Les Trois Pommes takes up most of the first two floors of a luxury apartment high-rise. When Tama arrives at said high-rise she finds Batman perched on the edge of the roof, peering down into the restaurant's parking lot. He must have some magnifying gadgetry in his mask, like she does, or such an exercise would be useless – after all, the object of his attention is a whole thirty stories below.
He looks up at her as she comes within a few meters of him and lands her board on the roof. "Find anything?" she asks. She doesn't really think he has, but she has to ask.
Batman turns back to the parking lot. "One of the valets just finished his shift," he says. "I'm waiting for him to leave."
Tama joins him at the roof's edge and looks down, but not long enough or intensely enough to make her optical equipment magnify the view. "You think he might've seen something?"
"Maybe. He was probably the last person to see your boss before she disappeared." He leans forward a little. "Look. There he goes," he says.
Tama follows his gaze and lets her visual equipment zoom in. She sees a young man jogging out of the parking lot, headed for the street. "Nearest subway station is five blocks from here," she remarks. Tama and Batman both withdraw from the edge of the roof. He leaps to the roof of an adjacent building as she hops on her board and flips her electropigment switch.
A brief chase ensues – well, not quite a chase, since they're just shadowing the guy. Tama follows Batman from rooftop to rooftop for a couple of blocks along a relatively quiet street, until he judges that their man – or kid, since he seems pretty young – is far enough from anyone else that they won't attract unwelcome attention when they talk to him. "Should we both go, or just one of us?" Tama asks. "Both of us together might scare him."
Batman looks at her and pauses for thought. "You're right. Do you want to do it, or should I?"
"Let him do it," Alex speaks up over her transmitter. "He's probably better at it. No offense."
"You know more about this kind of thing than I do," Tama admits.
Batman nods at her. "Okay. Just wait up here," he says. Then he spreads his wings and dives off the roof. Tama watches as he goes into a glide, more or less in the direction of the kid.
Well, she thinks, even if she's not participating, this could be a good learning experience. She zooms in on the kid, pulls a small tube out of a slot in her armor and points it in his direction. She's not sure how much the microphone will pick up at this range, but if she's lucky, she'll be able to see and hear the whole conversation.
~***~
Terry shouldn't feel so anxious about this – it's not the first time he's questioned someone, after all. Getting information from the average guy on the street isn't as easy as getting info from the average thug – you can threaten a bad guy, you can't threaten a civilian – but he's got it down pretty well by now. And he has Wayne to help him. Maybe Kitsune's respect for him is putting the pressure on. It's not a kind of respect he's used to getting.
He very deliberately lands a couple meters behind the guy, just heavily enough for it to be audible. That'll startle him a bit, but won't cause him to panic. The idea is to scare him a little so he cooperates, but not so much that he clams up or runs off. Terry doesn't have Wayne's talent for intimidation, but he's gotten pretty good at this. He thinks of it as playing the Good Cop and the Bad Cop all at once.
The guy spins around – a little spooked, as Terry expected – and freezes, looking at him with wide eyes. He's about average height, kind of chunky, with short middling-brown hair (that's Terry's guess, since the cowl's visual systems tint everything red) and lots of freckles. Probably about Terry's age or younger. "It's okay," Terry says, using his serious-but-not-dangerous tone of voice. "I just want to ask you a couple of questions."
"M-me?" the kid asks, like he's not sure he heard right (Terry is Batman now, so he can think of a person his own age as a "kid").
Terry nods. "I'm looking for two people who were at the restaurant where you work. You might have been the last person to see them."
The kid swallows nervously. "How- how did you know I worked at…um." He lifts a hand and rubs the back of his neck sheepishly. "I guess you were watching, huh?"
"For the past fifteen minutes," Terry answers. Then he gets back on track. "I'm trying to find two women. One's blonde with blue eyes, about as tall as you are…" He pauses for a second to wonder why he started describing Melanie first.
"Oh. She was with a short black lady, right?" the kid asks. That's good, he remembers them.
"Yeah," Terry says. "You saw them?"
"I, like, got their car. They climbed in and left. That's it." It sounded way too simple, too clipped…
"He's lying," Wayne says. Terry already knew that, if only because the kid's not that good an actor.
"Something you're not telling me?" Terry asks with just a hint of menace. He takes a step forward.
The kid shuffles back a little, cringing and raising his arms as if to protect himself. Terry's proud that he's doing this the right way, but it also makes him feel a little guilty.
"No, man! I told you everything! Really!" He's almost sobbing. Terry doesn't want to press him, but he knows the guy's hiding something.
His eyes are hidden behind the reflective white optic patches of the cowl, but he can still glare fiercely – which he does, to great effect.
"Okay, okay!" the kid squeaks, lowering his hands and making a sort of 'calm down' gesture. Then his gaze darts around like he's looking for eavesdroppers. "If I tell you," he says in a quiet but very panicked voice, "I'm worried that the guy will come back and kill me. You know, if he finds out."
Terry takes this seriously and looks around himself, although more methodically and through the infrared spectrum as well. A hovercar passes by overhead, but otherwise there's nobody around who can hear. Except maybe Kitsune, up on the rooftop, and he doesn't have to worry about her. He switches on the cowl's radar scanner and uses it to check the kid for any listening devices. There's some change in his pockets, but nothing that looks like a bug. "There's no one listening," Terry reassures the kid. "He's not going to find out that you told me anything. I promise."
The kid takes a deep breath and calms down a little. "When I went to get the car, there was a guy waiting in the parking lot. I couldn't see his face 'cause it was dark, and he had a hat and coat on. He came up to me while I was unlocking the door and held a gun in my face." He swallows nervously. Terry can see that he's sweating. "He told me to keep quiet and open the door, so I did. Then he waved the gun, like this" – the kid demonstrates with his index finger – "so I stepped back. And then this other guy came out, with this little suitcase. He put it on the front seat and opened it up-"
"What was in it?" Terry asks.
The kid shrugs. "I don't know, I couldn't see it that well. But he took something out of it and then stuck it under the dashboard – or that's what it looked like, anyway. After that he popped the hood and put something else in there. Maybe it was a bomb or something. I couldn't exactly ask him…" He trails off and rubs the back of his neck again. "Then he finished up, closed the hood and just disappeared. The guy with the gun said to bring the car like there was no problem. He said he'd shoot me if I didn't act natural."
"It probably wasn't a bomb," Wayne says thoughtfully, "If it was, we would have heard something by now. See if he can remember any other details."
Terry asks the kid some more questions, trying to get more details – did the men he saw have a car? Did he see its license plate? Did he see them leave? – but all the answers he gets are along the general lines of 'I don't know.'
Finally he gives up, thanks the kid for his help (he manages to sound sincere about it), and jets into the air to rejoin Kitsune on the roof. The kid runs the rest of the way to the subway station like he's being chased.
"I heard everything," she says gravely when he lands next to her.
Terry shakes his head. "Got any other ideas?"
"No," Kitsune says. "Alex is trying to find their car by tracking its anti-theft beacon, but that's going to take a while. And there's no guarantee that they'll be with it." She sighs with frustration. "I can't believe Natalie didn't put her own homing device in it or something."
"I hope Alex finds something," Wayne says, "Because if he doesn't, we're at a dead end."