Chapter 10
Gordon gagged when he saw the girl's corpse lying prone underneath the streetlight. It wasn't that he hadn't ever seen a dead body before; he'd seen plenty of them during the war, most of them mutilated even more than this poor thing had been, but the savagery of it all made him want to lose his lunch.
Her throat had been slit and ripped out, her eyes slashed vertically, and her mouth cut from ear to ear. Her hair and nose were smeared with blood. Somebody had made her out to be his sick little version of a circus clown.
"Home-made justice, served rare," said Flass, who was bent over examining the body. He and Gordon hadn't been partners since he was promoted, but he'd shown up to this crime scene along with the rest of the department. "No doubt that Bat guy's involved. No question about it."
"What makes you say that?" As brutal as the Batman was with criminals, he wasn't a killer. Gordon knew that much for certain. He'd beaten rapists and murderers to within an inch of death before trussing them up like Christmas presents and leaving them for the police to find.
"A maniac kills like a maniac. Guy sees a street-walker and takes her down for disrupting society's order all. Does it all messy-like as a warning to the other hookers. It's getting worse, Gordy. Pretty soon he'll be taking down jaywalkers like this."
"But why the clown motif, Flass? It ain't Batman's M.O."
Lieutenant Perry, a younger, more innocent officer, fought back rage and disgust and he dipped his gloved hands into a pool of blood near the body to retrieve a small, flat object. "Captain Gordon, you might want to see this."
Gordon took the blooded object from the Lieutenant and perused it closely. It was a common playing card, half-soaked with blood, bearing the clownish symbol of a Joker.
He handed the card to Flass. "Make of that what you will. I say we've got a new killer on our hands, and he isn't Batman."
Flass cursed under his breath and then said, "You let one psycho run the city and it breeds more psychos. Batman's still an accessory."
"That would be tough to prove, Flass."
Later that night, police discovered the bodies of four mob bosses. One had been disfigured in a similar fashion to the first victim, while the other three appeared to have been killed together, by an unknown chemical compound. Each victim was found with a Joker playing card on his person.
Gordon's heart sank as he read the headlines the following morning. The Batman might have been a help against muggers and hoods, but this Joker maniac might be something else.
The coffee was warmer today. Even though Barbara was getting closer and closer to her time, she got up early and warmed the coffee just for him. His child couldn't grow up in a city like this, with madmen on the loose.
He remembered the war. It was a bedlam, fire and smoke and blood and shells and screams and pain. But he knew why he was there, two and a half years ago. He was fighting for sanity, so that the people could have normalcy once again, so that the bombings and pillaging and invasions would all stop. He had become a cop for the same reason. Everybody came home and couldn't be normal. They were too used to war, too used to chaos, too used to insanity. He had protected Gotham's streets before the war, but after—it seemed as though the war had never ended. It had just come home.