Keeping safehouses inside the city would have been a lot more difficult if Minerva and Athena had shown any intelligence… or guts… in how they used their powers. The combination of superspeed and supersenses meant they should have been able to locate her along with any ongoing criminal activity inside the city limits with a quick sweep, but while they occasionally used those powers to their fullest extent to canvass a particular area when they were looking for something specific, they drew the line at indiscriminate citywide surveillance.
Why? It wasn’t like they ever bothered with search warrants…
Whatever. Their folly, her gain.
After making sure she wasn’t being followed, Rhyme had retreated to one of her favorite little hidey-holes in a nice-ish neighborhood on the outskirts of town. Singleton had once been the sort of insular enclave where everybody knew everybody and there was a strong sense of togetherness and community. Then rising property values and city taxes had started to drive the older residents out. Some of the neighborhoods became gentrified as white families fled the inner city. Others fell into disrepair and disrepute. In both cases, neighbors became strangers and people stopped looking next door to fulfill their need for camaraderie.
Rhyme’s house in Singleton had a lawn service come by once a week to care of the yard. They were billed automatically from an account that would never be linked to her, as it had never been used for anything more exciting than paying the gardeners. The lights were on a timer. During her periods of freedom, she had used to make a point of dropping in on her properties and making small changes to keep up the illusion that somebody lived there. She’d quickly concluded that in most places, nobody cared enough to notice.
Just as long as the lawn was kept nice and neat.
“Hey, kids… did you miss me?” Rhyme announced to the darkness as she entered the house. She turned on the lights, and looked around the room. Everything was just as she’d left it, the very picture of insular suburban tranquility. She headed down to the basement and found it similarly untouched. Even the pair of heads she’d left on her workbench had barely decomposed any further.
“And how are my favorite two FBI agents?” Rhyme asked them. “No complaints Agent Moulder, Agent Skully? Good to hear!”
She knocked the mummified remains aside and then went to the three-drawer filing cabinet. She opened the top drawer. It had alphabetical dividers with nothing behind them for the first fifteen letters, and then a series of file folders which stretched through the entire second drawer and most of the third drawer under P.
Within that letter, there were four sub-categories: “Plans To Destroy The World”, “Plans To Save The World”, “Plans To Take Over The World”, and “Pornography”. Rhyme rifled through the first group until she found a particularly thick folder and pulled it out, then began laying out the charts and diagrams on her workbench.
“To think I almost had it within my grasp,” she said. “And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling duly appointed officers of the law.” She sighed and rolled up the plans she was studying. “If I go for the rock again and I fail, one of those dunderheads at DELPHI might start wondering what’s so special about it,” she said. “If I succeed, of course, none of that will matter, but failure… ugh, I hate second-guessing myself like this. There just isn’t any point in making further plans until I’ve dealt with the irritating improbable Officer Seven. Break out your Junior Psycho Disguise Kits, kiddies,” she said to the shattered skulls at her feet. “We’re going undercover!”
A flamboyant supervillainess with a reputation for over-the-top gestures like Rhyme was an unlikely chameleon, but it wasn’t that hard to get such a reputation while still having an unnoticed facility for subtlety. The fact that the zany atrocities were easier to notice and stuck in people’s minds much longer helped. The advantage of committing crimes in greasepaint and fetish gear was that when people heard you were on the loose, that’s what they looked for.
The news tedia, as she thought of them, were flashing photos of her unmasked all over the place… but institutional lighting tended to have a distorting effect on one’s face, and Rhyme had carefully cultivated a whole separate set of facial expressions for when she was going out incognito. Neutral expressions that weren’t blank masks. Smiles that didn’t make small children cry. Using them gnawed at her soul, but it was a necessary sacrifice.
Rhyme’s mother had been a dark-skinned woman with features that were a blend of the Mycenaean Amazons and the South American tribes the Spaniards unwittingly named in their honor. Her father had been the product of the fabled American melting pot, heavily flavored by the northern European stock so prominent in the American heartland. Her own features were somewhat dark-complected, but she could pass for just about any race if she adorned herself with just the right suggestive touches. The human mind loved its categories, and it positively leapt at the chance to shove whatever it encountered into a tiny little box.
