The Richard C. Battle Center housed Nebula City’s 1st Precinct, as well as the bulk of the bureaucracy that supported the entire police force. Portions of the heavily fortified structure had once been a prison, and before that a county courthouse had stood on the spot. As far as the records went back, the lot on which the Battle Center stood had always been used in the pursuit of justice in one form or another.
In modern times, it was the jewel in the crown of Nebula City’s police force. The captain of the 1st was, by virtue of the municipal code, also the deputy chief of police for the city. The current holder of that office, Larry Zarbrucker, was considered by many to be a living representation of the 3 C’s the NCPD were supposed to embody: competent, courteous, and clean.
After an escaped villainess effectively paralyzed the force with a multi-pronged chemical attack, the “competent” part of the equation was being called into question by those in the halls of power, and worse, the media.
“It’s the God damned doughnuts,” Chief Vic Wychowski said to Larry Zarbrucker where they huddled in the otherwise empty conference room. A corrugated cardboard cup of tea sat on the table in front of him, untouched. There was no coffee to be had anywhere in the building. “You can forget all about the gas attacks and the drugged coffee, because I guarantee you everybody else will… but a hundred years from now, people will still be talking about how the entire NCPD was defeated by doughnuts.”
“The independent panel’s recommending we put out a blanket prohibition on outside food deliveries to all precinct houses as well as a recommendation to all personnel to only eat meals prepared by themselves or a spouse while on duty,” Zarbrucker said. “Obviously a second attack of this magnitude is unlikely, but the question on everybody’s lips is going to be what we’re doing to prevent it, anyway.”
“Bunch of God damned vultures,” Wychowski said. “I don’t see why we we’re alone in the pillory on this. The doughnut shops obviously slipped up big time. Why isn’t anybody baying after them?”
“Actually, the share price of Krusty Kream has already taken a beating since the markets opened,” Zarbrucker said. “Apollo’s Coffee only went down an eighth.”
“What did I tell you? Because we’re cops, the doughnuts are the only part of the story that sticks,” Wychowski grumbled. “Well, we might as well get this over with.”
Zarbrucker stuck his head out the conference room and said, “We’re ready in here now.”
Two men and two women filed in past him.
“I think you all know Captain Larry Zarbrucker, the deputy chief,” Wychowski said as they took their seats. “We want to keep this meeting tight, so I’ll just introduce everybody. This is Detective Lieutenant Stacey Bishop, Dr. Norman Lascomb from the asylum, Eva Miller…”
“Mueller,” she corrected.
“…Mueller, from the mayor’s office, and Mark Richland from the press office. The agenda of this meeting: what the hell happened, and what the hell are we gonna do about it?”
“Why isn’t the chief of detectives here?” Mueller asked.
“Manderson burned himself with a pot of coffee during the Big Sleep,” Wychowski said. “The Detective Lieutenant will be acting in his stead.”
“Was she really the highest ranking member of the detective division available?” Mueller asked.
“She’s the best,” Zarbrucker said. “She’d be here even if Manderson was, too. He’d have insisted on it.”
“I know why you’re objecting to me,” Bishop said. “Or rather, I can think of two possible reasons. In either case, what I do on my own private personal time is just that: my own, private, and personal.”
“Until the news media gets a hold of it and runs with it,” Mueller said. “The mayor’s office was asked to comment on why the city’s limited police power was being wasted on harrassing celebrities…”
“Bishop gave a nice lady who’d had one too many a ride home from the bar,” Wychowski said. “Everything else is just a load of garbage.”
“Garbage alone can be a deadly weapon in the hands of the media,” Mueller noted. “I think you’re underestimating that.”
“Why do you think we’ve got our press agent here?” Wychowski countered. “On that note, Mark, what can you tell us?”
“They’re calling it ‘The Big Sleep’,” Mark Richland said. “The papers are lining up against us. The Observer ran a photo of an officer zonked out in the front seat of his patrol car with the caption ‘Police Dept. Asleep at the Wheel?’ The national news is being a little kinder, treating it as a wide scale terrorist attack and focusing more on the lack of casualties or significant damage.”
“So, instead of hapless boobs we’re just helpless victims?” Detective Lieutenant Bishop asked rhetorically. “Beautiful.”
“It’s interesting to me that there were no casualties, though,” Zarbrucker said. “Rhyme could have just as easily poisoned everybody as put us to sleep. In fact, it probably would have been easier to pull off a lethal dose of… whatever she hit us with… than come up with something that would knock out the three hundred pound sides of beef as easily as the welterweights without anybody getting an overdose.”
“Well, uh, yes,” Dr. Lascomb said. “Ms. Henderson is a…”
“Fuck is Ms. Henderson?” Wychowski interrupted.
