A/N: Standard Disclaimers Apply

Chapter Nine: Lost Leads

"Give me some plastic wrap," I ordered. "Now!"

Garfield rushed over to the pantry and grabbed the roll. He slapped the box in my hand as if giving me a surgical tool. I wrapped the box, stuffed it under my arm, grabbed the evidence bag with the brown wrapping paper, and stormed out of the common room. Vic caught up and tried to get my attention as we marched to the lab.

"Gar didn't bring the bird in, Dick," he said. "I did."

"It doesn't matter who brought it in. Did you notice that there was no shipping label, cancelled stamps, or anything like that? Someone knew exactly where to drop it off so we'd find it."

All this "It was really my fault" stuff was counterproductive. It didn't change the fact that someone was trying to scare us, and dammit, it worked. I stopped and looked into Vic's eyes. He was as scared as any of us. We walked into the lab and I spread the box and the paper wrap on the stainless steel worktable. Vic washed his mechanical hands and ran them under a sanitizer. I washed and regloved my hands as well. We donned dust masks and aprons before undoing the plastic wrap. I took the bird out of the box and picked up a mushroom brush.

Vic nodded and laid down a sheet of parchment paper before I began to brush the bird's feathers. Particulates fell to the paper. The bird was recently dead, no more than twenty-four hours, and I couldn't readily see a cause of death. I looked up and saw Kory, Gar, and Rae in the doorway.

"Come on in. We could use the help," I said.

"What can we do?"

I looked at the bird. "We need to prep for a necropsy. I want to know what killed this bird. Kory, you can help me with that. Rae, help Vic with a chemical analysis on the particulates we're taking from the bird, the box, and the wrapping paper."

"And me?" Gar asked.

"You can dust for fingerprints, right?"

"Um, yeah."

I pointed to the box. "As soon as you get through taking the particulates out, then get started."

I took the poor bird over to another examination table and laid out my dissection tools. Before I even cut it open, I examined the creature's spine and found it broken in three places. Then I looked at the wing tips. The wings, too, had been snapped, but I couldn't tell if it was before or after the raven died. I re-pinned it to an examination board and made a long vertical incision along its breastbone. The muscles showed extreme bruising. The raven went through some blunt force trauma, which broke the left wing and its back. The neck was snapped, and that's what killed the poor creature.

"What is that in its beak?" Kory asked over my shoulder.

She pushed the stand magnifier and pointed out a small bit of material. I took a pair of tweezers from my tool kit and plucked it out of the bird's mouth.

"It's burlap."

"As in… a sack of some kind?"

I looked up and grinned. A lot of people thought Kory was stupid. Of course I knew otherwise.

"Exactly," I agreed. "Judging from the injuries, I'd say the bird was bagged and then clubbed to death."

"How horrid."

I could only nod.

"Dudes, I just dusted the box for prints, and it's clean," Gar announced disappointedly.

"Good work," I said honestly. I didn't expect to find any.

"I've just set up the float tanks," Vic reported.

Vic carefully took each sheet of parchment and dumped them in individual tanks. The particulates would float or sink, depending on their density. It's an easy way to separate stuff. Dump all the stuff in, let it settle and skim off the top. Easy. Unfortunately analyzing them is going to take time. Time. That reminded me to look at my Lenny countdown. Ten hours, forty-one minutes.

"Vic, can you complete the lab work?" I asked as I stripped off the examination gloves and rewashed my hands.

"Yeah, no problem. You got a lead?"

I nodded. "Lenny's time is about up, and I'm going to see if he's about to be one of the most wanted men in Jump City or not."

"What makes you think he's still here?" Gar asked. "If it was me, I'd be in Tucson by now."

"I put a GPS tracer on him that night," I announced. "He went home, but you're right. Lenny could have skipped town."

"Are you really going to give this ledger to the Ivan?" Kory asked.

I grinned. "Someone just about as bad: Internal Revenue."

…..

I waited for sunset before driving to the Giordano Hotel. It was a grand old place in the very fashionable historical district. Even though the sign said it was a hotel, the fact is it was converted to condos about the same time the Titans took up residence here. I looked down at my tracker. Now that it was so close, the device was tracking the altitude difference. Looked like the fourth floor. I used the old iron fire escape and scaled up the building. The tracker blipped faster as I approached.

Room Four E.

The window was open, and I accepted the invitation. I smelled something all too familiar and tracked it to the bathroom.

Lenny.

He was in the bathtub, his arms submerged in blood-filled water, and his lifeless eyes stared at the ceiling.

"Well Lenny, you may not know it, but you're about to take down sixty percent of Jump City's drug traffickers," I whispered and called the police.