Tseng did not lose his temper, as a rule. He prided himself on his ironclad control over his emotions and the subsequent reactions such things engendered in the greater masses. It wasn't merely a shield behind which he concealed his flaws and weaknesses, it was never a good idea to let any one subordinate to him see any such thing for their own well being. His people put their faith in his unwavering steadiness, the knowledge that his control was unshakable and he was always someone they could depend upon.
Tseng did not lose his composure, often.
He stood in the center of his room, chest heaving and hair in disarray, as he glared down at the remnants of his PHS that he had flung to the ground in a fit of impassioned rage.
Was Aerith merely the victim of circumstance? Was it an accident of fate that her appearance matched that of the killer's particular type? Or was the killer's type someone who looked like Aerith? He couldn't entirely rule either out, and that was more than frustrating. He had spent fifteen years - years - ensuring that one girl survived to adulthood with something resembling a childhood, lonely and isolated as it was. He'd fought for her, killed for her more times than she would be comfortable knowing of, and she had slipped through his fingers at the whim of someone he could never have anticipated. He had been far too late in his realization that the killer's preferred victims had more than a superficial resemblance to his charge. He let the thoughts tick over in his brain as he forced himself to calm down and control his breath.
He went down to one knee, fishing through the bits of electronics sprayed across his otherwise spotless bedroom floor, and plucked the sim card from the remains. A drawer in his desk was full of copies of the exact same device, and he kept his hands steady through sheer force of will as he installed the card and booted it up. The Shinra Corporation logo welled up on the screen like a splotch of blood, spreading out into the familiar diamond shape and pixelated insignia, and messages he'd not yet seen began to trickle in.
Most of them could be ignored, the usual status reports of things he had no control over - Phoenix's bones, how much he loathed this constant rotation of things he could do nothing about. It had all been necessary, but the coup had progressed far more quickly than he would have liked, even though there had been no time to do anything but act decisively rather than waste time in calculations.
He selected the messages marked with a bright red priority indicator, and dragged his eyes quickly over the words. To Elena, he replied that he would, in fact, be joining her momentarily. Rude and Reno were already in the vicinity and making their way to Sector Seven, asking whether the should drag Rufus along with them from where they'd spent the night keeping him occupied and entertained, distracted from some plot or other that he thought he'd concealed from his guards. He sent a 'protection' detail of two SOLDIERs to meet them, freeing them up to perform the preliminary search.
Broken composure or no, he couldn't appear to be anything less than flawless and in complete command. If he rushed through his ablutions and his hand shook as he pressed the black ash between his brows that was between himself and his god.
"Hey bossman," Elena's usually boisterous exclamation was more subdued than Tseng had ever heard it as he slipped into the surveillance room and carefully closed the door behind him. A dozen screens splashed shifting colors across the other Turk's pale face, washing it out in sickly tones as she spun her chair back to face them.
He leaned forward and braced his hands on the edge of the desk as he flicked his gaze from one camera feed to the next. Ordinarily each screen would show a scene from within the building, each floor and executive suite under constant observation. Now they showed the messy streets and trash strewn alleys of the slums of Sector Seven. Over half of the recordings were glitched and shaky, and it was a miracle any of them existed and continued to transmit so far as the tower. Cameras in the slums had a tendency to be shot out or redirected to film blank walls and the steel 'sky' of the plates' underbelly.
"Do we have anything yet?" he asked, forcing the words out, properly impersonal in tone.
"Not yet." Elena's voice was quiet, careful, and Tseng did not need it… but appreciated it all the same. "But Rude's down there questioning the people Aerith had gone to see yesterday and asking around for who else might have seen her. She got there around 1300, to some place called Seventh Heaven to visit a friend of Zack Fair's, and left about two hours later to head home."
Tseng gripped the edge of the desk a bit harder as he thought it over. Seventh Heaven was of little interest to him, although it was a known meeting place for those who had a grudge against Shinra and were possibly being courted by various eco-terrorist groups. That could be said for half a dozen establishments in each under plate Sector. It was known more to him as the home of the Nibelheim Massacre's sole survivor outside of Shinra's employees, and it did not surprise him that Aerith would feel the need to speak to the last person to see Zack well, not fading in and out of a Mako coma and thus unavailable to her to speak to with any regularity.