“Myra A. Henderson,” Zarbrucker said. “It’s Rhyme’s legal name. It’s an…”
“Yeah, yeah, I know that,” Wychowski said. “Just never heard anybody call her ‘Ms. Henderson’ before. Kind of jarring. Makes her sound like a school marm, or something.”
“We try not to indulge the fantasies of our patients by using the bizarre nicknames that society foists upon them,” Dr. Lascomb said. “Although in… Myra’s… case, it’s debatable that anyone could force anything on her that she didn’t want. In any event, outright poisoning would probably have struck her as crude, for the very reasons you mentioned. It would have required no artistry. She even seems to have gone out of her way to prevent accidental deaths by making the sleep preceded by a period of increasing drowsiness. I’d chalk this up to pride, as well.”
“How so?” Zarbrucker asked.
“If Rhyme kills somebody, she damn well wants it to be on purpose,” Bishop said.
“Crudely put, but essentially, yes,” Lascomb said. “There’s also a theory that’s been floating around the halls of the hospital, but it’s a bit… well, I’ll say it’s grim speculation at best.”
“We’re all ears, doc,” Wychowski said when the doctor seemed hesitant to say any more.
“Well, the theory that’s been put forth–by some people–is that the only reason she’d have worked so hard to avoid casualties now is if she had something ‘even better’–not my phrase, by the way–planned for later.”
“God damn,” Wychowski said, shivering in his seat at the way the doctor had said ‘even better’.
“She wasn’t too picky about killing anybody who got in her way at the museum,” Zarbrucker said.
“Well, they were in her way,” Bishop noted. “You’ll notice she didn’t use any ‘artistry’ taking them out, she just hit a few with her crossbow and moved on. She only started playing games with Officer Seven because her goal was at hand.”
“Myra is very goal-oriented,” Lascomb admitted. “You can see how selective she was in who she freed.”
“Phreakshow, Macavity, the Adverteaser, and Psychout,” Zarbrucker reported. “Of the four, only Macavity is back in custody.”
“And he surrendered himself as soon as he saw the morning papers,” Wychowski added, chuckling ruefully. “Was ready to make a full confession, if only to make sure he got his due. It seems he just couldn’t stand the idea that Rhyme was getting all the credit for his master plan.”
“I’m missing something here,” Mueller admitted.
“Macavity’s real name is Wilson Pullman,” Zarbrucker explained. “He’s a low-level clairvoyant/precog who used to work off and on with the force, helping us pinpoint crimes. At some point, though, his ‘gift’ kicked into high gear and drove him completely round the bend. He decided the only way he could know all the details of the crimes first hand was if he’d pulled them off himself. He started styling himself as a crime lord… ironically, he still gives us nearly as much information on crime in the city, but now it comes in the form of cryptic clues that are supposed to taunt us with his superior intellect.”
“So why the name ‘Macavity’? That sounds like he should be drilling holes in teeth or something.”
“It’s from a song, about a master criminal who’s responsible for all the crimes in town,” Zarbrucker explained. “But he’s so sneaky that he’s never actually caught at the scene of the crime.”
“Ah, I see,” Mueller said, though the look on her face suggested that she still didn’t quite get the connection.
“So, she sprung the Nuisance Squad instead of the big guns, like Straightjacket or King of Pain,” Wychowski said to Dr. Lascomb. “What’s that supposed to tell us?”
“Nuisance Squad?” Mueller interjected before the doctor could answer. “Is that a team?”
“You really don’t know much about villainy in Nebula City, do you?” Wychowski said.
“I work in the mayor’s office,” Mueller replied.
Wychowski coughed into his hand.
“Well, the first thing you need to know is that we categorize costumed villains into three levels,” Zarbrucker said. “They used to just be called 1, 2, and 3, but somewhere along the way they picked up nicknames: Nuisance, Menace, and Threat. The Nuisance guys are the ones that feel compelled to paint every blue thing in the city orange, or whatever. They do a lot of incidental property damage, but they’re usually not looking to hurt anybody. The menaces are mostly career crooks that just happen to put on a costume. They rob banks, take hostages, and hire out as muscle to the more organized criminals. The Threat level villains are the real deal. They’re the ones looking to hurt, kill, or do enough property damage to level a city block.”
“And let me guess,” Eva said. “Rhyme would be a Threat.”
“Myra’s not on any level that we can measure,” the psychologist said. “In a lot of areas.”
“You sound like you’re a real fan,” Wychowski said.
