Danny watched Zoe signing the release paperwork for her daughter, Michelle next to her having quickly checked it over first. He turned to the side as someone came out of one of the side offices, walking over to stand next to him. "Hey, Earl," he said, nodding in recognition. Sergeant Earl Jeffries nodded back.
"Hey, Danny. Been a while. How's it going?"
"It's been better, I have to admit, but things are picking up," he replied. The tall and heavily built dark-skinned man smiled briefly.
"Glad to hear it. And sorry about your wife."
He sighed a little. "Yeah, that's never going to stop hurting, but…" Waving a hand vaguely, he was silent for a second, then added, "Life goes on, you know? I forgot that for a while, so did Taylor, but we're healing."
"Know what you mean, yeah." Earl nodded slowly. "It's never easy to lose someone close to you."
"No."
"I expect the work city hall is tossing your way will be useful and cheer a lot of people up though?" The man grinned as Danny chuckled.
"It's certainly helping morale, I can tell you that much," he agreed. "There are a lot of dock workers who suddenly know they'll be able to pay the bills next month, which is better than it's been for some time."
His companion nodded again. He was watching Zoe talk to the booking officer, the woman looking upset but resigned and determined. "Friend of yours?" he queried.
Danny followed his eyes. "The Barnes' have been close to my family for decades," he replied after a moment. "Despite some recent… issues."
"Barnes… Alan Barnes, right?" Earl looked thoughtful. "I think I met him at one of your barbecues years back. Lawyer or something?"
"Yeah, divorce lawyer."
"Got it, I remember now. And his daughter is the mouthy redhead in the cells, the one who kicked Nick in the face a couple of times." Earl snorted when Danny sighed. "Got some spirit, that one, you should have heard her yelling about an hour ago. But her judgment is kind of iffy if you ask me…"
"To put it lightly," Danny grumbled. "She has not impressed her mother. For several reasons."
"Not surprised." The cop looked around, then leaned a little closer. "She was involved in that bust in Winslow, with the other girl, Hess?"
Looking at him, Danny slowly nodded. "I heard that your daughter was also involved?" Earl looked at him seriously. "Accused of having drugs, the same ones the Hess girl turned out to have on her."
"Basically that, yeah." Danny sighed heavily. "It was a false accusation, obviously. Neither one of us is very happy about it. I can't get into the details right now because there's a legal case being built, but Hess has been causing… let's call it a lot of trouble… for Taylor for quite a while now. The school is more than a little implicated in the whole thing, for reasons we're still trying to work out."
"Winslow is a shithole, so that might just be the reason there," Earl commented dryly, causing Danny to roll his eyes in agreement. "But…" He looked around again, as Danny wondered why. "Look, I can't really say much, but you want to be a little careful with that one. There's something weird going on. I've known you for a long time or I wouldn't mention it…" He trailed off, Danny giving him a curious look.
"Weird?" he echoed.
Earl nodded a little. "Definitely weird. In a very specific way." When Danny raised an eyebrow the other man lowered his voice. "Hess is gone. A couple of alleged lawyers turned up out of the blue, paid her bail, talked to the Captain for about twenty minutes, and took her away."
"Alleged lawyers?" he asked, puzzled and suspicious. "What do you mean?"
"I mean that one of them was definitely armed, and I'm not convinced that lawyer is the best word for either of them. Sure, they had the paperwork and all, but…" He shrugged minutely. "I've at least bumped into practically every defense lawyer in the city at one point or another, like most cops around here. You meet all sorts in this line of work. I didn't recognize either of them, and something about them just didn't smell right."
"I see." Danny thought hard. He was vaguely getting a picture he wasn't entirely sure he liked.
"Funny thing is that what they kind of reminded me of was familiar," Earl added almost conversationally. His eyes flicked towards the window behind them. Danny looked at him, then in that direction. All he could see through it and the slowly falling snow was the street, and at the far end, half a mile away…
What the other man was circling around abruptly registered. He froze for a brief moment then looked back to Earl, who nodded almost imperceptibly. "Oh. Weird." Danny returned the nod and kept his feelings from showing on his face with the ease of very long practice in controlling himself. "I think I understand what you're saying now."