"Stop that one, right there." Tseng reached out and tapped one screen in particular, and Elena flicked the switch on the console that froze the image in place. A rough map of the slums was pinned to the wall above the screens, numbers scrawled in Elena's dyslexic penmanship, the number 'three' written backwards as she often did when in a hurry, to indicate where each camera was located.
This particular street was halfway between the speakeasy and the train station, and he reached out himself to unpause the image. Aerith walked just along the edge of what the camera captured, the black and white image grainy and unfocused enough that he might not have recognized her if she hadn't been wearing a ribbon in her hair in the style she always favored. She disappeared from view, and he glanced up at the map before redirecting his attention to the next camera placed along her likeliest route.
She did not reappear.
"There's, like, only two ways to get back to Sector Five," Elena said, rewatching the tiny bit of footage they had, "the train, which is a huge pain in the ass 'cause its going to go through Eight and then up to the plate and all the way back around and that takes like, literally two or three hours depending on the time of day. The other way is cutting through Wall Market, or sneaking through the collapsed roads around where Five would have been. I doubt she'd have gone through that way, 'cause she's not stupid - and she promised she'd avoid Wall Market too, right?"
"Yes." Tseng frowned, sharp eyes flicking over the image again and again and trying to come up with a trajectory - then paused the image once more as he noticed a minuscule detail.
"What camera is this?" he asked, tapping a small black square affixed to a building just at the furthest reach of the security camera. If it hadn't slowly turned back and forth in a familiar fashion he might not have noticed it. The range of that camera must have picked up at least some of the massive blindspot they had between the ones they had access to.
"Huh… not sure. It doesn't seem to be on the list." Elena pushed away from the desk and snatched her suit jacket from where she'd tossed it over the back of her chair. "Let's go find out."
Unlike the last time Tseng had come beneath the plate, the people of Sector Seven were skittish and kept a much more deliberate distance between themselves and the two Turks. Clearly, Reno was being his usual disruptive self, the perfect match to Rude's stoicism as the professional unruffler of feathers that he was obliged to become in his partner's wake. It was the strangest form of 'good cop, bad cop' that any law enforcement official would dread filling out paperwork for.
The former approached through a tunnel of pedestrians that gave him a wide berth, tapping his magna-rod idly against his shoulder. In deference to the situation, his usual fox-like smile was nowhere to be seen - the lines of his mouth and brows drawn down into a fierce scowl. "Hope you got somethin' for us, yo…"
Tseng jerked his head in the direction of Aerith's path, Rude appearing on the other side of their small group and falling in as they began to walk. "A single security camera caught sight of her moving in the direction of the train station, but the next one a few blocks away showed nothing. However, we spotted a camera that seemed operational outside of our control that may have caught something."
"What cameras don't we own down here?" Reno asked, using his weapon to scratch the back of his head as he walked backwards to face him. He uncannily dodged debris in the street without seeming to look back over his shoulder, and Tseng wondered how many times he'd traced each pathway in the vicinity in his diligent search.
"Privately owned businesses and homes," Tseng replied thoughtfully, "all of which may or may not be on any records, let alone within our purview."
"One way to find out," Elena said, looking about them, on alert. Tseng made a mental note to refresh her training on peripheral vision rather than looking about in so overt a manner.
The building with the camera was painted a dingy white, not just sporting one surveillance camera but several - and as they rounded it Tseng understood why it was so carefully on guard. A pharmacy, likely filled with valuable controlled substances, that also served as a small clinic for those addicted to Mako. Both of which would make them a prime target for robberies, as well as altercations between those who came for their services - or were forced into it by whatever passed for an authority figure in their lives.
Unlike the hospital, Tseng doubted that any money was being donated to the establishment. Illness and injury was marketable by those who deigned to be charitable, but addiction was more likely to be seen as a moral failing of the individual and thus shunned and ignored.
