Chapter nine is here! Dana plays connect-the-dots and learns something new.

Un-beta'ed, as always.

- o – o -

Chapter nine: Connect the dots

Dana was fairly sure she was turning into a conspiracy nut like Orwell. She was sitting at her kitchen table, a mug of tea in one hand and a pencil held loosely in the other. A notepad filled with minute writing rested in front of her.

The public defender was pretty sure she should have been in bed hours ago, but the adrenaline coursing through her veins after helping a masked vigilante break into ARK wasn't helping. And, Dana noted, the mug of tea probably wasn't helping matters either.

She sighed and placed the mug on the table. After eight—nearly nine—months of thinking her son was crazy, she'd been proven wrong in a spectacular fashion. It stung, and worried her at the same time. Why was a masked man visiting her son—her underage son—after dark, on a roof?

It was rather suspicious, and it worried her to no end.

Dana added that concern to the growing list in front of her. She'd been at this since eleven pm, and had still gotten nowhere. Even trying to make an influence map had proved fruitless. After all, there was no way that ARK was behind everything that had happened in recent months…

She had, however, managed to create a conspiracy that would put Orwell to shame. Dana smirked at that thought, and took a sip of her lukewarm tea. She half-wondered if the rumors about the blogger and the vigilante were true...

Dana looked at her pages of notes and sighed, rubbing her temples in exasperation. Everything was leading back to ARK's take-over of the police force. And while she wasn't discounting that as a primary motivation (even with taking their involvement with Chess into account), it seemed…unlikely.

One: the Cape had quasi-supernatural powers that included (but were probably not limited to) teleportation, mind control, and necromancy. And, either he was in contact with her husband's ghost, or he was still alive. The vigilante had, after all, kept referring to Vince in the present tense.

(A voice in the back of her head—that sounded suspiciously like Scales, for some reason—said that the vigilante was either delusional or her husband was back from the dead; or had never died… Dana ignored it.)

Two: the Cape was following her, and her son. She didn't know why, and quite frankly it disturbed her. On the drive to the public defender's office, he'd questioned her extensively about Scales. And why had he been so insistent that she avoid Scales at all costs? Well, aside from the obvious, of course, Dana amended silently.

Dana sighed, tapping her pencil on the table. What was she missing? And was the vigilante a threat to her son? He'd practically told Trip to keep his existence a secret from her; a grown man, telling a young, vulnerable child to keep their meetings secret. It was highly suspicious.

Grown men who were mentally sound did not run around in a costume, pretending to be a superhero, and visit young children in the middle of the night.

Dana chewed on her lower lip for a minute, before adding the concern to the end of an already exhaustive list on another pad of paper. Well, how much of a threat was he going to pose to Trip? Her son knew how to box, and she had been thinking about giving him a can of mace…

Another niggling thought bothered her a bit more. The man who called himself the Cape did seem to genuinely believe that he was a superhero. Surrealism aside, his mental health was questionable at this point.

Dana sighed, rubbing her eyes. She really ought to go to bed, because the idea of a deranged man talking to her son in the middle of the night wasn't bothering her as much as it logically should.

Dancing criminals who made jokes, mafia dons who put protection around the wife of a deceased cop, and masked vigilantes… Was anything ever going to make sense again?

Vince, at least, would have loved this…

Dana froze mid-thought. Occam's Razor. Think Dana, she chided herself, think. What is Occam's Razor in this scenario? Find the simplest explanation…

Her husband's body had never been recovered by the coroner. ARK press officers had claimed the remains were too damaged to be classified as Vince's, and had then denied that any remains existed at all… Two months after that, rumors of a vigilante began surfacing in Trolley Park.

If she recalled her college days correctly, there were service tunnels under the train yards. She'd played Dungeons and Dragons there years ago…

The timing of the Cape's appearance and her husband's death were a little too coincidental for her taste. Either the Cape had been an indigent who'd rescued her husband, or her husband was the Cape.

Her train of thought was derailed by someone knocking on the door. A glance at the kitchen clock made her seriously consider ignoring whoever was knocking. There was only one person she knew (aside from Trip) who would be up this late—or early, depending on how someone viewed one in the morning.

She gave in after the knocking turned into an insistent beating.

Dana's suspicions were confirmed the second she opened the peephole to take a look into the hallway. The friendly neighborhood smuggler was standing outside her apartment, looking decidedly worried.

Well shit.

Dana opened the door as far as the chain would allow leaned against the doorjamb to watch the agitated smuggler. He was shifting his weight from foot to foot, and constantly clenching and unclenching his hands. The smuggler looked, dare she say it, worried and scared.

"Mr. Raoul?" she asked quietly, not wanting to provoke the man into one of his infamous rages. The smuggler stopped his agitated movements quite suddenly and looked up at her. Relief clearly showed in his eyes, and how his posture instantly relaxed.

"Mrs. Faraday," he said, a small smile gracing his lips. "You're all right." He sounded almost relieved, Dana thought.

"Why wouldn't I be?" she asked, crossing her arms. The smuggler rubbed his throat absentmindedly, appearing to be mentally composing a reply.

"Well…" Scales rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably. "I 'eard ye wen' ou' with th' Cape," he muttered in reply. "I was worried abou' ye… Di' ye know th' Cape's been 'angin' aroun' the docks?" he asked in an apparent change of subject.

Dana nodded warily, wondering where he was going with this. Did it have something to do with the bikers who were following her and her son whenever they left the apartment? And then Scales answered the question for her.

"Alrigh'," Scales muttered, rubbing his face with both hands. "A few nights back, th' blackbird came to me docks, wantin' a word abou' ye. 'e made some remarks wot 'ad me worried. Same night, I gets a visit from Chess, see."

Dana raised an eyebrow, and wondered if it were possible to kill the smuggler by thinking hard enough about it. The man in question grinned nervously at her, as if he'd guessed what she'd been thinking.

"I migh' 'ave made an error in me judgment," Scales continued; Dana noted that his accent was getting thicker. The smuggler was definitely agitated about something.

"So imagine me surprise," he continued, "when I 'ear tha' ye've been runnin' aroun' wiv a certain masked character wot 'as designs regardin' you."

His tone had gotten much darker than in previous conversations and he sounded positively menacing now. Dana glanced worriedly at her think door and the two-dollar chain holding it partly closed, half-wondering if they'd hold up against an enraged gun-toting lunatic with rage issues.

"When I sen' th' bodyguards," Scales continued in the same softly menacing voice, "it was because I don' wan' t' lose ye t' some nutter wot can't tell th' difference between fiction an' reality. Th' blackbird's dangerous, me luv."

Dana stared at her visitor openly; her mouth was probably hanging open in shock, but she couldn't really bring herself to care at that point.

This had to be the product of the evening's break-in combined with late-night pizza. Because there was absolutely no way that Scales—a violent criminal with a reputation for beating people to death—had come by her apartment just to make sure she was safe and deliver a warning.

"It is too early for this," Dana muttered into her hands, leaning against the doorjamb. She looked up at her visitor, and sighed. "While I have my own problems with the man," Dana admitted, "I think he knows where my husband is."

It was Scales' turn to look shocked. And then the look turned from shock to one of quiet thoughtfulness. Scales had reached the same conclusion that Dana had fifteen minutes beforehand.

The Cape was, in all likelihood, Vince Faraday, alive and well.

- o – o -

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Side note: I return to classes on Monday. Updates are no longer guarenteed to occur at least once a week.