They cris-crossed the industrial park for an hour. There were several false alarmed but each time what looked liked signed of recent occupation turned out to be dogs digging into months old trash. Finally they drove back to the Nasty Burger, ordered some soft drinks and sat around a table thinking.

"We should get a Fenton Finder and reset it so that it picks up Danny," Sam suggested. Danny had some time before modified all the ghost detectors the Fentons manufactured so that they would no pick up his unique ghost energy, in an effort to keep his parents in the dark about his having acquired ghost powers.

"We have a big phased-array detector in the Ops Room on the roof. I already tried using that to find Danny. Nothing. whatever she did to Danny, she must have him behind a ghost barrier.

"If he's still alive," Tucker said.

"How could you say that!" Jazz cried and broke into tears.

Sam called him a shockingly vulgar term before turning to comfort Jazz.

Unable to face his friends, Tucker pulled out his PDA and connected to the Internet. He was about to boot into one of his favorite games when a thought came to him. Pulling up a search engine instead he typed in a description of the woman and hit "go."

"What are you doing now," Sam asked in the sort of tone one uses for traitors and serial delinquents.

"I'm googling a description of the woman we're looking for."

"Do you have any idea how many women there are in this country who answer to that description?" Sam asked.

"Over ten million according to this search engine, but I think I can narrow that down a lot."

"How?" Sam asked with interest even though she was madder at Tucker than she had ever been in her life for making Jazz cry.

"We know she's tall, thin, and has red-hair..."

"And has big tits and an ass, yes we know."

"But she's also interested in Danny and that means there's got to be some kind of ghost connection to her as well. There cann't be that many tall red-heads interested in ghosts. Fifty Thousand hits! Oh, Good Lord...."

"Let me see that," Sam asked as she tore the PDA from Tucker's hands.

"Did you put in 'freckles'?" she asked as she flicked through pages of search results.

"Of course."

'Hey, this looks promising. Kat Bowen."

Jazz looked up. "I know her."

"Personally or professionally." Sam asked.

"I've met her but don't really know her. She's part of the Extreme Ghost Breakers team. I met her at a Ghost convention my parents took us to. Why would she be interested in Danny?"

"Former member of the Extreme Ghostbreakers team," Tucker corrected. He had snatched his PDA back from Sam and was running a search on Kat Bowen. "It says here she quit the group about six months ago over 'creative differences'."

"Meaning what?" Sam wondered.

"Here's a report that she throw a drink at her colleague, 'Hog' Wylde at last years Ecto-Plasmic Enterprises conference."

"She drinks?" Jazz asked.

"She's 25," Tucker flipped back through several tabs to find her biographical information. "I guess she can drink if she wanted to."

"Does it say why she threw the drink?" Sam asked,

Tucker was silent for a minute. "Here it is. He called her 'dude'?"

"Dude?" Jazz echoed.

"Hey, remember when Vlad put that million dollar bounty on Danny's head,?" Sam said. "They were one of the groups trying to collect it, and I seem to recall that she was always complaining about them calling her a dude when she was a girl."

"She threw a drink because some guy couldn't tell she was a girl?" Tucker marveled

"She quit the Extreme Ghostbreakers because of that."

"But her partners were complete morons," Sam protested. "How could she take anything they said seriously?"

Jazz was daubing at her eyes with a napkin. She was looking confident once again. "In my studies," she said, "I've learned that people often settle on some minor grievance to hide the larger issues that are tearing them apart. Perhaps she saw their calling her 'dude' as a symptom of their greater disrespect for her because she wasn't a man like them. After all there were only three of them on the team and as Freud says, three is the minimum number needed to have one man out in a group.

"I think you mean Blue Man Group not Freud," Sam said, "but I know what you mean. So how do we use this to find Danny?"

They thought about that for a moment. Tucker had called up a picture of Kat Bowen and passed it around. She was a not unpretty woman despite the half dozen or more dime sized freckles on her face. Her hair was very orangish and kinky. In the picture she had combed it back and held it in place with a tie. She was laughing at something and held a drink in her hand. Dark sunglasses were perched in her hair and what could be seen of her T-shirt fit her like a glove. Jazz and Sam both nodded that this looked like the woman described as looking for Danny.