"Good." Earl smiled slightly. "I hope your legal case goes well. If I can help, let me know. Some of the boys remember the Union fondly."
"Nice to know," Danny replied with a nod of acknowledgment. "When summer rolls around, I may have to start up the barbecues again. It's been too long."
"Looking forward to it. You did a damn good crab as I recall," Earl smiled. Both of them looked back to where Zoe was standing. "Hope things work out with them too."
He shrugged rather tiredly. "That part is going to be hard, but we'll see what happens."
"Good luck," Earl responded, turning to walk off. "Got to get back to work, but you take care of yourself and that kid of yours. Later, Danny." He lifted a hand in a wave. Danny watched him go, then walked over to where Zoe was folding up the documentation and putting it in her bag, next to a transparent plastic bag with Emma's phone and other things in that the desk sergeant had given her. He placed a hand on her shoulder as she looked around.
"Everything sorted out?"
"We're just waiting for them to bring Emma out," she replied, heaving a sigh. Leaning on him for a moment, she continued after a second, "Thank you so much for helping, especially after what Emma has done."
"I can't say I'm happy about it because I very much am not, but I'm not going to drop friends I've had for longer than Taylor or Emma have been alive just like that," he replied quietly. "You didn't know anything about it, and I know you'd have stepped in if you did. Taylor knows the same thing. Neither of us blame you, or Anne. I'm reserving judgment on Alan until I talk to him about it."
She growled under her breath. "If that man knew anything about all this I am going to kill him," she snapped.
"Probably best not to say that in a police station," he advised mildly, causing her to nod and Michelle to look slightly amused for a moment. "But I understand."
The door to the detainment area opened just as she was about to reply, causing everyone to look around. Emma, very disheveled and appearing like she'd been dragged across a carpet by her ankle, clearly still extremely angry, walked through it accompanied by two cops, a man and a woman. Neither seemed entirely pleased with things. "Your daughter," the male cop said as the female one unlocked the handcuffs that were holding Emma's hands behind her back. The girl jerked her arms free and spun, pointing at the man.
"You haven't heard the…" was as far as she got before her mother stalked forward and grabbed her wrist in a very tight grip.
"Emma, shut the hell up right the hell now," Zoe said in the most vicious tones Danny had ever heard from the woman. Her daughter turned to look at her with wide eyes, makeup streaked around them.
"Ow!" she cried. "Mom, that hurts!"
"Tough shit. Live with it." Zoe nodded to the cops, who were watching with a certain amount of schadenfreude visible on their faces. "My apologies for her behavior, and thank you."
"No problem, Ma'am," the female cop replied politely before both turned and went back the way they'd come. Zoe grabbed Emma by the free hand as she raised it, shaking her head.
"No. Not a word out of you. We're going home and we are going to have a very long, very frank discussion about your activities. Not only today's, either. I think I've missed a lot of things that I shouldn't have in the last year or so, but that ends now." She was glaring at the girl with a gaze that could have stripped paint. Emma shrank back, clearly shocked. Turning, Zoe simply walked off, still holding Emma's wrists, giving her daughter the choice to follow or be dragged.
Danny exchanged a glance with Michelle, then the desk sergeant who was doing his best not to grin, nodded to the man, and followed with the legal expert trailing along behind him.
Yeah, he thought, Zoe was amazingly like Annette had been when she was riled up. Which under the circumstances was probably a good thing.
As they got back into the car, Emma being shoved into the front seat, he looked over the roof towards the bay for a second, pondering what Earl had said, before sitting down and closing the door. It wasn't until then that Emma appeared to notice the other two. "What are they doing he…" she said as she looked around. Her mother put her hand over her mouth for a few seconds.
"Not a word. I meant it. We're going home and we're going to talk about a lot of things that are long overdue. Starting with Sophia Hess and ending with you never seeing her again."
