"Phillip!"
The offices were busier than they were on Monday as Bruce rushed through. He recognized a number of lawyers and accountants working on what he assumed to be an audit of the pharmaceutical department after the excitement of a few nights ago.
He found his uncle, looking a bit tired in his office.
"Bruce. Good morning. Not a great time, though. A lot going on today."
"I really think you need to be taking this guy with the ice weapon more seriously. He could be another Riddler!"
Phillip sighed and put down the papers in his hand, seeing Bruce was not going to let him get back to work.
"Is that what all this is about? That business was messy, sure-"
"Messy? He got into my home, Phillip."
"And he failed! Alfred survived, you weren't even there; all he managed to do was burn up your foyer. You still don't understand the order of things, and that's why you aren't ready to run this company!"
Bruce took a breath, and allowed his mask to slip just enough for Batman to supply Bruce Wayne with some patience.
"Why don't you enlighten me, then."
Phillip shut the door to his office.
"We aren't like other people, Bruce. Killing us, wounding us, running us down like the common rabble, that's hard. We have defenses others don't. But think about how the Riddler went after you once he failed at your penthouse. How he went after the mayor. He attacked your image. Your reputation. That's where their danger lies, despite all their bluster. Think about it. In two days I'm supposed to walk into the Gotham Mint as Humanitarian of the Year Phillip Kane, poised to start a prosperous new era with Powers International. If this guy keeps it up, I'll be Phillip Kane, embattled CEO with no choice but to sell to Powers to salvage what's left. My accolade, sullied by scandal and humiliation. Regular people live and die by their actions, Bruce. We live and die by optics. How do you think I got this award in the first place?"
"Regular people like our employees are the ones who make this city run," Bruce said, his temper building. "My father knew that."
"And your father lost everything. My sister included," he added bitterly.
"Because he believed in the common man. He believed he had a responsibility to the people of this city. Let me tell you Bruce, I've been all over the nation and it's all the same. Carnegie and Rockefeller. DuPont and Vanderbilt. Wayne and Powers. We exist on a different level than those on the streets. And we don't owe them a damn thing. So no. I'm not going to be looking over my shoulder for a boogeyman in a parka. Because I have a business to run, and I run that business from the top floor of a building with dozens of cameras, and metal detectors, and men and women with guns - that I pay for. Because if I've been sure of anything for the past twenty years, it's that I'm not going to die like Thomas Wayne!"
Bruce was silent as he stood up to leave.
"I don't think you'll have any trouble with that. You're nothing like either of them."
"Bruce, come back," Phillip started as Bruce opened the door.
But he did not.
Bruce was snapped out of his dark mood as he heard an argument down the hall.
"Frank, nobody ever gave me access to the manifests, so I don't actually know whether everything is accounted for. But everything in that room made it onto the trucks, you have my assurance."
"Just remember, Lucius, your instructions were to dispose of things, not to snoop. I'll be checking in."
A square-jawed man in a black turtleneck rounded the corner, shot a sour look at Bruce, and called the elevator. Bruce pushed past him and towards where Lucius was walking. He found him slumped over a chair in the break room.
"One of those days, huh?"
Lucius looked up at him.
"Mr. Wayne. You heard that?"
I heard enough. Phillip said you worked here longer than he did. So you knew my father?"
"Yes. I started as a temp in record keeping before I got hired into RD. I've never been very important, but he would always say hello or good morning when he came around."
"I don't know that anyone is unimportant. Even a small rock can make big waves. But if you have seen something you don't like going on here, you shouldn't be afraid to tell someone."
Lucius looked around and gulped.
"I'm not sure that here is a good place to talk."
"And I'm not sure I'm the person to tell," Bruce shook his head. "I don't have the pull anymore - plausible deniability is better at this point. But you have an ally, if that helps."
Lucius smiled a little.
"Thank you, Mr. Wayne.
"Bruce, please."
The reedy man hurried off. Bruce looked down at his phone, which had successfully cloned Lucius' SIM Card during their conversation, and returned to his car. It didn't take much waiting for a call to go out.
"GCPD, if this is an emergency please hang up and dial 911."
"Hello. I have a tip for that guy robbing places with an ice weapon. But it's something I need to show you, rather than tell you."
Another round of winter storms was spreading over the city that night. In a matter of hours, Gotham would be snowed in.
"A Wayne building again. Probably not a coincidence."
