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The Leopard from New York.
Peter smirked underneath his mask as he stayed in the shadows of Anna Watson's house at night while he watched as the old woman left her house, dressed to the nines as she got into her car (he did wonder how she could claim she was so hard up when her car looked like it was top of the line whenever the overdramatic old hag kept saying 'how bad things were' whenever she had arrived at his house, but he decided it didn't matter).
While he waited for her to get into her car and drive away though he planned to wait right where he was to make sure the woman didn't come back by chance and find him going through her home, Peter had time to reflect on everything he had done these last few weeks on the run-up to graduation which was now so close after he had waited for it for so long so he could go to college, and finally learn real science and technology.
After he had checked out Anna Watson's house that night, he had returned home and immediately checked online for miniature cameras that were small and compact enough to do their jobs, but after a while he realised he didn't need to use cameras at all though he made a mental note to get his hands on some cameras and the app he would need to get them to work right, but he had downloaded an app to his mobile that allowed him to tap into Anna Watson's phone.
Okay, part of him was still cringing at the lack of morality in tapping into the old woman's phone, but truthfully it was great having a means of keeping tabs on her in order to prepare for the burglary.
Peter had at first listened in to the conversations, which were frankly bizarre - it sounded like Anna was threatening people, but he had quickly stopped; he didn't know and frankly didn't want to know what Anna was doing, though it did sound truly odd that Anna would speak to someone in a threatening manner. He had always seen her as an inconvenience, really, never someone who threatened others.
In any case, when he had started to use the tracking app, he had lost interest in Anna's bizarre phone habits, especially when he discovered that she frequently went out to bingo, but according to the tracking code of the software he'd downloaded into his mobile, she sometimes went out to posh and swanky restaurants, sometimes with Mary Jane.
That had surprised him; Peter had never heard Anna mention anything about bingo in all the time he'd known her, but he guessed it made sense she would want to keep some things secret, but why would she want to keep his Aunt May out of things like that when she knew how desperate his aunt was for new friends?
But what had puzzled him the most was just how…rich some of the Watsons were, though it was clear only a few members of the family were actually that well off. It was just so weird, but Peter hadn't seen any reason to not continue with his plan to burgle the house.
The revving of an engine made him stiffen and he reflexively stepped further back into the shadows, and he watched as Anna left in her car and drove away, but the teenager didn't leave his hiding spot for a few minutes as he waited to see if Anna returned because she had forgotten something and realised it.
After a few minutes of waiting for any sign of Anna returning, Peter was about to step out into the open and head to the door so then he could carry out the first part of his plan, only to curse in annoyance when he spotted Anna's car appear. Scuttling back into the hiding spot again, biting his tongue to stop himself spewing out a slew of nasty insults against Anna, the Watson family, and half of the human race, Peter went back to standing still for Anna to come in and out, so he could begin.
When she came back out of the house again after a few moments and drove off again, Peter continued to wait and keep an eye out in case the old woman returned, but this time she didn't.
Cautiously Peter stepped out of the shadows, and he headed over to the front door in full view of the security cameras. Taking a deep breath under his mask, he pressed the doorbell and let it ring a couple of times before he stepped away from the door, and went down the alleyway again to the backdoor where the cameras would definitely pick him up.
He didn't want the police to think he had tapped Anna's phone, never mind he had visited the property already and knew about the cameras. He just wanted them to think he was an ordinary burglar who had gotten lucky. The fewer clues the police had that he'd tapped into Anna's phone (he would remove the tap soon, but not just yet), the better.
When he reached the backdoor, he made a show of taking out of his backpack some tools he'd brought to deal with the lock. Peter wished he could have used his superhuman strength to just snap the tumblers inside the lock through sheer pressure, but with the scattered cameras in the garden, he couldn't risk it.
With all the press coverage about mutants being so negative, Peter did not want to add any more fuel to the fire than there was already. And besides, there were dozens of groups out there who justified their actions against humanity simply because they could, and because of the misery caused by ordinary people, and there were other groups who took the opposite view, that mutants should not exist.
They were like modern examples of the KKK, or the Nazi party - the less they suspected one of New York's newest burglars of actually being someone who had been genetically spliced with leopard DNA, the better and as long as everyone in New York believed that he was just an ordinary, regular burglar, then he would be alright.
It didn't take long for Peter to get the door open, and when he did he took out a small black torch from his pocket. Anna had drawn the curtains before she had gone out, but he had expected that since she had always done that whenever she went out to bingo. But he didn't dare switch on the main light in case some neighbour with nothing better to do looked out of the window and noticed. Peter recognised the double-edged sword with the torch, but he was keeping the beam as far from the window as he could while he focused on the rest of the house, and he noted one or two things that would be great for him to steal before he went upstairs, taking care to keep the torchlight away from any windows.
It didn't take long for Peter to find Anna's bedroom. The best thing about the bedroom was, for some reason, he couldn't work out, Anna had left the curtains open, so there was just enough ambient light outside the house which gave Peter's leopard enhanced eyesight room to work.
Peter hurried over to the vanity table and pulled open drawers, and he smiled underneath his balaclava when he saw the jewellery boxes inside. It took him only a few moments to completely empty the drawers, when he was finished he walked over to the built-in wardrobe where he took a look at some of her clothes. They weren't as flashy as the clothes worn by celebrities like Paris Hilton, but Peter could definitely see they were not the type of clothes you bought secondhand. For a long moment, he was tempted. Just steal some of the clothes, sell them off….
No, it was not a good idea. While he had superhuman strength, he wouldn't be able to hide the fact he was carrying something from his aunt and uncle if they saw him go into the house. Maybe in the future when he had his own place, he would take more in the future, but not right now.
