Day 3: Pocus hijacked Channel 52’s noon news broadcast, making the anchors dance, sing, and perform skits about the glory of his sorcery. He also did about ten minutes of truly lame card tricks, live on the air. Barry buried his head in his hands and moaned.
Day 4: Joe called.
18
On suspension from CCPD and unable to trust himself as the Flash, Barry had no reason to venture beyond the walls of the apartment he shared with Iris. She would wake up early for work; he stayed in bed. By the time she came home, he’d managed to migrate to the sofa, where he lounged in his pajamas, watching TV and muttering imprecations at the news people. It was definitely the darkest time in his life since his childhood, when his mother had been so spectacularly and cruelly taken from him.
He thought again of that powerless day on the playground. He’d been unable to defend himself against the other kids’ punches or their taunts. So he’d curled up in a ball and hoped for the best. And now here he was, years later, a grown man. A grown man with superspeed, for Pete’s sake! And he still couldn’t defend himself.
And so he was in his apartment, curled into a metaphoric ball. So when his phone rang and a picture of Joe’s face lit up the screen, Barry dived for it as though it were the last life preserver on a sinking ship.
“Hey, Barry, how you holding up?”
“I’m fine,” he lied.
“Cisco and Caitlin still haven’t figured out anything about the, you know, the bats in your belfry?”
“They’re not bats. And no.”
He felt Joe’s hesitation through the line. “Well, I was just checking up on you—”
“Nah, you can ask Iris how I’m doing. Why did you really call?” Barry got up from the sofa and started pacing the floor. Maybe Joe had prevailed upon Captain Singh to give him another chance . . .
“It’s nothing,” Joe said, suddenly self-conscious. “I shouldn’t be bothering you. You’ve got bigger issues to deal with than some weird bodies.”
Weird bodies. “Whoa!” He stopped pacing. “Is this about the T. gondii deaths?”
“Yeah, but . . .”
Barry grabbed his laptop and slid into a chair at the kitchen bar. He flipped open the computer and opened some files. “I’m on this. Give me what you’ve got. If I can help, I will.”
“Seems like a lot of work.”
“It’s the easiest thing in the world.”
“You must be really desperate for something to take your mind off things,” Joe told him.
Barry grunted something noncommittal in order to avoid agreeing. “What have you got?”
Joe took a long, deep breath and then sighed for so long that Barry thought it would never end. At last, he said, “All right, all right, here’s the deal: Coroner looked at the new guy, MacDonald, and also the first victim.”
Barry had the file open on his computer already. “Ryan Paulson, right?”
“Yep. Hey, wait.” Joe’s voice went stern. “Do you have backup copies of official police files on your personal computer? That’s against—”
“Just a good memory,” Barry said, scrolling. “So, the coroner?”
“Oh yeah. Right.” He could hear Joe shuffling some papers, could see him—in his mind’s eye—flipping pages in his battered old cop’s notebook. “So Paulson had a hip replacement but wasn’t immunosuppressed at the time of death. MacDonald had no surgeries on record at all—looks like the prednisone we found on him was for bronchitis.”
Barry tapped his fingers on the laptop. “That doesn’t make any sense. T. gondii isn’t fatal for most—”
“Wait up. There’s more. I said MacDonald had no surgeries on record. But the medical examiner found a big ol’ surgical scar on his side, and when they opened him up, guess what they found?”
Realization dawned on him like a harsh interrogation room light. “More like what they didn’t find. A kidney, am I right?”
“Got it in one guess,” Joe said. “Missing a kidney. M.E. says it was a decent enough removal, not a butcher job, but there’s zero record anywhere of MacDonald having a kidney removed.”
Barry stood up and started pacing again. “So someone must have done it illegally.”
“And then patched the guy up and sent him out into the world. And get this: Paulson had a scar over his abdomen. Barry: his stomach was missing. I don’t even know how that’s possible!”
