Chapter 27

I awoke to the feeling of a cold compress being gently laid across my forehead. The right side of my head throbbed painfully. The eye was swollen shut. Slowly, I opened the other to see Chief Grayson standing over me.

“Welcome back,” Grayson said.

“Where am I?”

“My office. You've been out for...” He consulted his watch. “...forty-one minutes.”

“Where's Mark? Is he okay?”

“He's fine but right now he's in jail with about thirty-five other people.”

“In jail? Why? Mark didn't do anything but defend me, Chief.”

“I know, but I'm the law. I can't play favorites, especially not with Diana's people. I had to arrest every man and woman that looked like they'd been fighting. Don't worry. It isn't the first brawl the Tramp's seen and it won't be the last. Tomorrow morning the judge will give everyone a stern lecture and drop the charges. Now, tell me how you feel.”

“Like I went ten rounds with Lennox Lewis. How badly am I damaged?”

“Not too. You have an ugly gash above your eye but it only required a few stitches. Sewed you up myself, in fact. You're going to sport a beaut of a shiner for a few days. You feel up to giving me a statement?”

I nodded before closing my good eye and laying my head back down.

“What started it?”

“B'wana Beast.”

“How's that again?”

I gave the chief the Reader's Digest version of the brawl.

“The thing is,” I concluded, “Zoe had things under control until that woman started it all up again. She wanted them to fight.”

“A couple of people have mentioned this mysterious beauty but their descriptions were pretty vague. Think you can do better?”

I tried. When I was finished, I asked, “So what's the verdict, Chief? Anyone you know?”

There was no reply. I carefully opened my eyes. Grayson was sitting next to me staring off into space, pen still pressed to notepad in the middle of an unfinished sentence.

“It couldn't be,” Grayson said, more to himself than to me.

“Chief?”

He roused himself from his reverie.

“Sorry, Val, just thinking. You say this woman had an Arabian accent?”

“A slight one, I think, but I'm not much of a linguist. There might've been a touch of upper class British mixed in too.”

“That would fit. But this is crazy! It couldn't have been her, not here and not after all these years.”

“Couldn't have been who?”

“Forget it. Chalk it up to a tired old cop with a long memory and a vivid imagination. Listen, I've got some paperwork to finish up here and then I'll drive you home.”

I was now clearheaded enough to see that I was laying on a lumpy old couch along one wall of Grayson's tiny but tidy office. My chair was parked close by. Gingerly, I swung my legs over the edge of the sofa and pulled myself upright. As I did, something shifted in my inside jacket pocket, something that wasn't there when I was knocked out.

“Now that's just weird,” I said. “Somebody stuck a sheaf of paper in my pocket during the fight.”

“Let's have a look,” the chief suggested.

He lifted them out, taking care not to smudge any fingerprints. Seven sheets of fine parchment had been rolled up and tied with a silk ribbon. Grayson's hands trembled as he undid the ribbon and laid the pages out on his desk. He turned pale at the sight.

“Talia.”

The name hung in the air like incense.

“Who's Talia, Chief? What's on those papers?”

Slowly, Grayson walked over and sat down next to me to show me. One side of each page was filled from top to bottom with seven-digit numbers, eight columns of them per page, all meticulously handwritten. They seemed completely random. There was no apparent rhyme or reason to them, no discernible pattern or sequence. What was most interesting was the notation written across the top of the first page in an elegant script:

“Beloved - for thy sake is the demon betrayed a final time.”

“I don't understand,” I said. “Is this a code of some sort? What demon? And who's Talia?”

Grayson was like a man in a trance. He stood at the window, staring out into the night, absently rolling and unrolling the packet of papers. He remained that way for perhaps five minutes. Despite my curiosity, I held my peace. At last, whatever debate Grayson had been having with himself came to an end. He sat down at his desk and began carefully examining the document.

“What does the name Ra's al-Ghûl mean to you, Val?”

“Ra's al-Ghûl,” I repeated. “The world's most remorseless terrorist, an Arabian nobleman of incalculable wealth and power rumored to be nearly five centuries old. Ra's has pledged his life and fortune to restoring the planet to its proper ecological balance, even if it means murdering the vast majority of humanity in one fell swoop. All his schemes have failed to date, thanks mostly to you, but he remains a serious threat.”

“Very good. Most people think he's a myth, if they've heard of him at all, but he's all too real. Ra's is the only one of my old foes that I ever truly feared and yet, in a strange way, I admire him. How could I not? Ra's is Bruce Wayne reflected in a funhouse mirror, an aristocrat convinced of the righteousness of his cause and relentless in its pursuit. The difference is Bruce believed in the worth and dignity of every individual and Ra's loathes the human race. That difference has made us mortal enemies. That, and Talia.”

He sighed.

“Talia is the daughter of Ra's al-Ghûl. She's a bona fide genius, as well as one of the world's most skilled martial artists. She may well be the most dangerous woman in the world. Talia is also the only woman I've ever loved.”

“But Chief,” I protested, “this woman couldn't have been more than 22 or 23.”

“She looked 23 when I first met her thirty years ago. It means nothing. Ra's looks 60 or so but the earliest mention of him is in documents from the Sixteenth Century. Through bathing in what he calls the Lazarus Pit, a combination of science and sorcery, Ra's has achieved virtual immortality. Until relatively recently, I believed Talia had never used the pit but I've seen irrefutable proof that she was born in Damascus in 1887. Every time I finally think I know her...”

He was lost in thought again.

“All right,” I said, “so the demon in the inscription is Ra's al-Ghûl. If these papers represent a final betrayal, there must have been others.”

“Yes, and every one of them for my sake. There have been times when only Talia's love for me stood between mankind and armageddon. Ra's generally rewards treachery with a prolonged and painful death but Talia is his one soft spot. He indulges her shamelessly. He also hopes my feelings for her will one day bring me over to his side. From the first time we met, Ra's has wanted me to become his acolyte and eventual heir. That's why he's always let me live when he could easily have killed me.”

“Why does an immortal need an heir? And why wouldn't Talia take over, in any case?”

“Apparently, the Lazarus Pit can only be used a finite number of times. Ra's has often said he fears his next immersion will be his last. And he needs a male heir because most of his inner circle are Islamic fundamentalists. They'd never accept a woman as their leader.”

“How long since you last saw her?”

“It was in '84, just before Vandal Savage started all his nonsense. In fact, that's why we met that last time. She was passing on some information. It isn't generally known but it was Ra's who tipped us off to Savage's plans, allowing us to plant our spies in his organization almost from the beginning.”

“Wait a minute, slow down!” I pleaded. “I can't keep up. Why would Ra's rat out Savage?”

“Savage and Ra's were bitter rivals for centuries, even fighting face to face during the Napoleonic Wars. In spite of that, Savage approached Ra's and the other major international villains under a flag of truce and persuaded them to sign a mutual non-interference pact: he would have free rein in the States in return for not exporting his revolution. Both sides were lying, naturally. Ra's just tipped his hand sooner.”

“Who were your spies? I knew about Boston Brand but who else?”

“I sent Boston in first. He possessed Solomon Grundy. Bad idea. Grundy doesn't sleep so Boston couldn't vacate him even for an instant without the risk of blowing his cover. Around the same time, the Creeper was recruited for Savage's super-villain army. He was actually a good guy but only the JLA knew that. He got messages to us when he could but security was tight. Finally, I sent in the Human Target disguised as my old foe Killer Moth, while I kept the real Moth locked up in the Batcave. He was able to sneak out more often than Creeper thanks to his mastery of disguise, sending us a steady stream of sketchy but reliable intelligence from the enemy's camp.”

“So you all had Savage's number right from the start, thanks to Ra's al-Ghûl. That's some marker. Has he ever tried to call it in?”

Grayson smiled.

“Ra's has too much respect for me to think I'd ever compromise my principles out of a sense of obligation to him. Besides, he acted purely out of self-interest. The Earth wasn't big enough for two ambitious immortals. It was inevitable they'd clash one day. Ra's was more than happy to let us do his dirty work for him.”

“And you haven't encountered him or Talia since then, I take it.”

“No. They've clashed with Batwoman and her Robins a few times but when I hung up my cape and cowl, they lost interest in me. I think, too, that Talia couldn't stand to watch me get old.”

“That's as good an explanation as any for why she took such a roundabout way to pass her message on to you. But why single me out as her transport system?” — I thought of that glint of recognition I'd imagined seeing in her eyes — “How did she even know who I am?”

“Ra's has the best intelligence network on the planet. He once made a point of showing me his files. They contain the true identities of practically every superhuman and costumed adventurer that ever lived. He knows that Lash House is a haven for our kind when they get sick and old, that its owner is the original Wonder Woman, even that she adopted you back in '70. And what he knows, Talia knows.”

“That's... that's frightening.”

“The upside is that Ra's hoards that knowledge like a miser. As far as I can tell, he's never shared it with a living soul aside from Talia. If you are being watched, it's doubtful the person watching you knows why and they aren't going to ask. Nobody questions an order from Ra's and lives.”

“And now his daughter has come to Devereaux Corners to tell you what exactly?”

“I don't know but I plan to find out.”

He reached for the telephone.

“Helena? Dick. Fine, thanks, and you? Good. Listen, sis, I need a favor. I have a document I need decoded ASAP. Oh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I understand that but this... Yeah. Uh-huh. Well, what about Tim? You can? Great, put him on. Tim? How goes it, champ? Glad to hear it. I've got a real challenge for you, kiddo. An encryption problem, right. Right away. By Monday? Great. Okay, I'm going to fax it over to you. No, my line's not secure so I'm going to send it to the machine in Bruce's old office. Right. And Tim? This is really important. I know you won't, chum. Okay, put the boss back on. Hi. The kid's worth his weight in gold, you know that, right? Probably a better Robin than either of us were. Okay, okay, better than I was. Yeah, thanks, thanks a lot. Soon, I promise. And, sis? Good hunting. Love you too. Good night.”

He hung up and scooted his desk chair over to the small copier and fax machine in the corner, the little wheels squealing in oil-starved agony. Quickly he photocopied the parchment sheets then loaded the copies into the fax. Three pages into the transmission, the telephone rang. He scooted back and picked it up on the second ring.

“Grayson. Hi, Etta. Yes, he's right here. He's fine, just a little banged up. We were going to... What? What? No, that's exactly right. Nobody touches anything, right. Who's...? Ah, good. Pat'll deal with it. I know. Me either. Yeah, we're on our way. All right. Bye.”

The chief looked about as grim as any man I had ever seen.

“Time to saddle up, Val. That was your Aunt Etta. They just found Snapper Carr. He's dead.”

Chapter 29

I dodged Ana's mandated medical exam once but there was no way I was going to avoid it forever. Now I lay in the claustrophobic confines of the MRI while it took photographic cross sections of my bruised and abused head. Ana paced alongside the machine. A tousle-haired Charles McNider sat nearby on a supply cabinet listening to Etta describe the images to him in minute detail. Their conversation largely consisted of incomprehensible shorthand.

Chief Grayson, having sent Snapper on his way to the morgue, entered the examination room.

“I'm sorry about what I said earlier, Ana,” he said. “The last thing I meant to do was upset you.”

“I know that, Dick,” she replied. “I overreacted. But, damn it, I'm frustrated. This bastard is killing my people right under my nose and I can't do anything about it. Haven't you got any idea who we're dealing with?”

“You know as well as I do that there are any number of villains who'd be delighted to slit every throat in the place. I could hazard a guess or two but I wouldn't have one iota of proof to back it up. If any of you have any suggestions, don't be shy about sharing them.”

“Before we do,” Doctor Mac interjected, “you might like to know that Val has a minor concussion. No serious damage otherwise. He'll have headaches for a day or two but that's about it. By the way, that was a very nice patch job you did, Richard.”

“Then somebody get me out of here, please,” the patient implored. “Now I know how a pizza roll in a microwave feels!”

That got a laugh. A moment later, Etta reversed the MRI's mechanism and the table on which I lay slid back out into the open air. I sat up and gratefully stretched.

“This fight tonight you got hurt in,” said Etta. “Didn't you say it started because people were arguin' about super-heroes?”

“That's right,” I answered.

“Why?” Grayson asked.

“Supposin' we're thinkin' about this all wrong? Maybe insteada tryin' to guess which black hat is gunnin' for us, we should be lookin' outside The Life. Maybe Pam an' Snapper died to fit somebody's political agenda.”

“If so, you can bet their manifesto will have Jim Olsen's fingerprints all over it,” the doctor snapped.

“Possibly,” agreed Grayson. “Olsen has a loyal following, especially through the Bible Belt, but Lash House isn't some storefront abortion clinic you can look up in the phone book. I'm not convinced the kind of folks he attracts are intelligent enough or organized enough to pull off anything this sophisticated.”

“They might if they had inside help,” Ana suggested, “someone with enough of a connection to The Life to gain him admission to the Center with few questions asked, someone who avidly agrees with Jim Olsen's politics and who understands infiltration tactics. A commando.”

“Rip Carter,” Etta growled. “I hate that man!”

“You talked to Carter, Val,” the chief said. “What do you think?”

“I don't buy it,” I said with a confidence I didn't feel. “Major Carter genuinely hates superhumans, of that I have no doubt. The thing is, if Snapper's lobotomy really is the reason for the difference between the methods used in these two murders, then we have to assume we're dealing with some form of psychic phenomenon. For Carter to be our killer, he'd have to be psychic which would, by his own standards, make him superhuman himself. I didn't get that kind of self-loathing from him. He's paranoid and delusional, yes, but not homicidal.”

I paused for a breath, then looked around sheepishly.

“Sorry, Chief. I didn't mean to go on and on like that.”

“Not at all, son,” he replied. “That was sound reasoning.”

“Much as I'd love it to be Carter,” Etta conceded, “I gotta confess I checked on him durin' the lockdown an' found him dead drunk an' delirious in his room. Looks like he stole a bottle of Scotch outta Eel's room, it was his brand. I meant to tell you he was off the wagon, Di, and forgot.”

