A/N: *Manic laughter*
Let's do this.
Chapter 10: What You Don't Know Will Kill You
They found the Asylum grounds slumbering in the dusk. A light was on in the security tower, a single bare bulb rigged by a cord forty feet to the platform. There was a foot patrol over by the Botanical Gardens, but nothing that would stop Ed and the goons following the mansion wall around to the courtyard.
That was, until Mickey's boot sent a stone skittering across the forecourt.
The trio flattened themselves against the wall, Ed feeling paint flaking under his gloved palms. They'd almost reached the corner of the mansion; only twenty yards separated them from the guard tower.
Voices stirred on the platform. "D'you hear that? Sounded like someone in the trees."
"Probably a bird."
"We should check it. Drain's over that way."
Footsteps thundered down the metal grill stairs. Ed swallowed. He'd come prepared for this, although he'd hoped to delay it a little longer.
Bracing his foot against the wall, he grabbed Mickey's arm and shoved him from the shadow of the mansion. Bright blond-headed Mickey stumbled onto the forecourt with a shout – and froze in horror as three guns trained on his chest.
"Stop right there!"
Mickey threw Ed a horrified glance, then spun on his heel and sprinted for the drain.
"Hey! That's him! Get him!"
Three security guards pounded by in hot pursuit. Ed and Alvaro clung to the wall, Alvaro's eyes round as pennies, any protest he might have offered smothered by Ed's hand over his mouth.
There was a scrape of the metal cap being yanked open, and a shriek as Mickey plunged into the darkness. Ed looked sideways at Alvaro.
"He'll be fine. Move, now, while they're distracted."
Alvaro's throat worked. He nodded, once. Together he and Ed slunk the final twenty yards and hooked around the corner into the courtyard.
Ed pulled ahead of him, passing low gardens of weeds and splintered benches, skirting a fountain whose foul smelling water spilled brown over its mouldy sides. The courtyard was a small space, perhaps once used by doctors on their coffee breaks or private consultations with well-behaved patients. Now rotting leaves made a carpet over the cracked cement and piled like black snow against the walls. The plaster sculpture which ran along the top of the free-standing wall peeled off in great grey scabs. All Ed smelled was rot and stagnant water.
A single door opened from the courtyard, accessed by stone steps slick with moss. It was locked. No surprise. Listening to the distant shouts, Ed nodded to Alvaro. The big man put his shoulder to the door, ramming it twice, three times, before the door flew off its hinges and crashed down hard in the mouldering passageway.
"Oops," said Alvaro.
Ed didn't waste time glaring. He either found the name of the killer tonight, or he went to prison for obstruction of justice. He had come too far to turn back.
They replaced the door as well as they could in its frame. Anyone who tested the door or even looked closely would see it was busted, but it would have to do. Ed flicked the flashlight over the piles of papers and sagging shelves lining the narrow side room. It was impossible to say at a glance whether there was anything of value here. There certainly didn't seem to be; possibly there was nothing of value in the entire Asylum. Ed's nose twitched as his lungs pumped mildew infected air.
Tucking the flashlight under his arm, he propped his briefcase open against his belly and dug out a pair of facemasks. He passed one to Alvaro, who stood sniffing by the door.
"It'll stop you inhaling mould spores."
"Gracias."
They moved together through a carved wooden door into the lofty main hall. The flashlight cast the faintest silvery glow over the rafters. It didn't reach the far wall at all. An alcove to the right opened onto the main foyer, but the record room was further on, accessed by a door in the far wall.
A few steps dropped onto carpet black with water stains and mould, the pale grey caps of mushrooms rising from bowed floorboards where the water sat in brown puddles. What furniture inhabited the main hall was discarded, dumped here like the stacks of papers in the foyer and the alcoves. Candlesticks and little chairs, broken desks and un-upholstered cushions. Cobwebs hung in hanks like hair from the rafters, thick by the walls, but even in the central walkway invisible threads fell all the way to the floor.