Every time the news mentioned her mother and semi-siblings, the minds of listeners would shade their memories of Rhyme’s mug shot a bit darker. Every time they mentioned her father and her Everett family kin, they’d shade her lighter.
Rhyme was counting on Dear Cousin Evie’s influence to keep the news from hammering home their relationship. The day after her escape from Dunwich, she needed to be invisible in order to stalk her prey through the city, and that meant Caucasian. She dyed her hair… not platinum blonde, as that would only emphasize her skin tone, but a sandy color. She dressed herself in clothes from Ancient Armada, complete with a visor cap and sunglasses. Luckily, it was a bright and sunny day, or else she’d look like somebody trying to disguise themselves.
Finding Officer Seven’s home address had not been difficult. In fact, she’d taken care of that little detail before she’d been sprung. Staking out a cop’s apartment was a bit risky… nobody recognized surveillance techniques like somebody who was trained in them. Still, Rhyme felt confident she could escape Karen’s notice so long as she didn’t do anything foolish.
After all, it was very rarely in anybody’s best interests to stumble across a vengeful villainess. That little extra “something” that Karen Seven depended upon to keep her safe out on the mean streets would thus also keep Rhyme safe, at least until she decided what her next move was and went to take it.
Other people tended to discount them, but Rhyme made it a point to never underestimate a probability manipulator. In her considered opinion, trying to estimate their impact in the first place was a fool’s errand. The universe was an unpredictable place, and Rhyme liked it that way. She simply preferred it to be unpredictable in the same old predictable ways, and not on anybody’s behalf. That kind of blatant favoritism was just downright unfair.
Her brain was advanced enough to play the “Let’s Show Everybody How Smart We Are By Calculating The Odds That Something Will Happen” game. She was also smart enough to know how pointless that was. Even if the odds against something happening were up in the stratosphere, it still could happen, and that was all the wiggle room some powers needed to throw a perfectly sound plan out of whack.
She had come up with some rather nebulous ideas about how to kill somebody like Karen Seven. It seemed to her that the key was to contrive a set of circumstances in which the universe felt the individual who was being so protected would be better off dead. Certain of Rhyme’s long-term plans would probably accomplish that in an incidental way, but she couldn’t escape the feeling that Seven’s ongoing existence would make those plans more difficult, now that their paths had crossed.
There was no reason behind this, only intuition… but Rhyme knew well the limits of where reason could take you.
Karen Seven had to be dealt with. To do that effectively, Rhyme needed to know more about her… who she was, how she thought, and… most importantly… how her power worked.
“So, this is the rock star girlfriend,” Karen said, holding out a hand to Lily Binder as she joined her and Stacey Bishop at the Old Stationhouse, a cafe built inside the disused Littleton police station. “Go to any wild parties last night?”
“That’s all behind us now,” Stacey said, leaning over and putting her arm over Lily’s shoulder protectively. “Lily’s making a clean break.”
“Yeah, getting not-arrested by your partner was probably the best thing that could have happened to me,” Lily said.
“You two order yet?” Karen asked, sliding into the booth.
“Just coffee,” Stacey said. “We thought we’d wait. I’m trying to teach this one some manners.”
“I can’t believe I’m about to have an honest-to-God breakfast, and while the sun is shining. I’ve been pulling third shift so long, I’d almost forgotten what it looked like. I’ve been chasing drug dealers and talking down angry shirtless reality show rejects since my first week on the force, and now that I’m the media darling du jour they’ve got me trolling the ‘burbs. And they’ve saddled me with one of the most experienced detectives in the department for back-up.”
“What, you don’t enjoy my company?” Stacey asked.
“Oh, I do. But I would have appreciated it even more when I was busting meth dealers.”
“You know, I’ve been arguing against the shift bid system since I started,” Stacey said.