The door had a hand written sign taped on the front of it, 'Closed For Lunch', in neat block letters. Elena knocked, politely, and Reno groaned in annoyance before smacking his magna-rod as delicately as a sledge-hammer against the wall beside the door - just as someone appeared to open it with a horrified look on his face. The employee on the other side of the glass stared at them with wide eyes, clearly caught between running further into the store and obediently opening it. His gaze flicked across the four of them, taking in the matching black suits and steely expressions. He unlocked the door.
"Can I…" the man said, voice somewhat strangled as he was forced to step further inside when Reno shoved past him. He gave an exaggerated bow as Tseng and the others followed. Rude closed the door back, twisting the lock into place and folding his hands in front of it as he took up a guard position. "Can I help you, sirs, er uh, sir and ma'am, folks?"
"We need access to your security footage." Tseng tilted his head forward in acknowledgement of the man's growing terror. There were moments for treating civilians gently, particularly when they had likely done nothing to be afraid of, but there were also moments when niceties were an inconvenience for everyone involved. He was certain the man would be more than happy to have them gone as soon as they had what they wanted - Tseng raised one eyebrow significantly. "Immediately."
"Oh shit, yeah, man sure," the man stumbled away from them, tripping over his feet and grabbing the corner of a tall shelf that rocked ominously before he caught his balance. Several boxes and packages rattled off of the display and he muttered a curse as he kicked them out of the way.
One third of the building consisted of the pharmacy, the Mako clinic taking up the rest of the space - cordoned off by a wall that didn't quite reach the ceiling. It was plastered in charts and diagrams, explanations of what Mako did to the system and why it was so dangerous, and the clinic's reassurances that no one there would judge or dismiss. Through the open archway, Tseng could see curtained off beds with plastic pockets empty of patient charts. The sign above it gave the hours of operation, from seven in the morning until noon, and from five in the afternoon until the pharmacy closed.
The pharmacy itself was laid out in standard fashion, metal shelves full of medications and first-aid supplies, with a long counter in the back, bullet-proof glass shielding it much like a bank teller's. A door directly beside it was labeled 'SECURITY' in large black letters, another bullet-proof window inset with a lacework of metal.
"Um, I'm just the cashier so I'm sorry." The man hovered beside the door, shifting from foot to foot. "I can't, it's just… I don't have a key, the guy who has it is out getting lunch and-"
He trailed off as Rude moved to the front of their group and examined the reinforced door for only a moment. He shifted his stance, one foot up and twisted to land a solid kick to the spot just beside the doorknob.
The poor cashier's shoulders slumped. "Okay that just happened," he said, followed more quietly by, "that's gonna come outta' my check…"
"Nope." Elena patted him on the back as she followed Rude through the door that now hung from one hinge. She pulled a black card from her pocket and shoved it towards him. "They can bill us, if your boss tries to take it from yours after we pay for it you can call me and I'll set him straight."
Tseng caught the door as the screws holding it in place slipped from the frame, smoothly leaning it against the wall and entering the room as Elena flicked on the lights.
A single large television dominated the aluminum banded table it rested on. With just the weight of Tseng's hand it gave a hollow thunk against the wall as it rocked on uneven feet. The wildly patterned laminate tabletop was covered in pits and scratches, clearly a piece of furniture cannibalized from some entertainment venue that died out decades earlier - it was in sharp contrast to the highly sophisticated surveillance setup. The screen had all six camera angles in view at once, and all in crisp focus and even in color. A laptop was set up in front of it, metal bands holding it in place - it would be far more likely to be grabbed and stolen than the television, and the data on it would be far more valuable.
"We take'n this with us?" Reno asked, clipping his weapon to his belt and fished out a multitool, flipping it open to a screwdriver.
"I'm just gonna go wait up front right, okay, please?" The cashier began to back away and Tseng held up a hand without looking over his shoulder, his fidgeting ceased immediately and he muttered a faint, "'Kay, that's a no."