Batman said nothing as they approached the building. It was a wide, low, concrete structure retrofitted with a "green roof" that supported trees and sod. This must be the RD Bunker Phillip mentioned before. A heavy metal door stood before them, with a call box set in the wall. Gordon looked at Batman pensively before pushing the call button.
"Hello?"
"Captain Gordon, GCPD. Are you the one who called in the tip?"
"Yes, yes, come in. Quickly. Don't draw too much attention to yourselves."
"Gladly. It's cold as hell out here."
A buzzer sounded, and the door opened with a heavy click. They entered a cluttered environment of shelves stuffed with filing cabinets and banker boxes, endless expanses of paperwork.
"All this stuff… is this a lab, or an archive?"
"It's a dumping ground for things Wayne Enterprises doesn't want to look at anymore."
The voice came from Lucius, who rounded a corner to greet them. His eyes passed over Batman briefly, but didn't register as particularly surprised to see the caped figure.
"Like me. This way."
As they journeyed deeper in, the shelves grew higher and the boxes turned into crates, then entire shipping containers. Bruce had never been here as a boy, and he wondered how they got some of this stuff in here in the first place. Perhaps his father had constructed special tunnels out from the harbor.
They climbed to the second floor, and at last Lucius stopped. The area they were in was less a room than a space carved out of the storage racks for human habitation. A tangle of cables powered several computer monitors and a haphazard stack of CRT's, in one of which Batman could see the doorway where he and Gordon arrived. The keyboard was strewn with papers and the odd empty cup of ramen.
Lucius tugged at his collar as he began.
"So this is… how to start? Last Friday I received a call from my supervisor… very late at night. He wanted me to come to an off-site lab in midtown right away. Told me it was an emergency, and that my job depended on it. When I got there, I learned that the site research director, a man named Victor Fries, had been recently terminated. I don't know the specifics of what he was hired to do, but the split must not have been amicable. Ordinarily, the policy is to break down the entire workspace, all sensitive and proprietary materials either isolated or destroyed based on an audit that would have to be done of the contents. For security purposes, you see. Wayne Enterprises works on a number of sensitive materials. In this instance, the supervisor had approved the whole lot of it to be preemptively destroyed."
Batman stared deeper into the engineer.
"Your… supervisor. Would that be Phillip Kane?"
Lucius bristled.
"Um, yes."
Gordon looked up from his notebook.
"Didn't it seem a little fishy to you that the CEO of the entire company wanted to personally oversee the cleaning out of an employee's desk?"
"At the time, no. I was scared at the time, taken rather off guard. My position at the company is… tenuous. I'm used to getting assigned grunt work, but this seemed particularly serious. But please… I've only just begun."
He walked the two detectives over to a secluded room.
"I suppose Phillip expected me to just load everything up without giving it the once over. A lot of it had already been packed away when I got there, and just needed to be put on the truck. But with chemicals it isn't that simple, and I could tell some pretty heavy duty biochemistry was going on there. So I cracked a few boxes open, maybe against Mr. Kane's wishes, to make sure everything had been disposed of properly. I saw a lot of the usual equipment. And then I saw… unusual equipment."
He turned on the lights and revealed the stacks of boxes and peculiar machines stockpiled inside the room.
"It was at this point that I realized Mr. Fries had been working on cryogenic storage of organic compounds and medicines. Stuff that would make it easier to transport vaccines to places without ready access to electricity."
He sighed, and reached for a tarp covering part of the room.
"And I suppose what got him fired was that he started dabbling in cryogenic storage of humans, too."
He pulled back the tarp, and Batman and Gordon looked across at one another, mouths agape. Beneath the cloth was a cylindrical glass chamber covered in frost. Inside was the visible outline of a person.
"Jesus," Gordon breathed. He stepped forward and wiped some frost away. A woman lay inside, pale skin and blonde hair. The air inside the chamber was thick with an unknown vapor.
"Who is she?"
"A lot of his hard drives are encrypted, and I haven't cracked them yet. But uh,"
He reached into a box and handed Gordon a photo frame. Inside, a bald man smiled warmly with the same blonde woman, flashing engagement rings in front of the Gotham State University Pre-med hall.
"Looks like they're married."
Batman peered down at the woman's face, placid and unmoving in the chamber.
"Is she alive?"
"Yes, actually. I've run imaging tests on the body, there is a very faint but distinct heartbeat. She seems to be in a coma, though at present I lack the medical expertise to rouse her from it."
"At present?"