Emma opened her mouth, her face going red. Zoe snapped a hand out and pinched her lips together, her eyes alight with fury sufficient to make the girl shrink back. "I said no talking," the older woman hissed like an angry dragon.
When Emma finally nodded meekly, she started the car, looked over her shoulder, indicated, and pulled onto the street.
The ride back to the Barnes house was very quiet.
"You are probably the stupidest child I've ever met," Emily Piggot stated with false calm, wishing she could reach over the desk and strangle the glowering figure of Sophia Hess, who was standing on the other side with her hands in front of her, bound in a Tinker tech device Armsmaster had produced to nullify her abilities. "Do you have the faintest idea what you've done? And what might happen as a result?"
"Someone set me up!" Sophia snarled.
"Oh?" Emily leaned back and folded her hands on her desk. "Please enlighten us all as to how that happened to occur. We're fascinated to know how you ended in police custody on drugs charges, not to mention evading arrest and…" She looked down at the document in front of her, then raised her eyes again. "...being an irritating little shit, it says here, but I think that's just the arresting officer's personal opinion not a legitimate charge, no matter how valid it seems to me."
Sophia's cheeks darkened with rage and she bit down on the first words she'd been about to say. Which was probably a good thing all in all, as no one present was in a forgiving mood. Armsmaster was glowering at her from one side, Miss Militia, who was scanning a copy of the police report appeared furious on the other, and Renick was sitting in a chair next to Emily's desk with an expression of deep annoyance on his face. "How exactly were you set up, who set you up, and why?" the director urged when the girl didn't say anything.
"Someone put that crap in my pocket," Sophia blurted.
"Oh?" Emily raised her eyebrows. "And you didn't notice? Are there a lot of skilled pickpockets who make a habit of giving out about five hundred bucks worth of high grade cannabis resin in Winslow?" Her voice was still mild although the sarcasm was biting. "I have to admit I wouldn't entirely disbelieve that based on the reports I've read, but the big question would then be why you?"
"It's not my hash!" Sophia shouted. "It was planted on me!"
"Really," Emily said in an arid voice. "Who and why?"
"Hebert did it," the girl blustered.
"Ah." Leaning forward again, Emily looked at the document. "That would be Taylor Hebert, a student at the school whose locker someone claimed had drugs in? Drugs that were oddly enough said to consist of cannabis resin remarkably similar to that found in your possession?" She raised her eyes to meet Sophia's, which looked furious and worried in almost equal amounts. The girl was sweating noticeably. "See, the funny thing about all this, the part I can't help but notice," she went on sweetly, "is that Principal Blackwell, when our people insisted, happened to mention that it was you that claimed that Miss Hebert had a large quantity of an illegal substance in her locker."
Sophia's eyes flicked to either side as she tensed.
"Officer Wilson, the one who tased you so neatly, also reported that you and Miss Barnes were present outside the Principal's office when he arrived, accompanied them to the corridor Miss Hebert's locker is located in, and stood watching as he searched it. He also mentioned that Miss Hebert was no closer to you than twenty feet at any point during the entire fiasco. So it seems highly suspect that you can claim with a straight face that she planted the drugs on you."
The girl was sweating more now, and looking very worried indeed. Her mouth worked a couple of times, then she swallowed. Emily waited for a few seconds, then settled back in her chair, giving Sophia a very, very unfriendly glare. "There is also the minor point that there are currently four different videos from various viewpoints showing the entire event, in a way that to me suggests very strongly that the whole thing was orchestrated in advance. Interestingly at least one of them nicely displays your expression of panic when Officer Wilson told you to show him the contents of your pockets. It's the sort of expression I might expect to see if someone suddenly realized they'd made a mistake, like for example forgetting to put the drugs in their victim's locker!"
She rose to her feet as she spoke the last, pressing both fists on her desk and roaring at Sophia, who paled visibly.
"I didn't forget!" the girl shrieked, before nearly biting her tongue off as her mouth snapped shut. She looked horrified, while Emily nodded in satisfaction, sitting down again. Reaching out she pulled another report in front of her with a forefinger, then tapped it.
