Once the car burst into flames, Jim knew it was no use...
He had lost them.
The night was heavy on Jim Gordon, and the soles of his leather dress shoes fell wearily on the old oak stairs of Arkham Asylum's massive ballroom staircase. It hadn't been a long while since he'd last been here, and internally, he wished that the time between his visits had been significantly longer. Tonight the place was crawling with police officers, investigators, detectives, and forensics, and all the while the press was held at bay by the same emotionally shattered guards who had been called in to give their statements and fill in shifts for their viciously slain brethren.
Jim went on his way up the stairs and down the hallway, flanked on both sides by the executive offices of Arkham Asylum's leading doctors. At the end of the corridor, the last door stood open. A few investigators were just leaving the room, still scribbling furiously upon their tattered notepads. As Jim passed, he noted the somber, sullen look on their faces, and it made him want to walk just a little bit slower, just to put off the inevitable, just to avoid learning the truth that he already knew.
In his heart of hearts, he was certain of the culprit, and he could feel the heat welling behind his eyes as he prepared himself for the revelation.
Please God, Jim prayed internally, please let it be anyone but her.
Slowly, he made his way through the door, glancing at the pooling bloodstain that had crept out from under the receptionist's desk. Her death had been merely a crime of pure necessity, as there was no way anyone could hold a vendetta against someone as empty-headed as she had been. Jim had remembered coming to meet with Arkham for investigations in the past, and not long into a brief and polite conversation with the girl had easily realized that the old doctor had clearly hired her out of convenience. She didn't have a psyche for him to decipher.
Not that he would have bothered anyway.
They were wrapping her up in a black body bag, as Jim moved toward the sound of a flickering camera taking pictures of the crime scene beyond the double oak doors of what had been Jeremiah Arkham's office.
"Good evening, Commissioner," one of the forensics investigators in the room ahead greeted him as he entered. His voice was bereaved, and he offered Jim a box of packaged latex gloves.
Jim glanced around the room, memorizing the utter tragedy of what he saw. "No. No, it's not."
The place did not seem out of the ordinary, save for Arkham's lifeless body slumped over in his Italian leather swivel chair. A few books from the bookself behind him were now strewn out on the floor around him, their pages and covers spattered with dried blood.
Jim had to admit to himself that what made him sad was not seeing Jeremiah Arkham sitting dead in his chair, a hole between his brows and a ghastly exit wound that had turned the back of his skull into a bloody crater. It didn't even make him sad to see this debauched and discredited facility without its leader, as surely there would be some other old, unethical man to replace him.
What made him sad was the passion with which this murder had been engineered.
After a moment, Jim's internal detective sprang into action. Arkham must have been out of the office, and so the receptionist was used to garner his attention and bring him back. She was then killed and quickly hidden under the desk before the killer laid in wait within the darkness of Arkham's office. A very simple game of bait and hook. Jim bent down to examine the execution-style shot between the eyes, and concluded it had been made with a high-powered round. Had to have been a Magnum, at the very least.
Rising to his full height yet again, hands stuffing in the pockets of his taupe trenchcoat, Jim looked down at Arkham's bloody corpse with only a melancholy half-smile. "Well, my friend..." he muttered, "it couldn't have happened to a better person."
"Commissioner, you might want to come here and take a look at this."
Jim turned to see the forensics investigator crouched on the opposite side of the room, pointing with the eraser side of his pencil to a small square object on the floor. As he took a few steps closer, it became clear to him that it was nothing more than a cheap prepaid cell phone. "We found this earlier, sir," the young man said, "but didn't want to move it until you or your team had a look."
Jim bent down, with no visible enthusiasm, to pick up the phone with his gloved hand, using his thumb nail to flip open the cover. The phone was standard, completely generic, inexpensive, and held absolutely no personal information. It had only ever placed one call – Jim recognized it as Jeremiah Arkham's direct office number, which had clearly been used to lure the doctor to his death. The inside was smeared with foundation and held a light scent of perfume, and it slowly affixed the killer's identity in his mind.
The young investigator was certainly enthused with the sight, though. "Did you want me to swab that for DNA?" he asked, eyes wide at the microbial treasure trove that Jim held in his latex coated hand.
"Go for it..." Jim told him, a deadness in his tone lingering over the words like a dark cloud. "It won't matter much anyway." But the kid didn't care, he just wanted to do his job. He swabbed the phone, and sealed both the phone and the swab in separate Ziploc bags.
Another investigator entered the room only seconds later, an open file resting in his hands. "Gordon, I ran the plates on that car you chased down St. James a minute ago."
"And?"
The investigator flipped through a couple pages, coming over to show Jim a lease from a car rental dealership downtown. "The Saab was rented by a Mrs. Vanessa Ferguson, with a credit card that was reported missing only yesterday afternoon. Pretty easy to track down, considering that there were less than a hundred sold across the country. We got people trying to contact the kid that leased it to her."
