I
Brittney Billings, eight and a half years old. Taken from her own back yard. Bruce Wayne had placed the police reports and the crime scene photographs in front of him on a steel table in the Batcave. He examined each closely, holding them under the clinical blue light of the desk lamp's compact florescent bulb. This wasn't his first time reviewing the evidence; evidence he had obtained thanks to a remote access tool he had covertly installed during an unauthorized midnight trip to the Gotham PD server room. In retrospect, he realized that Jim Gordon probably would have been willing to give him his own username and password, and that the subterfuge had been unnecessary, but patterns of behavior, once established, are stronger than the will of most men.
Brittney Billings. ("They're all Brittneys now," Tetch would tell him later, nothing but a smile under the rim of a Gibus hat. "At least the days of Madisons and Mackenzies are finally over. What awful, awful, ugly, ugly names. And I can look forward to all the Sophias who have just gone from safety seats to boosters. Sonorous Sophia. Sophia. Sophia. Sophia.") Her parents had noticed the tea table first, a little pink plastic item, cheap, with two matching chairs, one overturned, the other holding a stuffed white rabbit with its face and paws flopped limply on the tabletop. In the center of the table was a ceramic tea set—a floral print pot and two cups, one also overturned—a probable thrift store purchase. They had never seen any of it before. Brittney didn't host imaginary tea parties. What little girl does anymore? Her father had walked out into the yard and called for her. She didn't answer, of course. He found her 3DS on the lawn, still on, still playing a shrill chiptune. The battery hadn't run out. She couldn't have been gone for long. Not more than an hour. He called again. And again. Her mother ran out of the house, one gym sneaker on, the white sock on the other foot becoming permanently grass stained. She ran around the house to the front, and stood at the end of the driveway, by the mailbox, repeating her daughter's name to the empty suburban street. She was still there when the police arrived.
It was three days and six hours later, at dusk, when Brittney walked down that same driveway and rang her own doorbell. Her parents never saw the car that brought her, if there had been a car at all. She was wearing only a pair of underwear, from the Disney Princess line, depicting Alice blue skirts inflated, in the midst of her fall down the rabbit hole. ("These are not my daughter's," her mother would tell the police later, holding the evidence bag in her pale hands. "These are not Brittney's.") She remembered nothing from the previous two days. Later, her parents would decide this was probably a blessing.
The rest was all procedural details: the rape kit (no evidence of trauma, no semen found), the chemical analysis of the tea (Earl Grey with traces of an unidentified benzodiazepine), the neighborhood canvass (no one saw anything; windows have blinds, there are no dogs allowed in the development, people have their own lives, etc.), and the obligatory interviews with the parents, conducted in separate rooms (both were devastated, and had largely identical stories).
Bruce started. For a moment he thoughts the details of the case had gotten to him—maybe he hadn't become as cynical as he thought—but then he noticed Alfred's hand on his shoulder. He was standing over him, looking at the photographs. "Alice in Wonderland?" he said in a practiced, disapproving tone, not really a question so much as an annotation. "What a ghastly cliché. I hope you apprehend this one, Master Bruce, if only for his crimes against taste and creative thought." Bruce felt Alfred's cold hand squeeze his shoulder, the only way that the aging butler ever revealed when he was joking. His tone never softened. Only his fingers showed affection.
"What is it, Alfred?"
"It's the Grayson lad. He refuses to sleep. He is crying out for his parents again."