The Edge of a Blade
Chapter 2
By Draco664
Tim Drake casually tossed up a fluffy white object high into the air and caught it in his mouth as it fell. He sat slouched down in his chair with his feet up on the massive bank of computing equipment, legs crossed at the ankles. In front of him, the crays compiled the latest changes he had made to an experimental program. Seemingly lost in thought, he chewed and swallowed, before extracting another snack.
"You'll choke."
Tim looked up at Oracle's features on the screen. "Nah, it's just popcorn."
Oracle gave his a smirk. "Does Bruce know you're down there."
Tim tossed up another kernel, and deftly caught it in his teeth. "Mmm-humm," he mumbled as he chewed. "He's got me working on something pretty big."
"Well, I've got something he might find a little more important."
Tim raised his eyebrows. "Good luck. He's got me running all sorts of theoretical models on some heavy-duty physics. From what I understand, he's trying to determine if there was a way to reverse entropy over a small area."
Surprise registered in Oracle's eyes. "He doesn't believe in starting small, does he?"
Tim shook his head. "Nope. Anyway, he's all in a fuss about that explosion uptown last night. He's got all sorts of evidence that breaks a heap of the laws of physics. Like the unravelling fire hose, the cars out the front starting; he seems to think that something caused the potential energy in the area to reverse or something without anything to force the change. Like I said, he's trying to work out how to reverse entropy."
"Well, I've got a lead for him."
"Uh huh," Tim replied, tossing up another piece of popcorn.
Oracle's eyes focused on something to her right and she tapped a few keys off screen. "After the Clench, I cracked the coroner's office computers and made an addition. Whenever an autopsy returns an odd result, it raises some flags here." She focused on Tim. "One popped up on the radar about an ten minutes ago."
"And?"
"Jones, Gary, 27, cab driver. Found dead in his cab by an off duty police officer."
"What was so odd that it flagged him for your attention?"
Oracle grimaced. "Symptoms indicate he was poisoned. His nervous system simply crashed around him. Toxicology reports say there were some odd things in his bloodstream, but nothing matched in their database. He had an empty stomach, since he'd woken up about an hour before his death, and apart from a small cut on his finger, there were no puncture wounds."
"Odd, but I doubt it will catch Bruce's attention."
"How about the fact that his cab's GPS puts it at your odd scene before the explosion, and has it leaving the scene just afterwards, but before the police arrived?"
Tim swung his feet off the desk and turned around in his chair. "Bruce!"
The graveyard shift at the Gotham morgue was generally rather exciting. At least, compared to other big cities around the country. At many times in recent history, the door barely stopped swinging as bodies were wheeled in and out at all hours of the day.
At times when the various nutters Gotham seemed to attract were at large, the intake of corpses sharply increased, often with little calling cards. It didn't take a genius to tell that the Joker was on the loose when bodies started piling up in here with gruesome grins, or that the Scarecrow was free and plying his deadly trade when expressions of terror were common on the dead.
Even so, the orderly on duty tonight didn't notice the almost inaudible sounds of someone taking a pair of bodies from his care. Neither would he notice the empty drawers and missing personal affects.
In five hours time, he wouldn't notice their return either.
Tim examined the clothes of the headless corpse while Batman inspected the body itself, doing his own post-mortem.
While the neck of the shirt was stained with blood, not a great deal more was.
"Was he wearing anything else over the top of his shirt?" Tim asked.
"No." Batman replied absently.
Tim made a face. "If someone cut off your head, the blood spray would cover everything, wouldn't it?"
"Only if you were standing upright. The blood pressure would force most of the spray away from the body otherwise."
Tim blinked. "I suppose that makes sense. What about this guy?"
Batman looked up, his cowled face intent on his task. "From the spray patterns on the walls, he was kneeling as he was decapitated by a single blow."
Tim swallowed. "It would have to have been a sharp blade. Beheadings in Europe during the middle ages sometimes took a couple of strikes with the axe, and that was when everything was done correctly."
Batman nodded. "You can see how sharp the blade was by the cuts in the material on the sleeves. He managed to evade a few attacks after his sword was shattered."