“It's my fault,” Ana sighed. “I never considered how upsetting his fight with Steve and relocation to the annex must've been for Rip. Remind me to call Don Hall in the morning and see about getting Rip into one of Don's substance abuse support groups.”

I had to smile at this abrupt about-face. One minute she was hoping to unmask the man as our assassin, the next she was blaming herself for his lost sobriety. That was Ana, reflexively compassionate toward even her bitterest enemies.

Now that she had sat down, it was the chief's turn to pace.

“I think we can rule out the idea of someone outside The Life being the key player in these murders, at least for the time being,” he said, “for much the same reasons Val ruled out Carter. I'm not saying one of these fringe groups couldn't hire themselves a telepathic trigger man but I think it more likely that we're dealing with either a superhuman loner or someone with access to very sophisticated technology.”

“There's another possibility,” said McNider. “Remember Deadman? The ghost with the strange name? Named for a city, I think…”

“Boston Brand,” Ana prompted.

“Yes, Brand. He was on our side but he's probably not the only spook who can take over a living being. God only knows how many old villains hated us enough to come back from the beyond for revenge. Maybe we've got a case of ghostly possession on our hands.”

“It's not a ghost.”

The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. Every eye in the room immediately focused on me. I reluctantly told them about my long friendship with the ghost of Bat Lash, of the spectral gunslinger's premonition about an evil bearing down on Lash House and of his sudden inability to manifest. I'd kept the secret of this friendship so long and dreaded its exposure so much as a child that when I finished, the little boy in me cringed, waiting for a parental tongue-lashing that never came.

“He wears a flower in his hatband, don't he?” Etta quietly asked.

“You've seen him,” I replied.

“A coupla times, in the second floor hallway real late at night.”

“And in the library,” Ana admitted. “I catch him out of the corner of my eye every now and then.”

“This is hardly good news,” Grayson mused. “I think I know why Lash can't materialize. I've encountered ectoplasmic inhibitor fields before. Ra's al-Ghûl paid the Luthor cousins a million apiece to invent the first EIF projector specifically to keep Boston out of his hair. That first projector was the size of a battleship deck gun but I'm sure someone's managed to miniaturize the technology in the last thirty years. A device that could generate a field big enough to blanket the entire county might be the size of a cigarette pack. We'd never find it. What bothers me more is that we suddenly have evidence that someone's using a technology invented for Ra's on the same night his daughter shows up in town.”

“Talia was here?” Ana asked in alarm.

The chief quickly outlined Talia's role in the Saddle Tramp fight and told them of the enigmatic parchments we found planted on me afterward.

“Ra's al-Ghûl,” moaned Ana. “What does he want with us?”

“I don't know,” came the answer, “but as I told Val earlier, these deaths aren't his style. Whatever Ra's is up to, I don't think the murders are part of it. At any rate, there's nothing I can do about him until Tim's got that code cracked.”

“Let's hope Ra's gives us that long,” McNider said as he began to climb down from his perch, resting his full weight on his antique cane as he did so. Suddenly the cane snapped in two, throwing the elderly physician to the tile floor with a sickening thud.

“I think I've broken my hip,” he said, vainly attempting to mask the agony in his voice with a veneer of clinical detachment.

Ana picked him up and lay him on an examining table as though he weighed no more than a kitten. She and Etta quickly examined and probed the hip while McNider, refusing for the moment any painkillers, stoically detailed his responses. While they worked, Chief Grayson stooped to retrieve the pieces of the broken cane. Only I noticed how carefully he was examining both the break points and the cane's rubber tip.

“You're a lucky man, Charles,” Ana declared. “We'll take x-rays just to be sure but I don't think there's a fracture. There's almost certainly some severe bone bruising but I think you'll be fine after a few days of bed rest.”

McNider was understandably relieved. A broken hip was no joke to a 91-year-old man, retired mystery man or not.

“In that case, I think I'd appreciate some Darvon,” he said. “You know, I've had that cane for over forty years. Strange the way it just snapped like that.”

“Probably picked up a case of wood rot thanks to our glorious Wisconsin winters,” I opined.

“There are certainly signs of it,” agreed Grayson, “but I think Old Man Winter had some help. Where were you when Snapper was killed, Doc?”

“Asleep. I took some sleeping pills about 9 o'clock.”

“That's true,” Etta confirmed. “It took me almost five minutes to wake him up and tell him about Snap.”

“What exactly are you getting at, Richard?” McNider asked.

“I'm not completely sure. Val's right about the wood rot but it hasn't spread far enough to cause such spectacular damage. However, if you look closely at the broken ends you'll see traces of blood and hair. Also there's fecal matter in the indentations of the tip.”

“Are you saying Charles killed Snapper?” Ana asked in disbelief.

“No, I think his cane was used to kill Snapper, which isn't the same thing at all. I think our killer snuck into the doc's room while he was sleeping and took the cane to use as a weapon. Doc, would you have heard anyone come into your room tonight?”

“I was dead to the world. I wouldn't have heard Solomon Grundy himself stomp up the stairs. Sorry.”

“Chief,” I began, “do you think...”

Before I could finish my thought, a wave of dizziness and nausea overwhelmed me. I nearly toppled off the MRI platform. Etta noticed and caught me in time.

“All right, that's enough detective work for tonight,” Ana announced decisively. “We're all tired and upset and these two are injured. We all need to get a good night's sleep. That means you too, Dick Grayson. You aren't a young man anymore.”

The chief nodded.

“You're absolutely right, Diana. As soon as I drop off the cane at the station and make a couple of notes, it's off to Nod for this ex-Boy Wonder. Val, I'll be here tomorrow around 2 or so, we'll go over our strategy then.”

I barely heard him.

While Ana tended to Doctor Mac and Grayson headed home, Etta dosed me with some sort of sedative/analgesic cocktail and put me to bed. I drifted in and out of consciousness for a few minutes, images of Snapper Carr and Bat Lash and Ra's al-Ghûl running scattershot through my exhausted brain, until I sank into sleep.

Chapter 31

Ana was sitting in the infirmary's waiting room when I emerged from the access tunnel after breakfast. She had been crying, judging from the pile of crumpled Kleenex at her feet.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She wouldn't look me in the eye.

“I lost control back there,” she said. “In thirty years of running this place, I've never ever raised a hand to a resident. I know my own strength. I know the kind of damage I can inflict on ordinary people. But, Hera help me, I wanted to hurt him. What's wrong with me?”

“Gee, I don't know,” I replied. “The state's springing surprise inspections on you, your husband's health is failing, old men are beating the hell out of each other in the hallways, you haven't had a decent night's sleep in a week, oh, and there's a killer stalking your residents. Nope, nothing there to stress you out.”

Ana smiled despite herself.

“You know, I used to hate it when you'd get sarcastic with me.”

“Yeah?” I smiled back. “How do you like me now?”

She laughed and gave me a kiss.

“By Hera, you're incorrigible! Don't worry about me. Just let me wallow in self-pity for a bit and I'll be fine. Now you scoot. Dick's waiting.”

I found the chief sitting in the library, sipping from a bottle of Coke and idly thumbing through a volume of Frederick Remington art. He was out of uniform. Clad in old jeans, work shirt and dirty waffle stompers, Grayson looked more like one of the local dairy farmers than the billionaire attorney he'd once been.

“Sorry, Chief,” I said as I came in. “I hope I haven't kept you waiting too long.”

“Don't sweat it,” he said. “You had quite a night. Anyway, I'm always happy to have a chance to poke around the Center's library.”

He showed me the page he'd been looking at, a black and white photo of a Remington bronze.

“The original of this statue sits in the entryway of Wayne Manor. Between the two of them, Bruce and his father put together one of the finest American art collections in existence. I wanted to build a museum for it but Helena prefers to keep them at home. She enjoys the perks of wealth more than I ever did.”

“It never bothers you that you walked away from all that?”

“I walked away from the lifestyle, not the money... or the responsibility that comes with it. I'm still chairman of the board of both Wayne Enterprises and the Wayne Foundation. Helena has an equal say, theoretically, but all she cares about is her work as Batwoman. She's content to leave the big decisions up to me.”

He paused to take a drink of his soda.

“I never was comfortable playing rich man. I was a circus brat for my first eight years, always on the move. Some nights, just when I'm drifting off, I swear I can hear the calliope. If Boss Zucco hadn't killed my folks, I'd probably still be a gypsy. I don't regret the path my life took, not for a minute, but I'm not sorry those days are behind me either. I like the slower pace of the Corners.”

“I hear you. I keep waiting to feel homesick for New York but it hasn't happened yet.”

“The only thing I miss about Gotham right now is the Batcave's forensic labs. I'm autopsying Snapper tomorrow morning and examining Doc McNider's cane. I've also started running new background checks on the Lash House staff and I've got Barbara Gordon looking into the anti-superhero orgs just in case Etta's theory is right.”

“Barbara Gordon. Batgirl, right?”

“She was, until Giganta snapped her spine at Metropolis. Now she acts as a behind-the-scenes information broker for the Justice Legacy under the name Oracle. She's also forwarding the whereabouts of all known villains with any connection to either Ivy or Snapper.”

“I was thinking about that. The fact that our killer targeted both a super-villain and a super-hero — and I don't think I'm out of line applying that term to Snapper — suggests this is a vendetta against anyone involved in The Life and not necessarily a case of personal vengeance.”

“You'll forgive me if I hope you're wrong. I can crack any case where there's a specific motive but it's going to be much harder to solve a series of random, opportunistic murders.”

“I don't know how helpful they'll be but I have transcripts of my interviews with Pat, Karl, Lia and Don Hall for you in my backpack.”

“Have you picked up anything suspicious with your empathy yet?” Grayson asked as he retrieved the documents in question.

“Not so far, other than the sort of half-truths we all use in talking about ourselves for the record. As far as I can tell, none of them are involved in these deaths. What do you want me to do next?”

“Talk to Mardon about his staff, the ones who know the truth about the residents. I've already interviewed them but he may know something I missed.”

“I'm not comfortable dancing around the truth with Mark. I'd like to bring him up to speed, let him in on everything that's been happening, unless you tell me otherwise.”

“Do you trust him?”

“He's my friend.” Do you know how long it's been since I could say that about anyone? I silently added.

“I'm inclined to trust him too. If he had anything to hide, he certainly wouldn't have volunteered to let Diana use her lasso on him the other night. And I can't forget that we might well all be goosestepping to Vandal Savage's tune now if it weren't for Mardon. His sins were all washed away that day in my book.”

He laid the Remington book aside and stood up.

“One last note,” he said as we walked out to the Jeep Pathfinder he drove when not on duty. “I'm not much of a stickler for protocol. My officers all call me Dick, not Chief. Why don't you do the same?”

He climbed into the car and drove off.

Saturday was officially Mark's day off. I didn't know him well enough to know how he normally spent his leisure time. Tracking him down was easy. I found him in his room, reading the latest Reader's Digest and listening to the Brewers game on the radio. He looked tired but weren't we all?

“What's the score?” I asked, peeking around the doorjamb.

“I have no idea,” Mark laughed. “I'm not having any better luck following the game than I am this article. I've spent the last ten minutes reading this same little paragraph and I still don't know what it says. Too much on my mind, I guess. Come on in. I can use some company.”

“I never did thank you for last night,” I said as I parked next to the open window, through which the scent of fresh-mown grass wafted.

“That shiner you're sporting is all the thanks I need,” he replied with a grin. “Too bad you slept through the second half of the fight, I'm sure you would've enjoyed it. It was that gorgeous chick with the long hair who pulled you to safety, by the way, not me.”

“Yeah, well, it turns out she had an ulterior motive.”

“Oh? Do tell!”

His cocky smile faded as I shared with him all the events of the previous evening, from Talia's mysterious document to my unexpected deputization to the real cause of Snapper Carr's death. It returned when I told him of Grayson's trust in him.

“Nice to know he's come around. When I first moved to the Corners, he kept a close watch on me. He was quiet about it but I knew. I can't really blame him. We skirmished back in '66, you know. I decided to give somebody other than the Flash a chance to kick my ass, so I pulled a couple of jobs in Gotham. Need I tell you how it came out?”

“I think I can guess.”

“Now that you've told me what's really been going on around here the last few days, I'm beginning to understand that scene in the dining room. I was really thrown off balance by that. In the time I've worked here, I've seen her sad and stern and even silly but I've never seen Ana like that, in a total rage.”

“Neither have I. She has a temper, all right — God knows I felt the Wrath of Ana a time or two growing up — but that wasn't like her at all. Then again, these are extraordinary circumstances and she's only human.”

“No, she isn't,” Mark insisted. “She's an immortal, one of the strongest people that ever lived and a founder of the JL-freakin'-A. She's a living legend. She's Wonder Woman!”

“That's the difference between us. You look at her and, even after working beside her all this time, you still see the super-hero. I look at her and all I see is my mother, the woman who swoons over old Dana Andrews movies and gorges herself on Cap'n Crunch when she's upset. But I saw the Wonder Woman side of her this morning. She's always solved problems through direct action. Now she's straightjacketed by the very secrecy she imposed on Lash House. She feels helpless. Amazons don't do helpless.”

“I understand helpless. It's like you want to do something but you're sure no matter what you do it'll be the wrong thing. It's how I felt before I decided to turn on Savage.”

“So it wasn't just what happened to Pam Isley.”

“One time, I trailed one of the little squads of villains he was sending out from time to time. I was curious about what was going on. I thought maybe I could cut myself in if they were pulling heists or something like that. Instead I watched a pair of villainesses, Killer Frost and the Cheetah, slaughter a man named Rob Reed and his family in their own home. According to Hammond, Reed had been a super-hero, dozens of them actually, during the Sixties, thanks to some kind of alien matter transformer device, but the device had run out of power years ago. There was no reason for those people to die, no reason at all. I figured I'd capture the killers, turn them and myself in as a gesture of good faith, then rat out the whole slimy bunch. I tried to stun them with lightning but I... I miscalculated.”

