A/N: With all the crazy character development going on with Gotham, I thought I'd have a stab at bridging Ed's character from an odd-but-sweet good guy to a homicidal maniac. What! Doesn't that sound like fun? This story is the first step of Ed's lifetime of poor decision making skills. It's also a hard-boiled moider mystery in twelve chapters (plus a short epilogue.) Enjoy!
Chapter 1: Shooting the Breeze
The old asylum dominated the hill above the bay, its back on the world, its eyes on Gotham City. Sprawling, spike-backed and grey, it groaned in the breeze, loose tiles and mortar dust flung away over the steel blue bay. Police vehicles clustered in the open yard between the sheer-faced cell blocks and the rambling, crumbling mansion. Behind them, at the mouth of the old northern bridge, the black gates hung open to Arkham Asylum.
At the mansion's highest point, the clock tower, three bodies were suspended by their ankles from a length of rusted wire. Black thread sewed the mouths into a tight, blood-crusted line. It was the second time bodies had been hung from the tower in a week.
"This, again? I thought we did this last Friday." Harvey Bullock, GCPD, passed the binoculars to the detective beside him. "Man, I wish they'd stop swaying around like that."
The usually unflappable Harvey was green behind his scruffy beard. Clean-cut and sharp-eyed, Jim Gordon saw why. He lowered the binoculars quickly. "The crows don't seem to mind it."
They shuffled aside for a pair of crime scene investigators bearing a stretcher across the courtyard. More CSIs and uniforms were scattered around the broad yard, as many as the weeds poking through the concrete. The nearest were arguing about the best way to reach the bodies. By navigating through the rotted mansion or scaling the clock tower from the outside? Last week one of the CSIs on body retrieval had fallen through a rotten wooden step, breaking her leg and disabling an entire flight of stairs in the process.
Harvey and Gordon skirted past the mansion's main entrance and a small enclosed plaza, through the tangled grass and low bushes towards the clock tower on the mansion's southeast corner. The corpses had an impressive view out over the city, across the dark waters where the river met the bay. A narrow ledge wrapped around the tower's foot buffered it from the drop into the bay. The tower formed the last pole in a twelve foot high fence built right to the edge of the island, capped in a triple row of razor wire and obscured by wind-torn trees.
A sharp sea breeze rattled the razor wire. Any abseiling venture to reach the bodies would be a lively one: that wind would pluck you right off the ropes. Assuming the grappling gear held to the crumbling mortar in the first place. It was nothing Gordon wanted to put his faith in. He peered over the edge of the promontory, paling a little at the fifty foot drop into the rock-fanged sea.
"Why's it always have to be here?" Harvey stayed a good few paces away from the cliff's edge, one hand clamping his fedora to his unruly blond hair. He kicked the dirt. The wind threw it back in his face. He spat, "Man, I hate this stinking place. I hope they never reopen it. Can you imagine being hauled out whenever one of the looneys gets hold of a gun? Shit. I want no part of that. I don't know who's hanging these bodies up here, but second time in a week they've landed me out here, I'm gonna shoot him right in the ass."
"Your pursuit of justice is inspiring, as always," Gordon told him flatly.
Harvey squawked, "Look, are you gonna climb up there-"
"It could be worse. You could be the killer," a voice called behind him. Harvey shot two feet into the air and came down snarling into the expectantly smiling face of the on-scene forensic scientist, Edward Nygma.
"Ed!" Harvey barked. "You do not sneak up on people on the edge of a cliff!"
Ed peered over the cliff's edge. He looked up at the bodies silhouetted against the drab morning sky. Crows and chattered and flapped between the corpses. Clouds pushing east over the mansion made the clock tower appear as if it were collapsing on top of them. The three men shuffled back a pace.
"As I was saying," said Ed, his genial demeanour unimpaired by the sight of the bodies nor Harvey glaring daggers at him, "it could be worse. You could be the murderer. Imagine having to sneak in here at the dead of night, lugging those bodies upstairs, in the dark, and with the alterations Miss May made to the staircase last week. It's amazing our perpetrator isn't trapped in the floorboards."