Closing the wardrobe, Peter left the bedroom to see if there was anything else he could steal in the house and he went next door, and he found an office inside painted a dark colour that he couldn't identify in this light. The office looked fairly basic to him; a neat desk with a collection of pens, pencils, ad calculator, chair for Anna to sit on, computer, a couple of trays laden with papers and letters that didn't really interest him. There were a couple of bookshelves laden with files and folders, and there was a TV and a DVD player next to a CD player Peter guessed Anna used to help her concentrate on her work when she was in here. but that was it. Peter walked over to the drawers. There was virtually nothing in them, just stationary supplies; pens, paperclips, things like that.
When he finished his search, he was about to leave when he noticed something odd about the room. The wall, the one facing the wall with the bookshelves, was too close to the window. There was something about the room which didn't make sense to him, and he stepped back into the room and he pressed his ear close to the wall and he began rapping on it - he would prefer to have a stethoscope, and he made a mental note to find one as soon as he could; if he came across something like this again, he wanted to be better equipped - and he slowly moved along the wall.
It didn't take long for Peter to hear a change to his rapping on the wall before the sound had been a wall that was solid but now it sounded…. hollow. The wall was hollow.
Peter pulled back and stared at the wall in surprise, and he looked at the window to see if there was a way to cover it, and he was relieved when he saw a blind covering the window, but there were two heavy curtains covering it. He smirked, Anna really did not want to keep this room hidden from view.
He gently pulled down the blind and then he drew the curtains and he hurried over to the door and closed it before he switched on the light and looked along the wall, and he instantly saw a faded sticker on the wall. Peter walked over to it slowly, keeping his ears attuned to the other sounds in the house, and he studied the sticker. It was of a large, old-fashioned, and faded version of Donald Duck. The plastic was covered with dirt on the surface and underneath it as well, but it was still visible.
Peter lifted up a finger on his left hand and gently rubbed the sticker, and it clicked as the hidden door swung slowly outward. Peter grinned and he looked inside the hidden room, the light in the office picking out the light switch on the wall. And he saw jars inside the hidden room.
When the light in the room was turned on, Peter was surprised when he saw jars on built-in shelves. They were filled with cash, but Peter was more interested in the books. He picked one of them up and he began flipping through the pages, and his eyes widened.
There were a number of entries in the book, written in Anna's neat handwriting; names, addresses, but next to the addresses was something he hadn't expected. One of the names and addresses had was of a man who had once been drunk driving, the entry read "murdered a child by accident - learnt that via hypnotherapy - further evidence attained," while another had "took photos during college years of the inside of a girl's sorority, hides it from wife and daughter," followed by "forged parent's wills to write other relatives out," and a third read "Ponzi scheme," all of them with incredible amounts of money.
Some of the entries had the word "continuing", which showed Anna didn't leave these people alone and continued to extort small amounts of money from them in order to keep her income going, but Peter was surprised by how many times "hypnotherapist" cropped up. He hadn't known Anna Watson was a hypnotherapist, but he imagined it made sense to him such a role would be something any blackmailer would want since it would allow them to get their hands on more cash. Peter looked thoughtfully at the book, and at the cash before he went to the shelves and took down the jars. He opened two of them up and he filled his bag with the money.
It took Peter half an hour to fill his bag with the money, and when he was finished he looked around the room for anything else before he decided to go, but he paused and looked at the desk with the book on it. He picked it up thoughtfully, casting his eyes on the other books lining the walls, and judging from the dates Anna had been blackmailing people for a long time, using her skills as a hypnotherapist and god knew what else to extort money while she also probably ran a few Ponzi schemes on the side, and perhaps other classic cons though Peter wondered how they could fall for something that obviously didn't work. He shrugged his shoulders dismissively, deciding they were irrelevant for now, in the meantime, he wanted to know what he was going to do now because he didn't think Anna should get away with something like this before he spotted a number of newspapers and magazines which seemed odd.
Peter took one of them curiously and found that certain letters or words in the pages had been carefully cut out. He remembered an old trick in kidnap letters you saw in movies and on TV had the kidnapper using letters cut out of a newspaper or a magazine being stuck together to form ransom demands in letters demanding cash for the life of a loved one or a colleague. From the look of it, Anna used the same trick, which made sense given she wouldn't want to advertise too much about herself to her victims, much like Peter didn't when he had broken into the house earlier.
And yet… as he looked at the cut up newspapers and magazines, Peter had the idea in his mind he could make a letter himself and send it off with details about Anna's blackmailing operation and one of the books, which would be enough, and she would be arrested. No, that would take too long, he decided. There was something much better than that.
A grin spread across Peter's face underneath his mask as the idea entered his mind. Taking one last check in the room to make sure all of the money was in his bag, Peter left the room and the office, not even bothering to switch off the light, and he headed downstairs to the telephone.
He picked up the phone and tapped in the number.
It was picked up after a few rings. "911 emergency?"
Keeping his voice disguised, Peter whispered, "There's been a break in.."
Sitting in the dark shadows of a nearby rooftop, Peter watched as the police car appeared, and according to his watch, he could tell it had taken seven minutes for the cops to arrive on the call. Not bad, he thought to himself as he watched the police arrive at the door of Anna Watson's house and found it wide open. Peter stayed on the rooftop and watched as the police officers entered the house, and he checked off the minutes before the police found the hidden room.
Peter smirked when the cops came out and one of them made a call to the station and asking for a detective, and he decided he had been here long enough when he noticed the time on his watch. He'd better get back home; he had told his aunt and uncle he had planned to go into the city again to search for work. He had indeed gone to the city, but he had come back early to commit the burglary. It was the only way he could stay out for a long time without suspicion. Peter pulled back into the shadows of the rooftop, and soon he was gone.
Until the next time...