other word for it, vengeance. He’d been silently hoping and praying that Dick didn’t start thinking the way that the young Bruce Wayne had once done, but it seemed inevitable. It’s a phase, he told himself, knowing it was more to convince himself than a need to understand the real truth.
He thought about Dick’s abrupt interruption of General Kinnear at the charity ball. Thinking on this, he considered the troop withdrawal promised by the POTUS and General Kinnear later this month. It was supposed to start at the end of October, and carry on steadily until spring, when Gotham City would finally be lifted from all semblance of martial law, and full power would be returned to the city’s administrators. So far, General Kinnear and the President had kept their promise, and more than five hundred National Guard troops had been sent home last week, ahead of the December start date.
The FBI, though, had made no promise to send their Breaking Point task force anywhere else. Indeed, it seemed like their three new clandestine offices in Gotham might be here to stay, and Breaking Point might only melt into the existing system, get renamed something official-sounding like the “Gotham Bureau of Investigations,” and then be a permanent part of law enforcement in Gotham City. That was fine, as long as they didn’t renege on their deal with the Batman, he had no problem with that.
More associative thinking. Thinking about Breaking Point caused him to think about Sarah Essen, and thinking about her made him think about meeting with her and Gordon earlier, and then of course about the frozen infant. Something kept nagging at him, causing him to return to that snow angel’s face, suspended forever in tranquil dreams. Then, Batman’s right hand reflexively squeezed shut, and for a moment he realized he was imagining his hand around the killer’s throat.
This wasn’t like him. He usually had greater control than this. His mind leapt everywhere. He thought about the thug whose hand he’d just broken, and the old man’s hand that he’d just held with care. Both of those incidents were rather extreme for him, in one direction or another. I could’ve kicked the club away. He was incapacitated. Why did I decide to stomp his hand?
Then, he thought about the Joker and his Harley Quinn, where they’d gone to, and why they’d been so quiet. That was frustrating enough itself.
Then, all at once, his mind went unbidden to the old man, face smashed, feeble hands reaching for someone, anyone. Then, he closed his eyes and thought about the frozen infant. He hadn’t wanted it to go there, but it did anyway. “It’s important to know why things trouble us,” his father had once said to him. Or had it been Alfred? It didn’t matter, because the lesson was the same. It meant Batman needed to know why he was so troubled by the sight of the infant.
He closed his eyes, took a deep, deep breath through his nose, held it for ten seconds, and then let it out slowly through his lips. He did this several times, running through a meditation technique called “small orbit” that Cassandra had taught him. He imagined energy collecting behind his navel, three finger lengths behind his belly button, where Eastern philosophers believed the soul resided. Mentally, he imagined moving this energy down to his groin, then around to the back of his hip, up his spine, to the top of his head, down through his mouth via the tongue, through his chest and finally back into his navel.
Batman conducted small orbit several times, setting his mind at ease.
While he did this, other thoughts came to him. Progress…changes…the old man…Alfred…his parents…
…the snow angel…
…the Joker…Harleen Quinzel…
…the boy…Dick Grayson…
Batman opened his eyes. All at once, he knew himself. He felt the connection that his mind had made. A child. An innocent child. On some level, Batman knew he could relate to it because of what happened to his parents. On another level, he knew what changes, what progress, he had made, not just with Gotham’s scum, but with the boy, Dick Grayson.
He never allowed himself to think about family when he was out on the prowl at night, but now that he was almost safely home, he could honestly admit to himself that things had changed for reasons he hadn’t previously considered.
I’m a parent now, he thought, the stark realization dawning on him. He thought about the chess matches he’d been setting up with Dick on a regular basis. He hadn’t gotten terribly close with the boy, and Dick was obviously headstrong and occasionally very ornery, recently the lack of action in the streets had given Bruce a bit more time than usual to consider other things.
Without him knowing it, Bruce Wayne had started creeping in on Batman’s world. The frozen infant had affected him because it was a dead child, something small and innocent that had been trusted to someone else’s care, and had been killed directly in front of that person. Are these the feelings of a vengeful parent? he wondered. He wondered at how life had once again turned it all around on him. Once, he’d been the child of a murdered man and woman, angry at the adults around him who couldn’t do anything, only tell him it was going to be all right. Then, he’d become the adult for the boy of murdered parents, saying the same things he’d found so frustrating and empty. “It’s going to be all right. You’re going to get through this.” Now, he was the father, looking out for an innocent placed into his care.
How irresponsible is it of me to go out every night like this, still putting my life on the line, when the boy’s at home without parents? If Bruce Wayne died, what would happen to Dick Grayson? Orphaned twice? How awful! It was the first time he’d really considered the implications of that, so absorbed had he been in his work and in keeping his secret from the boy.
I have to end this, he suddenly realized. Many times he’d thought of quitting, and each time there had been reasons to stay on the job. Good reasons. But now, things were under better control. General Kinnear, Special Agent Essen and Commissioner Gordon were all pulling together, pooling their resources, and finishing what the Batman had started.
It could be time for the Batman to retire.
* * *
SPECIAL AGENT SARAH Essen had plenty of time that night to think of what she was going to say to her direct superior. Only, she hadn’t quite conjured up the courage to say it yet.
The phone was in her hand, and the computer on her desk was switched on. She shut her eyes, knowing that she was only delaying the inevitable. She couldn’t get the images out of her head. It could just be a coincidence, she told herself. You might just be getting ahead of yourself. But Sarah Essen had long ago learned to listen to her intuition, both the feminine and cop variety.
The images of the frozen bodies were seared into her mind, and she wasn’t going to shake them, not tonight. Please let it be a coincidence, she thought as she started dialing. The phone started ringing. Please, please, please let it be.
Someone picked up. “This is Mosley,” said the director, sounded as groggy as Sarah felt.
“Director Mosley, it’s Special Agent Sarah Essen down here in Gotham. I’m sorry to wake you so late, sir, but I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t important.”
“Essen…yeah, yeah, what’s the sitrep?”
“Sir, I’ve just visited a crime scene firsthand. I had no idea it was…that is, it was described to me earlier by members of my task force, but I didn’t see it myself until just now,” Sarah said, stopping herself before she went into full babble mode. “It’s, uh, it’s difficult to say exactly what I saw. There were bodies, frozen, and in a very ritualistic fashion. Um, looks like a mob hit, but neither I nor our Black Informant thinks so.” Black Informant had become the FBI code word for Batman, at least in the upper echelons, so that they could speak freely without worry of people finding out they were supporting a vigilante loose in the streets of Gotham City.
“Out with it, Essen,” said Director Mosley. “What is it?”
“Sir, I need to speak directly to Special Agent Raymond Conroy. I haven’t spoken with him in over a year. He changed his number and I don’t have his new one.”
“Conroy? I know him. What’s this about?”
So, Sarah just said it. Jim’s gonna kill me for telling someone else before I tell him. “Sir, I think I may have just seen evidence linking this killing with his Mr. Freeze.”