"If you kick any torsos on the stairs, let me know. Hey!" Harvey waved to a CSI who had appeared alongside the hanging bodies. Somebody must have repaired the clock tower staircase. The CSI swore and eased back from the railing. "Sorry to scare ya, lady. But hey, while you're up there, hunt those crows, will ya? Giving me the creeps."
Ed trailed after the detectives. Despite being long-legged and lean, Ed was prone to shuffling wherever he went, with a puppy's pinballing attention between dreaminess and obsessive focus. "Okay, Detective Bullock. What's quieter the louder it gets?"
"I dunno. Mac and cheese?"
"No. The answer is-"
"Ed!" Harvey snapped. He stared at the scientist until Ed shrugged and busied himself in his notebook. He turned away. "Thank you."
The mansion doors stood open, uninviting. Lion heads or maybe some weird, carnivorous sea creatures had been carved into the heavy wood. A few electric lights were running off a generator in the foyer, but otherwise the place was dark. Their footsteps creaked on floorboards black with mould, the carpet like wet moss where it hadn't rotted away entirely. Papers littered the floor. Some may have been torn from the bookshelves in the record room deeper into the old wreck. Others seemed simply to have been dumped: patient profiles and maintenance reports discarded like flotsam as the previous tenants made good their escape.
Gordon peered into the shadowy corners of the mouldering foyer, pursuing the thinning groups of CSIs and uniforms through the maze of halls and stairwells to the tower. Wan shafts of sunlight pierced the dusty, broken windows, scattering a hazy illumination around the ground floor, a million strands of spider web. The pockets of gloom were deep, in places the shadows impenetrable, the mould and shadow stirring deeper pools of blackness than any moonless night. It was a lonely place, a pestilent place, where mildew was queen, the splendour of the vast mansion corrupted long before it had been forgotten.
They left the foyer for the main hall, then moved into the record room, tearing a tunnel through spider webs. The ceilings were vaulted, but the windows so encrusted with filth they were required to proceed with flashlights. Harvey asked, to distract himself, "Jim, who found our bodies?"
Gordon expelled a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding "A couple of fishermen. Their trawler passed close by the island around dawn."
Harvey grunted. "Probably on the lookout after last week's headlines. Mad Stitcher Strikes Arkham, that it?"
"Something like that."
"Reporters oughta have more sense. Ah, maybe they do. This is obviously a mob hit. Guess I wouldn't report that, either."
At the mention of the mob, Gordon brushed the butt of his handgun. They were only a few hours past dawn. The killer might still be here. Waiting. Perhaps the killings were no more than a ruse to draw the police into this decrepit place. Rig a couple of shotguns over doorways, separate the investigators, and BAM! A place like this was full of traps.
He drew a shaky breath, glancing beside him to Ed. Generally the scientist was a good choice to notice anything askew about a situation. However, today Ed had his head to the side, reading the spines of binders jammed into the discarded shelves. He tripped over a bulge in the carpet, and Gordon gave up on him.
They found no tripwires between the tall shelves. Gordon looked, found none as they ducked an alcove, winding up a mossy marble staircase, and none again on the side passage leading to the clock tower. By time they were creaking up the repaired tower stairwell, he had almost convinced himself they were safe.
Yet his breath left him in a rush as they stepped through the narrow door onto the tower balcony. He stood there for a moment, doing as Harvey was, sucking in fresh air, drinking in the sunlight twinkling on the bay waters. A lone CSI leant against the concrete railing.
"It's all yours, boys," she sung, gathering her kit. Breaking waves boomed on the wind, the trio of bodies shivering on their wire. "I'll show the others up."
Harvey blocked her. "Shouldn't they know the way? You guys just spent a week here dusting for prints."
"That's the problem," the CSI agreed. "The crime scene is the entire asylum. We've found thousands of prints. Hundreds more skin, hair and fluid samples. We've been so busy cataloguing data that no one has had a chance to move around."
"No idea who our perp is, then? I really wanna shoot this guy."
The CSI nodded to Ed. "Not my department. Ask your forensic."