“It’s dangerous to underestimate her,” Lascomb said. “I wonder if your Officer Seven knows how lucky she really is. In any case, she chose four patients whose peculiar pathologies and powers would result in an ongoing diversion. Those four men may be ‘nuisances’ in the sense that they don’t pose much real danger to anybody but themselves, but controlling minds and predicting the future are nothing to sneeze at. We still have only the most rudimentary idea how Hoffman Lewis–the man you call Adverteaser–does what he does. If Pullman hadn’t turned himself in, he could have used his visions to evade capture almost indefinitely while tying up emergency services with true but misleading tips. He’s done it before.”
“And that’s to say nothing of Phreakshow playing merry hell with the phone lines,” Wychowski added. “Thank God he didn’t crack the cellular networks last night, or we wouldn’t have been able to pull in as many off-duty officers as we did.”
“Quite,” Lascomb said. “The point is, Myra was equally invested in attaining her goal and not causing undue harm to the police or the greater community. Were I a younger man, I would probably assume that this represented progress towards a cure. Now, I’m not sure what to think.”
“How is it exactly that she was able to escape unnoticed?” Zarbrucker asked.
“We’re assuming she had outside help,” Lascomb said. “We’d grown suspicious of her behavior over the past weeks… well, months… but she’s kept in a sealed room and it’s rare for anybody to have direct contact with her.”
“What exactly constitutes suspicious behavior for a nutbar on the order of ‘Myra’?” Wychowski asked.
“See, that was exactly our problem,” Lascomb said. “One of the orderlies put it best: she wasn’t behaving any more erratically than normal, but it was a different sort of erratic. How do you quantify something like that? She was moving a little more stiffly and clumsily than normal, talking aloud seemingly at random and ignoring attempts to converse with her… but while this behavior was new, it wasn’t any more outlandish than what she’s done in the past. She’s gone catatonic for months, carried on conversations with imaginary beings, or invented whole new personalities for herself… usually out of boredom or an attempt to provoke someone to come into her room and intervene. There’s literally nothing she can do to harm herself, so we usually just let those things play themselves out. We all wondered what she was up to, but it never occured to any of us that it was anybody–anything–other than Myra herself in the cell.”
“So what exactly was it?” Bishop asked.
“A mannequin,” Lascomb said. “A dummy.”
“I read that, yeah,” Zarbrucker said. “But don’t you mean a robot?”
“No,” Lascomb said. “No metal parts. Nothing but plastic through and through, but permeated with some substance that appeared to be animating it.”
“Any idea what that substance was?” Zarbrucker asked.
“We have a fully equipped laboratory, but we were only able to determine that it was organic in nature before the dummy and all samples we’d taken from it were confiscated by Department 4B,” Lascomb said. “I’m sure they’ve completed their own analysis on it, if you’d care to petition them for the information.”
“Yeah, I’ll start holding my breath,” Wychowski said.
“This is great, good stuff,” Mueller said. “There’s a lot of information to work with here, it seems. The key question–the thing the people, and thus, the mayor, are going to want to know–is, what are you going to do?”
“We’re going to investigate, and take whatever steps are appropriate,” Zarbrucker said.
“Of course you will,” Mueller said. “But in the mean time, what else?”
“What else would you have us do?” Zarbrucker asked.
“Hey, I’m here in a purely advisory role,” Eva Mueller said. “I just hope you’re more willing to listen to my advice than the mayor is.”
“We’re always willing to listen,” Zarbrucker said.
“I’m glad to hear you say that. My most immediate recommendation was that Wychowski be asked to step down or be removed from his post and let you take command of the department moving forward,” Mueller said. “His Honor shot that down, unfortunately.”
“What?” Wychowski asked, choking.
“How do you imagine this would have gone down differently if I had been chief instead of Vic?” Zarbrucker asked her more calmly.
“Well, for one thing, I would have recommended you be removed instead of him,” Mueller said. “Obviously, this kind of foul-up is bigger than any one person, but the important thing is to show the public we’re taking decisive, even drastic action.”
“As if banning patrol cars from drive-through windows isn’t drastic enough,” Wychowski murmured.
“Don’t underestimate the value of a symbolic gesture,” Mueller said.
“The value of a symbolic gesture is that it lets us get on with doing the real job without everybody looking over our shoulders demanding results that may be slow in coming,” Zarbrucker said. “Making the most experienced member of the force a scapegoat’s only going to make our job harder.”
“In the same night that the police force was so quickly and completely incapacitated, the city had a giant robot attack…”
“Powered armor,” Zarbrucker corrected.
“…that was taken care of by a pair of out-of-town heroes,” Mueller continued. “There was a rash of petty crimes and vandalism as the word spread, a woman was burned to death…”
“That’s the first I’m hearing of this,” Bishop said. “Do we know who it was?”