Elena dropped into the molded plastic chair. "Taking it back up top is a waste of fucking time," she said, dragging a finger over the laptop's track pad and scowling as a password prompt appeared over a plain blue background.
A banging sound came from the front of the store, and Reno loped out into the main room with the cashier following close behind like a nervous puppy. "That's probably Benny, he's got the password I swear, he's kind of an asshole so maybe don't kill him, gods I'll have to mop it up."
"Priorities," Elena muttered, fidgeting in place as they waited.
A new figure, Benny, Tseng assumed, appeared in the doorway. His dark face was ashen as he stepped gingerly through the door and bent over to touch the keyboard.
"You'd better not be typing 'password'," Elena interjected the moment the letter 'P' was tapped. The man's hands jolted across the keys, turning to look at her with wild eyes before rapidly deleting the mess of nonsense symbols strewn across the input box.
"It's not," the man said, very quietly, looking as though he may genuinely burst into tears, "it's, Placebo…"
"Good, great," Elena batted Benny's hands away and typed in the word. "Now show me which cameras are which and how to get to three-o'clock."
"Yes ma'am." Benny seemed to be made of sterner stuff than the cashier, whom Tseng had neglected to even gather his name.
He flinched inwardly at that, his expression still smooth and cold. On any ordinary day that wouldn't have escaped him, he would have noted it down and made a profile of the man even if merely for the practice of it. Tseng was off his game, and he did not like that, but he could perhaps give himself some semblance of grace - this was an unprecedented situation. It was far more nerve wracking than any stage of the takeover had been, a great deal more fraught even than successfully faking his predecessor's death. This was… personal, in a way that nothing else had been.
He wondered, as Benny leaned over and explained the workings of the security system to Elena and they began to search each camera in turn for a glimpse of their quarry, if he should have brought Verdot in on this - he was still in 'retirement', his whereabouts yet unknown, but Tseng now had his contact information. He was loath to use it, yet another sign of weakness he couldn't afford, as though he couldn't handle his position himself.
They all focused on the footage that Elena expanded to fill the screen. Aerith had appeared on the camera, walking lightly around the building and crouching down to coax a mangy stray cat close enough to scratch its tattered ears - Tseng almost sighed, of course she would.
That was the vulnerable moment her attacker needed, and she had no warning whatsoever to struggle as she was grabbed from behind by a man wearing… green scrubs, a white coat, a badge, and a disposable face mask. Tseng didn't need to try and decipher the badge from the excellent recording - not when the pharmacy's logo was right there at the top of it.
"Fucking hell!" Benny leaned close and pointed at the kidnapper as though he thought they hadn't noticed him, finger jabbing at the screen, "That's Doctor North! He went home sick… or said he was sick, oh my gods!"
They watched as Aerith went limp, and Reno rushed out of the room when he saw something small and slender be flicked away into the gutter behind the pharmacy - a hypodermic needle, no doubt. They watched as she was hefted over the doctor's shoulder and carried unsteadily to a sheet of corrugated metal leaned against the wall - the metal shoved aside to reveal one of the many man-holes that gave access to the sewers that served both the slums and the plate.
Benny and Elena both gasped as Aerith was lowered down, dangling from one wrist and then simply dropped down to land somewhere below. The doctor carefully wiped his hands on the inside of his scrub shirt, and walked back as casually as though he'd merely dropped a sack of garbage down the hole rather than a woman.
Tseng stepped away and out of the room, a strange mix of heavy foreboding and a light-headedness he hadn't felt since childhood flooding his body. His ears rang as his blood pulsed through his veins, his heart pounding in his chest as he shoved open the door the doctor had walked back into.
There was a terrible question that he couldn't voice yet. The world was full of monsters. The odds of there being two of them lurking in the slums and hunting their prey individually was not nearly low enough. They'd either found their serial killer, or uncovered another one of his kind - and Tseng hoped it was the former, if only for the peace of mind that they had at least four days left to find him.
"Boss?" Reno, standing just outside the door and about to return, held up the syringe he'd plucked from the gutter - glinting in the sunlamp's unforgiving light where it was pinched between his latex gloved fingers.