Harvey let her skip around him into the tower. Gordon and Ed were already by the rail. Gordon followed the wire rigging the bodies. It wound around the tall stone post caps on two corners of the square balcony, then yanked sharply downwards to wrap around the railing, probably to prevent the weight of the bodies tearing the post caps into the sea. The wire sagged between caps, but it had been tightly secured, leaving the victims' ankles at eye level. Each of the three was secured by one ankle, the weight of the free leg casting the bodies at odd angles against the railing, decreasing their resistance to the wind gusting up the face of the tower.
What Harvey could see of the ankles wasn't pleasant. As thick as it was, the wire had cut right through to the bone.
Gordon shook his head. "How the hell did our guy lift these up here?"
Harvey shrugged. "Maybe the Stitcher is a team? Or a body builder. Hey, Ed, don't touch that!"
Too late. Ed's gloved fingers pulled at the bruised and lacerated flesh of a wire-bitten ankle – and the skin ripped right off the foot like a sock, the wire slipping over the wet muscle beneath, the body vanishing in a spray of coagulated blood.
Gordon, Ed and Harvey peered over the balcony. Ed flinched as the body struck the rocky promontory four floors below.
"Oops."
Harvey squinted at him. "You know that's tampering with the evidence."
Ed shot him a glance.
"I'm just sayin'. We got three of 'em, right? You're allowed to demolish one."
Lips pursed, Ed moved to the leftmost body. He frowned at it but didn't touch it as it pirouetted in the wind. "Looks like she bled out after being hanged. Agonising way to go."
"It's gotta be a mob hit," Harvey told Gordon. "Look at that. No eyes, even. Get outta here, you filthy crows!" he waved an arm at the bird settling on a post cap. "Probably Maroni. This is Maroni's style. Violent and obvious. Vic's probably a building surveyor. She assigned work to Falcone's men. Maroni had her taken out as a message he's not missing out on his slice of the Arkham pie."
Ed peered over the railing, careful not to touch the body. The woman's skin was grey. Her face crow-pecked and eyeless. The most colour on either corpse was the stream of dried blood running from the ankle down the length of the body.
He took a recorder from his black GCPD jacket, muttering into it in what seemed to be a shrill apology for his earlier indiscretion. "Victim is a Caucasian woman in her late forties. Short blond hair, navy pencil skirt, stockings, white blouse. No shoes and no jacket. Bruising on arms, legs and neck. Probably bled to death after being beaten unconscious and hanged."
Harvey looked up from his casual examination of the third body. "Maybe you ought to focus on the obvious. You know – the mouth sewn shut?"
Ed waited for the wind to pull the woman's face away from the tower. Sutures welded her lips. They formed thick, ugly, zigzag lines in the flesh. Bruising around the mouth suggested the victim had been alive for the procedure. Ed glanced at Harvey. "If this is a mob hit, why sew the mouth shut?"
"Uh, duh, so they can't speak out against Moroni."
"But what can a corpse say? Maybe it's symbolic." Ed tipped his head. "It's a puzzle we're meant to solve."
Harvey glowered at him, at the bodies. "There's no puzzle. They needed to be quiet. That's why. These three and the first two, they all had something to say. Something Moroni didn't want getting out. The shut mouths are symbolic – for shut your mouth!"
"But-"
"Harvey," said Gordon, "if your theory is right, maybe whoever did this was doing more than protecting Moroni's share of the investment. Maybe the message is to give Moroni more than his share. He's spooking future contractors into taking his side."
"Actually," said Ed, "that's a hypothesis, not a –"
"Ed!" Harvey slapped his face in exasperation. "We're the detectives here. You work on how they died. We'll figure out who did it. All right?"
The detectives moved towards the stairs. Ed stared at the body. With a vicious jab he un-paused the recorder. "Mouth is sewn shut. Looks like old surgical wire, may have been found on the Asylum premises. May or may not be a part of a larger puzzle..."
In the clock tower, Harvey rolled his eyes. "Some people. You'd have to sew their lips up to get some peace."
A/N: Like it? Review it! Like, review it! Like it, review it. Review it! Yeah! Subscribe to this story and review it! See you next week, enjoy Gotham you lucky damn Americans!