“You killed them.”

“It was an accident but that didn't make them any less dead. I couldn't go to the law with their blood on my hands so I split. Savage and his flunkies assumed Reed used his powers to get the women before he died. I decided I'd work from within somehow to bring him down. I started sucking up to Hammond and the other Joint Chiefs, getting deeper and deeper into their operations, deep enough to figure out the plan was heavily dependent on the weaponry Luthor was building. I learned the weaponry shorted out if it got wet, which is why Savage attacked when he did, because of weather conditions. If it started to look like the good guys were losing, I'd use my powers to generate a hurricane and shut down all of Luthor's junk. When I sat what happened to Ivy, I couldn't wait any longer.”

“You made the right choice. Savage had the good guys outgunned. He would've won if not for you.”

“I suppose,” he said, “but I wonder how many lives might've been saved if I'd had the guts to try to shut Savage down before he got fully organized. I could have tipped off the Justice League at least.”

“Ra's al-Ghûl beat you to it,” I told him, “and the JLA had spies planted before you were recruited. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Except killing Frost and the Cheetah.”

“The gloves were off, Mark. Even Superman was forced to kill before it was over. What matters is our side won. You know the nightmare America would've become under Vandal Savage's rule. If I were you, I'd be proud of my role in preventing that instead of beating myself up over the accidental deaths of two vicious assassins.”

“You aren't going to make a very good cop if that's how you handle a confession.”

“That reminds me,” I said after I finished laughing. “I promised Chief Grayson I'd ask you some questions if he agreed to my leveling with you about the murders.”

“Okay,” he said, getting to his feet, “but it's gonna cost you. Come into my bathroom. While we talk, I'm going to change the dressing on that gash.”

“When I was growing up,” I began as I dutifully followed him, “the Center's personnel were hired on recommendation only, and even then only if they passed a rigid security check. As far as I can recall, only one or two over all that time ever figured out who and what the Center's residents were. Now, though...”

Mark finished my thought for me.

“Now, though, you're thinking security's gotten lax because Zoe, Danny and Larry all know the score, and you want to know if they merit that trust.”

“Well, uh, yeah,” I answered.

He was silent for a minute, absorbed in cleaning the wound.

“You're angry, aren't you?”

“No. Sometimes I worry about it too. Ana offers top dollar and great benefits to her employees but the Corners is awfully remote. It's getting harder and harder to lure people here. We can't always afford to be finicky about the recommendation. And there's another problem. The residents have gotten careless around the staff, dropping hints about their pasts. Of course, everyone's still required to sign a confidentiality agreement but human nature is human nature. Somewhere, somehow, somebody's probably let something slip. In fact, I know that's true because that's what prompted Larry to apply.”

“He knew in advance?”

“Uh huh, because he'd worked under a former member of our medical staff at his last job. The doc wasn't running off at the mouth, mind you, I worked with the guy and he wasn't the type to gossip, but some of his comments enabled Larry to put two and two together. Larry's a fan, you see. You should see his apartment, it looks like your research assistant decorated it, super-hero memorabilia everywhere. Working here is a dream come true for him.”

“So he was recommended by this former staffer?”

“Yeah, but we would have hired him anyway. He had a stack of glowing references and evaluation reports a mile high. He leaves the fanboy side of his personality at home. On the job, he's 100% professional, no hounding people for autographs or anecdotes or anything like that. And he hasn't put all the pieces together. He has no idea, for example, who Dick Grayson or Clark Kent really are.”

“What about Zoe?”

“Zoe's family. Do you know who Tubby Watts is?”

“No.”

“How about Johnny Chambers?”

“You mean Johnny Quick? Sure, I remember him, kind of a roadshow version of the Flash.”

“Right. Well, Tubby Watts was Johnny's sidekick. He's also Zoe's granddad.”

“And Danny?”

Mark taped a fresh bandage in place before replying.

“Well now, Danny's kind of an enigma. He showed up on the doorstep about a year ago, fresh off the boat from Okinawa. Ana was reluctant to hire him, since we couldn't run a background check on him without contacting the Japanese government. But he had a flawless résumé and a recommendation from J'onn J'onzz, the Martian Manhunter, so she decided to take a chance. She's certainly had no reason to regret the decision.”

“How did Danny know the Manhunter?”

“He didn't, exactly. J'onzz maintains human identities all around the world and it was as one of them that he met Danny. Ana and the Chief recognized the name on the recommendation immediately and a quick phone call to JLA headquarters confirmed it. So Danny was in.”

“But how did he know about Lash House if he didn't know J'onzz was J'onzz?”

“Sorry, I wasn't very clear about that, was I? Danny didn't know the secret until after he came to work for us. His work was so outstanding and Etta and I were so swamped that Ana decided to let him in on things so he could start helping out here in the mansion. It was kind of funny. We had to explain to him who everybody was. Super-heroes are such a part of American culture, we forget that it isn't as big a phenomenon elsewhere in the world.”

We walked back into the other room.

“Okay, Mark, I need your honest opinion. Is there any reason you can think of for us to look closer at them?”

“If you mean do I think any of them might be involved in what's going on, I'd have to say no. They're my friends, of course, so I'm biased.”

“That's good enough for me. I suspected Grayson was just creating busywork for me to keep me feeling involved in the investigation. He's doing all the important work himself.”

I caught a glimpse of Mark's clock out of the corner of his eye.

“Oh man, look at the time! I'm due at Bob and Naomi's for dinner in an hour and a half and I haven't gotten any of the reading done that I was going to do today.”

“You've sure got a different approach to vacationing than I have,” Mark laughed.

I looked at him askance for a second before breaking into laughter of my own.

“What, you think I'm a workaholic, is that what you're saying? Ah, you're right. Screw work. I'm going to the beach. Join me?”

“No thanks,” he said as he picked up his magazine. “I'm going to try to finish this article. Have a good time.”

As I ambled on down to the lake, I realized with a shock that I was having a good time. My life in the outside world was shaped by the need to keep secrets. Here in the Corners, I was free to be myself. I still didn't know who that was exactly but I was enjoying finding out.

Chapter 33


I crept slowly forward through the thicket of brambles, gripping my spear so tightly my knuckles gleamed in the enveloping dusk. Ahead lay the plain where the tribe had brought down a woolly rhinoceros and her offspring the previous autumn. The meat had sustained us through the winter, the shortest winter anyone in the tribe could remember. The world was changing. This latest omen was proof.

The falling star had slashed across the sky like a flint knife through a deer hide. It crashed to earth not far from the caves that served the tribe as its home base, the thunder of its impact knocking us all off our feet. The others still cowered in terror in the deepest part of the main cavern but my curiosity was stronger than my fear. A vague notion had entered my mind that if this flaming rock was indeed a message from the sky spirits as the shaman insisted, great power could be mine were I the one to receive that message.

It lay smoldering like a coal from a giant's campfire atop the very spot where the rhinos had fallen. The ground surrounding it was flattened and blackened, every trace of vegetation obliterated by the stultifying heat. Smoke hung thick in the air. I had expected as much. As a child, I went with my father to see the great volcano in whose shadow I was born. The ground around its lava pits was much like this.

Nothing in my experience, however, had prepared me for the voice that issued from the star-thing. Not a human voice, no, nor that of any other earthly creature. It was the voice of the gods, nothing less, low and piercing and terrible, and my eardrums thrummed to its rhythm. It sang of war and conquest and eternal life and I laughed to hear it, for it was the same song I heard issuing from the most secret recesses of my soul late at night when the others slept. My fear evaporated like dew in the morning sun and I stepped forward to

gaze out across the dusty valley with smug serenity as the scribe at my side droned on about cost overruns and labor shortages and a thousand other trivial details in which I had no interest. I raised a bejeweled hand to silence his babble. Though the construct below was years away from assuming its final form, in my mind the great stone pyramid already towered above the desert sands, mutely proclaiming the eternal majesty of the earthbound god in whose name it was raised. The name of Khufu. My name.

“I beg your pardon, O Son of Horus,” said the scribe meekly, “but I must be heard. We cannot possibly meet your schedule without more men. The Nubians are strong indeed but even they cannot work night and day.”

“If we must have more slaves, then make more slaves,” I answered impatiently. “Send the army into the surrounding lands. Send them after the Hebiru if you like. Now bother me no more. I would commune with my grandfather Osiris and no mortal man may be privy to the conversation of gods.”

The scribe bowed low and scuttled away like a fat brown scarab. I watched his departure with a contemptuous sneer. How simple it was to cow even the most educated of these people! How eagerly they lapped up the ludicrous tales of animal-headed deities and life beyond the grave! Laughable though their religion was, it rendered them obedient. Once I had established my divine credentials, they indulged my slightest whim with reverent alacrity. A few more generations and there would be enough of them for me to lead out of

the dank dungeon that had been my home for the last seven years. I blinked painfully in the bright Mediterranean sun. The most brutish of the Saracen guards shoved me forward with a snarl, saying, “Go, infidel. You are free. The great Saladin has ordered all you Christian dogs released.”

My legs — weak, covered with rat bites, the skin raw where they had once been gripped by chains — buckled beneath me and I fell to my knees.

“I am no Christian,” I muttered.

“What do I care?” the guard answered as he dragged me back to my feet. “Christian, Jew, whatever sort of unbeliever you are, you have no place here among the sons of Islam. Tell your countrymen to forget their foolish crusade and go home. Jerusalem will never belong to such as they.”

I stumbled on, the taste of bile on my tongue, my own stink heavy in my nostrils. The other guards held back, their superstitious souls trembling to see me unfettered and out in the open air. Beatings, starvation, hallucinatory drugs: nothing in their considerable repertoire of torture had broken my spirit. Year after year, the caliph's lackeys had tried to wring from me the location of my hidden treasure but to no avail. Soon, it would be in my hands again and I vowed I would use it to raise a great army and return to make them regret their cruelty. But not before I stood once more on the soil of Europe and felt again the rain upon

the battlefield. Wellington's dragoons had turned the tide. I glanced over at the Corsican. He stood with head bowed, shoulders rounded beneath the inevitability of his defeat, already returned to the living death of exile in his mind. We had come so close to realizing our dream of a continent united under his vigorous and enlightened despotism. Unable to look at him any longer, I turned my charger's nose east and left the blood and fire of Waterloo behind me.

Why had I believed? What aspect of the little artillery captain's personality had convinced me to put my own plans in abeyance and willingly follow another? I had sired tens of thousands of children over the centuries. Most lived and died in obscurity. Some I elevated to greatness. Others found their way into the pages of history without my help. A few dared to oppose my schemes and I struck them down without a second thought. But this son of my son, this course peasant, this military genius, this visionary lawgiver, this Napoleon the First, Emperor of France, was unique. For the first time in five millennia, I dared to love another. Turning my back on Bonaparte now, however prudent a decision it was, broke my heart. I swore I would never be this weak, this human again.

An inn lay not far from the road I traveled where I knew I could find a hot meal and a saucy Belgian wench to dally with. Echoes of English cannon still rebounded off the hills but I no longer heard them. I heard only the beating of my own

heart pounded wildly as the alien approached. Death was in his eyes, my death, and I knew this time there was no escape. I had thought the massacre of the creature's friends, the razing of his city, the death of his woman would break him, would at last render him vulnerable. It was my final, fatal mistake. All I had accomplished was to strip the alien of his soft human veneer, exposing the stargod beneath, unleashing the elemental fury so long bottled up and before which no work of fragile man could hope to stand.

An old saying popped unbidden into my mind. You have sown the wind, it said, now shall you reap the whirlwind. Those clever Hebiru. They were going to get the last word after all. The absurdity of it made me smile.

It was the wrong thing to do. With my hands still closed about the woman's throat, the alien concluded that I was gloating. He was wrong. I hadn't enjoyed her murder. It was an act of pure desperation, a last feeble thrust made in the false hope that this ultimate outrage would do what all my allies' weapons and exotic powers could not. The smile froze on my face. I couldn't cast it off no matter how hard I tried.

For just a second, I heard again the song of the fallen star, the song that long ago and far away had made me what I was, but it quickly dissolved into the alien's inhuman howl of rage and my own pathetic squeal of mortal terror. Fire flared in the alien's eyes. An instant later, I felt

nothing. A shoreless sea of nothingness and I, the only piece of flotsam to be found on all its boundless breast. And it truly was me bobbing on this ocean of oblivion, not the other whose life I had just sampled. Lost, confused, frightened, I tried to shout for help but no sound issued from my throat.

Do not be afraid, my son.

The voice seemed to come from everywhere and from nowhere. If I wasn't afraid before, I certainly was now.

I mean you no harm. I have allowed you a brief glimpse into my world that you might better

“Val?”

might better appreciate the magnitude of the offer I make you now. You are the last, my son, the last of my many children. My blood is your blood, my power is your power. The plunder of a hundred thousand conquests, the worship of a million dedicated acolytes can be yours

“Val!”

can be yours if you will only cast aside your parochial notions of morality and join me. The aspirations and inhibitions of mortal men are not for such as you and I. We were born for greatness, born to stride the planet like colossi, the lives of men and nations alike nothing more than dust beneath our feet. But there is danger, my son. Another seeks to claim your inheritance, seeks to obliterate us both with a single blow. You must

“Wake up!”

I opened my eyes to see Mark standing over my bed, concern written on his face. My breath was coming in ragged gasps and my sheets were soaked with the cold sweat pouring off my body. I looked around wildly as if to assure myself the nightmare was truly over.

“That must've been one doozy of a dream,” Mark said. “I heard you cry out from halfway down the hall.”

“It was awful,” I agreed. “There was a battle in a castle and a meteor...”

I stopped, confused. Despite the dream's vividness at the time, the details were already fading from memory. Only the fear remained.