“Well, in some extreme cases, surgeons bypass the stomach entirely and connect the small intestine right to the esophagus.” It was called a total gastrectomy, and it usually happened only when the patient had advanced stomach cancer. But that wasn’t the point, Barry realized, because no one would perform such an operation and then let the patient wander off. “Where was Paulson found? Near the recycling plant, right?”
“Yep. How did we miss this?”
Barry scrolled through his files. “Well, we were going too fast . . .” He stopped himself even as the words tumbled out of his mouth.
You always try to go faster. That’s what Madame Xanadu had said, and she’d made it sound like a bad thing. Which had befuddled him, but now Barry thought maybe he was beginning to understand.
“We moved too quickly,” he said. “I got the blood samples from Paulson so fast and checked them . . . I saw something strange and assumed it was the answer, not just a clue.”
“And then when you saw the same thing in MacDonald . . .”
“Confirmation bias,” Barry admitted. “Seeing what I wanted to see, not what was actually there. If we’d waited for the M.E.’s report first, I might have gone into it with a different perspective. But the M.E. is always backed up, and I always think I can figure it out faster, don’t I?” He slammed a fist on the table. “I’m such an idiot! Singh is totally right to fire me!”
“Hey!” Joe snapped at him. “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk from you! You got me?”
Barry said nothing, fuming at himself.
“You goofed,” Joe said. “It happens. But what sets you apart from other people, Barry, is that when you get evidence to the contrary, you don’t just charge ahead with your original thought. You actually change your mind. And that’s a rare thing in this world.”
He didn’t want to admit that Joe could be right. It seemed easier to wallow in self-pity and anger. But what Joe described was nothing more than the scientific method, the basis of Barry’s entire life. You propose a hypothesis. You test it. If it’s right, great. If it’s wrong, you adjust and keep testing. You don’t stick to a wrong hypothesis just because you like it or because you’re invested in it. You let the world be the world and change your mind to fit the facts, not the other way around.
That’s what he’d done all his life. And that’s what he would keep doing.
“So let’s think about this,” he said. “Paulson was found at the recycling plant.” He closed his eyes. “And MacDonald was found at—”
“In the alleyway,” Joe told him.
“Right,” Barry said. “I’m there right now.”
And he was. He’d sped over in the microseconds it took Joe to interrupt him.
There was nothing special about the alley. He remembered the puddle—now dried up—in a divot of pavement not far from where the body had been found. That, combined with the dampness on MacDonald’s leg, had convinced him that someone had dragged MacDonald in from a particular direction.
But what if that snap judgment was wrong? What if he was going too fast?
“Slow down, Allen,” he muttered to himself, and he took a turn around the alley, eyes narrowed, searching for . . .
Well, he didn’t know what for.
“Anything?” Joe asked.
Barry blinked. He grinned. He told Joe to wait a moment, then got down on his hands and knees. Not far from the divot, a large Dumpster lurked against the exterior brick wall of the grocery store. He got down on his hands and knees. The Dumpster was on wheels, and from this vantage point, he could see very, very light tracks in the filth o
f the alley floor. The Dumpster had been pushed into a different position, and recently, too—the wheels still glimmered with wet grime.
Barry got down lower, lying on his stomach, not caring that his clothes were getting dirty. In the light from his cell phone, the area under the Dumpster leaped into shadowy relief.
And there he found exactly what he was looking for.
“Joe,” he said, scrambling to his feet, “get down here—fast!”
Joe crouched down, one hand pressed against the Dumpster, trying to look underneath without getting any alley grunge on his suit.
“You have to really flatten yourself,” Barry told him, pacing the alleyway, biting his thumbnail.
“Man, this is a six-hundred-dollar suit,” Joe complained, straightening up. “I’m not scuzzing it up. I’ll take your word for it—there’s a sewer grate under there.”
“It looks like one of the old ones,” Barry told him, “from before the big infrastructure remodel back in the eighties.”
Joe giggled deep in his throat. “And now you’re also an expert on Central City’s sewer system?”