“You think the more experienced cops should get stuck with the graveyard?” Karen asked.
“I think the ideal would be to keep a better mix of raw and proven officers on duty at all times,” Stacey said. “I joined the force right after the purge and there weren’t enough experienced cops to mentor us rookies. It was sink or swim all the way… and believe me, it wasn’t pretty when somebody sank. Who’s your regular partner, again?”
“Dare,” she said. “Jason Dare.”
“I don’t think I know him,” Stacey said. “Another newbie?”
“No, he’s been in the uniform so long I think it’s starting to grow into him,” Karen said. “He’s just… well…”
“He doesn’t have your back?”
“Oh, he totally does,” Karen said. “He’s just very… careful. I mean, you do things by the book, and that’s good. The book’s there for a reason, right?”
“Right.”
“But he doesn’t just go by the book, he spends fifteen minutes reading the footnotes on the footnotes before he wants to move.”
“Let me guess,” Stacey said. “Every five minutes he mentions how much longer he has until he can put in for a desk job.”
“You know, I don’t think he’s ever mentioned that, come to think of it.”
“Well, trust me, he’s thinking it,” Stacey said. “I know the type. Guys like him can’t wait until they get off the street, and good riddance to them.”
“Well, he’s off the street now,” Karen said. “He spent seventy-two hours under observation at Dunwich after getting exposed to Rhyme’s blood, and then was put on paid leave while he undergoes counseling.”
Karen nodded.
“I can only…”
She was interrupted by a loud clattering as the sculpture Lily had built with her fork, spoon, saucer, and empty coffee cup came clattering down.
“Oops!” Lily said, sheepishly.
“I’m sorry, are we boring you?” Stacey asked.
“Sorry,” Lily said, sheepishly. “But I didn’t really have anything to add to the conversation, and I’ve… well, I’ve got a lot of nervous energy today. I kind of missed a work-out last night,” she said to Karen.
“Right,” Karen said.
“She’s going to have to get used to a lot of quiet nights at home,” Stacey said, turning towards Lily and patting her on the jittery knee. “Because from now on…”
She froze. Her face was still turned towards Lily, but her eyes had just flicked across the plate glass window beside her.
“Karen, are you carrying?” she asked.
“Yes,” Karen said. “Why?”
“Power walker,” Stacey said. “Across the street, she stopped to fiddle with her MP3 player… don’t turn and stare.”
“What?” Karen asked, surreptitiously glancing out the window. She saw the woman Stacey was talking about, holding some sort of music player or PDA or smart phone with headphones in her ears. Karen couldn’t see anything suspicious… though the LED on the side of the device was quite prominent, even across a street.
“That’s her!” Stacey said, grabbing her jacket and throwing money down on the table.
“Who?” Lily asked.
“Rhyme!” Stacey said. “Call it in, Seven… I’m going after her. Lily, go back to the house.”
“Rhyme? In broad daylight?” Karen said. “Are you sure?”
“I noticed she’d been standing there, and then she turned her head and tilted it up… I’ve been seeing her sneering face in my dreams for a week. I recognized her chin, the shape of her jaw. It’s her.”
“You can’t engage her,” Karen said.
“She’s right there,” Stacey said. “And whatever she’s doing, she’s not even looking at us. I’m just going to get a little closer, get a positive ID, and then blow her brains out.”
“…not even looking at us,” Stacey’s voice said in Rhyme’s ear. The miniature laser surveillance system was working like a peach. Less peachy was the fact that fate had arranged for Officer Seven to be eating breakfast with a belligerent moron who just happened to be a skilled observer, and who… it seemed… just happened to be dating one of the Hex Kittens.
Rhyme had always made a point of avoiding the Kittens, when she could… for much the same reason that she tried to avoid the lucky ones. Rhyme could make life chaotic enough all on her lonesome.
Still, she had some advantages. They didn’t know that she was onto them, Bulldog Bishop—which wasn’t quite what they actually called her—was trying to sideline the ones with powers, and … most importantly… she was Rhyme.
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