“I don't know what it was all about. I'm just glad it's over.”

My eyes turned back to Mark.

“You're dressed. What time is it?”

“About 7:15,” he answered. “Do you want to get up or do you want to try for some more sleep?”

“Up. I lazed around enough yesterday.”

We chatted as we went through our routine.

“I was surprised to see you spend your day off hanging around the house,” I said. “I figured you for a more active lifestyle.”

“Tell you what,” he laughed, “you spend a night in a jail cell with fifteen surly drunks and see how much energy you have the next day. I had plans. I've got a ladyfriend in Oshkosh I was planning to see but I canceled. Peace and quiet seemed real appealing.”

“You have a girlfriend? What's her name? What's she like? Inquiring minds want to know.”

“Her name's Heidi. She's a beautiful blue-eyed blonde with skin like satin and a pair of hooters to die for. She's sweet and funny and classy and she's dynamite in bed.”

“Is it serious?”

“Not even close. She's married. Mr. Heidi is in his early eighties and bucks up. Heidi's thirty-three or thirty-four, I don't remember exactly. She's the proverbial trophy wife. Her job is to hang on his arm and look gorgeous at cocktail parties so all the other old geezers will croak with envy. He knows she's got a boyfriend, though he doesn't know who and he doesn't want to. He actually encourages it since he knows he can't keep her satisfied that way. All he asks is that she have only one boyfriend at a time and that she be discreet. He makes a point of being out of town most Saturdays so Heidi can take her exercise in the privacy of her own home.”

“And you're okay with that?”

“Yeah, usually. I could have a real girlfriend if I wanted one, I'm still a good-looking guy and women hit on me all the time, but I don't want to be tied down. My work here at the Center is what really matters to me, it's always going to come first. My arrangement with Heidi isn't perfect but it's better than a knothole in a pine fence.”

He grinned broadly.

“A lot better! You aren't going to get all moralistic on me now, are you?”

“Who, me? Not likely.”

“What about you? I haven't heard you make any mention of a special someone.”

“There isn't one. There never has been one.”

“That doesn't seem to bother you much.”

“Yeah, well, the itch gets scratched. If you've got money and power in a city like New York, there are plenty of women more than happy to do the dirty deed. I like it that way. It's honest. There's never any doubt about why they're boinking you.”

“Uh huh. That way there's no more Jills.”

I looked at him sharply.

“I thought you said you didn't know what happened between us.”

He shrugged.

“I don't, not the details, but I don't need to. I've been around the track a few times, you know, and I picked up a thing or two about human nature along the way. Anyway, there's no need to get defensive. I've paid for it myself lots of times, when I couldn't hook up with a groupie anyway.”

“Groupie? What, you're Mick Jagger all of a sudden?”

“Come on, you don't know? Back in the Sixties and early Seventies, there were always girls on the make for anybody in a costume. We all did very well. Ye gods, some of the orgies the Rogues staged would've made Larry Flynt blush.”

“That figures. Women who get turned on by dangerous men are a dime a dozen.”

“Exactly. They weren't the kind of girls you took home to Mother or even carried on an intelligent conversation with but oh baby, were they tasty. Speaking of which, what say we grab some breakfast?”

I laughed.

“You're on, I'm fam...”

“Help me!”

At the sound of that shrill scream, we dashed out into the hall to see Tina Platte, clad only in a nightshirt, run up the stairs from the second floor.

“Somebody help me, please!”

My mother and Etta were also in the hall. Ana grabbed the hysterical robot and shook her lightly until she began to pull herself together.

“Calm down, Tina. Calm down. What's wrong?”

“It's Doc,” she sobbed. “He's, he, oh God, Ana, I think he's dead!”

We all stood immobilized by this news for a half-second. The air was saturated with dread. Then Ana leaped into action.

“Mark, you come with me. Etta, keep Tina here until we know what's what. Val, get ahold of Dick and call an ambulance. Move!”

I quickly dialed 911 and ordered the ambulance. There was no answer at the police station, just a recorded message telling me to call back during regular business hours. It began to give me the emergency number but I hung up impatiently. Dick Grayson's home number was in the Devereaux Corners directory. It seemed to ring forever before a voice thickened with interrupted sleep growled, “What?”

“Chief, it's Val. I think we have another one.”

“God damn it! Who is it?”

“Doc Magnus. That's all I can tell you for now.”

“All right, I'm on my way. You know the drill. If he is dead, clear that room. Nobody touches anything until I get there.”

The dial tone was humming through the speaker before I could reply.

The calls completed, I sped to the elevator. I pushed the call button half a dozen times before realizing the car had been on my floor all along. As I emerged on the lower floor, I found Ana and Mark standing outside Doc and Tina's suite. The look on their faces spoke volumes.

“He's gone,” Mark said simply.

“He's been dead for hours,” Ana concurred. “He's already in rigor.”

“The good news is he seems to have died of natural causes,” Mark added.

“I'm not willing to take that for granted,” said Ana. “Not anymore.”

A door opened down the hall and Karl Byrd poked his head out.

“What is it?” he asked sleepily. “What's wrong?”

“Not now, Karl,” Ana snapped. “Stay in your room until one of the staff tells you otherwise. Please,” she added as an afterthought.

The old man looked hurt but he complied.

“You could've handled that more diplomatically,” Mark said quietly.

“I don't need you to tell me how to handle my residents,” she growled.

Regret immediately replaced her anger.

“I'm sorry, Mark, that was uncalled for. You're right, of course, but I'll smooth Karl's ruffled feathers later.”

She sighed.

“Right now, I guess I'd better go tell Tina. I'm not looking forward to it. Is Dick coming?”

“Yes, and so are the paramedics,” I told her.

“You two stay here,” she said. “I'll be back in a few minutes.”

“This is not good,” Mark said after she was out of earshot. “She's never spoken to me in that tone of voice before. I'm afraid for her. I'm not sure she can handle another murder.”

“Then let's hope Doc did die of natural causes,” I answered.

No such luck.

Chapter 35

“What did you say to her?” Ana wanted to know. “She barged in here, told us she was done answering stupid questions and demanded we deactivate her on the spot.”

“We've got to turn her back on,” I said. “She's hiding something. We've got to bring her back and make her talk to us.”

“It's not that simple,” Naomi said from where she sat comforting her sorrow-stricken husband. “It takes 72 hours to bring our systems back online after they've been shut down.”

“What? But you said last night...”

“One thing at a time,” Grayson interrupted. “What are you talking about, Val? What's she hiding?”

“Tina was romantically involved with someone...”

“That's a lie!” Naomi hissed.

“I saw the two of them together yesterday but I was too far away to see who he was. They were arguing, over Doc apparently. She said he wanted her to choose between him and Doc and she chose Doc. He wasn't happy about it. She loves this guy, whoever he is, and she's covering for him even though she suspects him.”

“We don't have to stay here and listen to this anymore,” Naomi snapped as she helped Bob to his feet and guided him to the door. “Humans. You're all the same, always ready to blame it on the robots. The chief thinks Tina killed Doc, Val says she cheated on him and the rest of you stand around and let them shut her down.”

She stopped in front of me, her eyes meeting mine accusingly.

“We thought you were our friend.”

“Naomi, wait,” I pleaded as she slammed the library door behind her.

“Let them go,” Dick said. “There'll be time to worry about that later. We have more important things to talk about.”

He began to pace back and forth in front of the window.

“What are you thinking?” Ana asked.

“That I'm beating my head against a stone wall,” he answered distantly. “There are too many questions I can't answer. Was Tina a willing party to Doc's murder, an unwilling catalyst, or is this secret admirer of hers just a red herring? Was Doc another victim of our mystery killer or did someone take advantage of the situation to pass him off as one of the victims? Was he the intended victim all along and the others just a smokescreen, or is Doc's murder not connected at all? What few bits of evidence we have don't begin to explain what's going on.”

“Maybe whoever possessed Pam possessed Tina too,” Etta suggested. “She coulda done it without even knowin' it.”

“I won't say it's impossible, Etta,” he replied, “but if our killer couldn't possess Snapper because of his brain damage, I doubt he could possess a computer. No, if Tina's involved, it's by her own choice.”

“She's innocent,” I said confidently. “When I questioned her, I detected no deception when she said she didn't kill Doc but she hesitated when I asked her if she knew who did. That tipped me off to her suspicions about the boyfriend. But that's all I read were suspicions, nothing concrete.”

“That's not enough, Val. I can't justify reactivating her solely on the basis of your empathic reading. If she were human, I might feel differently. You say her emotions felt like the real thing but you've never been around non-organic lifeforms before so how would you know the difference? She could be the Rich Little of empathic impressions for all we know. I'm not belittling your abilities, son, but let's be realistic: you haven't really mastered your power and you don't know its limitations. And even if we were absolutely sure your reading was accurate, Tina would still be my prime suspect. She had motive, opportunity, the means and she has no alibi she'll admit to.”

“I can see your point,” Etta said, “but I still say there's no way did Tina do it.”

“Agreed,” nodded Ana. “I've watched that girl care for Will Magnus for more than a decade and her devotion is absolute. Women like her don't just turn on their loved ones, I don't care who or what comes along to tempt them. Hera grant I never see a time when...”

“When the lover doth slay the beloved,” I half-whispered.

Ana spun around to stare at me in astonishment.

“Fate's prophecy,” she gasped. “With everything that's happened, I'd forgotten all about it. How did you...?”

I felt my face flush as my gaze shifted nervously around the room, anxious to look anywhere but into my mother's eyes.

“I was passing by while you were talking to Mr. Kent my first night home. I didn't mean to eavesdrop but once I heard what you were talking about I couldn't help myself.”

“What the hell are you two talking about?” Grayson demanded to know.

Ana repeated her conversation with Clark Kent. When she got to Dr. Fate's cryptic verse, she fumbled through her purse looking for the scrap of paper on which Kent had recorded it, apologizing all the while for not being able to quote it exactly. When her search came up empty, I recited the poem from memory.

“Gee,” said Etta, “that bit about the unlivin' helpin' the dead attain death sure seems to fit the situation. Tina ain't really alive, not like we are, and Doc was brain dead and now he's really dead. Maybe she did kill him.”

“Nonsense,” Anna said. “I'm not about to condemn the girl just because Kent Nelson has a new hobby. Everyone knows Nostradamus' prophecies are so vague they can be interpreted to mean anything. We don't even know for sure that Fate meant the warning for us.”

“I guess. I hope you're right. I don't want Tina to be guilty.”

All through this, the chief stood looking from one of us to the other, his expression unreadable. Suddenly, startlingly, he exploded.

“I don't believe this!” he shouted. “You two have been sitting on this since Monday? Neither one of you thought to mention that the world's most powerful sorcerer warned us something was wrong? Save me from the goddamned Stevens family and their goddamned secrets!”

“Hold it right there, Dickie,” Etta growled. “You can't...”

“Stay out of this, Etta,” Ana ordered. “I can fight my own battles.”

She stood toe to toe with Dick in the center of the room, her greater height forcing him to tilt his head back to meet her impassioned stare, throwing him slightly off-balance.

“I've had more than enough of that kind of talk, Richard Grayson.” Her voice carried a tone of gentle menace. “I didn't take that crap from you when you were in short pants and I'm not going to take it from you now. Okay, we screwed up. Okay, it might've made a difference if you'd known about it but you know what? I don't think so. You've been giving us your ‘world's greatest detective’ act for days now and what's it gotten us? So far all you've done is count bodies and whine about how tough the case is and how unprofessional the rest of us are. I'm sick of it. Put up or shut up.”

“Don't think you can intimidate me, Diana,” he said through clenched teeth. “Maybe I'm not the man I was and maybe I haven't got the answers I need yet but I'm still the law. You don't like the way I'm doing my job, that's fine, but I won't let you or anyone else bully me out of doing it however I see fit. Now get the hell out of my face.”

“Stop it, both of you,” I barked, astonished at the authority in my voice. “We can't afford to be at each other's throats this way. That's just doing our enemy's work for him.”

Grayson looked at me, a quizzical half-smile on his face, then dropped his gaze and swallowed hard before quietly saying, “He's right. We can't let our frustration turn us against each other.”

He looked up again.

“I'm getting old, Princess. This is the first genuine mystery I've encountered in fifteen years and one of the most baffling of my entire career. It's going to require all my energy and all my concentration to solve it. Please, I'm asking you as a friend, stop pressuring me and let me do my job.”

“I'm scared, Dick,” she replied. “I'm frightened half out of my mind. I can smell disaster on the wind and there's nothing I can do about it. I envy you. I wish I had your intellect but I'm just a strong set of biceps and a few gimmicks. All my hopes are riding on you. Do your job. On my honor as an Amazon, I won't get in your way anymore.”

“Still friends then?” he asked with a smile.

“Still friends,” she said before gathering him in for a fierce but affectionate hug. “I love you, Dick. You're not getting old. You'll never get old. To me, you'll always be that adorable, spunky eight-year-old fighting at Bruce's side.”

“That's right,” Etta giggled. “It was all downhill after Robin.”

“All right, you two,” the chief said, much of the tension he'd been feeling visibly melting away, “Val and I need to do some brainstorming so why don't you go do whatever it is you do on Sunday mornings.”

“Come on, Etta, let the boys play cops-and-robbers in peace,” Ana said as she stooped to lift the dormant platinum robot in her arms. “We have to make arrangements for Tina anyway. If you've no objections, Dick, I'm going to lay her down in her room.”

“We can grant her that much dignity,” he agreed.

“A question before you go,” I said. “Who among the Center's staff knew that Tina was actually a robot?”

“The two of us, plus Mark and Vic,” Etta answered. “Tina was pretty persnickety about that not becomin' common knowledge. Why?”

“Just another fact for the file. Thank you.”

Once the doors had closed behind the women, Grayson pulled up an ottoman and sat down next to me. He pulled a notebook from his uniform blouse's front pocket and rapidly flipped through it.