Alvaro scratched his arms. "I don't like spiders."
"What has six legs, two wings, and can't move a muscle?"
"I dunno."
"A fly trapped in a web."
Alvaro stopped. "That's not funny."
Ed squelched on into the filmy darkness. "It wasn't a joke."
Something banged against the wall high above them. Alvaro ducked and Ed shot the flashlight at the noise. The beam caught only webs, beaded with the bodies of ten thousand spiders. Ed let the flashlight drift to the carpet. He frowned at the outline of a boot in a pool of mould.
"It's the roof cooling," he told Alvaro, his heart thrumming a frantic tattoo. "That's all."
Alvaro crept after him to the end of the hall. They found the door to the archives unlocked, which was something. Ed wasn't sure his nerves would have endured Alvaro smashing it open. Somewhere here, someone was watching them. He was sure of it.
"Fear without evidence is paranoia," he murmured, heedless to the sharp look Alvaro shot him. They slunk through the archive door. A thin balcony circled three walls. Reading rooms were tucked away behind cages of bookshelves and narrow brass bars. Two tall aisles of books ran down the centre of the room. Filing cabinets lined the balcony. The cobwebs were thinner here, but even through the masks the stench of mildew and rot was nauseating.
Ed hadn't the faintest idea where to start. There might have been five hundred book cases here: there might have been a thousand. But if the information he wanted was anywhere in Gotham, it was here.
He thumbed a book from the nearest shelf and handed it to Alvaro. "Start here. There are gas lights in the reading rooms. If you can't get it to work, call me."
"What am I looking for?"
"Patient and employee records dated Arkham's final year of operation." Alvaro was close enough for Ed to smell his fear, sharp and unpleasant on his tongue. What would a man like Alvaro have to fear from a place like Arkham? Perhaps he was afraid of being left here alone. Ed ran a tongue across the back of his teeth, but he could not rid himself of the unpleasant taste. "We want names. Names and dates."
The big man nodded. "Any names in particular?"
His mental list of the Riverside Docks patron manifest was too much to go through. Softly, with a flicker of his habitual smile, he said, "I have no idea. We'll see when we go through the records. So long as our killer isn't going by an alias."
He found a lamp with enough oil to run in one of the four reading rooms. Alvaro carried a stack of folders in with him. The room was closest to the door. No light penetrated the dust encrusted windows.
With Alvaro set up, Ed prowled the aisles. Many of the books were medical histories of asylums predating Arkham. There were patient files of people six generations dead, of doctors so ancient their apprenticeships had been conducted on stolen bodies. These brittle pages crumbled under Ed's careful fingers and sagged from their water-logged spines. A drip from the ceiling had swollen a shelf's contents to twice their size, books erupting onto the floor, now no more readable than leaves in a pool of mud.
"Um, Mr Nygma?" Alvaro stood at the end of the aisle. Ed glanced up from a tome on Jeremiah Arkham. "Where's a man take a leak around here?"
Ed drew a creased piece of paper from his pocket. On it was his game of bridges. Except rather than islands, Ed's bridges connected rooms in Arkham mansion. "Looks like you'll need to retrace your steps to the main hall and take the first left."
Alvaro shambled for the door. He paused. "Hey. Uh. You want the name of the killer, right?"
Ed nodded.
"So ... how were you planning on arresting him?"
It took a single moment for all of Ed's assumptions to come crashing down. Adrenaline hit him in a tidal wave and he slapped the book into the shelf. Pain blossomed in his knee. He had been wrong. The killer wasn't an ex-Arkham employee. The killer was Fish. He was trapped in the Asylum with a murderer's henchman.
Alvaro scratched his neck. "Like, I know you're with the GCPD. But aren't you in Forensics? I thought you'd have to have a detective's warrant to make an arrest. Or did you arrange that already?"
Ed just blinked at him.