"This makes interesting reading," she said conversationally. "Our people are still looking into the Winslow situation, but we've managed to uncover a program of systematic abuse stretching back well over a year. Abuse towards Miss Hebert primarily, although there are other victims too. And the same names keep coming up time and time again. One of them is, of course, yours." She smiled grimly. "It seems that there are a lot of people who really, really don't like you. Not at all. Neither are they particularly fond of Miss Emma Barnes or Miss Madison Clements, along with a number of others. Strangely enough, your case worker, who should have referred this entire steaming pile of shit to us more than a year ago has been totally silent on the subject, and Principal Blackwell likewise didn't see fit to mention it. I will be dealing with them later. Right now, though, you are my problem."
She motioned with her head to Armsmaster, who pushed a chair behind Sophia, then put a heavy armored hand on her shoulder, forcing her to sit. "You, my girl, are fucked. Very fucked indeed. And it's quite possible you've fucked the entire ENE division in the process of destroying your own future. Let me tell you what you did and what's going to happen now." As Sophia opened her mouth, she pointed at her. "Not a word. Just listen. I'm not in the mood to say this twice."
The sweating girl's mouth snapped shut and she nodded, leaning back again and tapping her fingertips together. "You have been engaging in a psychotic pattern of abuse that's frankly disturbing to a level I've seldom seen against one of your fellow students, for literally eighteen solid months. That girl must have the patience of a saint or she'd have killed you by now. I know I would have shot you in the head inside six weeks even at that age. Or paid someone in the Empire to do it. Somehow you dragged the Barnes and Clements girls into this whole thing, which is even more disturbing. You've done, based on the information we've seen so far which I'm completely sure is only the beginning, everything you could to push the poor girl to suicide. Or possibly Triggering, which is worse." She noticed both Armsmaster and Miss Militia were giving Sophia looks that should have made her faint on the spot. "Which, if you'd actually succeeded could have caused a disaster I hate to even consider. That sort of thing has happened in the past and it never ends well."
Her eyes bored into Sophia, who was definitely appearing like someone who finally figured out that they'd run out of options. "Then, as the latest little entertainment in this sick operation, you decide that it would be a fantastic idea to plant enough drugs on the girl to get the cops to arrest her for possession and probably dealing, exactly as happened to you. But you can't even do that properly and get caught in your own trap. Which on one level is about the funniest thing I've heard in years, but on every other level has opened a can of worms that makes me wonder if I should simply arrange to have you shot while trying to escape and say 'whoops.'" Sophia went a pasty gray color and she smiled nastily.
"I won't, I'm not that much of a bitch, but don't think it didn't cross my mind," she carried on. Pausing for breath, she watched Sophia sweat for a while. "I don't know how you managed to screw it up, and frankly I don't care. You tried to ruin an innocent girl's life with some idiotic little plot, which alone is enough to kill any hope you had of parole permanently. To be honest everything up to that point would have done the job if we'd found out about it, but we'll take what we can get. And now you, in your civilian identity, have a criminal record for drug dealing and resisting arrest, a record that the BBPD hold and not us. We can't make that just vanish even if I wanted to. We've pulled enough strings just getting you here, and I'm not going to risk causing any more of a rift between the BBPD and us for one stupid and arrogant little girl who thinks she's much cleverer than she actually is. And having it get to civilian court is out of the question."
She leaned forward and put her elbows on the desk. "See, the issue now is that Sophia Hess can't be associated with the PRT in any way, because it opens us up to more problems than I care to imagine. If the E88 got hold of this, especially if they managed to work out your civilian ID, they would use it for a propaganda campaign worse than anything we've had in the last five years. You are not worth the pain that would cause us. And that's leaving aside the little problem that you've pissed all over your plea deal, and I suspect have been doing that since day one. We'll find out, because we're going to look into how deep the rot goes, but that's not important right now. What is important is that I can now cut you loose, and there's nothing the people above me who insisted you were worth the effort can do about it without replacing me and half this post."
