Do Unto Others...

Chapter 9: Closing In

The Bat-Cave, June 29th, 6:31 a.m.

With Barbara's assistance, I had been able to download the file on the car accident from the sheriff's department. It hadn't been the shoddiest work I had seen, but it was close. They had done a fair enough job photographing the scene with a third rate digital camera and had also gone through the process of searching for matches on missing persons or stolen vehicles but neither had resulted in a hit. At the time being, they were making inquiries at the remote residences around the state park, hoping that someone had seen something.

Hope was not a method in solving crime, at least not one I practiced.

After the sheriff's department had made it to the scene in the wee hours of the night, I had departed, already collecting blood samples, photographing the body and taking scans of several boot prints that had led into the woods. The coyotes had obviously dragged the body from the actual kill site, which I had found thirty feet east. Copious amounts of blood splatter and pooling in addition to scattered footprints and drag marks. If I could match them to the previous prints taken, I would have physical connection to the previous murders instead of relying solely on my gut instinct.

I had made it back to the Cave just before six in the morning, Alfred ready and waiting with a breakfast tray and a carafe of fresh coffee. After directing him to set them on the workbench of the computer bay, I took ten minutes to shower and change, hoping to scrub away the fatigue. When I had emerged, he had waited until I had taken a seat before pouring the first of many cups.

"Ms. Selina called last night."

I had been occupied with logging onto the computer, slightly put off when I found that Barbara had signed off already. I had taken the steaming mug from him, sipped carefully and had replied, "I'll call her later."

"Very well, sir. I take it from the determination beaming from your eyes that you have made progress?"

"In a way," I had responded without looking at him, my gaze directed at the screen as I looked through the file Barbara had composed the previous day. Regrettably, Tim and Cassandra had made no headway in their work from the previous night, nor had Dick. I had briefed Alfred on the discovery of another victim at the scene of the odd motor vehicle accident and then voiced my interim plan aloud.

"The suspects the feds have don't match either of the cars. There was no ID on this new victim, so the coroner is going to have to rely on alternative methods of figuring out who she is. If someone reports her missing, that would help, but I can't count on it," I plugged in the vehicle description into the state DMV and linked it to a face recognition from the photos I had taken.

Alfred had cleared his throat at the sight of the ghastly face and said, "Thankfully, we can always count on you, Master Bruce."

While I had waited for the search to hopefully put a name to the face, I had then started another comparison with the new boot prints to those we had on file. Sure enough, a perfect match. Not a second later, the DMV search had completed, with three possible results. One of the young women lived in Newark, the second in a small rural town over a hundred miles away and the last lived in Greeneville.

Just outside of Rockledge.

"This is her, it has to be," I had muttered to myself. Claire Sumner. Aged 23. Blonde and blue, five and one-half feet tall. Corrective contact lenses and she was a registered organ donor. I had the crays bring up whatever else there was on file for the late Claire Sumner and had proceeded to drain the rest of the mug as multiple windows popped up. Two arrests, one two years earlier for public intoxication and the second for indecent exposure. Skimming the police reports, she had just had too much fun for the local police to handle.