“All right, chum,” he said, “let's get back to the basics. We have three murders committed in the same place in the space of five days. Right so far?”

“No. Pamela Isley and Snapper were killed in the annex, Doc Magnus in the mansion. Or am I nitpicking?”

“I was considering anything within the boundaries of the estate as the same place but your distinction may prove important, who knows?” he replied as he jotted a new note down in the book. “We can do this a lot faster, Val, if you'll stop apologizing for your opinions and theories every time you offer one. Now, what do the three victims have in common besides location?”

“They were all connected to The Life.”

“What else?”

“They were all white and were roughly the same age.”

“Snapper and Ivy were at least ten years younger than Doc. That's not a big difference but it is a difference. What else?”

“I'm not sure there is anything else. Doc was an immigrant, the others native-born. The men were in the physical presence of their killer but Ivy was alone. Ivy threatened suicide and Snapper said something the other day about wishing he'd died at Metropolis but obviously Doc had nothing to say on the subject. Every fact I can think of relates to one or two of them but not all three.”

He smiled.

“You're missing something obvious, something you of all people should've caught right away.”

I felt stupid.

“What did I miss?”

“They were all handicapped to one degree or another, either physically or mentally or, in Doc's case, both.”

Now I really felt stupid.

“Don't let it get you down,” Dick said. “I wanted to teach you an important lesson Bruce taught me. Everyone has blind spots. Nobody can be 100% objective about everything. The good detective recognizes his particular blind spots and always, always accounts for them in his investigation.”

“I'll remember that,” I said. “What comes next?”

“I'm due at the morgue for Snapper's post-mortem at eleven. We'll probably do Magnus at the same time. That's going to keep me busy for most of the day. Why don't you mingle with the staff and residents, see if you can pick up anything that might put a name to Tina's boyfriend. We'll get back together at,” he shot a glance at his wristwatch, “eight-thirty tonight and compare notes.”

A knock came at the door. A second later, Etta poked her head in.

“Call for you, Dick. Line two.”

“Take a message, please, Etta,” he replied. “We aren't quite done yet.”

“It's Clark Kent. He says it's urgent.”

He walked to the phone where it sat almost unnoticed in a niche between two of the library's antique display cases.

“Grayson. Good morning, Clark, how are... What? Just now? How is he? Uh-huh. You've already called for an ambulance, I take it? Yes, we lost another one here overnight. Doc Magnus, but keep that to yourself for now. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Who's that? Put him on. Peterson? Once the medics are done, get the photos taken then have Kent lock the doors. See to sealing it up yourself. No, I'm going to take a look later this evening. No, someone else will take his statement later. You stay there and ward off the looky-loos. I'll send someone to relieve you at the end of shift. Put Kent back on. Clark? No, alert the other elders and let them make the calls. I need you to keep my officer company until he's ready to lock things down. If you don't mind, I'd like to have someone drop by your house later and get your statement then. Diana's son. Good, I hoped you'd say that. All right. Bye.”

“What's wrong?” Etta asked.

The chief momentarily had that deer-caught-in-the-headlights look before he pulled himself together and replied, “Clark was supposed to help Don Hall set up for this morning's services. He found the church trashed and Don beat within an inch of his life.”

Etta took this news badly.

“Is the pastor gonna make it?”

“Clark thinks he'll pull through. Give us one more minute, would you please, Etta?”

She closed the doors again.

“What do you think?” I asked. “Is this connected to our case?”

“No, from what I got from Kent and Sgt. Peterson it has all the earmarks of a botched burglary, probably drug-related,” he told me, “but I'm confused. I've seen Don Hall in action. He's an awesome hand-to-hand combatant. I know he's a man of the cloth but I can't believe he'd turn the other cheek to the point of suicide. Why didn't he fight back?”

“He told me the other day he only knows his combat techniques when he turns into the Dove. If he got taken by surprise, he may not have had time to make the transformation.”

“That would explain it. Well, we'll know better after you talk to Clark.”

“You were serious about that? You want me to interrogate... him?”

“I do. There's no time for stage fright, Val. I need more than just his formal statement. I want more details about his call from Kent Nelson. And anyway,” he concluded as he began gathering his things, “he's been expecting you to drop by ever since Diana told him about your book project. Clark hasn't given an interview since Lois died, not in either identity. It's extraordinary that he's willing to talk to you, so take advantage.”

“But he's, he's, you know, he's...”

“He's Superman, Val, not God.”

That was easy for him to say. I was withholding judgment.

Chapter 37

The first thing that struck me about Clark Kent's home was the contrast it made with Lash House. Its clean geometric design was the polar opposite of the mansion's arcane quirkiness. The sterile walls of stone and glass radiated none of the warmth, the sense of long habitation, of Lash House's weathered wooden siding. It was the house of a lonely man.

Though the once gleaming black hair had turned pure white and the face had grown seamed in the years since he was last in the public eye, there was no mistaking those familiar features: the bull neck, the strong jaw, the squint, the unruly curl hanging over the broad brow. He had to be within spitting distance of 90 yet his massive frame was as solid as in his heyday, his movements those of a man a third his age. Incredible though the notion was, I was face to face with the strongest man to ever tread the planet Earth, the legendary Man of Tomorrow himself, the one, the only Superman.

To add to the enormity of it, Clark Kent was a legend in his own right, the reporter every would-be journalist wanted to be when he grew up. His writing style defined a generation, his editorials required reading for anyone wanting to make sense of the American scene in the 1950s and early '60s.

As happened before every important interview, I worried I was about to make a jackass of myself.

Kent led me into the living room. The décor was cold and impersonal, the furniture black leather and chrome. The marbled walls were bare except for a huge Jackson Pollock original and three handsomely framed front pages: one for V-J Day, one for the JFK assassination, one for Neal Armstrong's small step, all featuring the Clark Kent byline. The only warmth came from the window which served as the west wall, its panoramic view of Lake Winnebago and the surrounding woods providing welcome relief from the relentless sterility of the rest of the room. I parked my wheelchair in a pool of sunlight as my host walked over to a well-stocked bar.

“Drink?” Kent asked.

“No, thank you, not for me,” I replied, “but please, don't let me stop you.”

“It's funny,” he said as he poured himself a glass of Canadian Mist on the rocks, “I'm totally immune to the effects of alcohol ― I can't get drunk ― but all my years of palling around with newspaper men gave me a taste for good whiskey. You worked out of the Gotham Gazette offices when you started out, didn't you?”

“That's right.”

“Was Jack Ryder still there?”

“No. He'd been gone about a year by then.”

“That was a damned shame. Ryder and I differed politically but he was a fine reporter. If his side career as the Creeper hadn't cost him his sanity, he'd have won a Pulitzer some day. As you will.”

“You know my work?”

“Who do you think nominated you for the Golden Fedora? Your coverage of the Long Island public utilities scandal was some of the best reporting I've ever read. I wish I'd had you on staff back when I was running the Star.”

I was flabbergasted. Fred Astaire just complimented my dancing.

“Thank you, Mr. Kent. I'm honored you think so.”

“Since it's just us old newshounds, why don't you call me Clark?”

“All right, uh, Clark,” I agreed, feeling both foolish and flattered. “Dick wants me to tape this, do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

He reached into my backpack and removed my recording equipment. As he set it up, he said, “I really don't have that much to add to what I told Dick earlier but I know he won't be happy 'til all the eyes are dotted and tees crossed.”

He pulled up one of the barstools and had a seat, joining me by the window.

After giving the date and other identifying trivia, I began the questioning.

“What time did you arrive at the Lakeshore Church this morning, Mist... er, Clark?”

“It was just eight o'clock when I pulled in. I remember hearing the town hall clock sound the hour as I was getting out of my car. I was angry at myself for being so late. I'd promised Don I'd be there by 7:30 but I got a phone call from Lucy, my sister-in-law, just as I was walking out the door.”

“Is this something you do every week, helping Reverend Hall set up?”

“No, only on the third Sunday of each month. The other elders take the rest.”

“What first tipped you off that something was wrong?”

“There was no music playing. That by itself made me suspicious. Don, child of the Sixties that he is, usually has the Grateful Dead playing full blast when I get there. When I found the rectory door ajar, I knew there was trouble.”

“What did you do?”

“The first thing I did was locate Don. I tried doing a quick scan of the property with my x-ray vision — don't worry, Dick will reword this stuff — but the lead in the stained glass blocked most of my view. I followed the sound of his heartbeat instead. I found him lying behind the altar, unconscious. He was in bad shape. His face was beaten to a pulp. He must've gotten some licks of his own in. His knuckles were skinned practically down to the bone.”

“The chief said the church was trashed.”

“There'd been a struggle. Some of the fixtures had been tossed around, the baptismal font was knocked over and there was spattered blood everywhere.”

“Any evidence of burglary?”

“The lock on the back door of the rectory had been jimmied, with a crowbar from the looks of it. They must've seen Don head over to the church and decided to hit the house first. His stereo and TV were gone, his collection of autographed baseballs too. Every closet and drawer in the place had been gone through. There was junk strewn everywhere. I imagine we won't know everything they took until Don comes to.”

“You say ‘they.’ Was there evidence of more than one burglar?”

“It would've taken more than one man to carry that TV away. And nobody could've done that kind of damage to Don unless they were traveling in a pack.”

“What then?”

“After I'd made Don as comfortable as I could, I called for an ambulance. Winnie, the dispatcher, mentioned she'd just sent one over to the Lash Center. That's how I knew where to find Dick. They were sending a squad car but Don is one of us. Dick would want to know right away.”

“Well, I think that ought to do it.”

“I told you it wouldn't amount to much,” Clark said, as he switched the recorder off. “Why don't we use a fresh tape for the rest of our talk?”

He put in a blank and pushed the Record button.

“You sure you're okay with going on the record? I may ask questions you don't like.”

“If you cross any lines, I'll tell you. Let's do it.”

“Now that we're getting down to it, I hardly know where to start.”

“Surely you're not nervous? You've interviewed presidents!”

“Yeah, but you're... who you are. You're Superman!”

“No, I'm Clark Kent. Superman isn't real. He's a legend, an ideal no one could possibly live up to. God knows I tried to. I tried for nearly fifty years. But I'm tired. Let the younger heroes have their day in the sun. The world doesn't need me any more. Maybe it never did.”

“You aren't just Clark Kent though. What about Kal-L?”

Clark got up and poured himself another shot of whiskey as he considered his answer.

“Kal-L,” he said slowly, “died with the rest of his race many, many years ago.”

“I don't understand. You've always seemed so proud of your Kryptonian heritage.”

“Krypton? There's no such place. There never was.”

“But...”

“My home planet's name was Rao, which translated into English means simply The World. The name ‘Krypton’ was hung on it long before I learned its true name. After the first couple of times I encountered kryptonite, I took a sample to an astronomer friend of mine. Ted said...”

“Ted Knight? Starman?”

“The same. It was Ted who gave the substance its name. He called it kryptonite because its spectrographic signature showed a high concentration of the element krypton. Ted also figured out that kryptonite's adverse effect on me probably meant I came from the same place it did. Later, he was able to identify our point of origin as a supernova in the constellation Aquarius. The nova showed the same krypton spike. He nicknamed the star Krypton-One, the press started applying the name to Rao and that was all she wrote.”

“When was this?”

“1949. No, '48. No, '49, I'm positive.”

“So you first learned you were an alien, excuse me, an extraterrestrial, in '49?”

“No, I first learned it in '27, on my sixteenth birthday. That was the day Ma and Pa told me I was adopted. Then they dropped the other shoe. I thought they'd gone mad, the both of them, until they showed me the rocket I'd come to Earth in. When I touched it, something in the way it felt convinced me they were telling the truth.”

“Tell me about your parents.”

“No two finer people ever lived. Without Jonathan and Martha Kent, there would be no Superman. They were already in middle age when I came to Earth. This was the winter of 1911. Pa was 55, I think, and Ma was three years younger. They'd wanted children but Ma was barren. It seemed like a miracle to them when they found me. They couldn't really afford a child — Pa's land was farmed out — but it was love at first sight. The state orphanage was already overcrowded. Since Ma and Pa were willing and had such upstanding reputations, they let them take me home with them.”

“This was where?”

“Kansas, near a town called Smallville in the middle of wheat country.”

“The Kents must have been something special to handle a superpowered child.”

“Let me guess,” Clark said with a grin. “Your teachers used to read you the Superbaby books during story time, am I right?”

“Uh oh, have I been suckered again?”

“I'm afraid so. My people — we'll call them Kryptonians to keep things simple — aren't born supermen. Although our enhanced senses are active from birth, our strength and speed don't develop until puberty. So when my physical powers started developing, I was old enough to handle them.”

“I doubt if most of us, given such amazing abilities, could've resisted using them for our own benefit. You might've ruled the world instead of being its greatest hero.”

“Why would I want to rule the world? I had enough worries running a daily newspaper.”

He paused to sip his drink.

“Ma and Pa's philosophy of right and wrong can be summed up in a single sentence: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. They always told me you could never go wrong if you followed that rule. My folks weren't saints, mind you — Ma tended to gossip and Pa liked his jug — but they had the courage of their convictions. It was Pa who shamed the local Grange into accepting the colored farmers. It was Ma who played midwife for the town's shady ladies when no one else would.”

“What was it like, growing up in that time and place?”

“Primitive. The kids today have no idea how good they have it. No electricity. No indoor plumbing. Horse-drawn farming equipment. Up before sunrise, in bed at sunset. We either grew or hunted our food. It was a constant struggle. Pa never wanted to be a farmer. He and Ma hated the isolation. A few years after I came along, they sold the land and moved into Smallville. They opened a general store and did pretty well for themselves.”

“You were quite young when they passed away, weren't you?”