"With me." Tseng's voice was mercifully emotionless as he stalked across the beaten dirt walkway and grabbed the edges of the sheet of metal and revealed the man hole. He steeled himself, tugging his gloves further up his wrist in an old nervous tick he'd thought he had long purged from his behavior, and lifted away the cover. He breathed a sigh of relief that he did not see a body lying broken beneath the ladder, and swiftly climbed down to the bottom.
The concrete walkway that lined both sides of the sluggishly flowing channel of sewage was wet - and it shouldn't have been. He took several steps to the left, carefully stepping over the more obvious waste, and frowned as the wetted area ended. He pulled a penlight from the inside pocket of his jacket and cast its narrow beam at the ground. Splashing marks flared out in an arc further down…
He returned to the ladder, and then passed it, following the filthy water stained concrete until it too ended - without a spray of water leading further down the channel - but leaving behind a plastic kidney-shaped basin discarded on the ground, along with a pair of blue latex gloves.
Tseng climbed back to the surface, smoothing his suit down and sucking in a discrete breath of clean air and blowing out the stench from his nose as much as he could.
"He isn't stupid," Tseng said as Reno fell into step beside him and followed him back into the pharmacy, "get a guard-hound, borrow Darkstar if you have to - she's trained to track the scent of Rufus and should do just as well with any other. But he's spread sewage all over both sides of the ladder to obfuscate the search - but not enough that I can't tell which way he went. Go right at the ladder, he made certain not to get any of the filth on himself."
"On it," Reno said, passing the syringe into Tseng's hands, "Oi, Rude, we're running topside for a minute!"
"Have one of the SOLDIERS who can pilot bring a helicopter and drop a ladder if he can't find a landing spot," Tseng ordered as he returned to the security room. Another doctor, shorter and with a pot belly straining at the front of his neat green scrub top, was wringing his hands as he stood inside the door and spoke in softly anxious tones to Elena.
"Yeah that's North all right," the man said, the metal badge naming him as Rudolph Montrose and as the head pharmacist, shook his head, "always wearing a mask like that and gloves but I just took him for a germophobe. Washed his hands all the time, changed his gloves every single patient he worked with which, hell, I thought that was pretty responsible. I figured him for being on something but down here… you get what you get. He had the records, the info was good, he was clearly trained and his credentials said he worked with Mako patients in the Mideel clinics before moving here to look for his missing son."
"And you, like what… never had him take the fucking mask off?" Elena's frustration was boiling over, her expression utterly incredulous as the man gave a helpless looking shrug. "Gods I knew shit down here was incompetent but FUCK that's so godsdamned stupid."
Tseng folded his own hands in front of him, one hand wrapped around the opposite wrist, content for now to let Elena take the lead as she seemed to be doing well enough. He could get any details he had missed from her afterward, and interrupting and demanding a recap would drag things out unnecessarily… They had five days. Four and a half, perhaps. No time to waste on games of telephone.
"He did take it off for the interview," Doctor Montrose said, hands dropping to his sides and shoulders somehow slumping even more dejectedly, "and it matched the background check, I don't know what you want from me. Am I supposed to check every hire to see if they have a secret and totally unknown life of villainy?"
"Where does he live? He did not return to the sewer from here." Tseng asked, leaning over to rewind the video once more and sped back through it to the present - Doctor North did not reappear in the back of the pharmacy. An unexpected complication. "He must have used a different entrance to the sewer to retrieve the victim and taken her to a secondary location."
"I don't have an address for you." Montrose held up his hands. "I mean I know generally where he lives, but not specifically. That's pretty common around here, you know? I can tell you it's here in Seven, somewhere near the station. I do know it's a shitty basement apartment, and I only know that because the first thing he did was buy a bunch of air purifiers after Daisy complained about the smell. He said he didn't even notice. There aren't a lot of those - or at least even people down here mostly won't live in them because…" He trailed off, hands coming up to twist together again.
"Because? Because what?!" Elena snapped, looking as though she might surge up out of her chair and shake the man.
