Thanks again for all the great reviews. I'm glad that you are enjoying this story. I think the next chapter will be the last one for this story.

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Barbara sat at her worktable in the clocktower trying to repair her motorized chair. Her head was pounding and breathing caused her ribs pain. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. She was so tired, but she hadn't been able to sleep after getting home from the hospital. Whenever she closed her eyes, she could see his face and hear his voice. He was another monster that would haunt her dreams.

She opened her eyes and replaced her glasses. She had been working on this piece of circuitry for almost two hours. It was difficult to focus with the pounding in her head and his voice and image playing in her head like a movie, not to mention the constant interruptions from her family.

As if on cue, the telephone next to her began to ring. Barbara was tempted to let the phone keep ringing, but she knew that if she did not answer, he would be at her door. She did not need that right now, so she answered the phone.

"Hello, Dad," Barbara said.

"Hi, Barbie," came her father's voice at the other end of the line. She could hear the worry in his voice. "How are you? Do you need anything?"

"No, Dad. I'm fine. Just like I was fine when you called an hour ago, and the hour before that."

"Okay, okay. I get it. Please call me if you need anything, or if you want to talk. I can be there in less than twenty minutes. I love you."

"I love you, too. Bye."

A sense of relief washed through her as she hung up the phone. She loved her father, but she could not handle his guilt. She heard it in his voice on the phone. Last night at the hospital, she had seen it in his eyes. When he had walked into the hospital room, guilt and pain had filled his eyes as he had seen his little girl hurt. He had not said anything about it, but she knew that he was thinking about that night seven years ago. He blamed himself for that night despite Barbara's protests and now he blamed himself again.

Barbara's thoughts were interrupted by another member of her "family" as Dinah came into the room. The girl had been to see Barbara almost every half hour trying to subtly check on her. Dinah definitely needed to work on being subtle.

"I'm going to make a sandwich. Do you want one, Barbara?"

It was time to end this. "You don't need to keep checking on me. I'm fine, Dinah," Barbara said as gently and with as much sincerity as she could muster.

"Are you sure? Do you want to talk about what happened?"

"No, there's nothing to talk about," Barbara said dropping her eyes to the circuitry to avoid Dinah's gaze. "I don't really remember what happened anyway."

Dinah knew that Barbara was lying. She had seen into Barbara's mind, but Dinah did not want to push Barbara to talk about it. "So, about that sandwich then. Do you want one?"

********

Helena had returned to the clocktower to find Dinah in the kitchen and Barbara working with circuitry. Seeing Barbara brought back all the images of last night. Helena had hoped that talking to Reece would give her a direction to find this scumbag, but she was more frustrated than ever.

Helena changed into workout clothes and went into the training room. She ran on the treadmill for twenty minutes, but her frustration did not lessen. Getting off the treadmill, she headed toward the punching bag suspended from the ceiling. If I can't actually hit that creep, at least I can pretend, she thought.

She started off with a few jabs and some different hand techniques and combinations, finally adding some kicks to the mix. She hit the bag harder and harder remembering how Barbara had looked lying in the parking lot the night before. She was hitting the bag so hard, it seemed that the chain suspending the bag might break. Helena kept hitting until her mind was completely blank and the sweat was pouring down her face.

"It wasn't your fault."

Helena stopped and turned to find Dinah in the training room looking at her with worry.

"It wasn't your fault," she repeated. "No one blames you. You shouldn't blame yourself."

Helena stared at the teen. If anyone else presumed to know how I felt, I would have lost it on them, Helena thought to herself, but she did not feel angry. With a start, she realized that her "family" had grown to include Dinah.

"I know it wasn't my fault, but I can't help feeling like I should have been there sooner, or I should have done something differently to stop it from happening. The worst part of it is that I'm still not doing anything. The police don't have any leads to finding him because Barbara doesn't remember enough about the attack. Part of me is glad that she doesn't remember, but another part is so frustrated because I need to find this guy so that he can pay."