“I was barely eighteen. Ma died of pneumonia that winter and Pa just pined away without her. It taught me that despite all my special powers there are some enemies who can't be beat. Time. Death. Before he died, Pa made me promise I'd always use my powers for the benefit of mankind.”

“You didn't appear as Superman though until, what, ten years after that? What did you do in between? Did you go to college?”

“No, I sold the store and used the money to bum my way around the world. Smallville was naïve in its isolation. I knew I needed to know more about life before I could decide how best to use my powers.”

“How did you end up in Metropolis?”

“I served two years on a merchant ship based out of Metropolis in '32 and '33. The city appealed to me in a way that New York or Gotham never did. It had a kind of small town feeling despite its size. When I decided to settle down, there was no question in my mind where I was going.”

“You were the first of the modern heroes to wear a costume and adopt a colorful alias. How did that come about?”

“When I was growing up, there were only two forms of live entertainment ever came to a small town: revival meetings and circuses. My costume is nothing but a trapeze artist's tights with a cape tacked on. It seemed the most practical outfit for what I had in mind.”

“Well, the look certainly caught on. Shortly after your debut, half the country was wearing its underwear on the outside.”

Kent laughed.

“Do you know why circus acts did that?”

“No.”

“It provided extra covering for the performer's privates so as not to offend the refined sensibilities of the ladies. Quaint, isn't it? At any rate, the idea behind Superman's costume was to hide in plain sight. I figured people would be more likely to remember the blue and red tights than the face.”

“That brings up something I've always wondered about. Superman wore no mask yet nobody ever recognized him as Clark Kent without his glasses. How did you ever pull that off?”

“Oh ho! You do want to learn all my secrets, don't you? Well, this has to be seen to be believed so watch this.”

For a moment, nothing happened. Then he changed: he lost nearly three inches in height, his shoulders grew rounded, his hips widened, his legs bowed slightly, his neck narrowed and his eyes moved forward in their sockets, eliminating his squint. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. In the time it took Clark to draw a pair of old glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on, he had become an entirely different person.

“You... you're a shapeshifter?”

“Not exactly, not like Eel O'Brian is,” he answered in a voice an octave higher than before. “Kryptonians have a certain degree of control over their anatomies. What I've done is compress my spine, loosen some ligaments, tighten others, adjust the length of my vocal chords and do a few other little tricks. I can even change the tension of the skin at my fingertips, giving each identity its own set of prints. Now do you see why almost no one connected Clark Kent to Superman?”

He returned to what I took to be his natural shape.

“I practiced that for six years before I went public. A lot of my time on the bum was spent mastering my powers. Even so, I didn't discover many of them until after I'd spent a few years as Superman, particularly my psychic powers. Kryptonians used to learn these things from their parents but naturally I had to work them out for myself.”

“You have psychic powers?”

“Of course. How else do you suppose I fly? I levitate, just as I saw you do the other day. My heat vision is psychic too. It's a sort of visually-targeted pyrokinesis. We developed the power during one of Krypton's ice ages. We have no telepathy, though, and no clairvoyance. Too bad. It would've made my work simpler.”

“I always figured heat vision was a variant of your x-ray vision.”

“They're unrelated. My 'x-ray vision' is nothing more than the ability to focus my eyes far past the resolution limits of the human eye. You know how you can focus past a screen door to see what's on the other side?”

“Sure.”

“That's basically what I'm doing. I can actually see through the molecular matrices of most objects. I only have about a 100-yard range, though, so forget all those stories you've read of my sitting in Metropolis reading a newspaper in China. It takes a lot of concentration. It gives me a headache sometimes so I usually save it for emergencies.”

“But when you do use it, you can see through everything but lead, right?”

“Lead is all I've publicly admitted to. There are other molecular matrices that have the same effect. We've never been able to figure out why some elements and compounds are impenetrable to my x-ray vision when other, far denser forms of matter aren't. That needs to be kept just between us, by the way. Kara would have my hide if I let that information get out.”

“Not a problem. I wanted to backtrack a bit. I'm not quite sure how to phrase this diplomatically so I'll just blurt it out. Why did you choose the name Superman? It seems so...”

“Arrogant?” Clark laughed. “There really was a good reason. Have you ever read Freidrich Nietzche?”

“No, but I've read summations.”

“Then you know that Nietzche more or less coined the term ‘superman.’ To him, it meant a being of such intellectual superiority that traditional morals no longer applied to him. The superman, he said, creates his own morality through what he termed the ‘will to power.’ Positive social values like compassion and humility were nothing but fictions maintaining the tyranny of the weak over the strong. I took the name Superman to prove Nietzche wrong. I meant to show that no one, no matter how powerful, is above their responsibility to their fellow men.”

“I've been looking at some of your earliest news clippings. You weren't exactly a testimony to law and order in the early days.”

“I never said I represented law and order. I was for truth and justice and freedom. I'll admit my methods were a little unconventional at first...”

“Unconventional? You tossed the Metropolis city council's cars off a skyscraper one by one until they agreed to clamp down on drunk driving! You deliberately tore down an entire section of the city as some kind of crazy urban renewal program!”

He downed the remnants of his drink before replying, “I was young, Val, and convinced of my own rightousness. I wanted to change the world right now. That led to some excesses. I had some growing up to do. The war took care of that.”

“There's still a lot of controversy surrounding your role in the war. Most people thought you could have ended it in a day.”

“I was one of them, at first. I'd stopped a border war in the Balkans in '38 but only because I proved that Alexei Luthor was behind the atrocities that had triggered the hostilities. It made me cocky. After the Nazis invaded Poland, I decided I was going to bring down Hitler's regime singlehanded. I was a fool. I never came close to Berlin. I was blown out of the sky over Aachen by anti-aircraft fire. The concussion knocked me out and I fell into the river. I damn near drowned.”

“But your invulnerability...”

“...isn't as absolute as the pulps would have you believe. Despite my extraterrestrial origin, despite all my superpowers, I'm a human being with the same needs every human being has. I need oxygen and food and sleep. I can be hurt. I can be killed. But I allowed myself to forget that. My conceit might have cost us the war. If the French Underground hadn't smuggled me off the continent, I might well have ended up being dissected in some Nazi laboratory.”

“I have to confess I'm a bit disappointed in our profession. I hadn't realized how much the media exaggerated your powers.”

“It was insane. Word of mouth inflated my reputation past all semblance of the truth. The pulp writers took these silly folk tales and ran with them. They always got it right when it came to the values I stood for, though, so I kept my objections to myself.”

“So does this mean there was no Legion of Super-Pets?”

Kent threw his head back and roared with laughter.

“I loved those stories! Krypto the Superdog and Streaky the Supercat and Comet the Superhorse and Beppo the Supermonkey! I wish they were real!”

“I was a fan of the Bizarro World stories myself.”

“Oh, me too. The writers were so clever. I collect the Superman pulps, you know. There's a whole closet full of old Action Tales upstairs. If my career had been half as much fun as it looked in those yellowing old magazines, I never would've retired.”

“You earned your retirement. Maybe the media exaggerated your adventures but that doesn't negate all the amazing things you really did. Your place in history is assured, with or without the pulps.”

“I don't know about history. I just did the best I could with what I had.”

My praise made Clark uncomfortable. He sat staring into his glass, absentmindedly swirling the ice cubes around.

“I'm sorry,” he said after a few moments, “we got way off track there. Where were we?”

“You'd come back from Europe a wiser man.”

“Humbler, maybe, but not wiser, not yet. It took a swift kick in the pants to complete my education. I had a long talk with President Roosevelt shortly after I got home. He told me war was a certainty. It was no time for loose cannons. There was another breed of superman threatening us from within, rogues like the Ultra-Humanite and Lex Luthor, Alexei's American cousin. It was in fighting those menaces that I could best serve my country. FDR offered me a full pardon for my early excesses, no strings attached, as a sign of his faith in me. It was exactly the morale boost I needed.”

“Have you ever had cause to regret that decision?”

“Oh, for a few years I lay awake at night worrying that I'd sold out. Eventually I realized that I was accomplishing more as a friend of the establishment than I ever could as its enemy. I also realized that Clark Kent was far better equipped to fight the inequities and injustices of life than Superman.”

“How did you get into journalism?”

“It was different back then. Almost anyone could walk in off the street and land a beat if they had the nerve and wrote well. I always wrote well. I'd even had a few stories about my high school's sports teams published in the Smallville Sentinel. When I settled in Metropolis, I applied to the Daily Star as a reporter. I got in on the strength of my reporting on the first appearance of some crazy costumed freak calling himself Superman.”

“Can we talk about Lois?”

“Of course.”

“The two of you didn't get along too well at first, did you?”

“Yes and no. The first time Lois Lane and I ever looked at each other, we both knew there would never be anyone else but neither of us would do anything about it. Lois was a liberated woman long before Gloria Steinem. She wasn't going to set her ambitions aside for any mere man. And me, I wasn't sure yet how well my Clark disguise would work so I started acting clumsy and timid to further distance me from the guy in the tights. Unfortunately, it also made Lois despise me. And then she met Superman and things got really complicated.”

“But you worked it out. You married her.”

“It wasn't resolved as tidily as you make it sound. Lois and I only got together after Superman temporarily disappeared in the spring of 1950.”

“My research assistant sent me something about that. You stopped appearing in costume for nearly a year. According to the article, the Luthor cousins claimed they'd killed you but they had no proof.”

“That was a bluff. The Luthors had nothing to do with it. It was the Wizard who was responsible. He cast a spell on me that made me forget my Superman identity. But the spell had an unexpected side effect. Since I no longer had a secret identity to protect, I lost Clark's namby-pamby mannerisms. I became the reporter I'd always wanted to be. Lois fell in love with me all over again. With no Superman coming between us, well, one thing led to another.”

“What brought Superman back?”

“Something very simple. I have to be conscious to hold Clark's shape. The Wizard's spell could erase my memory of my true form but when I fell asleep, I reverted. In the morning I would subconsciously resume Clark's identity the instant I woke up. Until my honeymoon, there was nobody to see the change happening. When she woke up during the night, Lois found herself in bed with the missing Superman.”

“Was she frightened?”

“Lois frightened? Not a chance. She grabbed a mirror and held it up to my face while she shook me awake. The sight of my real face in the instant before it changed shattered the spell.”

“There must have been awkward.”

“I told her if she wanted out of the marriage, I'd understand. She was having none of it. It had hurt her to choose between Clark and Superman. When she found out she could have us both, why, she was delighted.”

“Marriage agreed with you. Your career really took off after that.”

“True. George Taylor retired as managing editor of the Star that same year and they offered me the job. That was where I'd began my career before the Daily Planet raided its writing staff back in '40. Lois decided to stay with the Planet. She didn't move over to the Star until '78.”

“You also started working regularly with Batman around the time you got married. Tell me about him.”

“A very sad man, Bruce Wayne. So scarred. He would have become dangerous in time if it hadn't been for Dick. Becoming a foster parent saved Bruce. He had responsibilities. He could no longer afford to martyr himself to his cause. He became a better man for the change. Working with him was a privilege.”

“They used to say it was the combination of your brawn and his brain that made it work.”

“That's about right. I'm no idiot but Bruce's intellect made me feel like one at times. Still,” he said with a crooked grin, “when it came to dealing with monstrosities like Titano or Solomon Grundy, there was something to be said for being able to punch one's way through a mountain.”

“What prompted you to organize the Justice League? You hadn't been much of a factor in the Justice Society so what made a team more appealing to you twenty years later?”

“Bruce and I had been keeping our eye on the new heroes coming up. We liked what we saw. We started reminiscing about the old days and realized we both regretted not being more involved with the JSA. Then we ran into your mother. She told us she'd been very impressed by the new Flash after sharing a case with him but she felt Barry could use a little guidance. So the seed had been planted by the time the seven future founders of the League took on the Apellaxian Champions in late '59. But I confess I had an ulterior motive. I wanted to promote the feeling of community among the super-heroic population for Kara's sake.”

“That's right, she came to Earth around that time, didn't she?”

“Spring of '58, actually. That was when I first encountered Brainiac. He escaped that time but not before I'd confiscated the bottle city of Kandor from him.”

“He collected miniaturized cities, didn't he? One from every world he visited, right?”

“Right. Kandor was among the first cities he collected.”

“How long before Krypton, er, Rao, was destroyed was Kandor stolen?”

“Five years.”

“Then Kara must be older than you even though physically she's nearly forty years younger.”

“Kara was thirteen when Kandor was stolen. My uncle, Zor-L, Kara's father, was both wealthy and superstitious. A fortuneteller he trusted predicted a great disaster. Zor-L spent his entire fortune making provisions to put the Kandorians in suspended animation should it come. He was jeered at for this right up to the day Brainiac came. But the hibernation units were designed as a short term solution. They weren't meant to run longer than a year. Brainiac held Kandor captive for more than forty years. Kara's was the only unit in the entire city still operational. Out of six million inhabitants, she was the sole survivor.”

“I hope you don't take this the wrong way but did you ever consider working together to, um, repopulate the species?”

“And create a genetic catastrophe? We're cousins. Our descendants would become progressively more inbred. The end result could turn Earth into a real life Bizarro World. You've never met Bizarro. Trust me, one is plenty.”

“You found Kara in '58 but she didn't appear publicly as Supergirl until the next year. I take it she spent that first year learning how to use her powers?”

“No, she had a pretty fair handle on those. She spent that time learning English and Earth customs. Remember, she grew up in the Kryptonian culture, which was much more formal and ritualized than most human societies and, at the same time, less concerned with appearances and less inhibited about bodily functions. She had a big adjustment to make. Lois and I legally adopted her. We explained away her difficulties with English and so forth by telling folks she'd been raised by a peasant family in Bhutan after her missionary parents died in an avalanche. Lois turned it into a great story for the Star’s Sunday feature section. She was doing both her job and mine for a while there because I was spending all my time miniaturized, exploring the ruins of Kandor, hoping to get a feel for my heritage. I can speak Kandorian now, at about a five-year-old's vocabulary level. Kara makes fun of my accent. If you really want to learn about Rao, you should talk to Kara. I'm sure I could set it up for you.”