Again, it only deepened the dark conviction that lurked in Jim's mind. "Anything else?" he asked somberly.
"Yeah, they got the security tapes up," the investigator said gruffly. Before anyone could so much as bat another eyelash, Jim rushed past him, bolted back down the hallway of which he had just come, and took the stairs two-by-two, directed by other police officers to the security station toward the end of the hallway on the first floor.
The place was packed. Everyone squirmed and huddled around the monitors, straining to see the carnage that this murderer had wreaked upon all these defenseless nurses and oblivious guards. Jim pushed his way to the front, gazing down at the tiny thirteen-inch monitor they were rolling the feed on.
Watching in the corner as the seconds rolled by, the technician spoke. "Here she comes..."
Some gasped, others gazed on in horror, but Jim came as close as wanting to cry as he ever had.
Off from the right side of the screen came a darkly silhouetted figure, with a strange devil-horned headdress and dark eyes. Jim immediately recognized it as the court jester on the Joker card... and the image sent a wave of terror down his spine. He watched as the figure sent two guards to the ground, having swung into them off screen, each one of her tiny feet she planted in their chests appearing in the corner of the monitor. Then she shot the one on the right in the head, smoothly leaning over to take his baton from his belt loop, and swung over to bludgeon the head of the other guard until his death.
Most people looked away then, but Jim couldn't. The shock of blond hair that stood out from her bangs, the blackness that swallowed the pixelated blue eyes, the blood red lips, the sweetness in her twisted smile. In his mind's eye, she looked very much like the fifteen-year old girl who'd opened the door for him that day, and whose heart broke behind those sad young eyes of hers as her tiny world crashing down around her. He could see it in the way she winked mischievously up at the security camera, after having just committed one of the most violent crimes he'd ever seen.
"That's her..." Jim whispered, hitting the pause button on the archaic VCR, the frame freezing on her malevolent, devilish, beautiful face. "That's Harleen Quinzel."
# # # # # # #
Back in Arkham's office, Jim stood vigil over the heart of carnage that had settled into the Asylum that night. The Asylum was already closely associated with violence, so it seemed only suiting that it had finally turned into a murder scene. Jim and his colleagues had investigated crimes here before, but nothing of this magnitude.
Thirteen murders, and Gotham's most dangerous criminal let off the leash again.
Though the video had made it clear that the Joker was not to blame for any of the killings, there was something so malicious about the way these people had been killed. How could the Joker have passed his torch to a woman of completely sound mind in just six months, with only the power of suggestion?
Now, as the seconds paced around him at an achingly slow circumference, the ticking of his wristwatch seeming to echo in his ears, Jim's eyes fell upon the printout he held in his hand – a much smoother image from the video he had just watched. There was so much wrong with this photograph, something so dark that he had never even seen a whisper of in Harley. Her pretty face stood out so vividly in the photograph as she winked to the camera, her back turned on the two dead guards that she had left beside each other. One of them was apparently seizing from the severe head trauma she had dealt him. Unlike the Joker, the makeup she wore was smoothly applied; her face was pale, and fresh, but not white, and her lips were bold and red, the petals of a tulip in a world of beige. Her hair was a mix of precious metals, silver and gold, like spider's silk struck by morning light.
But above everything else, it was the eyes that transfixed him so.
They looked like a glistening pool of blue ocean water in the middle of a freshly paved parking lot. Jim had stared down the Joker a couple times before, and his features reminded him of melted, folded candle wax. His eyes in particular were like black spider-legs tucked into the crevasses dug by squinting, skeptical, curious glances. Harley's could have come down a runway in Paris. The smoky blacks and silvers covered the space around her eyes and arched up her brow, where it tapered off to a point in a dramatic cat's-eye.
As Jim sat there, gaze fixed on her face, there came a draft that pulled him from his mental meanderings and brought him to look up to the rustling curtain in front of the open window. Furrowing his eyebrows from behind his thickly-rimmed glasses, he stood from where he leaned against Arkham's desk and moved to close the large window.
He didn't have to wonder who had opened it for very long; as soon as he turned around, a shadow emerged from the darkness of the room.
Normally, Jim would have jumped to have been greeted in such a way, but he had expected to see or at least hear from the Caped Crusader tonight. "I figured you'd be around at some point... seeing as this has something to do with the Joker. Is it on the news yet?"
"Not yet, but by morning Gotham will be hearing about it," Batman said in his usual gruff tone. He made little fanfare about his sudden appearance, like always. Batman was never one for grand entrances, let alone grand exits.
Jim tugged at the corner of the photograph in his hand, reluctant to hand it over to the shadow-draped man. "Well, I'm not sure how much you know, but I have to assume it's more than me."
Batman's cape swirled around his ankles as he examined the room. Arkham's body had been moved from the scene just minutes ago, along with most of the evidence - the blood spattered books, the drenched swivel chair, and the prepaid cell phone. He was later than he usually was. You could set a watch to time how soon Batman would show up at a crime scene, and it was usually only seconds after Gordon had.