"I've looked through the on-line phone book and can't find a listing for her," Tucker said, nose buried in his PDA. "Nor is there any evidence that she's bought any land around here. It would be in the city deeds database. Water is public information and I can't find anything there. Electric is private and they don't have an on-line database of clients. The only mail address I can find is in Colorado but its at least a year old. There's no way to tell if she's in Amity Park."

"Check some of the celebrity tracking sites. See if she's been spotted in town?" Jazz suggested. "It looks like she likes to party. Maybe one of them has a line on her."

"Bingo!" Tucker exclaimed. "PartyHardyInThePark dot com has a photo of her from last month. She was dancing at the Industrial Club. Says she got thrown out for starting a fight. Wow, she's got issues."

"But what does she want with Danny?" Jazz wondered.

"Maybe she likes dating younger men?"

"Tucker!" Jazz and Sam exclaimed simultaneously.

"Well, maybe Danny called her a 'dude'?"

"I think she would have just kicked him in the groin and let it go at that." Sam said.

"The Industrial Club is our only clue," Jazz said, getting up. "We have to go there."

"Jazz, we're too young to get into a club like that and it's mid-afternoon. They won't open until 9 or 10. No one will be there now."

Jazz sat back down. "But we can't just wait around until there. Danny's in trouble I know it. We've got to do something."

"I agree with Jazz, but Sam's right, too," Tucker said. "This club is our only clue. The only thing we can do is stake out the club tonight and hope Kat isn't one of those people who stays until closing."

***

Danny was squatting on the floor. hours later, in the glass tube he was imprisoned in, trying to rest while not touching the electrified walls of the cylinder. He head continued to throb but there weren't the blinding flashes of pain when he moved he head like there had when he had first awaken. He wondered what Sam and Tucker would do when he didn't show up for lunch like he'd promised. He'd completely forgotten about his promise to help his wondered who his captor was and what they were planning to do.

Eventually the lights came on in the large room again and there was his captor, still encased in a full body hazmat suit, a clipboard in his hand. Danny noticed he was humming a song as he came in, but couldn't recognize it. When the song came around to the chorus his captor began a weird kind of complicated dance, flailing his arms, twisting around in a well-execurted spin and stamped his feet with a final tada! before going back to recording the reading on the instruments as if nothing had happened at all. The thought crossed Danny's mind that this guy was nuts. Still that wasn't goign to get him out of this giant test tube any time soon.

"H-e-l-l-o!" he called out. "H-e-l-l-o! When are you going to let me go?" Danny wanted to get his captor talking in hopes of finding out what was going on but also because he just couldn't stand the silence any more.

The person in the baggy hazmat suit ignored him. From the tinted glass on the large bucket shaped helmet Danny couldn't even tell if he was looking at him.

"Why are you doing this. What do you want? Come on, mister, what have I ever done to you?"

"Mister!" his captor shrieked. "Mister!" He ripped off his helmet revealing a angry young woman with orangish-red hair, green eyes on a blazing red face with large, darkish freckles. "Do I look like a 'mister' to you!"

"Sorry, lady," Danny apologized, springing to his feet and trying to back away from the woman intense anger. Bumping against the wall of the cylinder caused a brief flash of electricity and Danny jumped back to the middle of the tube. "I didn't mean anything by it. It's just that .... in that suit and with your helmet on you could have been anybody, man, woman, green Martian. I'm sorry. What's the big deal, it was an honest mistake." Danny realized that he was babbling and shut up.

"Do you know who I am?" she asked.

Danny squinted. "You know I'm still a little concussed from when you hit me," he admitted. "Frankly everything still a little blurry. Should I know you?"

"I'm Kat Bowen!"

"From the Extreme Ghost Breakers?"

"Late! Late of the Extreme Ghost Breakers. Late of the soon to be Late Extreme Ghost Breakers!"

"You quit the group?" Danny asked, genuinely surprised. "When did that happened?"

"Last year! Doesn't anyone pay attention?" She began pacing the floor then tried to jam a hand into a pants pocket only to find the hazmat suit in the way. She fought with it for a moment, then ripped the zipper on the front down and tore off the suit. She was almost in a frenzy by the time she got the elasticized booties off her shoes. With a growl of rage she smashed her hand into her pocket, pulled out a small cylinder and placed it in her nose and snorted. She held her breath for a long ten count before exhaling contentedly.