Sophia's mouth worked as she looked furious, terrified, and utterly bewildered. "Shadow Stalker is going to get reassigned to somewhere so far away from civilization no one will expect to hear from her for a decade. You will be in front of a federal judge by the end of the week, and most likely spend several years behind bars following that. How long depends on anything else that turns up during our investigation. Your family will be brought into this and if they want, relocated somewhere else to protect them from your idiocy. Perhaps, by the time you're about twenty five or so, if you manage to keep from doing anything else so spectacularly stupid, you might be able to join the Protectorate, but I certainly wouldn't put money on that."
"You can't do this!" Sophia finally screeched.
"I can, and I will thoroughly enjoy it," the director replied calmly. "You've been a pain in the ass for everyone who ever met you since we picked you up off the street, despite everything we've tried to do. I get that you don't like us, I even get why, but you could have and should have kept your head down until you were eighteen at which point you'd have had a clean slate and a new start. Most people with at least a functional level of intelligence would have realized that. But you decided that it was a great idea to do all the crap you've been doing, which is entirely on you. Your handler is also culpable and trust me is not going to enjoy her next few years either." She shrugged slightly. "The saying about making your bed and lying in it comes to mind. In any case, we're done here. We'll keep investigating and if, as I fully expect, more evidence comes to light you can expect the charges to be increased appropriately."
Looking past a furious Sophia at Armsmaster, she said, "Get her down to the cells, I don't want to see her again for now." He nodded stiffly, visibly very angry, hauled Sophia to her feet ignoring her loud protests, and left the room with her in tow. The door closed cutting off the swearing. Emily relaxed slightly, sighing heavily.
"Jesus fucking Christ, I hate that little bitch," she commented with feeling.
"It's a common sentiment," Renick replied, shaking his head in disgust. He looked down at the tablet he was holding, then up again. "We've got Welton, her handler, in interrogation. She's talking pretty damn fast. Looks like she and Blackwell colluded to keep Hess's exploits from us, although we're not completely sure why yet. Probably money at least in part."
"That doesn't surprise me," Emily grumbled. "Fuck. We're going to have a lot of problems because of what that damn girl did, I can feel it."
"We're down a Ward aside from anything else," Miss Militia remarked as she sat in the chair Sophia had vacated. "Which is going to cause issues, not least with the rest of the Wards. They're going to want to know why Sophia left."
"I'd expect most of them to celebrate," Renick put in with a tired grin. She nodded.
"Probably, but it's still not an ideal situation. We'll have to tell them something. I'm not sure the whole truth is a good idea."
"For now, just tell them that Shadow Stalker has been benched for family reasons and leave it at that," Emily instructed. "It's not entirely wrong anyway. Once we find out the complete situation behind her campaign of terror we can reassess that."
"You don't think that any of the other Wards knew about it?" the other woman queried, her eyes worried. Director Piggot shook her head.
"As annoying as some of them are, no, I don't," she replied. "Most of them mean well although at least one of them doesn't take things seriously enough. Someone like Sophia is rare, thankfully. One sadistic sociopath is one too many."
"What do we do about the Hebert girl?" Renick asked. Both of the others looked at him. "I mean, don't we owe it to her to at least try to make up for some of the things Hess did to her?"
"I'm open to suggestions about how we do that without telling them the truth, which would make things vastly more difficult immediately." Emily shrugged. "I feel for the girl, I honestly do, but I can't see any practical way to undo what Hess did without opening us up to any number of severe issues. Hopefully removing Sophia from Winslow will at least fix that particular nightmare." He didn't look entirely convinced but nodded slowly. "If you think of anything we can do let me know and I'll consider it," she finally added a little reluctantly, as she genuinely did feel sorry for what Hess's victims had gone through. "But we have larger problems to deal with at the moment."
"True," he agreed sadly.
Emily pulled the next report off the stack beside her elbow, looked at it, and growled. The day had been a pain in the ass and it was only two thirds over. Shortly they were discussing yet another case that required resources they didn't have.
