"You ready to talk?"
Alexia looked up dispassionately from her coffee, her eyes meeting Jill's.
"No," Jill answered, and sighed, "of course you're not." She dragged the chair out from the table, the legs scraping the hardwood, and sat down.
Alexia smiled, sipped her coffee.
"So what the hell do you want, Ashford?" Jill asked brusquely. "If you're gonna try to bribe off the investigation, it's not gonna work." She put her arms on the table, leaning forward. "Irons couldn't buy me, and neither can you."
People hurried past their window, huddling under umbrellas, newspapers and briefcases to ward off the rain, and disappeared down into the Finch Street subway. Dimly through the glass, Alexia heard a homeless man, a raggedy creature in a grimy coat and sweatpants, preaching junkie gospels to disinterested passersby, a sad, shaggy mutt sitting beside him over an empty coffee can which, on a piece of paper taped over in clear scotch tape, read ALMS in huge felt-pen letters.
"Then it's very fortunate I have no intention of bribing you," Alexia replied, and paused as the waitress bustled over. Jill ordered a coffee, and a bagel with strawberry cream cheese. "It's on me," she said to Jill, and furnished her with a thin, polite smile.
"Bet that five bucks is gonna kill your wallet," Jill said sardonically, rolling her eyes.
"Oh, yes," Alexia answered, and swallowed another mouthful of coffee. "Absolutely murder it."
"What do you want, Ashford? Get to whatever point you're working toward."
"The six-winged woman," Alexia said, straightening up in her chair.
Jill stared, an unreadable look on her face. The waitress returned with her order, then rushed off to attend another customer. "How do you know about that?" she asked.
"I saw her," Alexia said. She finished her coffee and delicately set the mug on its saucer. "Her name is Miranda. I don't have a surname."
"You know something," Jill said.
"Not really," Alexia replied. "Just the name. What happened when you encountered her?"
Jill said nothing, and sipped her coffee.
"She's been targeting me," Alexia said. "Targeting my family. This is important, Jill. For my daughter." And for Sherry, Alexia thought.
Jill frowned, then heaved a sigh. She lowered her voice. "Nothing happened with her, but we found zombies," she said, looking at her. "Out on the Reserve trails. But these weren't like the infected I encountered in Raccoon City, or on Rockfort and Antarctica." She tapered off into silence, and then, after several beats, asked, "You know anything about it?"
"No," Alexia said, and meant it. "If you take me to the bodies your people collected, I could, perhaps, assist you in the investigation." She paused, adding, "Off the books, of course." She watched Jill's expression rollercoaster through a spectrum of emotion, and then Alexia said, "My daughter is only a baby, Jill. Would you really condemn her because of who her mother is? And you still care about Grayson."
The plea wasn't made wholly in earnest, and she barely trained back a triumphant smirk. She certainly cared about her family, but understood that pathos was a powerful tool when wielded against the right people, and Jill was as right as people came. The woman was too empathetic and soft, Alexia knew, and she intended to exploit that weakness. Anything, Alexia thought, to find Miranda and put an end to her schemes—so she could return to concerting her takeover of Umbrella, and excising the malignant tumor that was Albert Wesker.
"Fine," Jill said at length, draining her coffee and wrapping her bagel up in a napkin. "But you try anything," she said, lowering her voice, "and I'll blow your head open."
"I'd suggest leaving my skull intact," Alexia said, diplomatically. "I'm a very powerful, very wealthy, very well-connected woman. People would notice my absence." She paused, leaning toward Jill and sharpening a smile, predatory and cold. "Grayson, most of all, would notice my absence. And he'd kill you, once he found out you were the one who'd pulled the trigger—and he would find out, I assure you. I'd make sure of it, Valentine."
Jill slipped into her PABs windbreaker, said, "That arrogance is gonna cost you one day, Ashford, and it's a gonna be a steep price, even for your wallet," and walked out the door.
Alexia said nothing. She watched Jill go, then paid and pulled on her raincoat, hurrying after Jill. The junkie-preacher stopped his sermon as Alexia walked past him, and he said, like a child who finally saw the bogeyman, "You're the devil."
"Satan," she replied, tossing a fifty onto the wet pavement at the man's feet and watching, with amusement, as the man fished the bill out of the puddle, only for it to dissolve in his filthy, scabbed hand, "only wishes he could be me."
The ride over to the morgue was awkward, the uncomfortable tension only somewhat alleviated by the 80s music playing on the radio. Alexia didn't recognize the first song, but identified the second as Major Tom, and found she still hated it. She knobbed to the classical station, and Jill didn't fight her on it, but the sound quality was spotty, so Alexia settled on the classic rock station instead. Holy Diver was playing, and that was fine by her.
"You like heavy metal?" Jill said, surprised.
"Grayson's influence," Alexia said. "He was very much into heavy metal as a boy. Posters plastered all over the walls of his bedroom. Dio, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath—all of that. Had the long hair and everything for a while, too. Until his father forced him to cut it." She smiled to herself, then said, "He was so wild compared to myself and Alfred. I couldn't help but be attracted to him."
A few moments of silence, of Dio warbling on the radio, and then Jill said, "You know, that was a real shitty thing you did to that guy."
"Who? Grayson? He really needed the haircut."
Jill shook her head.
"Oh," Alexia said, "you mean that drug addict with the dog."
"You really don't have a single shred of compassion in you," Jill said.
"He would've used that fifty dollars to buy more drugs," Alexia said, and shrugged, staring out her window, observing the sidewalk crowds as if they were organisms in a petri-dish, drones in an ant-farm. "Besides," she added, "he called me the devil."
"You're the woman of Satan's dreams, Ashford."