The big man shrugged to himself, turning back towards the door. "Not that it's any of my business."
Not until the door clicked shut did Ed let out a breath. He left Jeremiah's biography on the shelf and moved to the next section. Manila folders on a steel shelf interspaced thick, yellowing binders. Ed drew out one at random. The cursive hand squirmed under the torch light. En – plog – oe – no, Employee Medical Records –
Ed grabbed an armload of binders and headed for the reading room. He soon discarded the first, dated April 1953, dropping it beside the bureau which filled most of the space between the shelves.
The binders were in no particular order. The fifth in the stack was dated 11 years prior, one year before the Asylum had shut its gates. Close enough. Ed flipped it open on the desk. Water damage rendered the bottom left of each page illegible, but for the most part the names were clear and black in the amber light of the lamp. The bulk of the binder was taken up with the details of new treatment plans, but the first dozen pages contained short references to current staff.
"Bingo!"
There she was, page three. Kym Katee, psychiatrist. The victom Ed had accidentally dropped from the clock tower balcony. Her description said she worked with newly arrived patients in the intensive treatment ward. There was not much else about her, other than her birthdate, indicating she was 36 at the time of her medical examination, and that she was of sound body and mind.
Nikolas Ozolinsh was listed on page five. Aged 45, Ozolinsh was a senior psychiatrist in the solitary confinement ward. His own psychiatrist expressed doubts about Ozolinsh's suitability for the job. Apparently Ozolinsh had expressed doubt about the Asylum's treatment methods. A message had been added under Ozolinsh's entry in blue ink. In for one, in for all. Family shall not betray family. Ed was at a loss to say what it meant.
He moved on. Joon Myeong Song, Peony Norman, Robina Frances, Olga Peak; every one of them was listed in the decade-old record. Those that were missing, Karl Waterman, Jarod Augustine and the most recent Timothy Knutch, were contractors in the case of the first two, inmates in the case of Knutch.
Ed dropped the record to the desk. He grinned at the cobwebs hanging motionless from the ceiling fan. So he was right. The killer had a history with Arkham, either as an employee or a patient. He had known it would feel good to be right, but he had no idea how good. Just wait until they heard this at the precinct! He laughed aloud in the circle of gaslight.
"But why?" he asked the fan, he asked the shelves. There were notes in the records of Song and Peak too that they doubted the Asylum's treatment regimes. Peak even refused to be present during electric shock therapies. And Timothy Knutch, the reformed inmate, was an outspoken opponent of the Asylum's reopening.
Except for last night. Last night Knutch had declined to say anything against the Asylum. Perhaps Maroni had gotten to him. The killings had been bad enough for the Asylum's reputation without the protest rally. It was easy enough to image Maroni or Falcone on damage control.
Yet obviously neither Maroni nor Falcone would have ordered Knutch dumped on the Asylum grounds, nor anywhere near it, even if he had spoken out against the reopening. So then ... one was lead to believe it was not Knutch's outspokenness, but rather his silence that had seen him slashed throated and bobbing in the tide.
He flicked through the record, searching for names he recognised. If the killer was a contractor, as he may well be, then it was going to take all night to find his record. Then there was the matter of the arrest. He scrolled the final page of names. Jeremy Victor, John Vincent, Aaron An Vo ...
His finger hesitated on Aaron An Vo. The name rang a bell. He searched his mental list, but the nearest he could come up with was Erin Ahn Vo. Wrong gender, whatever the name.
He read the entry. Aaron An Vo. A psychiatric nurse in the intensive treatment ward. Age 32 at the time of the record. Mr Vo's physical appearance continues to be at odds with his kind-hearted and sometimes effeminate nature.
That was it. Vo was in good health but perhaps an uncomfortable mind space. That didn't make him a murderer.
"Alvaro?" Ed called, hearing a floorboard creak. He pushed back from the table. "Have you found anything on the contractors?"
