Author's Note: Quickly before the story I just had a little message. This is a Batman story based in comics continuity, but (hopefully) free of all complications that come with that. It's my intention not to revolutionise the treatment of Batman or anything, I've been reading Batman a lot recently because of the movie and I felt like nothing is self-contained anymore. It feels like you have to pick up several issues from six series and two trades to get a single issues' story. This is also hopefully a story that will satisfy on a chapter to chapter basis, not just be part of its own whole. Inspired by a conversation held in The Basement Tapes at comic book resources. If anyone has any reason to contact me, review or e-mail me at the address on my bio.
Batman:
Four Stars
Steam slowly made its way skyward from the polystyrene cup of coffee that was handed to Detective Renee Montoya. She took a sip as she walked up to the other detective on scene, Alan Gates.
"Montoya." He greeted.
"Gates," she replied with a nod, "what've we got?"
Gates led Montoya through a few winding corridors in the apartment block and into a large and very expensive looking studio apartment. In the centre of the room was a large black coffee table, and draped across it with its legs dangling off the edge was the body of a familiar-looking naked young man. Gates pointed to the body, "Anonymous tip-off, probably from the killer, brought street cops to this location. When they saw the crap on the table they figured it was more a job for MCU. Nobody touched anything 'til you got here."
Montoya, as acting head of Gotham's Major Crimes Unit and its most experienced detective, was the first to the scene of her unit. She walked over to the corpse and did a double take, "Is that-"
"Bruce Wayne?" Gates interrupted, "sure looks like him huh?" He said with a smile.
Montoya looked closely and spotted a scar on the man's chin, faded but still there. She looked again closely and saw that the hairline was different, "No, its not him. Any ID?"
"None. You seen our boy's handiwork though?" Gates pointed to the table next to the pseudo-Wayne.
Montoya looked and saw four exact star shapes that looked to have been made with a cookie-cutter, and underneath them in the manner of a film review was the word "Brilliant". The unsettling thing about these things, was the stars were made from what looked to be human skin, and the word was written in blood. Montoya bent a little closer to see more closely, "These what they look to be?"
"Yep. As far as we can tell, we had the coroner in here a while ago and I had him take a look." Gates lit a cigarette and began to puff.
Montoya looked at the body again, and saw only one star shape of skin cut from the direct centre of the man's chest, "They're not all his."
"That was my guess too, some of them have slight colour differences."
Montoya was silent for a long time, taking mental notes and using her mind's eye to photograph the crime scene, she was going to need to have this image in her head for months. The thought combined with a slight breeze from an open window across the room of the extravagant apartment made her shiver.
"Want to know the most interesting little factoid?" Gates asked with a smile wrapped around his cigarette.
"It gets any more interesting?" Montoya asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Guess who owns this place," Gates finished and flicked his cigarette but out the open window and when no response was forthcoming, answered his own question, "Bruce Wayne."
Montoya heard a slight tapping noise coming from behind the agent and saw a black finger on the window pane, "Good work Gates. Could you go and get the crime scene guys up here, I want this place done and dusted by sun-up."
Gates nodded, "By the way, since Bullock is out of action I was asked by the commissioner to assist in this one. Hope you don't mind." his tone indicated he didn't expect a response and he removed a second cigarette from his packet and pinched it between his lips as he nodded and walked down the corridors towards the investigation's base camp.
Montoya turned around full circle in the room, taking everything in. Suddenly the lights dimmed and a slight thump noise behind her, merely for courtesy, told her she was no longer alone.
"Leads?" the hollow voice asked.
Montoya turned to face a shadow, or at least what she presumed was a man cloaked in one. She smiled and handed him the notebook she was using, which had everything Gates had told her and everything she'd observed.
The shadow grew a limb from under the cloak, a black-taloned hand on the end of a dark grey arm took the pad and glanced at it. She assumed the Batman had total recall, as he seemed to simply blink as though taking it all in instantaneously and then handed the notebook back.
"There's no obvious or direct evidence like footprints or a weapon yet," Montoya turned away from the shadow and walked towards the table, "we haven't checked the security system yet."
"It's clean. Blank tapes. Possibly electrical interferance." The Batman commented, then looked directly at her through the lenses in his cowl as she turned to look at him, "The murder happened approximately four hours ago. The victim was killed somewhere else and moved here afterwards. The murderer came and went by the apartment's front door, which has not been interfered with. He was roughly five eleven and of even build from the slight imprints he left in the shag carpeting by the door. He used a scalpel and some sort of pattern to cut those stars and a gloved finger to paint the words. The body hasn't bled anywhere so we can assume that the stars were cut at an earlier point, perhaps while the victim was alive. The blood may have been the killers, but its more likely to have been drained from the body at another location and brought here like the body."
Montoya turned back to the corpse, writing the information down on her pad. She didn't have any doubts as to his credibility, Batman wasn't called the world's greatest detective for nothing. She spoke as she furiously took notes, "Thanks, this'll be a great help."
She turned to see an empty corner of the room, a black curtain blowing in the breeze from the open window.
Montoya turned back to the corpse and muttered to herself, "Now I know how Jim Gordon feels."
-
The Batman stood on the roof of Bruce Wayne's apartment. At least that's how he thought of it, he'd only been there as Bruce Wayne, and only then to keep up his playboy image by taking several girls up there. He ticked through his list of foes in his head, thinking if there was any similarity to past cases. Nothing. Yet.
"Oracle," he touched the small control that activated his radio connection and familiar woman's voice came from his cowl speakers.