“Well . . .” Barry blushed. “I know some things about some things, OK? Anyway, they put in new, more efficient grates around the city, but in a lot of situations, they left the old ones in place, too, so if we had a big flood, they would have additional capacity.”
“I can’t believe you know these things.”
“Joe, come on!” Barry pushed at the Dumpster, but it wouldn’t budge. “See this? Whoever moved it is really strong. And he pushed it aside, hauled MacDonald up from the sewers, and left him here. Someone dragged both of these guys down into the sewers, performed meatball surgery on them for their organs, and then tossed them aside. And before they died from complications due to the removal, they picked up a huge amount of T. gondii because they’re down there in the sewage.”
Joe tapped his pen against his notebook, thinking. “You think this is related to Mr. Presto Changeo with the wand?”
“Hocus Pocus? Doubt it. This isn’t his style. He’s a vain glory hound chasing the adrenaline high of a standing ovation. This other one . . . I don’t even know where to start with it.”
“Great.” Joe heaved out a sigh and threw his hands into the air. “Just great. Two of these bozos running around at the same time.”
“You need to check records,” Barry said very seriously. “Go back six months. Maybe even a year. See if any other bodies with removed organs showed up. Unsolved cases. The M.E. said the surgery wasn’t slapdash—the victims might have died of something else, so the surgery was ignored.”
“I’ll get on it.” Joe turned to leave, then turned back. “What are you gonna do?”
“Me?” Barry asked with wide-eyed innocence. “Nothing at all. Go home. Watch TV.”
As soon as Joe was gone, Barry made sure no one was watching him. He ran several circuits of the alleyway, building up enough momentum, before flinging himself at the Dumpster.
A loud CLONG! reverberated in the alley and in his skull, but it was worth it: The Dumpster skidded several feet, screeching along the pavement. Barry marveled at the strength of whoever had moved it originally to conceal the grate. Definitely a meta. A strong one.
Not his favorite kind.
With the grate now exposed, he knelt down and examined it. The lug nuts that locked it down had been removed. Yeah, someone was definitely using the sewers.
He hauled up the grate. It was cast iron and heavy, but with some effort and a fair amount of grunting, Barry was able to wrestle it from its grooves and slide it to one side, giving him access to the sewer below. In the light of his cell phone, the sewer plunged down into fetid darkness. Grimy rungs disappeared into the abyss. Spots along the rungs had been wiped almost clean by someone climbing.
He took pictures of the clean spots and what appeared to be partial imprints from shoes. Just in case. Not really enough to investigate, but it might be helpful later.
“Well, Allen, what else were you gonna do today?” he asked himself, thinking of the apartment, the sofa, the TV.
Hocus Pocus.
Might as well do something useful, if disgusting.
With a sigh and a deep breath, he climbed down the ladder. The sky shrank to a disk overhead, and then, as he descended farther, a dot above him. He thought of the mysterious card he’d drawn at Madame Xanadu’s. But that had been a black dot on a white field, not this shrinking beacon of fresh air and light against the murk of the sewer.
The lower he went, the stronger the stench of effluvia and waste grew. He gagged, then took a moment to pull his T-shirt up over his mouth and nose. Breathing through the fabric helped a little bit.
Just as Barry was wondering how deep the sewer went, his left foot, questing for the next rung, splashed into something viscous and in sludgy motion. Gross. He’d just stepped in sewage. And these were his favorite sneakers—a gift from Iris.
Oh well. Life with superpowers means getting dirty sometimes.
Barry held up his phone to peer into the murk. The tunnel ran from his left to his right, a slow-moving braid of mucky water trickling around and past him. Which way to go, upstream or downstream?
At superspeed, he could check both pretty quickly, but he didn’t relish the idea of kicking up a backwash of gross sewage.