A heartbeat passed in silence.
A figure wrapped in shadow slunk into the reading room.
It wasn't Alvaro.
But it was Erin Ahn Vo.
"Bloody hell."
Gordon glanced at Harvey in the passenger seat. "What are you, English?"
"Jesus shitting Christ," Harvey breathed. "Is that better?"
"It's so-so."
They were in the fourth hour of a seemingly endless night spent verifying the names and addresses on the marina patron lists. While the task had been split between eight homicide detectives and another ten uniforms, Harvey and Gordon had apparently drawn the bung lists.
"Riverside-damn-Docks," Harvey spat, flapping the manifest on the dashboard. He fought the urge to shred the paper and dump it out the window. "I thought we were onto a good thing with this list. Rundown shithole right on the river, closest marina to the Asylum. Most of the people on here don't even own boats!"
"Easy, pal," Gordon crooned. "Why don't we just forget about Riverside? We'll move onto the next list."
"What, Uptown? You think some silver-spoon prick is dragging corpses to the Asylum? Hell, Jim, those rich bastards can't wait for Arkham open day. They don't want all this bad publicity."
Gordon shrugged. "Maybe it's a kid gone bad."
"It's a kid hauling corpses up a thirty foot drain pipe, that's what it goddamn is."
So he had a point. Gordon drummed his fingers on the wheel. "Okay, how's this. We'll go over to Riverside Docks and check it ourselves. Maybe whoever's working there faxed us the wrong manifest."
Harvey's face puckered so hard he almost flipped inside-out. "I don't know shit about who's working there, but this ain't a fax. It's a goddamn print out. Looks new as shit to me, and it's got Riverside Docks Patron Manifest written on the top."
"But it's not new." Jim took the sheet before Harvey could ball it in his fist. "Because it's wrong."
Harvey unhooked the mic from the comms unit. "Let's find out." The comm speaker crackled. "Yeah, get me forensics, will ya? I want to know which dipshit tech gave us this list."
Gordon scanned the list of names printed alongside addresses. There were five sheets. He and Harvey had made it through the first two. Gordon flipped to the first.
T. Adams, 288-A Red Corner, Haysville
H. Ahearn, 1559 Bay View St, Reatton
I. Allen, 76 Nathorst Walk, Jerold
S. Anderson, 678 State Ave, Haysville
L. Aramini, 8771 Main Street, Gainsly
I. Asmus, 98-1-1 Harlow Close, West Harlow
S. Azzopardi, 43-5B Banks St, Haysville
T. Bach, 120-A Exchange Rd, Reatton
I. Backer, 65-C Glass Crescent, Stevensberg
S. Baj, 1001-10-2 Sigil Road, Gainsly
A. Baggio, 904 Cashley Circuit, Stevensberg
F. Banijamali, 811-2A China Street, West Harlow
A. Barone, 71 Arena Avenue, Reatton
K. Beattie, 154-B15 Roostville Road, Haysville
E. Bellato, 21-2 Hinkley Creek Road, Stevensberg
"Yeah, Forensics Department?" Harvey barked into the mic.
"Hold it." Gordon twisted the volume on the console, and the static fell dead. "You don't need to ask. I know who made this list."
"What? Whaddaya mean, made it?"
Gordon traced the initials. "THIS LIST IS A FAKE. How many people do you know who'd write that?"
Harvey let loose a long growl terminating with him slapping the mic down. "God damn it, Ed!"
A/N: No more complaining for me. I did some internet spoon fu and caught up with every episode. Absolutely loving the show. I wish I could hit Kristen Kringle with another bus. What is she, anyway, crazy? She dated the narcopolice! Narcopopo! NARCOPOPO. Bree (from Questions Without Answers) is right. Ed needs to find another lady. Maybe if I leave him alive, he will do just that. Mwahahahahaahahaha.
If you ever want someone to chat Gotham stuff with, tweet me at AnnequeMalchien.