"Are you OK, lady?" Danny asked, alarmed by her behavior.

"Better than you'll be in a little bit," she laughed.

"What do you mean by that?"

She didn't answer which Danny found to be very disturbing.

"What did I ever do to you?" Danny asked. He bumped against the side of the giant test tube again and got rewarded with another jolt of electricity. "Could you turn that damned thing off," he cried. "I can't turn around without getting shocked."

She looked at him for a moment, her lips curled up in a snarl. Them looked at the little inhaler still clenched in her hand. She raised it for a moment like she was going to use it again, then stuffed it in her pocket and made some changes on the control panel in front of Danny's prison.

"Have it your way," she said with a sigh. "As long as you don't trip the accelerometers the glass won't be electrified."

"Thanks." Danny took a longer look at his captor. She wore some kind of tight dark pants, ski pants he guessed because of the wide strip of greyish green down the sides. Her feet were stuff in fur-lined boots with short heels. And a half-buttoned red-check flannel shirt hung off her very thin shoulders. She had a kind of a pretty face, triangular shaped, with large greenish eyes, expressive eyebrows and a wide mobile mouth, but the eyes were burned under a ton of mascara and the way her lipstick attacked her face Danny wasn't sure if she was trying to look like the Joker or just didn't care.

Danny gingerly leaned against the side of his prison and when he found that he wasn't being shocked, learned into it, glad to be able to relax for the first time in hours. Except for the part about standing naked in front of a woman. He kept his hands across his front.

"So what brings you to Amity park?" he asked

"You."

"Me?"

"I need you for my revenge?"

"Against who?"

"My former team member, of course. That why I quit. I couldn't stand them any more. It was always 'dude, this' and 'dude, that.' I kept telling them I wasn't a dude but they never learned. I even flashed them my tits and they didn't care! "

"Maybe they were gay?"

"That I could have lived with!" Kat screamed. "But, n-o! They were so full of themselves that they never see anyone else! So they have to die."

"You're going to kill them? For calling you a 'dude'?"

"Yes! Well, you're going to kill them, that's why you're here."

"You're crazy! I'd never try to kill anyone!"

She smiled up at him, twisting her head to the side as far as it would go, baring her teeth a little. "Yes. I am - ever - so - crazy. But they still have to die."

"You know you're crazy? Isn't that a little crazy."

"Oh, yes."

"I mean...." Danny was floundering here. He didn't have his sister's background in psychology but there was something here that wasn't quite right. "if you know you're crazy, doesn't that mean you actually aren't?"

He saw that he had, for the moment, her undivided attention.

"I mean, isn't one of the characteristics of craze people that they don't know how crazy they are? So when you say you're crazy aren't you, like, admitting that you aren't. Crazy, that is?"

"The 'Catch-22' defense," she replied. "But if you really understand the book you'd know that the whole world is insane and there's no way out."

"It was a book? I thought it was a movie?"

"It doesn't matter, they have to die!"

"For not remembering you're a woman?"

"For a lifetime of insults! They will pay!" She suddenly pulled the inhaler out of her pocket again and took a hit. It seemed to calm her down.

"Couldn't' you, like, just beat them up a bit and call it quits? My friend, Sam, is quite a woman's libber. She's always hitting me when I say or do something sexist."

"The road not taken....Well, I'm glad she's exerting herself like that. But it's too late for them, for me. I have given this a lot of long, careful consideration. I have analyzed the situation using seven different forms of logical thought and it always comes back to the same point. They don't deserve to live!"

"Jeez, lady chill out." he muttered to himself. "So why did you kidnap me?" Danny demanded. "Did you need someone to confess your crime to? Why not save us all the trouble and go tell the police your plans."

"You're going to kill them."

"Like heck I am."

"I know all about you, Danny Phantom," she purred.

Chills went down Danny's spine. He could feel his whole back raise up in massive goosebumps while the pit of his stomach was rapidly falling towards China. "Fenton," he insisted. "I'm Danny Fenton. You've got me confused with someone else."

"No. You're Danny Phantom and Danny Fenton. And I'm going to steal those delicious ghost powers of yours to kill my ex-partners. It's so delightfully ironic. They who have spent their, admittedly short lives, breaking ghosts will be broken by a ghost! And with they're dying breathes they'll know who did this to them. And that I'm a woman!"