"I should know more than I do so far..." Batman seemed to be taking note of the gunshot residue on the desk, already tagged by the CSI team. "Harley remained elusive last week... low-key," he said flatly, a dark but dignified presence as he moved about the room.
And although what Batman had just said felt like the final nail in the coffin, Jim didn't find it hard to believe that he had known as soon as he'd heard, too. Once he'd gotten the call tonight, Jim had seen it coming a mile away as easily as a freight train through a wheat field. "I know," he said. "I called her last week...she never called me back."
He had been devastated, waiting by the phone for a call from Harley that would never come. Secretly, Jim had hoped that no one in Gotham would ever discover the truth about Harvey Dent. The Joker had taken the broken mind of a broken man, who had lost everything that ever meant anything to him, and turned him into a psychotic murderer. But Dent hadn't exactly been having the best day, to say the least – he was in a weakened mental state, and the Joker took advantage of that. Harley, on the other hand, had been better than she'd ever been. Her confidence was at an all-time high after receiving the internship at Arkham, and even after she'd been asked to treat the Joker.
Batman turned his gaze back over to the Commissioner. "She's not exactly easy for me to track."
"Are you joking? And here I was thinking that you were the kind of guy to know everything." His lip curled in disbelief as he thought that over a moment. Batman could discover just about anything... he could tell you how many shipments of drug stuffed teddy-bears had been unloaded from pier nine in the last three weeks, or he could tell you how many times during any given period that Carmine Falcone had stood up to take a leak... but he couldn't track Harley Quinzel? She had a public address, her number in the phone book, and in recent weeks there had been countless articles published about her personal life – and now, somehow, she'd eluded Batman?
Jim couldn't believe it until his mind had stumbled onto a thought - but as with most ideas, they just ended up leading to more questions. The Commissioner tip-toed around the subject delicately. "You really think that Harley would have been capable of something like this?"
Using some kind of tool from his belt, Batman scraped a small amount of the gunshot residue into a plastic test tube, sliding it into an elastic holder in his belt. "It's not hard to imagine a world where all people are capable of things like this."
"But what do you think of Harley?"
There was a thick silence that hung between them, and Jim knew exactly why. Anyone who knew Harley would not think her capable of such an act as this, and admitting that he didn't believe that she was capable would outline one very important fact.
"You know her... don't you?" Jim asked, solemnly – and then watched as, for the first time he had ever seen, Batman turned his ice-cold gaze away.
He'd hit the nail on the head. When the truth was assumed, it was only the guilty who fought back. Without thinking, Jim extended the picture to the Caped Crusader, waving it him to recapture his attention. Batman looked down at it, his features hardening again, but then settled just as quickly.
"Well, whether you knew her or not," Jim said, "throw out everything you thought you knew. I've known her since she was fifteen years old, and I never would have assumed she could do anything like this."
There was something paternal in the way he thought about this girl, Jim realized. Ethically, he knew it wasn't right, she had been a civilian caught up in the shuffle of crime, and he'd taken to her somehow... watched her grow and change. During her first couple semesters at school, she'd used to call him with her grades, and he always came away proud that this girl, who could have easily succumbed to a life of crime as her father had, instead decided to turn around and make something of herself. But now, to see this oddly-shaped monster lurking just below the surface... it made him ill.
"What are you going to do?" Batman asked.
Jim just shook his head, hands planted firmly on his hips, pondering any potential positive outcome. It was impossible. What could he possibly do for her now? The girl had thrown her life away. "I don't know...stop her, I guess, before more people die."
"What makes you think the Joker will let us get anywhere near her?" Batman asked, passing the photograph back to Jim and slowly making his way back over to the window.
With his brows furrowed, Jim's curious glance moved from the photograph and back up to where he was standing in the rustic orange light cast from the small reading lamp on Arkham's desk. "Does the Joker really seem like the kind of guy to take a partner?" he asked, turning the photograph to show it to Batman once more. "I don't care how ambitious Harley is, if this is her attempt to capture his attention, then I think she's going to be pretty disappointed."
"This is what the Joker's been waiting for this whole time. He's found care and sympathy in Dr. Quinzel, and he intends on keeping it," Batman said.
But the idea that that Joker would thrive off emotions like that didn't make any sense to Jim. He shook his head at the photograph.. "I don't understand why she would give him sympathy."
"Neither you or I will be able to understand it, but we both know something about the size of her heart. She understands things in people, and she's seen things in the Joker that no one else may ever see." He paused for a moment, and Jim's eyes flashed up to meet his once again.
"It's funny, isn't it?" Jim sniffled in the damp night air, rubbing the side of his nose with his index finger. "She knows something about all of us, and we hardly know anything about her."
"That's what makes her so dangerous."
"I know..." Jim whispered. "I think that's what breaks my heart most of all."