"If we're going to compare me to fictional characters, I feel it would be more favorable to compare me to Morgoth." She paused, then said, "Or, better yet, Galadriel. Beautiful and wise, and immensely powerful, who even Sauron would have struggled to overcome."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Jill said.
"Only the greatest bloody work to every grace the world of literature," Alexia said, feeling, as a very proud Englishwoman, personally attacked, as if Jill had just insulted the whole of England on the utmost personal level. "Lord of the Rings?"
"Wasn't Lord of the Rings a cartoon?"
"Stop talking, Valentine."
The morgue was in the basement of Arklay General. A grumpy pathologist by the name of Murray ran the place. She inquired about their business in the morgue, and Jill explained PABs had her babysitting an Umbrella rep, an assessor sent by the company to verify and log the infected for purposes she couldn't disclose, as it related to the Raccoon Trials.
"The bodies are over here," Murray said to them. She was a petite woman in a too-big lab-coat, with tawny hair and a perpetually harassed look. Pulling out the coolers, a waft of cold rot hit Alexia's nose, and something underneath it that, oddly, reminded her of mushrooms. The bodies were encased in bright orange bio-hazard bags. Murray eyed her, then said, "You look familiar."
"I'm certain we've never met," Alexia said coolly.
Murray gave her a doubtful look. "Right. Well, I've got work to do. Have fun," she said, and walked off.
"That was quite a lie you spun," Alexia said to Jill, cocking an eyebrow. "Consider me impressed, Valentine."
"I'm pretty well-acquainted with Umbrella's bullshit, as you already know," Jill said. She glanced at the bags, then said, "Hurry up and take a look."
"I'll need a sample," Alexia said, unzipping the first bag, that pungent odor of rotten mushrooms rising up like a hot cloud and gagging her. "God," she said, wrinkling her nose and turning her head away, "it stinks."
"So you can take a fucking sample of the virus and re-engineer it?" Jill said through her teeth, darting a look at the door the pathologist had vanished through. Then, "You know what kinda shit I'd be in? Knee-deep. Bad enough I brought you here."
"I have no interest in re-engineering anything," Alexia said. "I have my own projects." She directed her attention to the body, took a few deep breaths to acclimate herself to the stench, and looked it over.
A woman, likely in her mid-thirties, who was already in the throes of late-stage decomposition, a bullet-hole in her head. It wasn't, Alexia observed, the decomposition that accompanied T-Virus cases. The body looked as if it was breaking down into compost: slimy black mold which pooled in the bottom of the bag and smelled, overwhelmingly, of mushy, overripe mushrooms.
"Jesus Christ, that's foul," Jill said, pinching her nose and staring at the woman-slurry puddling in the bag like coffee dregs.
Alexia washed her hands in the sink on the work-station, then dried them off and pulled on a pair of disposable latex gloves. She grabbed a pair of forceps from a steel tray on a vacant autopsy table, a bio-hazard baggy from a plastic dispenser, and set to work.
The mold was tacky like paste, and it took some effort to coax off a mold nodule and drop it into the baggy. Alexia moved on to the other bodies and repeated the process, labeling each baggy with the subject's name, and which part of their body she'd taken the sample from. "This isn't the T-Virus," she said, securing the final baggy and tagging it. "That's for bloody certain. I'll need to run further analysis at my laboratory, however, to determine what we're dealing with—and, ultimately, to determine what Miranda's been up to."
"Your laboratory?"
"Yes," Alexia said, looking at Jill, "my laboratory." Her home laboratory didn't have the necessary equipment for this sort of work, which honestly made her quite happy; it meant she had a reason to return to NEST 3.
"And you're gonna keep us in the loop?" Jill said, though it sounded more like a command than a question.
Alexia hated being told what to do, especially by someone like Jill Valentine, but she was willing to comply for now, to extend an olive branch. If Alexia could convince the Private Anti-Biohazard Service that she was cooperating with them, she'd not only have a vantage point that would allow her to effectively devise countergambits against their investigative efforts, she'd also have access to their data and Federation resources—things that could shake Spencer out of the CEO's seat. If it was one thing Albert Wesker had ever taught her, it was to never look a gift-horse in the mouth.
"Of course," Alexia said.
Jill narrowed her eyes in suspicion. "Just like that?" she said, and clicked her tongue. "You're not getting out of things, Ashford," Jill told her. "Playing nice isn't gonna secure you a generous plea-bargain."
"That's what my money and connections are for, Valentine. No, this is much bigger than plea-bargains. Miranda made the mistake of targeting the Ashfords, and I'm going to teach her that was a very, very stupid thing to do."
"There are no Ashfords anymore," Jill corrected, and grinned with immense smugness. "Alfred's dead. Your daughter's a Harman, and so are you. When you die, your gravestone's gonna say Alexia Harman, and that's how your descendants will remember you. The Ashford name's—" and Jill moved her hand through the air in the pantomime of a breeze— "just dust in the wind."
"No," Alexia said icily, setting her jaw, "there are three Ashfords. One is standing right in front of you."
"Three," Jill repeated, as if Alexia had just told her the Earth was cube-shaped. "You mean your daughter and Grayson? That's not how the world will see it. Get over it, Ashford. Your family's gone. They've been gone. They died with Alfred."
"I'll be forgotten," Alexia said, looking at her, a smile ghosting her lips, "yet here you are, calling me 'Ashford'. And how do you think the Redfields will remember me, Valentine? Not as a Harman, I assure you."
Jill opened her mouth, closed it. "I'm done here," she said. "Call a cab or walk." She turned and left, slamming the door shut.
Murray appeared as if from thin air, and said, "Your monitor just left."
"Oh, no," Alexia lied. "She's just outside the door. Now," and she held up the baggies of mold samples, "put these in a container. I need to bring them back to my lab for processing."