"Because," Tseng answered for the doctor, "the smell of the sewer tends to get into them."
"Gross," Elena said succinctly, "super gross, especially coming back here and doing doctor shit smelling like… well shit. So wait… that means he's probably got access right around there someplace nearby to get down into the sewers where he goes down and does his se-"
Tseng silenced her with the smallest tilt of his head before she said the words 'serial killer', and she continued.
"Bad guy shit," she finished.
"How often does Doctor North leave early, or call in sick?" Tseng asked, "and how long is he usually away for?"
"I thought he had some kind of condition," Montrose answered, "and maybe it had gotten worse? He was always there and on time at first, which was kind of a relief since the guy he replaced was hungover and late most days. But it's been only a short while since the last time, maybe two or three weeks? I can look it up exactly, on the computer we use as a time clock."
Tseng motioned for him to lead, and nodding to Elena he continued, "Download everything, as far back as it will go if it doesn't save the recordings from when the good doctor was first hired."
Elena fished in a pocket and came up with a multitool, likely pick-pocketed from Reno earlier - she said she did such things for practice, but Tseng knew it was compulsive.
"They can bill us for a new one," Elena said as she began to remove the metal strap keeping the laptop bolted to the table, "I'm taking this into custody."
Tseng left her to it, his soft 'good' making her cheeks turn pink as he followed Montrose to his office. The small room was crowded with filing cabinets stacked atop one another, each drawer labeled neatly although they were mostly mismatched and likely obtained at separate times. He swept the room with a quick and considering gaze, memorizing the layout and contemplating whether it would be an appropriate addition to his mind palace and discarding the idea - too chaotic by far.
"Okay." Montrose's breath was unsteady as he sat down at his ancient looking desktop, dragging the keyboard close and shoving aside a pile of receipts and a stack of voided prescriptions. "He clocked out maybe twenty minutes after he, um," the man swallowed hard as he spoke, "after he did… that... and said he was feeling ill. He did that a couple-three weeks ago, lemme look, okay so…"
He tapped at the keyboard inexpertly, and Tseng forced himself to remain impassive - the man's two-fingered tapping took a frustratingly long time to bring up the pertinent details. Bertrand North, with both a Doctorate in Pharmacology and a PHD in Mako Sciences. His credentials and references had passed muster, his last position one in the Mako recovery ward of Mideel General Hospital. The identification photo was nearly useless, showing a pale man with badly cropped dark hair and dark eyes obscured by thick lenses in unfashionable plastic frames. A disposable paper mask obscured the rest of his face.
"He took off on the seventh last time," Montrose said as he waved at the screen for Tseng to observe, "but he called that in before his shift even started."
"When did he return?" Tseng asked, not needing to mentally tally the days when he well knew that was five days before the last body was found.
"Two days," Montrose said, and Tseng held himself very still as he contemplated that.
"Two?" he asked. Not five, two.
"Yeah, but he left early the next few days - he wasn't sick though… or… fuck I guess maybe he'd not even been sick before. This is fucking with me." Montrose ran a hand down his face before resuming his hunt and peck search in his records. "He said he thought he'd found his son's mother - that's why he said he moved to Midgar in the first place. His ex took his son and he figured she came here I guess. That's what he said, anyway."
"Give me every date he called in, every time he returned, and every time he left early." Tseng's voice was not overtly demanding in the least but the command was clear and he shortly had a still warm printout in his hands, "open the shop and the clinic as needed, say nothing out of the ordinary that might give away our notice when he returns. We will be watching."
"I can't just…" Montrose stared at Tseng as though he'd grown an extra head, or perhaps that he had turned an unnatural color. "I can't open up knowing he's fucking doing… What do I do when he comes back?"
"Nothing out of the ordinary." Tseng's command was made clear, and unbreakably firm. "Treat him as you usually would, and we will take care of it."
Cowed, but clearly terrified, Montrose gave a short nod and smoothed his hands over the edge of his keyboard nervously. "I'll… yeah… just… fuck…"