Putting her books back into her bag, Taylor waited for some other students to move out of the way then stood up, following them towards the classroom door. The announcement canceling the last hour of the school day had echoed tinnily around the room and caused considerably rejoicing among the student body, who were always pleased to escape early. She ambled out of the room and towards the stairs to her locker, climbing them in the middle of a pack of students. Reaching it she spun the dial, opened the door, and studied the contents. Eventually she shrugged and emptied everything into her pack, all the heavier items vanishing into her storage space as they passed the opening and couldn't be seen. When it was completely denuded of the old text books and other detritus, she slammed the door and rotated the dial for hopefully the final time.
Five minutes later she was outside in the cold, looking around and watching people exit. She spotted those two probably-not-cops talking to two more also-probably-not-cops, all four going back inside the school moment later against the flow of teenagers. Idly wondering what they were going to do, she decided it wasn't her problem and headed for the gate to the street. Reaching it, she sighed when she realized the usual bus wouldn't leave for over an hour. Peering at the sky Taylor studied the clouds and the light snowfall, deciding in the end that it was probably not too bad, and came to the conclusion she might as well walk. If she remembered correctly one of the city bus routes stopped about a mile and a half away, and that line went past the end of her street, so she could likely catch a ride there and avoid walking the entire distance.
She considered calling her dad, but in the end shook her head, as he was probably still involved with Zoe Barnes and it was better to let him get on with it. The walk wasn't all that far and the weather, while cold, wasn't terrible either. Her coat was warm enough to keep her going. Turning right, she made her way along the slippery sidewalk, avoiding any particularly nasty patch and finding out in the process that Little Anton's ability came in handy for that sort of thing. She amused herself as she walked by using the trick to look beneath at all sorts of stuff, practicing and finding it entertaining at the same time.
Eventually reaching the bus stop she checked the timetable and saw that she had a twelve minute wait for the next bus. Weighing it up in her mind she decided it was better to hang around for that one rather than keep walking. Looking around an area she didn't visit much she spotted a convenience store nearby, so wandered over intending to get a snack. Inside, she quickly found the chips and soda, taking a couple of bags of one and a can of the other, before looking around for anything else that took her fancy.
"Gimme two of those scratch cards," a girl's voice said from behind her, making her look back to see a pretty black girl with a pink streak in her hair, about three years younger than her and obviously nowhere near the eighteen you legally had to be to purchase lottery cards. The young man behind the counter didn't bat an eye, though, merely handing over two of the requested item and accepting a couple of dollar bills in exchange. The girl immediately pulled out a key and used it to remove the silver coating over the card, swearing softly when the first one came up empty for her.
"Balls," she muttered, tossing it over her shoulder, then repeating the process on the next one.
A moment later she squealed in glee. "Score!" she shouted, waving the card. "Fifty bucks!" Holding it out to the bored clerk, she demanded, "Pay me."
He sighed and took it, fiddled around for a few seconds, then handed her some cash. Grinning happily she took the money and ran out of the shop, vanishing around the corner. Taylor shook her head in amusement, then stopped as an idea hit her.
After a moment's thought she carefully examined the various scratch cards, covering a dozen different games, all of which were only variation on a theme. Nodding to herself, she read the placard that showed how the different systems worked, looked at the cards again, and checked how much cash she had in her pocket. "I'd like this," she said as she stood in front of the counter, putting her soda and chips down. "And… Nine of those cards right there." She pointed. The clerk, visibly not giving a crap, nodded and pulled out the top nine cards, slapped them down next to her chips, rang everything up, and accepted the twenty dollar bill she handed him. Taking her change she put everything into her bag, smiled at him, and left the store.
The bus arrived as she walked back to the stop, Taylor climbing into it and waving her bus card over the scanner, then moving to sit in a free seat before opening one of the bags of chips. Only ten minutes later she was walking the last hundred yards to her house. Once inside, she took her coat off, hung it up, removed her boots, and proceeded into the kitchen where she calmly made some tea.