She did not want to betray Barbara but this guy needed to be caught and Barbara seemed to be pretending that nothing had happened. "Last night when I hugged her, I saw into her mind," Dinah said quietly.

"What did you see, Dinah?" Helena demanded anxiously, seeing the girl hesitate.

"I was only in her mind for a few seconds, but what I saw . . . it was awful. Barbara's so strong and confidant and caring and he . . . he said horrible things to her. She was so afraid of what was going to happened." Dinah was trying to hold back her tears and her anger. "She felt so helpless and ashamed." Tears were running down her cheeks now as she relived what she had seen.

Turning back to the bag so that Dinah would not see the tears starting to well up behind her eyes, Helena asked, "Did you see his face?"

Taking a moment to wipe her eyes and to calm down, Dinah answered, "It was so quick. I know Barbara remembers his face, but from the flashes that I saw, I can only remember that he had a large scar diagonally across his forehead above his right eyebrow."

"That isn't much of a lead to investigate."

"I don't understand why she won't talk to anyone about it," Dinah said. "Doesn't she want him to be caught?"

********

Barbara sat in front of one of the computers in the middle of the clocktower. Barbara knew that Helena and Dinah wanted her to talk about what had happened, but she knew how they would react. They cared about her and if she gave them his description, they would hunt him down. Barbara did not trust them to control their emotions and to turn him safely over to the police. At least, this was the only reason for her silence that she would acknowledge.

In reality, she knew that it had less to do with Helena and Dinah's lack of emotional control, and more to do with Barbara's own feelings of helplessness. She needed to take care of this alone. She had worked too hard to regain her independence only to become a victim again. She hated feeling like a victim. She hated feeling helpless and useless, but worse than that, she hated the pity and guilt that she saw in the eyes of her family. Everyone felt guilty – Helena, Dinah, her father. It was as if Barbara was a child that they needed to protect and they had failed. If Barbara caught this guy, she could prove to them that she was fine, that she could take of herself, and then everything could go back to normal. She needed to do it her way. That's where Oracle comes in, she thought to herself.

Barbara had been waiting all day to be alone and now Dinah and Helena were upstairs working out. Barbara only had a few leads to her attacker's identity, but that was all Oracle needed. Using the face-sketching program on the computer, Barbara made a sketch of her attacker's face. It took her about thirty minutes to get the sketch just right, but it would take too long to search the DMV's database with only a picture.

All day, she had been trying to remember the logo that had been on his shirt, and suddenly it came to her.

"Puppies!" she shouted to herself.

He had been wearing an employee shirt from a pet store chain. Using the computer, she hacked into their mainframe. She discovered that they had several stores in the city with almost three hundred employees. She downloaded the entire employee list. She programmed the computer to find the DMV's photo of each person on the list and compare it to the sketch of her attacker. In a few hours, the computer would hopefully have a match.

Checking her watch, she realized that she needed to go to the police station to meet with Detective Johnson, the detective assigned to her case. Now that Oracle was working on the case, Barbara could cooperate with the police and agree to talk to a sketch artist. When she returned, the computer would have a match and she could anonymously e-mail Detective Johnson her attacker's address.

Feeling like she had accomplished something, Barbara grabbed her car keys and left a note for Dinah and Helena.

********

Dinah and Helena came downstairs after an hour of sparing and quick showers. They both felt better after their talk and they had burned off most of the frustration that had remained while sparing. They found Barbara's note in the kitchen where they proceeded to raid the fridge.

"How can you live here with all this health food?" Helena asked as she found some asparagus.

"Well, I have a stash of junk food in my room," Dinah answered. "You won't tell Barbara, will you?"

"I'll keep your secret, if you share some of it with me. I really need something sweet."

They both laughed as Dinah went to get some of her junk food. As Dinah passed the computers, she heard the computer announce that it had found a match. Curiously, Dinah went over to the screen to see what it had found. What she saw dispelled her newly found good mood.

"Helena!" she shouted.

Helena ran in to find Dinah staring at one of the computers.

"It's him." That was all Helena needed to hear as she memorized the home address and tore out of the clocktower with Dinah right behind her.