“That would be fantastic. I'd like to skip forward a few years and talk about the Battle of Metropolis.”

His face clouded.

“Not my favorite subject but all right.”

“How did it begin? The actual battle, I mean.”

He deflected the question for a moment by fixing himself another drink. I suspected the entire war was replaying in his mind's eye.

“As soon as Savage issued his challenge to the League, we sent for everyone who'd ever been in The Life. Dick was given command of the heroes, with J'onn J'onzz and I as his backup. We coordinated our forces with the National Guard commander and Metropolis' Police Commissioner, my old friend Bill Henderson. We thought we'd prepared for any attack and still they took us by surprise.

“Their main force appeared literally out of nowhere right in the middle of our command post courtesy of Warp, the teleporter from the Brotherhood of Evil. All hell broke loose. Savage's plan was to eliminate our biggest guns in a single stroke. Warp was to send some of us into deep space while the Time Commander sent the others into the prehistoric past. It was Boston Brand, inhabiting Solomon Grundy's body, who saved us. He forcibly turned the two villains' powers against each other at the last second. All three were torn to pieces. Losing that first skirmish cost them the war but the battle was far from over.

“I got taken out of the fight early. Lex Luthor armed several squads of Savage's army with guns that fired kryptonite rays. It was artificial kryptonite, thank God, so it couldn't kill me but repeated exposure made me too weak to fight. Kara and I watched most of the battle from a field hospital.”

He blinked back tears.

“The city I loved was being destroyed before my eyes and I was helpless to do anything about it. It wasn't until the Weather Wizard's hurricane knocked the central power generator for the ray guns out that I began recovering my strength. It was too late. The battle was nearly over and I'd contributed nothing. And then I heard that Savage had seized the Daily Star offices and threatened to kill everyone there if I didn't surrender to him... alone.

“It was a trap, of course. Any fool could see that. What choice did I have? Only a handful of heroes were still standing and they had their hands full with rescue work. Besides, Savage made it personal when he chose Metropolis. I wanted to make him pay. I was still too unsteady on my feet to make a dramatic entrance. I simply walked in through the front door. He had one weapon left: a basketball-size chunk of real kryptonite. I didn't care. I kept coming. And then, for spite, he committed one last sin.

“He killed my Lois.

“I went crazy, lost all control. I turned my heat vision on full blast and incinerated the bastard. I could hear his blood boiling as it cooked his internal organs and I'm telling you, Val, at the time it was the sweetest sound I'd ever heard.”

He shook his head slowly, as if denying the reality of the memory.

“Jimmy was there. I've always suspected seeing me kill Savage unhinged his mind but at the time he had the wherewithal to evacuate the other hostages and leave me alone with my dead. I brought the building down around our ears. I meant it to be a tomb for all of us but I got separated from the kryptonite so I survived after all. Dick and J'onn found me in the rubble eventually.”

“You announced your retirement a few days later.”

“I couldn't accept what I'd done. Pa told me that with power like mine, there was no reason to ever deliberately take a life. I lived by that code for sixty years and I betrayed it for revenge. Everyone says Vandal Savage had it coming but I'd give anything to undo his death. There were others who'd never had blood on their hands before that day. Dick. Donna. Barry. Hal. Roy. Shiera. All of them decided they wanted no more of The Life. I agreed. I was through.”

“You disappeared from public view in both identities six weeks after Metropolis and you haven't been heard from since, not outside the Corners at any rate. Where did you go?”

“I hid out in my sanctuary in the Adirondack Mountains for a year or so after losing Lois. Then I got an urge to go home to Smallville. It was all changed. There was a Blockbuster Video where Pa's grocery used to be and a 350-unit apartment complex on the spot where my rocket crashed. I couldn't stay. I traveled under an alias for a while after that, revisiting the places I'd been as a young man. Four years ago, I got word that there was property available adjacent to Lash House. I built this place and I've been here ever since.”

“I'm going to drop the names of some of your costumed colleagues. Can you give me your personal take on each hero in a sentence or two?”

“Sure,” he said, the shadows of the unpleasant past fading from his deep blue eyes, “I'll give it a shot.”

“Diana Prince.”

“What can I say about your mother that you don't already know? She set a standard for selflessness and compassion the rest of us could only dream of reaching.”

“Green Lantern.”

“Which one, Alan Scott or Hal Jordan?”

“Scott.”

“A good man to have at your side during real trouble but, like Hal, a little too in love with the spotlight. Alan's not well, I hear.”

“Flash. Jay Garrick, that is.”

“The nicest guy in the business, bar none.”

“Hawkman, the father.”

“A ferocious warrior and a superlative strategist but a total sphinx off the battlefield.”

“Hawkgirl.”

“A brave, impetuous young woman who had no business being in The Life. She would've gotten herself killed someday. We all breathed a sigh of relief when Hector was born. Motherhood made Shiera a lot more cautious.”

“Wesley Dodds, Sandman.”

“Dodds was hard to get to know. Friendly but very private. Charlie McNider tells me Wes struggled with the bottle for years after the JSA split up. I was trekking across the Himalayas when I got word of his death, too late to attend his funeral. I regret that.”

“Hourman.”

“Too fidgety. He made me nervous. Fine track record, though.”

“The Spectre.”

“The longer the Spectre remained earthbound, the more he forgot what it was to be human. He got mean. And arrogant. If more of Jim Corrigan's common sense had survived, the Wizard and the others never could've taken him down.”

“Doctor Fate.”

“Fate scared me, a lot more than Spectre did. His adventures took him to corners of reality where none of the rest of us could hope to survive. We were like children at play to Fate. I always wondered why he bothered with the JSA, where he was mostly just another strongman. He called me the other night.”

“Just to chat or did he have a reason?”

“Fate doesn't chat. He had a reason. You already know what it was. I heard you outside the door that night. If you wanted to ask me about it, Val, you should've just asked straight out. Well, I didn't always play fair with my interview subjects either. But I think that's enough for now.”

Sorry, Dick. Looks like you're not getting the details of Clark's conversation with Fate after all. What a fool I am.

And to prove it, I proceeded to push my luck.

“One more question, if you don't mind. I don't mean to be looking a gift horse in the mouth but why are you breaking your silence now?”

“Because talking about the old days helps me miss them a little less and, God help me, I do miss The Life. How's that for a headline?”

Clark reached over and turned off the recorder.

“You know what your problem is, son?”

Oh, yeah, this I want to hear, I thought. My mouth said, “What's that?”

“You spend too much time in your own head. Sometimes you have to stop analyzing life and enjoy it on its own terms. There's a lot of enriching experiences to be had in this world, many of them right at your fingertips, and it’s a crime not to take advantage of it. In fact, it's the one crime I'm still willing to fight.”

He drew my attention to the vista on the other side of the glass next to which we sat.

“It's too magnificent a day to stay inside. Let's go for a flight.”

“It wouldn't be much fun for you,” I admitted. “I don't really fly, I just sort of drift.”

“Don't worry about that,” he chuckled. “You provide the lift, I'll provide the propulsion. What do you say?”

Despite my reservations, I couldn't pass up a chance to share the skies with Superman himself. I gave in. We stepped out onto the deck. A moment later, we were high above the lake, the highest I could recall being without an airplane around me.

The lake itself stretched nearly to the western horizon, its surface at this height a smooth glassy blue. The Lash estate lay spread out before me, from Bat's statue at one corner to the rundown bungalows where the casino staff bedded down at the extreme opposite. Three horses galloped across the emerald fields but I was too far up to see who their riders were. Beyond the estate, I could just make out the airport, the planes little more than midges at this distance. To the north, Devereaux Corners filled its little valley, a Hallmark Christmas village stripped of its winter wardrobe. If I strained, I could see sunlight reflecting off the cars on Highway 41. It was almost more than I could take in.

“Are you ready?” a voice said in my ear.

I nodded, struck dumb by the view below me.

Tightening his grip on the back of my shirt, Clark slowly accelerated, turning our bodies parallel to the ground to minimize wind resistance. The wind stung my eyes but I didn't care. Cautiously at first, then with increasing confidence, I soared at the older man's side through a dizzying, exhilarating series of aerial acrobatics.

Suddenly, I realized that Clark no longer held me, that he hadn't been holding me for some time. I hadn't needed help at all. I'd executed turns and dips and rolls as if it were second nature. I was flying, really flying!
Laughing joyously, I swooped downward to skim the waters of the lake before plunging into the woods. I darted in and out of the trees, accidentally terrorizing a family of opossums, and was scolded for my impertinence by an ancient and decidedly unamused owl. Rising once more above the treetops, I saw a burst of pink lightning fill one tower of the distant Lash mansion. I briefly considered popping in to greet Johnny and the Thunderbolt before remembering that being seen in flight would seriously compromise the center's security. The thought brought me up short.

“What's wrong?” Clark asked as he came to a stop beside me.

“I shouldn't be doing this,” I said, panic inexplicably rising in my voice. “No flying. Someone might see. Someone might find out...”

A memory flashed before my eyes.

Night.

The city.

Flying above the rooftops.

A light where no light should be.

Voices not meant to be overheard.

A plan to silence an irritant.

“No!”

Before Clark could react, I streaked off. I didn't care where I was going, didn't care what was in his way, not even the bald eagle I collided with a moment later. The bird, frightened but not injured, regained its wings and made a hasty retreat from this noisy midair anomaly. I was not so lucky.

My concentration shattered, my newfound confidence dissipated, I forgot my power. A scream tore its way out of my throat as I hurtled at terminal velocity toward the waters of Lake Winnebago far below.

Chapter 39

We had barely passed through the gates when three horses came thundering up to the van bearing a trio of excited riders. It was Lia Briggs riding Sirocco, accompanied by Byrna Brilyant on a palomino and the Old Timer aboard a chestnut Morgan.

“We found something you should see, Val,” Lia said.

“Can't it wait?” Mark asked. “He's beat.”

“You are now a member of the local law enforcement agency, Valentine Stevens, is this not so?” inquired the Old Timer. “I presume then that you have the authority to examine a crime scene.”

“Crime scene?”

I exchanged looks with Mark and sighed.

“Okay, tell me what you've found.”

“There's a big stash of loot hidden behind one of the bungalows,” Lia replied. “There's a TV, some stereo components, a bunch of other stuff, even cash. I don't recognize any of it. I don't think it belongs to anyone here at the Center.”

“We thought it might be the things stolen from Reverend Hall's house,” Byrna added.

“Maybe I'd better take a look,” I said. “Mark, can you leave my chair at the foot of the ramp up to the back porch, please? It'll be faster if I hitch a ride with these three.”

“You may have my mount,” the Old Timer said as he slid precariously off the back of his steed. “I cannot bear one moment more on this quadrupedal instrument of torture.”

“Thank you for trying anyway, dear,” Byrna told him with a wave of her hand.

“You are welcome, Byrna Brilyant. Perhaps one day I may return the favor. Given your apparent penchant for discomfort, you would no doubt enjoy riding the magma mastodons of Korugar.”

He hobbled away, legs bowed.

It would be awkward mounting the horse without levitating. Mark would have to lift me on. No, to hell with pretending. I floated from my chair, still secured in the van's tiedowns, and settled onto the Morgan's back. Byrna's eyes were round with surprise but Lia just smiled knowingly.

“What?” I asked her.

“Nothing,” she said. “I wondered when you'd come out of the closet, that's all.”

“You're gay, Val?” Byrna asked innocently.

“I meant his superpowers, sweetie,” Lia laughed. “Trust me, Val has all the normal male urges.”

I blushed furiously.

“Let's go see this treasure trove you found, shall we?”

The six bungalows that sat several acres east of the annex had been vacant since Bat Lash's death in 1917. Apparently exempt from whatever prevented the main buildings from aging, the little one room cottages — and the outhouse and primitive shower their occupants had shared — fell into disrepair decades ago. Whenever my school friends visited, we inevitably wound up here. Originally we came for the sheer romance of the abandoned and decrepit, later because it was a convenient place to sneak a cigarette or a beer. I couldn't help but feel a nostalgic guilt for being here again.

Behind a hillock of dirt and dead leaves that ran between Bungalows 2 and 3 sat a pile of electronics, jewelry and other valuables including, I noted, a dozen baseballs sealed in Lucite cubes. The dirt road that once ran between the cottages and the property line was overgrown. The thickets were freshly flattened. A large vehicle, probably a pickup truck, had come down this path and paused long enough to dump what had to be Don's property. But why would druggies steal all this stuff only to abandon it here in the woods? And how could a pack of junkies have gotten onto the property undetected? Something didn't fit.

Lia and Byrna chatted happily about the escapades of some soap opera diva as we rode back to Lash House, leaving me free to brood about my role in this frustrating investigation. So far I hadn't been much help. That had to change.

My wheelchair was right where I'd requested. I thanked the ladies for their help and watched them ride off to return the horses before going to my room to track down Dick.

After several false starts, I reached an Officer Carlson on guard at the Lakeside Church. He told me that the chief was on his way to Lash House. I was authorized to handle whatever happened between now and his arrival. So I had been right to investigate the dumpsite.

A grating voice huckstering used cars derailed my train of thought. As I turned to lower the volume on the radio, I felt a muscle in my neck give. The pain caught me off guard but I shouldn't have been surprised. Flying put tremendous stress on my neck and back. Normally, regular exercise kept them limber but I had suppressed my power since Delgado's murder. Those muscles were now locking up on me.

I went to the therapy room hoping to find Vic Stone. He wasn't there. I'd forgotten it was Sunday. I did find Larry Collins supervising Woozy Winks and Noddy Toylan as they went through their daily regimens. Woozy was soaking in a whirlpool bath while Noddy slowly walked a treadmill. Larry found a heated pillow to wrap my neck with. As I lay on one of the treatment tables letting the pillow untie the knot, the Sidekicks continued their interrupted conversation.