She was shouting again. If they weren't in some large abandoned factory the police would have been here a long time ago on a noise complaint.

"They'll never recognize you as a ghost," Danny blurted out, then clamped his mouth shut. "Do I look like a ghost?" He asked a moment later. "I don't because I'm not a ghost!" Danny had always been afraid someone someday would recognize that he and Danny Phantom were one and the same. But he had always figured it would to his parents he would be making these denials.

"I don't know how you do it, but I intend to find out. Why else haul in so much equipment," Kat Bowen said, waving her hand at all the machinery laying around the factory floor, "but I know that you and Danny Phantom are one and the same. That's why I placed you inside a ghost-proof extraction cylinder. My sensors indicated that someone using ghost powers tried to break out of your cylinder shortly after you woke up -- from the inside! There's no mistake. You are a ghost and I am going to take those powers and kill my partners like I should have so many years before!"

Danny slowly slumped to the floor of the cylinder, the strength drained out of him by her announcement.

"After that disastrous Prize Contest by Vlad Masters to capture Danny Phantom I spent a lot of time analyzing what had gone wrong. There were my idiot partners of course, and the equally moronic Puzzle Patrollers, and the Guys in White -- what a waste of my tax dollars they are -- but how could Danny Phantom have eluded Jack Fenton for so long. The man is a moron, a buffoon, an idiot and a klutz...."

"That's my dad you're talking about!" Danny shouted.

"Yes, it must be very embarrassing to you." she continued. "But even with all his handicaps how could he fail to capture you, there had to be an explanation. So I've been in town for the last couple months researching you. At first I thought maybe you and he had some kind of deal where he was actually protecting you. For a time I thought he might actually be Danny Phantom. But of course I was wrong. Then I realized that the only people helping Danny Phantom were a couple high school kids -- whose only other friend was Jack Fenton's son! So I reevaluated all my data and discovered that Danny Fenton is always missing when Danny Phantom is around. Like Superman, they're never in the same room at the same time. I had to be sure, so I brought you here, and now I have incontrovertible proof that you tried to break out of that cell by using your ghost powers! Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!" she kept on laughing for a full minute or longer.

"That's your proof?"

"It's enough, ghost boy! Tonight victory will be mine. All foes will lie at my feet. The world will know the power of Kat Benson -- Ghostgirl! Aha! ha! ha! ha! ha! How's my laugh, I've been working on it?"

"It sucks."

With a curse, the crazy woman stalked from the lab.

***

"See anything?"

Sam, Jazz and Tucker were sitting inside Jazz's car, parked next to a fire hydrant across the street from Industrial. The club was a two-story concrete building, a small warehouse converted to a dance studio. There were a number of security lights mounted around the corners of the building and along the fenced in parking lot to one side. The building was painted black with some white slashes for contrast and some graffiti long the sides. People milled around the door, not so much waiting to go inside as hanging out for fresh air.

"We should have come earlier, she might already be in there for all we know." Sam, in the passenger seat was tapping her foot nervously while Jazz, in the driver's seat, hogged Sam's father's big bird-watching binoculars.

"We got here an hour before the club opened. If we'd come any earlier it would have been daylight and we'd have stuck out like a sore thumb," Jazz whispered back, not taking her eyes from the big, swiss lens.

Tucker was in back with a pair of army surplus night vision goggles. Tucker had never had a chance to use the night vision goggles before and was relishing the chance. It was amazing how clear everything was, except since it had no light magnifying power all the crisply visioned people around the club were rendered as small green and white figures.

"What about you Tucker?" Sam asked since Jazz wouldn't give her her glasses back.

"Umm, I'm not sure how we're supposed to spot a red-head.. I'm not getting a lot of color here. Wait, something's happening."

Even Sam could tell that. A woman had just been thrust out of the club, followed by a guy that made Dash Baxter, Casper High All-Star Quarterback look small. Sam had opened the window on her side of the car. Since it faced away from the club no one was likely to notice the people inside the parked car. Through the window Sam could hear the woman screaming at the doorman. "F--- You! F---You! How dare you throw me out. Do You Know Who I Am?"