Eventually, having done all this, she opened her pack, retrieving the scratch cards. The girl spread them out in front of her on the table and stared at them, a small smile on her lips. Picking up the second from the right, her smile grew as she reached for the teaspoon and scratched off the pliable covering hiding the numbers.
"Dad is going to freak out," she giggled as she looked at the hundred thousand dollar winning ticket in her hand. The one she'd picked out in the store by being able to see the numbers right through the coating meant to stop that...
Very carefully storing it away where it would be safe, she finished her tea, feeling rather pleased with herself. Anton's trick had all sorts of non-obvious applications when you thought about it. Going upstairs to her bedroom, putting the issue of their sudden largesse to one side for now, her ponderings turned to a less pleasurable problem as she sat at her desk and rummaged in one of the drawers for the bag of disposable latex gloves she'd bought for working on Papa's inventions. Moments later she had a pair on her hands, and quickly cleared space on the desk. Then she removed from her storage space the item she'd acquired from its hiding place in a cavity in the wall behind the rear of Sophia's locker, a cavity that as far as she'd been able to make out would be quite difficult to gain access to without moving the entire bank of lockers. Which would be quite a job as they were a good fifty years old, large enough to probably get someone into, and made of very heavy duty steel unlike more modern ones, in blocks of a dozen units.
The question of how this item had ended up there had been puzzling her all day, although she had a couple of suspicions that meshed quite well with some of the thoughts she'd come up with after the meeting in Blackwell's office.
Now, she studied the black cloth roll, held shut with some velcro wrapped around it. Peeling the velcro off, she unrolled the thing, then stared at the six stubby arrows, each only eight inches long, which were inside in small pockets. Carefully removing one, she examined the extremely sharp head, the sort of thing she assumed was meant for hunting. There were dark stains on the shaft just under the head, stains which looked a hell of a lot like blood to her.
Which was more than a little concerning, she mused as she put the thing back, then picked up one of the knives that had also been in the roll. It was a double-edged dagger of some sort, the other one being a heavy single-edged hunting knife. Both looked high quality, and very sharp, the blades themselves black but the edges glinting silver under her desk lamp. Finally, she lifted the brass knuckles and turned the device over in her hands, thinking hard. Experimentally fitting it over her right hand, she made a fist and looked at the result, before replacing it on the black cloth and leaning back in her chair, her eyes resting on Sophia's hidden cache.
"Huh," she said under her breath, before turning her computer on and waiting for it to boot up. When the old machine finally stopped making grinding sounds and had connected to the internet, she quickly navigated to a popular cape website and typed for a couple of seconds, studying the results carefully and clicking on a link.
Taylor looked at the photo that came up, then at the arrows. Which were more accurately, she thought, small crossbow bolts. Ones that looked very much like the ones shown in that specific photo, loaded into a weapon held by the local teenaged cape Shadow Stalker, before she joined the Wards and switched to 'non-lethal' ammunition in her signature crossbow…
Quite a few things came into focus as she stared at the image, her mind racing and her overall emotional state best described as 'extremely not happy.' One of those things was just why a couple of PRT agents pretending to be cops would have turned up asking stupid questions.
"That little cunt," Taylor finally said as calmly as she could, very quietly and with a cold rage that made her shiver for a second. She now had a damn good idea why nothing had been done by the school all this time, and how Sophia and Emma had got away with the shit they did. And, of course, just how all those things had disappeared from, and appeared in, her locker...
She turned her head and looked at her gnurr-pfeife flute, the innocent case sitting on her bedside table, with a certain level of danger in her eyes. It was very tempting to go and do something rather spectacular.
The only thing that stopped her was the thought that while it would satisfy her inner rage, which was howling at her to do something, it would also inevitably make life far too complicated and disappoint her dad. So, after a long minute or so, she sighed angrily and shook her head. There were other options even if they were less instantly gratifying, after all. And she could always call the gnurrs later if required. Or maybe those flying tooth-balls, which she needed to think of a name for.
Or, she thought with a sort of savage inner glee, see what happened with a couple of the other tunes she'd thought of when played through the gnurr-pfeife...