Tim quickly arranged the material under the microscope so that one of the few bloody cuts was in focus. At high magnification, the clean and precise cut in the fabric was fairly obvious, if a little obscured by the blood. As sharp and straight as a razor, if not sharper.
Batman's voice became a little muffled as he again closely examined the corpse. "Now examine the stab wound on the front."
Tim fumbled with the shirt to lay it down flat. The obvious gash in the front was crusted with dried blood.
"What am I looking for?"
"A connection," Batman replied. "Come here."
Tim nodded, and moved quickly over to the examination table. The headless body made his stomach quiver slightly, but he swallowed and looked at what Batman was indicating.
"One thing I noticed at the scene was that the wounds under the cuts in the fabric appeared to be old. Look. See that one, just below the elbow on the forearm? The cut on his shirt was wet with his blood when I examined the body, but the cut beneath was almost completely healed." Batman pointed to a point on the body's other arm. "There was a bloodied cut in the material at that point too. The blood belonged to the victim, but there is no wound at all. Not even a scar."
Tim frowned. "Surely he wasn't just wearing a previously bloodstained shirt. One he was wounded in earlier?"
Batman shook his head. "The blood on the shirt after the murder was both fresh and warm. Now, consider the manner of death. At any other time, stabbing a man through the heart would be fatal. Decapitating him afterwards would be considered overkill, if not deliberate mutilation of the corpse. But I've examined the wound to the heart. Even though it was received just seconds before the final blow, it had started to heal." Batman shook his head slightly.
"This is the most fascinating cadaver I've ever seen," he continued. "Look, the kidneys are perfect. Perfect colour, perfect texture, right down to the cellular level. It is as though he never came in contact with any toxin in his life. The lungs are flawless, even though both his hair and home reek of pipe smoke. His liver is as unblemished as a newborn's, even though there were empty alcohol bottles strewn everywhere in his room."
Tim blinked. "So, he smoked and drank, but was perfectly healthy?"
Batman shook his head. "No, he smoked and drank heavily, and was beyond healthy. No, at the moment, only there are only two theories that make sense. Either this man's body healed itself orders of magnitude faster than usual or the body was perfectly reproduced cell by cell and planted at the scene.
Tim nodded tentatively. "OK. Which do you think is more likely?"
"I need more data before I make that decision. Normal human teeth do not heal themselves in the usual way, but this man's teeth were perfect. There were no cavities, fillings or blemishes. So if the first theory was valid, not only did he heal faster, his entire body healed."
Batman pulled off a latex glove and ran his hand over his chin. "On the other hand, the technology for creating a perfect body cell by cell may be able to create the same effects as were found at the scene."
Tim looked towards the refrigeration unit where the cab driver's body lay. "Um, we only have an hour or so before we need to return them. We should get started on the other one."
Tim watched Batman's examinations with open curiosity. The lining of the cab driver's extracted stomach proved to be of intense interest to his mentor; Batman had been almost hypnotised by the foul smelling organ.
"Um, since he hadn't had anything to eat, he couldn't have ingested the poison."
"You can poison a glass of water, Robin, and if the victim had only taken a sip there would be no trace of food in the stomach."
Tim grimaced. "Ugh, I didn't think of that."
Batman straightened, pushed back his cowl and shook his head. "You are right though, there is no trace of the poison in his stomach at all. Besides, the poison used is not one taken orally. It needs to be applied to the bloodstream."
"You know what poison was used?"
Bruce nodded. "I learned about it during my first trip to South America. It is an exceedingly rare poison, but it is only used by a handful of tribes to kill small prey, and as such it is not particularly potent. I didn't believe it could have killed someone."
"So it was given through the cut on his finger?"
Bruce nodded, his attention firmly on his powerful memory. "I've swabbed the wound, so we can run some more tests on it later. Right now, we need to find out what he was doing at the scene of the explosion. We need to know who he was transporting."
Tim nodded. "I'm on it."
As Batman ran the bodies back to the morgue, Tim sat at the cave's computers and worked his magic. He made a couple of calls to Oracle for some technical advice and one to Batgirl for help of a different kind, but by the time Batman returned, he had a few answers, which only led to more questions.