Then he spotted something off to his right, downstream. Creeping closer, walking like someone who’s spent too long on horseback, in order to straddle the sewage, he came upon a chunk of concrete missing from the wall. It had crumbled here and collapsed into the sewage, sticking up like an island, the size of a small toaster, maybe.
The chunk of concrete wasn’t interesting at all. But what lay next to it, shielded from the slow current of effluvia, was very interesting.
A shoe.
To be specific: a brown tasseled loafer, worn and thread-bare. Left foot. Size 10 ½, EEE.
Barry hadn’t conducted any tests, but he was positive: This was Mitchell MacDonald’s missing shoe.
It couldn’t have fallen down the sewer grate—the gaps between slats are too narrow. He had to have been down here. And since there was no sewage or filth on his body, someone carried him through here to dispose of the body up in the alleyway. But his shoe caught on the concrete and fell off . . .
Barry continued downstream, shadows leaping and jittering around him from the fragile light of his cell phone. Some part of him thought to call the gang at STAR Labs, just in case.
You don’t need backup, he told himself. You’re the Flash! You’re just getting nervous because it’s creepy down here. Looks like a weird first-person shooter with the brightness level out of whack.
He kept moving.
The tunnel tightened a bit as he proceeded; small pipes overhead merged into large pipes, reducing the head space. Crouching and ducking, he made his way deeper into the sewer system. So far, there were no other clues. He’d hoped for something else. Maybe something that had fallen out of MacDonald’s pocket. A clue that he was on the right path.
Above the trickle of running sewage, he heard something else. Something between a gasp and a snort. It was vaguely porcine, piglike, he thought, and it was coming from right ahead.
Moving slowly, so as not to make any noise, Barry continued down the tunnel. It narrowed further, such that his shoulder brushed against the sides as he moved. He grimaced in revulsion as something grossly dun-colored rubbed off on his shirt. He frowned and futilely tried to wipe it off. Now his hand was disgusting. He wiped it on his jeans. All he accomplished was making them dirty, too.
Another noise caught his attention. A rustling. Up ahead. He aimed his light in that direction and—
—something—
Something moved there. At first he thought it was a shadow cast by his moving light, but then he caught a glimpse of what had to be arms and legs, though they seemed attenuated to an extreme. Maybe it was the angle, the lighting, the shadows. It was a person—painfully thin and tall but crunched into an un
natural position, contorted to move through the tunnels.
A flash of wan, jaundiced yellow went by in the murk, lit momentarily as it passed before his cell phone. Barry heard a hiss of anger, of derision, and then the person vanished before his eyes.
Barry blinked in shock. Where had he—she—it—gone?
A moment later, he had his answer: There was an intersecting tunnel up ahead.
But when Barry got there, he saw that the offshoot tunnel was a much, much tighter squeeze than the one in which he stood. Barry couldn’t imagine how he could fit in it. A crushing sense of claustrophobia gripped him at the mere thought of it.
Peering down the tunnel, he saw nothing but a gradation spiraling into darkness. Whoever had run in front of him had had no trouble fitting into the tunnel and had moved through it incredibly quickly. Not Flash-fast, but really speedy for such a dark, tight spot.
What in the world am I dealing with here?
He had no more time for the question. His cell phone dinged its text message tone:
Get back to STAR!
19
“You reek,” Caitlin told Barry when he zipped into the Cortex, holding her nose to emphasize the point. Cisco nodded in agreement. H.R. politely said nothing.
“I know you’re depressed,” Cisco said, “but personal hygiene is still important, man.”
“I was down in the sewers.” Barry held up a hand to forestall comments. “Don’t ask why. We’ll talk about it another time. What have you guys got?”
Appropriately, Cisco was practically vibrating with joy. “I have good news and I have bad news,” he said, barely able to contain himself. He looked exhausted, having spent days with little sleep examining the nanites, but at this moment, his excitement seemed to banish the need for rest.
“Given how psyched you look, I’m assuming the good news outweighs the bad?”
Cisco’s grin flickered, then faltered. “They’re actually one and the same.”