Taylor had a suspicion that she could probably end up with something that made a million little flying eating things look fairly tame, assuming her growing ideas about how the crystal worked were correct.
Growling to herself, she rolled the weapons cache up again and put the velcro strap back on, shoved the entire thing into a large plastic zip-lock bag from another drawer in the desk, and stuffed it back into storage. It would keep there until she could figure out the best use for it, and show it to her father. On the whole she wasn't happy, not at all, but this discovery did seem to provide some potentially useful data for their legal case. Whether it could be used she didn't know, but Michelle would. It also expanded the possible list of people to sue rather dramatically in her opinion.
Her father was going to be absolutely livid when she told him, she thought as she peeled the gloves off then went and lay down on the bed to try to relax a little. After some ten minutes of lying there with her eyes shut, breathing slowly and calmly, she finally reached for Papa's journals and her own notebooks, feeling that doing some useful work would probably help her get over her feelings of betrayal and anger. The thought that she had a rather large payoff sitting waiting to be collected helped too.
Some time later she had managed to calm herself enough to concentrate on the task at hand rather than dwelling on the past, and on the whole, she reflected as she lay there reading, it had been a rather good day once you got over the whole PRT culpability thing.
At least she didn't need to go back to Winslow again, which was definitely an item for the win column.
Danny, Zoe, and Michelle exchanged glances. Emma, sitting on the sofa opposite him and his lawyer, was leaning on her mother in floods of tears. She'd been extremely combative and recalcitrant to say anything for the best part of two solid hours, spending a lot of that time ranting and raging in a genuinely disturbed manner, but Zoe had persisted in her questioning regardless of how much her daughter kicked and screamed. Literally for a while, to the point she'd had to ask Danny to help restrain the girl.
Eventually, without warning, something that either Emma or her mother said seemed to trigger a complete turnaround, the girl collapsing with a howl of anguish as some inner dam broke. What came out between the sobs was horrifying in more ways than he could easily name, and changed the whole scenario immediately.
Apparently the Winslow situation was a lot more complicated than they'd thought. And went much deeper, in a manner that was going to be a real pain in the ass to deal with.
Emma was clearly desperately in need of serious professional help, that much was clear. She'd needed it for well over a year, ever since something awful had happened to her and Alan. Something that the man had, for some bizarre reason, simply tried to pretend hadn't happened. Danny had a fairly solid thought that his old friend also needed to talk to a therapist immediately if not sooner, since that sort of behavior was out of character in his view. The whole setup stunk to high heaven and he was entertaining the thought that it wasn't out of the question that some sort of Parahuman influence might be behind it all. Which was terrifying.
On the other hand it might simply be good old fashioned PTSD combined with a psychotic break, of course. He was all too well aware that this was a thing, as he'd seen it before in some of the people he worked with, many of whom had a bad past.
He'd never seen it in someone this young though and was wishing he wasn't now.
The Barnes family was going to have a very hard time of things in the next few months.
And Taylor was going to be absolutely livid when he told her what was going on, he thought uneasily. His daughter had a temper all too much like his, and he was under no illusions how he would have reacted in her position. How he was tempted to react right now in his position, for that matter.
But watching Emma have pretty much a full fledged nervous breakdown right in front of him took the edge off his fully justified anger and replaced a lot of it with pity. Someone should have stepped in much, much earlier, and in the absence of her father, the fucking school should have done something. But, of course, the information Emma had gasped out made it abundantly clear why that hadn't happened, while complicating their entire case to a stupid level.
Michelle, he noticed, was writing a lot of notes, and when he met her eyes, she said quietly, "This is bad, but it also helps us in some unexpected ways." She glanced at Emma and Zoe, the mother holding her daughter and looking at her with desolation-filled eyes, and added, "It will help them too, I think."
"I sure hope so," he replied equally quietly, watching a woman he'd known for twenty years try to comfort a girl he'd known her entire life and wishing like hell his own wife was here to help.
Oh well. All they could do was move one step at a time and watch out for landmines, which summed up life in a nutshell in this city.