"I've had it with you, Kat," the bouncer yelled back, if oly to be heard over the woman's non-stop cursing. "I've overlooked your drugs, and I've overlooked your bad mouthing other people, but no one starts a fight in my club. No One!" He turned to go back into the club.

"Don't turn your back on me!" the woman shrieked. "No one turns their back on me!"

"That's it, Kat! You're banned from Industrial -- for ever! I never want to see your face here again. And yes, I am turning my back on you."

And he did.

With a scream she threw herself on his back and clawed at his face.

The bouncer? owner? grabbed a hand as it sped towards his face and peeled her off his back like so much chaff. "Beat it, Kat," he told her, "You're over." He was back inside the club by the time the woman had pulled herself off the pavement in the parking lot. "Aaaaagh!" she screamed a couple times stomping her feet. She looked around for something to throw but the parking lot was too clean. Finally she tore the sunglasses off her hair and heaved the ineffectually at the heavy door to the club. When she stomped off along the street.

"You think that's her?" Turner asked with a chuckle. "Talk about a woman with an anger issue."

"What has she done to Danny?" Jazz murmured. She handed the binoculars back to Sam now that all the excitement was over. "With a temper like that I'm scared to think." She reached for the keys hanging from the ignition switch.

"We can't following her in this car," Sam said, catching hold of Jazz's hand. "She's walking. It would way to suspicious to have a car following her all the way back to where ever she's going."

"I'll leave the headlights off. She won't see us."

"Street lights! She'll still see us."

"I'll drive past her, park and wait to see where she goes."

"Jazz, don't you think that would be pretty strange, too? We've got to follow her on foot."

"And leave my car here? Look at this place. If Danny weren't in trouble I wouldn't come within a mile of this place. If I leave my car here it won't be here when we come back for it."

With an angry grunt, Sam opened her door. "Fine, do what you want. I'm following her. Stay out of sight. Tucker, you coming?" But she didn't wait for an answer, Sam Manson was already sprinting down the street to catch up with the other woman.

***

Sam was beginning to be impressed by the woman's stamina as they made the turn at the Real Estate building into the industrial park a half hour later. She'd seen the aging Chevette drive past them a couple minutes after she left. Tucker still inside. She's noticed it on a side street several blocks later.

Sam was keeping across the street from the former member of the Extreme Ghost Breakers and at least a block back. Sam ran from doorway to alley to doorway, keeping out of sight as much as she could. As near as she could tell Kat Bowen had shown no signs of noticing her.

It was another miles of walking before Kat stopped before the gates of an old warehouse and fitted a key she took from a lanyard around her neck into a lock there. A smaller, man-sized gate beside the truck gates opened up and she slipped inside. Sam, hiding behind a tree near-by pulled out her cell phone and called Tucker and give him directions to where she was. Jazz must have been following close by because it wasn't more than five minutes later that the Chevette rattled up to a stop beside her.

"She's in there," Sam said, pointing. "It looks like the place is all locked up. I don't know how we're going to get in there."

"We could use Danny about now," Tucker said. "He could go all ghost and float right through that fence."

"But we don't have Danny, you doofus!" Sam snapped. "We're here to rescue him, remember?"

Jazz walked around to the back of her car and unlocked the hatch. "Here, arm yourselves," she said, handing out rather large plastic guns that looked like high pressure water cannons, but since the had the word "Fenton" printed in their side it was pretty fair to guess that they could blow holes through things."

"You came armed?" Tucker mused as he inspected the Fenton Cannon.

"Did you think this kidnaper was just going to let Danny go because we asked her to? Of course I came armed. Now what's the best way to get through the gate? I've got a bolt cutter, an electric saw and a small acetyl torch."

"Let's take all three," Sam suggested. "Who know what we'll need once we get inside."

"Is that a folding ladder?" Tucker asked looking at what else was in the little car's trunk.

"It's only six feet ..."

"Do you have a blanket?" Tucker asked. "We can throw the blanket over the barbed wire at the top of the fence and drop to the ground. It'll get us past the gate with less noise."

"How will we get out later? That's why I wanted to cut the gate," Jazz whispered back.

"We'll worry about that later. We've got to get Danny first," Sam said.

They all gasped them as lights snapped on in the middle of the building, throwing out rays of lights from the building's skylights. They grabbed everything and sprinted across the street to the fence.