Chapter II
"Meditations in Water"
Jason couldn't be Red Hood in Gotham. Too flashy. Too well known. Too many people happy to kick his ass. Couldn't be Jason Todd, either. Wasn't just that Jason Todd was dead, it was that they'd be monitoring for him. Have facial recognition set up.
Different mask would hide all of that, but a mask would also draw attention. Bats, again. Seriously, once upon a time you could get away with a bit of freelancing in Gotham City, but Bruce was getting more and more paranoid about that shit as he got older.
Maybe if he went to Batwoman. She was always the more practical of the lot of them… but no. Not worth the risk. Instead, he put lifts in his shoes. Added an extra layer of padding to his midsection, along with loser clothing, giving the illusion of fat. He put in dark contacts and a rinse in his hair that lightened it from black to brown, and he bleached a few more strands to white. He used makeup to hide his freckles and add subtle wrinkles. And, finally, a mouth guard prosthetic that changed the shape of his cheeks and lips.
The man who entered Gotham, Terrance Jameson, 36 year old travel journalist (and yes, he had an established blog that dated back to his days with the League, which brought in enough ad revenue to make Terrence a believable alias) bore little resemblance to the long-dead Jason Todd or the recently exiled Red Hood.
He wasn't an idiot. Both Babs and Tim had amazing surveillance systems in place, and he no longer had the benefit of Bizarro's enhanced tech to avoid them. He made sure he had a few exit plans before entering the city limits. This was a government-funded gig, after all. Jason knew Battleworth didn't give a shit about him, not really, but she also knew he had equally little loyalty to her and her masters. If they wanted him to keep his mouth shut about their programs, Battleworth would have to do what she could to extract him if things went to shit.
And Roy always had his back. He'd forgotten that for a while, but he remembered it now.
He could also lean on the few families with a stake in his hunt. Particularly Massareli, the exiled mobster currently residing in Brazil. The old man had arraigned for a path out for him, if needed. But Jason was planning on playing this one quite. He didn't want trouble. Trouble wouldn't solve this case, and it wouldn't catch the bastard before he went after another little girl.
From the Bat's perspective this would look like one dead body. One. Not nine. Suspicious, sure. Especially because of the way the crime scene was laid out. But, in the end, Gotham was drowning in dead bodies, and most of the connecting cases were international. It was very possible Bruce and the rest of the family would miss the connection.
Helped that every single country, including the U.S., was doing everything in their power to hide that connection. No one wanted to admit such a serial killer existed.
And those who did? They didn't want Batman on the case. They didn't want Nightwing or the gang of teenagers. No. They wanted the fallen Bat, who was willing to take life and death into his own hands and end permanently the monster's trail of corpses.
Which Jason could fully get behind.
Terrance was happily stretched out on the couch of his VacaySit's well-appointed sitting room/library. He was looking over images of the crime scene with a recently-finished paperback tucked beside him. Terrance and Jason were both upset about being finished with the book, but Jason knew it was time to get to work. He'd sink a little more into the Terrance persona when he slipped out for dinner in an hour or so. Let the locals see him, and study the locals, too.
It was a fully middle class area. Live how the locals live. That was one of the principles of Terrance's traveling life, as spelled out in his blog. Terrance didn't know Gotham all that well. Very few Gothamites fit firmly in that demographic. And in this clean, almost suburban rowhouse, he'd never catch sight of Gotham's most popular attraction, Her vast flock of vigilantes, who hunted criminals of the slums and criminals of great and corrupt wealth. Middle class areas were typically safe.
Jason suspected the killer would discover this fact quickly enough, if he hadn't been aware of it already. Somewhere in a middle –class neighborhood would be best for hiding, and then displaying, both the girl's sex organs and her hair. As well as hiding out after the kill itself. Man was no longer hunting for his own pleasure. He'd killed in Gotham. That was over. Now, now he rested.
Which made Jason furious. So instead he focused on those trophies the man would now be planning to display.
Both would be found in visible areas. He wouldn't hide them for long. At least he never had in the past.
Ground level or eye level. The hair in Hawaii had dangled from a hanging lamp fixture in an open room with a two-storey high ceiling. The rope had made the hair obvious to everyone who walked in the hotel lobby.
The small uterus of the girl in Colorado had rested in the arms of a statue, placed on a pedestal. It sat in a highly trafficked square. It was above eyelevel, but certainly eye-catching.
Wealthy Gothamites adored donating funds for statues and various other art instillations. When it came to "eye-catching", the man would have a multitude of options.
But Jason considered his evidence. Specifically those unique touches to each crime scene. Colorado had the picture frame with the stock image of the family, and then organ placement on the statue of the mother.
Hawaii had an old –fashioned stained glass bowl. Jason couldn't be certain, but he suspected it was like other such things he had seen used to hold candles. That was set against the modern chandelier.
In Uganda the girl was killed in a room where flowers littered the floor. Her hair was wrapped around vines that were wrapped around a vintage fence.
In Korea absolutely the only decoration in the room, apart from the body itself, was a calligraphy brush anchored to the wall behind her head. The trophies taken from her body were displayed in the window of a store whose exterior walls were decorated with a vivid, hand-painted mural.