"I've taken out several books on the subject. We'll see what comes out of it."
"But if she's alive," Gordon objected, "what was Kane going to do with her?"
"He probably didn't know. I certainly didn't when I found her. They probably saw this as an unauthorized use of a corpse and figured it was better to cover things up than deal with the sort of scandal that would bring."
Sounds like Phillip, Batman thought.
Everything here was supposed to be shipped to the incinerator. Due to a paperwork error, they wound up here instead. Feel free to root through them for anything of use."
"Good man," Gordon nodded. He began searching.
"Were there any security cameras in the lab?"
"Sure were. Files are corrupted. I think I can get them repaired before the holiday, but these things take time."
Batman noticed a book in one of the bins. It had a very worn spine, and its pages were marked by colored tabs. Inside the margins were full of handwritten notes and comments. It was some sort of science journal.
"Who is Percy Wright?"
"Oh, I've heard of him," Fox said. "He was something of a renaissance man in the early 20th century. He was the architect behind a lot of Gotham's most famous buildings, but he wore a lot of other hats. Sculptor, painter, physicist…"
"Chemist?"
"Sure. His grasp on the fundamentals was… quaint, by modern standards. But he was brilliant for his time. Why?"
"This article talks about using cryogenics to preserve the human body. Wright thought it could be the key to eternal life."
Fox nodded.
"It's a fad that's come and gone for most of the 20th Century. It was big in the 60s too. But the trouble with freezing people is there was never a plan to thaw them back out. It was always assumed they would keep in the fridge until science figured out a way to wake them back up. It's mostly just pop-sci dazzle. Probably not the sort of thing a Fortune 500 company would tap a scientist to tackle. But for a hobbyist like Wright, sure."
"He must have gotten close enough that Fries thought he could finish."
Gordon chuckled humorously.
"Cryogenesis? Eternal life? Doesn't that all sound a bit… impossible?"
"Impossible? Maybe. And yet - consider the weapon fired at me and Detective Essen the other night. Our definition of what is and isn't 'possible' isn't enough anymore."
"I'm starting to miss the dude in the gimp mask with the rat cages," Gordon muttered as he checked a ping on his phone.
"Did the BOLO come back already?"
"I didn't put out the BOLO for Fries yet. It's from Sarah," Gordon said. Then his face hardened.
"Mr. Fox, do you get cable to any of these monitors?"
Fox nodded and flicked on one of the TVs. They watched as the message "NEW INFORMATION ON CIRCUS KILLINGS" scrolled across the chyron.
"We're live at Gotham Police Headquarters where Commissioner Loeb has promised some dramatic new evidence in the death of the Flying Graysons. You might remember the grisly scene last weekend at-"
"I need to get back," Gordon said.
"Yes." Batman replied. "We'll take my car."
The precinct was still a flurry of activity when they arrived. The trip had taken longer than Gordon wanted, even in Batman's souped-up vehicle. The snow outside was nearly blinding, and road closures were abundant. Inside the car, however, Gordon's temper had been heating up.
"Dent! What the hell is he doing?"
The D.A. wrung his hands through his hair. He was watching through a window into the press pool. They could see flashes going off as Loeb addressed the crowd. He had a picture of an old mugshot on the projector screen next to him.
"Blowing our chance to nab this guy before he knew we were on to him, that's for sure. As soon as he knew the guy had priors he already had half the city snow-shoeing down here to prene at."
"Priors? Guy has a record?"
"That's where we found the picture," Sarah said, joining them in the bullpen. "I'm sorry, I tried to tell him."
"Pah! You try convincing him to do anything," Harvey laughed.
While the authorities commiserated about their Commissioner, Batman crept closer to the glass to get a better look at Zucco's mugshot. He mentally added a few years, some gray hairs, some extra weight in the face. His prey. Behind him, someone unmuted the TV so they could hear what was happening inside.
"As of now, Anthony Zucco is public enemy number one. The GCPD is offering a reward for anyone who can provide actionable information on his location. We will bring this man to justice."
"Jesus," Gordon slammed his fist on a pillar. "When Zucco sees this he's going to go on lockdown. Or he'll skip town. Either way, he's about to become ten times harder to find."
"That's not all," Batman said. "Dick Grayson's already not thinking straight. He's putting revenge before his own safety. Now he knows the name and face of his parents' killer."
And in his room at the Gotham Children's Hospital, face bathed in the blue light of the television, a young boy's fingers clenched around an aluminum bat…