“A Jane Doe, probably a streetwalker,” Zarbrucker said.
“Probably,” Mueller said. “But until that’s confirmed she’s a taxpaying citizen.”
“Hookers pay taxes,” Wychowski said. “Sometimes they even vote.”
“Look, the point is that while you were all sleeping, superheroes took care of the powered whatsit… and as we speak, superheroes are rounding up the other escapees,” Mueller said. “If you don’t do something big, the editorial pages are going to be full of people wondering why we even have a police department.”
“And the fact that two of our own brought down Rhyme just gets lost in the shuffle,” Wychowski said. “Mark, how are we playing that up?”
“Well, people love an underdog, and a rookie’s almost as good,” Richland said. “I made sure everybody got a copy of Officers Seven and Dare’s bios. Hers is too short to have any dirt, and he’s just such a typical, all-American golden boy. The only paper that lead with that story was the Herald… and of course, that’s going to be chalked up to their publisher’s anti-mask bias.”
“We just need to make sure the story doesn’t end there, then,” Wychowski said. “Let Stormfront mop up the schmucks she sprung… Rhyme was our baby, and we’re going to put her to bed. That’s a great symbolic gesture, and it’s all the better for not being fucking symbolic. Now, because of Seven’s report, we have a general idea what she was after…”
“That gallery was full of space rocks,” Zarbrucker said. “We’ve requested an inventory from the museum, along with an analysis on which specimens might be rare or unusual, but they’re in almost as much disarray this morning as we are. It’ll take some time.”
“It’s a city museum,” Wychowski noted. “Maybe the mayor’s office would like to help us light a fire under some butts and get some better cooperation?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Mueller said.
“Never mind that Rhyme herself’s already in the bag,” Wychowski said. “We find out what she was after, the headline is ‘NCPD Cracks Case’.”
“That sounds like a plan,” Zarbrucker said. “I’ll meet with the captains later today. Bishop, you can brief Manderson and help him put together a team of investigators to work the museum angle. Talk to Officer Seven, too. See if there’s anything she might have overlooked in her report, anything Rhyme might have said or done that would shed light on her motive. We need to know which rock she was after, and what she wanted it for.”
“That’s not going to happen,” a man in a hunter green suit said from the conference room door. Wychowski, Mueller, Lascomb, and Richland all jumped in their seats. No one had even heard the door open.
“Who the hell are you?” Wychowski demanded.
“My name is Agent Will Thompson,” the stranger said, “and I’m afraid all matters pertaining to the museum and its meteorite collection have just been classified 4B.”
Interlude: The Adverteaser
Minerva Wisdom wheeled high over the city, focusing her telescopic vision on the billboards and outdoor posters. Even with super speed, she couldn’t afford to read each and every one in detail, but she didn’t have to… she was looking for one that stood out.
And she had it… a poster on the side of a municipal bus shelter with an add for a popular brand of prophylactics. She was pretty sure “The choice of a new generation.” wasn’t a birth control slogan, though. She had to laugh. It was among his better work, right up there with the infamous “Beef: It Stops A Beating Heart/Abortion: It’s What’s For Dinner” switcheroo he’d pulled the last time he got loose. The pro-lifers had been divided in their response, but PETA had given him a special commendation for that one.
She scanned the area around the bus shelter. There was an anti-tobacco billboard with a picture of a smoldering butt, but whatever warning it had once delivered had been replaced with the message “Have you had your break today?” Further down the road, an ad focusing on a toddler’s diaper read “What happens here, stays here.” and what had once presumably been an exterminator’s billboard, bedecked with giant cockroaches in living color, now openly declared “We make any house a home.”
And beyond that, the board belonging to a modeling agency was being redesigned from within, where the moving image of a man was arranging letters with his bare hands.
Minerva flew straight up and then came down at the billboard above, so the figure inside wouldn’t see her approach.
“Sorry, Hoff…” she began, but he had already leapt on down the line, leaving the legend “We have the loosest slots in town!” above the pictures of the models. “Damn!”
She spotted him in an advertisement for a firing range that now, apparently, “Put family first.” This time, she zoomed straight at him, pouring on the speed. She plowed right through the billboard, coming out the back with her arms wrapped around the struggling Hoffman Lewis.
“Sorry, Hoffman,” Minerva said. “Your reign of mildly amusing terror has ended.”
“I’m not the criminal here!” Hoffman shouted. “The corporations are the real villains, infringing on public space and public consciousness with their monolithic monologue. The only sane response is to talk back!”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard your spiel before,” Minerva said. “Why can’t you just slap those bubble stickers on posters like everybody else?”
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