"Batman." She replied, "I got everything from the crime scene. You ok?"
The Batman merely grunted in reply.
"That was Church wasn't it?" Oracle asked, again getting no answer and carrying on knowing she was right, "Was he supposed to be there tonight?"
"No." Batman replied, Thomas Church was one of the men the Batman employed to pretend to be Bruce Wayne every now and then, so it didn't look like Bruce Wayne disappeared every night until four am. Church was a particularly reliable employee too, and a decent actor.
"Any ideas?"
"None yet," the Batman leapt from the rooftop and fired a jump-line to swing in an arc around the spire of a nearby tower, "you have the snap shot of Montoya's list and the bug I placed on her, keep working and listening. Tell me if you or they come up with something."
"Will do, Oracle out." she replied.
The Batman let go of his jump-line and grabbed the edge of his cape, letting the amazing fabric billow out and slow his descent. He landed and rolled on the edge of a small apartment block, jumping out from his roll and into a run without losing speed. He leapt off the edge of the building and slid down the ladder on the building's fire escape before landing lightly in the dark alleyway he'd parked the Batmobile in. He slid into the car's cabin and set the car to drive him home, the first rays of sunlight were peaking over the horizon as the car went over the bridge and out of Gotham.
-
The next night the Batman hit the streets hard. His first stop was Gotham Central, to see Montoya. The detective was sat at her desk looking through the crime scene photographs of the previous night's murder. The Batman was on the fire escape and put an arm out in readiness to slip into the office when a voice sounded from Montoya's radio.
"Detective, this is officer Weir. We've just spotted a suspicious-looking male matching the description you gave going into the Wayne Tower, carrying a large bag."
"Don't do anything," Montoya shouted into the radio, "just wait for assistance. We don't want to spook this guy into running off."
"Confirmed, watch and wait," the voice on the radio replied.
Suddenly Montoya heard a heaving sound of burdened metal coming from behind her window and a fluttering sound like leathery wings from the rooftop beyond Central.
-
The Batman was at Wayne Tower in a matter of minutes. Luckily Old Gotham was relatively close to central, so a short trip across the rooftop express landed Batman on the window of the penthouse he'd used as a home base for some time to eliminate the commute into the city. Inside he saw a figure dressed in black from head to toe, including a black mask which was pulled up to expose the man's mouth. The man brought his gloved finger to his mouth and licked the remaining blood from it before pulling the mask back down under his chin. The Batman stealthily climbed in the window and came to stand directly behind the man, his cloak fell forward to enclose him completely and meld him with the shadows of the room.
The man stood up and the mask moved a little, as though he were smiling. Suddenly he leapt forward and rolled, landing on the opposite side of the table he'd placed the body on. The Batman saw out of the corner of his eye that this time there where three stars and the body had two cut from its chest. There was something written in blood again, but the Batman didn't have time to read it before he was lunged by the figure in black.
He threw his fists seemingly randomly at first, then the Batman noticed the man was doing a practised form of stage fighting he'd learnt during the months he'd spent learning the actor's craft to become Bruce Wayne. He retraced the steps the man had taken in his mind and put the full sequence together, predicting the next blow and ducking under before spinning around and taking the legs from underneath the slightly smaller man. The man rolled to his side and then flipped back onto his feet, showing himself an accomplished acrobat. The Batman saw him take a deep breath before deftly leaping through the open window, landing in a handstand on the ledge outside the window before allowing gravity to take him in an arc that would surely have taken him through the window of the floor below. A sound of glass breaking confirmed his suspicions.
-
"Detective Montoya!" Officer Weir shouted over his radio.
"Go ahead," came Montoya's reply.
Weir and his partner looked dumbfounded at the windows of the Wayne penthouse over fifty floors up before shouting back to Montoya, "The Bat's just entered the penthouse, I think I can see them fighting."
Montoya said nothing while she thought for a few seconds, "Screw it. Get up there and get me a sicko in chains."
A figure dressed entirely in black leapt through the window and landed in a handstand on the wide ledge under the penthouse window before arcing down into the window of the floor below.
"Christ! You see that?" Weir asked his shocked partner.
"Looks like the Bat's got trouble. Call it in."
The Batman reacted instantly and followed only a few seconds after the killer. He jumped through the window and twisted about, firing a jump-line that swung him back into the floor below and through another separate window. He didn't care about smashed glass, and it was his building anyway.
He switched his cowl's lenses through the spectrums to infra-red and saw the heat trail of the killer leading through the door and onto the central corridor. His steps were far apart, he was a good runner. The Batman followed, but by the time he'd got into the corridor after him the killer's trail had gone cold. The floor in the corridor was carpeted and was already warm enough to block the heat traces of the killers steps, unlike the linoleum in the computer room behind him. The Batman cursed his own building design before turning back on himself and stalking back to the broken window where he saw that somebody up there was looking out for him. On one of the shards of glass by the door was a small sample of blood.
-
Author's Note: Hope you all enjoyed that one. The Story will continue in the next chapter, and yes I know that that isn't very self-contained. But what I'm intending to do is more to write a story that's fun, has suspense and mystery, and you don't have to have read a thousand other stories to get it. Something I think is missing from today's comics (bar Invincible which is brilliant). Also please review, tell me what you liked and what you didn't like, and what essential elements should be in every chapter. I decided that every chapter needs a spot of conversation, some interesting description, mystery and suspense, and a good fight scene. Tell me what you think! Oh, and read my other stories too because I like to think people still read them. I'm off to work on chapter two, expect it soon.
