Who is Killing the Great Capes of Heropa(79)

After the detective finished his speech, the chitchat swivelled on an oily dime to one of recrimination.

The mayor had put on a song and dance about what a nuisance the Capes were, how they threatened public safety. The fact that elections neared probably prodded the man into action.

“Things were better when Sir Omphalos was in charge — at least he kept them in check,” Garrett said. “Now it’s chaos out there, only a matter of time till those people do something very, very stupid. And civilians pay the price.”

“You need some kind of control mechanism,” Wright piped up, looking at no one in particular as he rubbed his bald head. “A leash, if you will.”

“How? I don’t have the resources,” Chief O’Hara complained.

“When you’re ready to outsource, and trust me on the matter, I believe I have the appropriate contacts.”

“And what will this cost us?” asked the mayor, ever the penny-pincher — aside from his infamous personal budget.

“Well, these things don’t come cheaply,” Wright said, feeding a lady finger banana to a small monkey he’d brought along in a cage. “Let me get back to you on that issue, Mayor Brown.”

Once the meeting was adjourned, Kahn had walked with Chief O’Hara back to the elevators.

“Needless to say, what was said in that room remains there,” the chief advised, all cautious tone. “I understand you have a soft-spot for the Equalizers, and I know they’ve done us their fair share of favours. But the Capes’ time is over, Robert. You need to remember that — remember whose side you’re on.”

“Yes sir.”

“May I have your hand on it?”

They shook, just as one of the elevator’s doors opened and dinged.

“There’ll be a bigger playing field for the police force once we clean out the old order. More space for people like you and me to move up.”

“Yes, sir,” Kahn had repeated by rote — his worries increasing every damned second.





#149


Gypsie-Ann Stellar was somewhat happier.

She’d spent several hours of the afternoon up in the newspaper archive, and finally tracked down Southern Cross’s John Doe.

There was a dossier, misfiled under ‘E’ with the name SEKRINE, L. on it, behind another misfiled report for ROGERS, Sarah and Joseph.

The Sekrine portfolio was unusually complete. It told of a fatality in a fight between Funk Gadget and Prima Ballerina, one of several deaths, thanks to a stray sonic musical blast — Funk Gadget’s signature mojo.

But the signature on the report, while indecipherable, was also one the reporter didn’t recognise. She knew the handwriting of all the cadets she assigned to do the menial, thankless task. This writing did not match theirs. The question was, who filled in the report, and why had it been completed with such care?

There were omissions — no coroner’s report, no police-artist sketch of the corpse — so how had a fresh newspaper recruit compiled this much information at a time when the twenty-four-hour Reset window still existed?

Gypsie-Ann flipped through the details.

Height, weight, address, age, hair colour, driver’s licence number, criminal record (none): all the information was present and accounted for.

Next of kin: a spouse, Louise Sekrine née Starkwell, and a father named Abe J. Sekrine.

Funnily enough, they’d forgotten to write in the actual victim’s first name or middle moniker — there was only that lonesome ‘L-full stop’.

Misfiled under ‘E’. Next to a report recording the deaths of Sarah and Joseph Rogers.

The reporter thought about that, and then she started reassembling the characters of SEKRINE, making one of the ‘E’s the first letter:

EKRINES/EREINSK/ESKINER/ERSKINE/ERKSIEN/EINSKER



One of these stood out —Erskine.

Gypsie-Ann underlined it. Could be an anagrammatic coincidence, but she didn’t believe in those. The dad’s name was the clincher.

Abe. Abraham.

An hour later, some time around four, she hopped out of a cab on the corner of Burnside and Monroe, in Hymie Heights.

The address was on the second storey of a nearby brownstone, above an antique store.

Gypsie-Ann looked at the windows. Late afternoon, a Thursday, and the blinds were drawn — nothing strange about that if the people who lived there were out to work.

The security door, sitting above a small flight of brick stairs, wouldn’t budge. An easy matter to pick the lock, but the reporter preferred not to resort to such tactics in broad daylight, on a main thoroughfare like this one.

She decided instead to head into the antique shop.

A bell rang overhead, and as she weaved through various kinds of junk, a pocket-sized old man stuck his noggin — boasting a shock of white hair — above the edge of a cedar desk in the corner.