TENSIONS

December 22, 1995

CLARISSE:

If I'd made it out the door five minutes earlier, there wouldn't have been a problem. But I didn't. And I ran right into Leonardo. "Where're you going?" he asked.

"Out," I answered.

He studied me. "Out where?"

"What am I, Leo, a prisoner?"

Leonardo looked away. "No, Clarisse, it's just... you have to be careful. We don't know if..."

"Hey, Leo, give her a break," Raphael defended, stepping up next to me. "Not like she's gonna go advertise to the world who she is. Besides, where were you all night and all morning?"

"We put her face on TV hoping that Shredder would recognize her," Leo reminded him, his voice cold. "You don't think anyone else will? And that's none of your business."

Raphael shrugged. "Nobody recognizes us!"

Good point. Leonardo was caught off guard for a moment. "Shredder does," he finally defended.

"Is that what this is about?" I asked. "Shredder?"

"Look, if it is, I'll go with her," Raph offered. "She'll be fine."

"She's not fine, Raph," Leonardo snapped. "And as long as she's in New York, she's not going to be fine. She's going to be in danger."

Raphael rolled his eyes. "I'm scared, Leo," he answered sarcastically.

I could feel the anger well up inside of me as they continued to argue over what was going to happen in my life. "Look, you don't own me!" I interrupted them. "Either of you. And if I wanna go out, I'm gonna go. And there's nothing you can do about it."

I turned and walked away, daring them to try and stop me. They thought about it. I knew they did. I was at the door before Raph broke away and followed me. But he didn't try and make me stay.

DONATELLO:

Leo flopped down on the couch and hid his face in his hands. I studied him for a minute. "Somethin' wrong?" I questioned.

He sighed and shook his head. "Just wondering how long it's gonna go on like this."

"Like what?" I questioned.

He glanced up. "If we keep Clarisse down here much longer, she's gonna feel like a prisoner. But it's really not safe for her to be going up to the orphanage or walking around the streets when she's not supposed to be in New York. It's not good for her or for April's job."

I considered that for a moment. If anyone ever found out that April had made up a good portion of that story, she'd be fired in a heartbeat. That much was true. "I didn't realize there was a problem with Clarisse, though," I mumbled.

"Well, there's not right now, because we're letting her just go do whatever the hell she wants. But sooner or later..."

"You talk to Splinter about it?"

He shook his head. "No, not yet. I will, though." He glanced up at me and forced a smile. "Not like I can put it off for too much longer."

I handed him the file folder I'd been reviewing, deciding it was time for a change of subject. "Got this from April," I told him. "It's about that woman last night."

He took it and looked over the contents. "She was Japanese?" he questioned.

"Blonde hair, blue eyed American," I answered. "Only her name is foreign. And her record's clean." I nodded to the papers. "That's everything April could turn up on her."

He considered that for a moment. "Maybe he thought she was someone else."

"Yeah, that's what I'm thinking, too," I nodded. "I looked into it this morning. You interested?"

He glanced up. "Yeah," he mumbled. "Show me."

LEONARDO:

"Thirteen targets," he recounted as I watched over his shoulder. Diagrams of each of the buildings came up on the computer as he spoke. "The orphanage was first, two apartment buildings, three homeless shelters, four soup kitchens, a hospital, a mall, and a McDonalds', not necessarily in that order."

I nodded. "Except that first apartment fire was ruled an accident."

"Doesn't mean it was," he mumbled. "And then, what we didn't see before..." He rolled the chair back over the floor, and I followed him to a table covered in newspaper clippings. "With all of the big-scale terrorism, this stuff got buried."

I glanced over the scattered articles. "House fires?" I questioned.

"Arson."

"You think there's a connection?"

"It's obvious if you have all the pieces together. Look."

He handed me one of the articles. I read it slowly, all the way through. "The victim's first name was the same," I observed.

"Name and approximate age."

He slid back over to the computer, and I stared at the clippings for a moment. The same name screamed at me from each one. "So I checked it out," he continued. "And you're not gonna believe what I found."

I walked over to him. A list of names was on the screen, all obviously similar. "Richards and Satami were both killed in house fires," he mumbled, using their last names to tell them apart. "Yamada was the victim last night, Allen is assumed dead from the first apartment fire. The one that accidently started in her room."

I let that sink in for a minute. "And, get this... Clarisse's roommate? The one who was kidnapped and killed?"

I stared at the screen as he pointed to her name. "It wasn't about Clarisse at all."

He shook his head. "No. It wasn't."

"Why the other buildings?" I asked.

"Police have had a hard time identifying a lot of those victims because they didn't have to prove who they were and most of them didn't have any families. It could be that there were more."

I shook my head. "That's assuming too much. There's hundreds of thousands of people in New York. How can we say that of the dozen who might have the same foreign name, three of them definately lived in homeless shelters?"

"Or worked in them," he corrected.

I glanced at him. "What?"

"Richards was a nurse aid in the bombed hospital, Yamada worked at a McDonalds, Allen at a store in the mall. Satami stayed home with her twin boys while her husband worked." He stared at the screen for a minute and shook his head. "But I don't really think so. I think he destroyed those buildings because he had reason to believe that whoever he was searching for would be there, among the people who went by names other than their own."

He hit a key on the keyboard and the diagrams of the buildings came up again. "Look at the order in which they were attacked. First the orphanage, then the shelters, then the soup kitchens. Then he started with the apartments and the businesses, killing the person first and then anybody they may have talked to at their place of work."

I stared at the destruction, and confusion mingled with anger deep inside of me. "Why?" I thought out loud. Donny looked back at the screen and sighed. "What does some twenty-year-old girl named Kioko know that he's so afraid of?"