On and on they went. Not all as obvious as those – a bolt of silk and a history of telecommunications museum? – but there was something connecting these added objects to the final body part disposal sites.
Girl Nine had wind chimes. Tomorrow, during the day, Jason would scour the city. Art instillations or sculptures with musical elements. Orchestras. Shops that sold musical instruments. Schools of music. Probably something on every damn street, but he'd have a list prepared tonight, and check them all out during school hours. Safest time of day.
OXOXO
Jason hadn't quite realized how much he missed Gotham. But as he wandered the park, searching for the waterfall xylophone (known as "Running Falls") he'd read about and getting reacquainted with the wide variety of food stalls as he walked, that homesickness became clear. That pressing ache was useless, however, so he pushed it aside. Focusing instead on finding the elusive corner of the park where the water chime was supposedly hidden.
"Ah!" he grinned. Pleased to see one thing go right. So many of the music school s and orchestra practice and performance locations he'd checked out so far had gone out of business or been boarded up for one reason or another.
It looked like Gotham was about to dip into one of her far-too-common economic downturn periods. Recessions sucked anywhere, but in Gotham they lead to an expansion of the slums, like a creeping cancer, that never quite drew back, even when things got better. Also, crime would balloon in the most vulnerable communities. It would generally result in at least one more costumed villain, which would pull the attention of the costumed heroes, and stretch the standard uniformed officers, leaving every-day criminals free to take advantage of the chaos left for them on the ground.
Recessions were hell in Gotham.
"Not that anyone really cares about that."
The Bats were so focused on the high-level shit that the smaller, every-day crimes too often slipped by them. Batman just didn't have time for opiates or child abuse 90% of the time.
"Steph might," he mumbled. Then almost slapped his well-disguised face. Last thing he needed was some Big-Brother-style program of Red Robin's catching him out because he was talking to himself.
Fucking embarrassing.
Jason finally made his way through the trees to an initially underwhelming torrent of water. It fell from a cliff barely twice his height into a small pool, and then fed into a stream maybe four feet across and two feet deep that skipped merrily from its little grove to some place deeper in the uncleared area of Gotham's largest park.
Jason took a deep breath. Though the sky above was the same murky yellow it was from any location in the city, here at least, the air was clean. It smelled of green grass and moss and faintly of rotting vegetation in wet earth. It was still too early in autumn to be crisp, but there was the taste of cold water in the air that spoke of the coming fall.
And music filled the place. Sweet. Delicate. Deep and hollow. Echoing.
The xylophone did not resemble any xylophone Jason was familiar with, but music was hardly his forte. Smaller keys were higher on the falls. Larger keys were lower. They seemed to be made of dark hardwood, but he didn't feel the need to disturb the instrument to discover its secrets just yet.
Looking around, Jason saw a bench cleverly disguised as a fallen log and chose to sit and study the falls from that vantage point for a time. He sat. He breathed. He absorbed.
The sound was right, he felt. It wasn't the same, but it was similar enough. And it certainly had the beauty all locations in previous kills had in common. Placement, though. Where would he place his trophies?
The bench he was sitting on? He wrinkled his nose, looking at the thing which was in itself a work of art. Maybe. The sign, small and not particularly eye-catching, at the subtle entrance of the clearing, declaring the name "Running Falls" and nothing else? More likely.
Also, it wasn't a well-traveled area. The killer might place something here and wait days for it to be found.
"Unless she is free," he whispered to the music playing around him. Ivy felt a very personal connection to this park. One of the reasons it remained so well-maintained and free of gang presence. You could feel her vengeance waiting in the air around you. She had been known to kill people who tried to modernize the park with unnatural materials and had done serious mental harm to a team of people who brought pesticides in to destroy some form of plant the city viewed as invasive for some reason.
Something vine-ish. He smiled. Should have known better. But every new mayor tries something to make their mark on the city, and the most foolish think they can take down people like Dr. Pamela Isley.
When she was free and active in the city, it was also a safe haven for children with nowhere else to go. Or who needed a safe place to run. Ivy was a lot of things, many of them horrible, but she had a strange maternal streak a mile wide.
If someone put body parts, a child's body parts, in Ivy's territory when Ivy was free, she would know almost immediately.
But would she tell anyone? The man got off on having his crimes exposed. He wanted people – maybe not everyone, but some number of people – to know.
For a woman. For a girl.
Yes. Maybe. Yes.
If she didn't kill him herself. Yes.
And it would be a uniquely Gotham crime scene. That would be something this killer might find himself leaning towards. All the museums and statues and even the fence in Uganda…. All specific to their respective regions.
What did Gotham have? Its costumes. For good, and for ill.
Jason couldn't be 100% sure. He would still check off every other location on his list. He would check the Arkham Attendance App to see if Ivy was currently in or out of the asylum walls. But his instincts were screaming at this musical pool.
He secured a few small motion detectors to surrounding trees and followed the stream out of the park.
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AUTHOR'S NOTE: Never expect an update this fast again. I had it, so I'm uploading it, again, to gauge interest. And to play with the character. The stories I read of Jason and the stories I love of Jason are family stories, Outlaws stories that focus on the team. It is amazingly weird that when I actually sit down and write him for myself that it is completely alone, and totally in his head. So... I'm pretty much doing this as I go along. Please, bear with me.