“I'm tellin' you, dere's sumpin' fishy goin' on in this joint,” Noddy was saying.

“So you keep insistin',” Woozy retorted, “but you ain't gave us nothin' to back it up.”

“It ain't no coincidence dat t'ree folks is dead. And now dis stuff about da Dove gettin' beat up...”

“Hey! You know the rules about secret IDs!”

“Aw, Larry an' Val bot' know Rev'rend Hall was da Dove.”

“Mr. Winks is right, Mr. Toylan,” Larry cautioned. “Mrs. Stevens' rules are there for a reason.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Da point is it ain't no ordinary mugg gonna take down da Dove like dat. Same goes for Snapper. Somebody's stalkin' us.”

“These rumors are all over the Center,” Larry replied, “but that doesn't make them true. Folks die in nursing homes and sometimes they die in bunches. If there were anything more to it than that, I would have heard. Isn't that right, Mr. Stevens?”

I felt like the top seed in a son-of-a-bitch tournament but I had to honor Chief Grayson's information blackout. I hoped Noddy and Woozy would forgive me when the truth came to light.

“That's right, fellas. It's just an unfortunate coincidence.”

“Besides if somethin' was goin' on, Plas and I'd be right in the thick of it,” Woozy said. “Dickie Boy would natcherly ask us for help. Weren't we FBI?”

“If you was FBI, it was Fat Bastards Incorporated, big mout'. You ain't da only one who ran wit' da high rollers, y'know. I woiked for da Flash! If Eel was such a hot number, how come he wasn't never JSA, huh?”

“Plas wouldn'ta joined them snobs if he'd been asked. Besides, he was a g-man, he was legit, see? He wasn't no vigilante.”

Noddy stopped walking.

“I hope dat was you fartin' in da tub and not you callin' Flash a crook.”

“Aw, I didn't mean nothin' like that. You know I think Garrick was a great fella. What're you so pricklish about, anyway?”

“Keep walking, Mr. Toylan,” Larry said. “You know Victor wants you to do two miles every day.”

“I don't give a shit what dat big coon wants. He can kiss my rosy red ass.”

“That doesn't sound like you, Uncle Noddy,” I said. “What have you got against Vic?”

“Here we go,” muttered Woozy.

“Hey, I got nuttin' against niggers, if dat's what yer thinkin'. I want dey should have freedom an' justice an' all dat stuff. But dere's right an' dere's wrong. Dey gotta know what lines dey can't cross. Stone ain't got no bizness sharin' a bed wit' no white woman. Like should stick to like.”

“It's the Twenty-First Century, knucklehead,” Woozy laughed. “Things are different now.”

“Just 'cause nobody else cares no more about da way t'ings is supposed ta be don't mean I'm wrong and ever'body else is right. Dis country's gone to hell since we let da coloreds run wild. We didn't fight Adolf an' Benito an' Tojo so's da niggers an' spics an' chinks could take over America. Dis is a white man's nation. Ain't nuttin' any of you can say will ever change my mind about dat.”

And on that note, he tossed the towel around his neck aside and shuffled out of the room.

“Wow,” I said. “I had no idea Uncle Noddy was so... opinionated.”

“I don't understand him no more,” replied Woozy. “You'd think he'd be happy about all the extra time he's had but he just gets angrier every year. It's like he resents still bein' alive.”

“Sometimes death is a mercy, Mr. Winks, to the very old and the very sick,” Larry said. “Mr. Toylan feels like his world died a long time ago and sometimes I guess he wishes he'd died with it. But he's strong and alert and still relatively healthy. Looks like you'll have to put up with his tirades for a while yet.”

“Aw, he's an okay joe if you can keep him off politics an' religion. I don't mind him much. Anyways, us Sidekicks gotta stick together. Ain't that right, Val?”

I smiled.

“That's right, Uncle Woozy.”

“Mr. Toylan reminds me of some of the old guys who used to hang out around the city park in my old hometown,” Larry said as he removed the pillow and began expertly massaging the muscles of my neck. “They were always convinced that nothing good happened after 1932. Sometimes I think I know how they feel.”

“Where's home, Larry?” I asked.

“A little town called Reminderville in Ohio, about twenty miles southeast of Cleveland. My folks still live there. I talk to them every day and go visit on my vacations. Guess I'm just a homebody at heart.”

“It's them small-town values that make you so sympatico to us old guys, kid,” Woozy told him. “You oughtta see this guy's collection, Val. He's got Plas memorabilia we didn't even know they made. He's even got Plas Junior's Wheaties box. The cereal's still in it!”

“I'd heard you were a fan,” I said.

“I probably get too carried away with my collecting,” he answered, “but I admire the mystery men so much, the originals I mean, the ones who came out of the Thirties and Forties, the ones who actually stood for something. They've been my heroes since I was a little kid. It's such an honor to know so many of them, to be able to make their last years more comfortable. This is the best job ever.”

He smiled embarrassedly.

“Guess I get carried away with more than collecting. Sorry.”

“You have nothing to apologize for. I know exactly how...”

“There you are,” said a voice from the doorway.

It was Dick.

“I wasn't expecting you for a few more hours, Chief,” I said. “What's up?”

“We need to talk. Now.”

I sat up. My neck felt much better, the tension in it soothed away.

“Well, fellas,” I said as Larry helped me transfer back into my wheelchair, “I hate to heat and run but duty calls.”

“See ya, kid,” said Woozy. “Go get them bad guys.”

“Are you finished with the autopsies already?” I ventured, as we stepped out into the hallway and headed for the elevator. “What did you learn?”

“Not out here,” Dick answered.

A moment later, he was closing the library doors behind us. Ana, Clark and Dr. McNider were waiting for us. The doctor reclined on the library's couch, the wheelchair that brought him folded up and parked nearby. The old owl I had encountered in the woods sat perched on his shoulder. Every few minutes throughout the ensuing conversation, Doctor Mac would pass the bird a bit of jerked beef. Despite this incongruous touch, I felt like I'd been summoned to the principal's office. I looked from face to face, aura to aura. All were unreadable.

Dick, obviously the ringleader of this little conspiracy, sat down heavily in a leather armchair, his face gray and tired. They all looked at him expectantly. I knew he never spoke until ready but something about this particular silence sent a chill through me.

“Clark told us what happened this afternoon,” he said at last. “It's time for complete truth between us.”

I should have seen this coming. Best just bite the bullet and get it over with.

“I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say to...”

The chief raised a hand to stop me.

“Let me go first,” he said.

That caught me by surprise.

“Okay.”

Dick rose and stood looking out the bay window, hands clasped behind his back. His posture had subtly changed. Age had settled over his shoulders like a shawl. Whatever had occurred since our meeting earlier in the morning had added twenty years to him.

“I'm a stubborn, foolish old man, Val,” he said, “and I owe you an apology.”

“We all do,” said Ana.

“Bruce warned me a thousand times never to fall in love with a theory before the evidence bears it out,” Dick continued. “Thanks to my tunnel vision, I've bungled this case from beginning to end and done you a terrible injustice in the process.”

“I don't understand,” I said.

“Do you remember the morning after Pamela Isley died? You asked me why you weren't a suspect.”

“And you said I was. I assumed you were joking.”

“The fact of the matter is that you've been my prime suspect from Day One.”

Whatever I was expecting to hear, this wasn't it.

“You think I'm the killer? Are you fucking kidding me?”

Grayson turned around to face me, his mouth twisted in a half-grin, half grimace. Something about my anger pleased him but he was trying to suppress it.

“Try to see things from my perspective. There hasn't been a murder in this town since 1949 yet within a week of your arrival, three people die under mysterious circumstances. The killer has psychic powers. You have psychic powers. You say you hate those powers and don't know how to control them but we only have your word for that.”

“But...”

“There was more. Clark pointed you out to me in the footage of the Delgado assassination days ago, yet until today you never mentioned being on the scene. Then there's this book you abruptly decide to write about The Life. Next thing we know you're asking all kinds of questions, poking into everyone's secrets, and nobody gives it a second thought.”

“And what was supposed to be my motive for all this mystery and mayhem?”

“My first thought was that your book was going to be an exposé of The Life, something to impress those TV people enough to change their minds about hiring you. A few suspicious deaths make for a sexier book. But that didn't fit the profile of a Golden Fedora winner. Those aren't handed out to sleaze merchants. Then I wondered if Ra's al-Ghûl had gotten to you somehow. It was you Talia singled out at the Saddle Tramp, don't forget. Or you could be possessed, a la Boston Brand. Or you might not even be the real Val Stevens at all but some sort of shapeshifter.”

“It was also possible you'd gone insane,” added McNider. “You wouldn't be the first empath driven mad by his own powers.”

“I can't believe you went along with this,” I said to Ana.

“I knew Dick suspected you but I never for a minute believed he was on the right track. I have been terribly worried about you, though. You haven't been yourself.”

“There were also the nightmares and the seizure outside John Doe's room and the laughing fit in the barn,” Doctor Mac said, ticking them off on his fingers, “all indicators that something is seriously wrong with you.”

“Etta provided the clincher,” said Ana, “when she noticed you weren't using your flying power correctly. You were straining to accomplish what should have been second nature to you.”

“That's when we realized you'd forgotten how to fly,” McNider concluded.

“I thought it more likely you were faking,” Dick said, “but amnesia isn't easily faked. I know what to watch for in such cases. If your memory loss was a sham, sooner or later, you'd trip yourself up.”

“That's why you asked me to help you with the investigation, isn't it? So you could keep an eye on me. You figured you'd give me enough rope to hang myself.”

Dick looked me in the eye for the first time since we'd entered the library.

“Yes, that was my original plan, to observe you firsthand. The problem was the more time I spent with you, the more I didn't want you to be guilty. But what the detective wants doesn't matter in a homicide investigation. What can be proven does. I couldn't prove you were guilty but I couldn't prove you were innocent either.”

“Last night after you turned in, Dick sat the three of us down and laid all his suspicions and doubts out for us,” said Clark. “In the end, we decided the best hope of clearing you once and for all was to help you get back your memory.”

“But we had to be careful,” Ana said. “Charles cautioned us that confronting you directly with the Delgado video, as Dick advocated, might be too big a shock. It might make the damage worse... or permanent. He suggested a more oblique angle to approach from.”

“The key to your problem was your power of flight,” the doctor said.

“Which put the ball in my court,” Clark said. “Once I got you into the air, we figured instinct would take over and the rest would follow. It almost backfired. For a few moments there, I thought I'd driven you deeper into denial. But Charlie said that if you voluntarily began probing your memory, the worst was over. You could handle seeing the tape.”

“So the formal statement was just a trick. You never expected me to get anything out of Clark.”

“We planned to lure you over to Clark's with an invitation to interview him,” Dick replied. “We knew that would be irresistable bait. But we certainly never expected what happened to Don. Having you handle the statement was a legitimate part of the investigation. You did a nice job, by the way.”

“None of us are proud of manipulating you,” Clark said, “but if Dick's worst suspicions were true and you were our killer, we couldn't be straight with you. You see that, don't you?”

Ana walked over and crouched down to talk to me face to face.

“Before you decide to hate us for what we've done, remember we did it out of love. We were desperate to help you and I couldn't think of another alternative.”

There was a long and oh-so-uncomfortable pause before I said tonelessly, “Answer a question. Why couldn't I sense your suspicions? They should've been obvious to me.”

“When we first started the Justice League,” Clark explained, “the Martian Manhunter taught the rest of us how to block out casual telepathic probings.”

“None of us are especially adept at it,” added Dick, “but as long as all we had to do was block that particular corner of our minds when you were around, it wasn't too difficult.”

I looked at them all in astonishment.

“I had no idea that was possible. Then... then I can't be sure any of my empathic readings are accurate. No wonder you couldn't accept my word about Tina's innocence, Chief. My God. This changes everything.”

It never stopped. The rejection by the network and my impotence in the Delgado affair had already blown gaping holes in my self-image. Now even the reliability of my empathy was in doubt. Enough. No more indecision and timidity. It was time to take back some control of my life.

“There's still a part of my memory missing. I was reluctant to find out what's in there. I'm terrified, in fact. But now...”

I looked at Ana.

“I want you to put me in your lasso and order me to remember.”

“The rope is powered by Olympian magic, honey. You have no conception of the concentration and raw strength required to harness that kind of power. I haven't used it since before you were born. It could tear your mind to shreds if we aren't careful. Are you sure about this?”

“I've never been more sure of anything. I have to know.”

“All right then,” she said unhappily. “I... I'll go get it.”

She left the room, her reluctance apparent in every step.

“You don't have to do this,” Grayson said. “I believe you're innocent.”

“I'm not doing this for you, Dick. This may be my only hope of finding the truth.”

Ana returned, a heavy length of thinly braided gold rope coiled in her hand. It seemed so beautiful, so fragile. You had only to look at it to know it was not of this world. Woven by Athena herself, it glowed faintly as if lit from within by the goddess of wisdom's superhuman energies. I tried not to be afraid but my mouth went dry.

“Val,” Dr. McNider warned, “I've felt the power of the lasso before. You'll be fine as long as you don't try to fight. If you resist, even subconsciously... well, don't.”

“Are you ready?” asked Ana.

I nodded once.

Gently, she wrapped a loop of the rope around my shoulders and cinched it snug. An ecstatic rush of joy surged through me, as though I were submerged in an ocean of love, all the love that had ever been felt between all the people that had ever lived. I looked at the others and saw not their frail physical shells but the angels they would one day become. I would say anything, do anything to please such beautiful souls. All they had to do was ask.

Ana's voice was like a distant church bell wafted on the evening wind.

“Listen to me carefully, sweetheart. There is a veil across your memory. When I count three, that veil will blow away. You will remember everything that it hid. One. Two. Three.”