Blood Borne
A Word: Ibid.
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Devon Fields is a freelance photographer who makes most of his money as a courier. It makes him mobile and gives him chances to shoot pictures at all sort of incidents while still having a fairly steady paycheck.
Tim doesn't bother rousing the snoring man who fell asleep watching Star Wars on his couch. The last thing he wants to do right now is alert the man that he has some photos that are going to be worth a lot of money very soon. He remembers the man from that day, and doesn't look for any physical copies. The man works with a digital camera and it only takes a few moments for Tim to hack his laptop.
Finding the files from that day take a little more time. Fields keeps them on a cloud storage, and Tim has to wade through a lot of randomly named files before finding what he's looking for. He copies them over before erasing them. They're worth a lot of money, but Fields seems fairly decent for a man in his profession and Tim doesn't want to see him tangle with the people who will be offering money for potential pictures of the Joker's son.
Tim stops by one of his safehouses to transfer the photos to his network and look at them on a larger screen.
Fields came in on the tail end of the incident. The murder already done, and most of the people involved scattered under the threat of police sirens. Which leaves just the shocked bystanders.
They're good photos, and Tim smiles as he sends them off to Babs. The faces are all clear and unblurred. Perfect for the search programs of Oracle.
"Nice," Babs comments almost immediately through the comm line. "I don't think I've seen these ones before."
"The man who took them isn't very good at selling his shots," Tim says as he copies the photos over to send to the Cave. There were other photographers there, people who listened in on the police band, but their photos he already knows focused on the victim and the men in cuffs. Everyone else out of focus. "I think he likes taking them too much to cater to what the press wants."
"I'll run these and see about getting some names to look into," Babs says, and Tim starts mentally preparing his excuse for not going into the office in the morning. They're all going to be running leads into the ground. "Don't you have somewhere to be?"
"I don't have anything to report yet," Tim sighs and thinks about the open cases he has, the warring gangs in his territory, and Tam's inevitable disapproving silence when he calls her at eight. It's been three hours since Babs told him about the DNA hit, and Tim can already feel this case starting to spin out of control. It hasn't even really started!
"Get donuts," Babs says with a laugh. "I'm stopping for bagels."
"You're showing up?" Tim grins and immediately decides to ignore the looks he knows he's going to get from Alfred for bringing food into his kitchen. Babs doesn't visit the Manor often. For a variety of reasons, only some of which Tim feels confident enough to guess at. Her presence will divert most of Alfred's unspoken ire at the intrusion of the donuts and their empty calories.
"Yes, anything involving the Joker tends to spiral out of control fast," Babs replies and there's an echo to her voice that Tim knows come from a bluetooth headset instead of her normal setup. She's already on the move, or getting ready to head out. "I'd rather we're all on top of it now than playing catch up later."
Because catch up with the Joker tends to involve bombs and timers. Tim winces and goes for the stripped down bike he's been working on in this safehouse. It's serviceable, but there's still a lot of things that need overhauling on it before he can use it on patrol. "We have the jump on him this time."
"We have twenty-four hours," Babs predicts grimly. "That's how long it's going to take some bright individual to let the news slip to him, and then Arkham is going to find out how very many holes in their security they have."
"Again," Tim pulls a helmet on and triggers the larger door open. The real draw of this safehouse is the entrance that leads into a yard that used to be a loading dock. An ever shifting array of shipping containers makes it hard for anyone to find their way in and his entrances and exits go unnoticed. "Are we even really sure that Joker's going to pay this any attention?"
Babs is pointedly silent, giving his rhetorical question everything it deserves. The Joker can't let anything go, especially not if it has anything to do with him specifically. A kid is something he's going to pay a whole lot of attention to. What kind of attention is something they're only going to figure out after he's escaped unfortunately.
"I'll see you at the Manor," Babs signs off with, leaving Tim to decide which bakery he's going to be bribing for their first box of pastries.
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