Homecoming (Complete)

Chapter Four

In three days Riley was going to have to leave town so that Alex could fly back from overseas. It had been a fairly productive month—she had caught someone trying to switch out high quality building supplies on the site with low quality crap to make an extra buck (it was one of the reasons she insisted on a twenty-four hour work schedule—it made it much harder for criminals to try to steal from the site, or use it for unsavoury things, if there was a constant flow of workers running all over the place), she had stopped several attacks on women in Amusement Mile and around Old Gotham, and she had even managed to get eyes on Batman in action while he was stopping a bank robbery. She'd had no more sightings of Batgirl, but she did help Batwoman shut down a drug lab. 

There had been something familiar about Batwoman—mannerisms, voice (obviously disguised, but there was still something about it)—so that when she had asked Alex who she was, Alex had replied "Shade. You can call me Shade", instinctively switching to an accent she hadn't used for years—one that had been her natural accent for a long time, but a long time ago. It was a blend of accents from all the cultures and languages she'd been exposed to as a child and it was impossible to pinpoint an exact geographic origin for it. She wasn't sure why she had done it, but something about Batwoman set off alarm bells. She had left the encounter with a niggling feeling that she should know who the woman was, but even her eidetic memory couldn't pull out an exact frame of reference for that feeling so she had let it drift to the back of her mind where her subconscious could chew on it for a while.

Tonight was going to be her last foray into the grime and slime of Gotham's darkest corners. She had been working on the problem of the missing women in Amusement Mile and Old Gotham all month, and she thought she may have stumbled onto a proper clue two days ago.

She had left her gloves sitting on a table in the lunchroom at the site and had to go back to get them. The room was empty for that few minutes between lunch shifts so it was extraordinarily quiet, and, as she walked under a vent on her way to the table to retrieve her gloves, she caught the tinny echo of a distant heated conversation. She only caught a few words before the next lunch group came pouring into the room, but the gist was that some important shipment was going out in a couple of days and angry voice one was telling frightened voice two that someone would die if they didn't cooperate. Alex had recognized voice two—it sounded like her project manager was being blackmailed into helping with something illicit.

Alex had searched for all potential shipments going out of Gotham over the next few days (there were tons, as you would expect in any large city), and, after discarding all the usual and legitimate stuff, she'd been left with a couple that seemed odd—one was at Tricorner Yards way at the south end of Gotham, and the other was leaving on a massive yacht out of Rogers Yacht Basin just north of the construction site and right on the edge of Amusement Mile. Her money was on the yacht —Tricorner felt like a ruse (it had stood out just the slightest bit, and in a way that didn't feel accidental)—so she leaked what information she had been able to dig up about the strange shipment out of Tricorner to the GCPD (she suspected it was a diversion to keep everyone away from Rogers) and decided to investigate the yacht basin herself. 

All the paperwork indicated the yacht was picking up a shipment of valuable art and artifacts that had been purchased from the Gotham Museum to take to a new museum opening up somewhere overseas. The art purchase had checked out, but the fact that it was being transferred at night, and that after verification by the proper authorities at the Museum (and only the Museum) the items would be sealed into a massive airtight holding facility on the yacht—not to be opened again until delivered to their new home in order to 'protect the valuable items from the damaging effects of the sea air, sunlight, and any other potential harmful dust or debris that they might be subjected to during travel'—raised some red flags. This was fifth such shipment in the past year—another red flag in Alex's books, but she was sure the authorities would just see it as proof that everything was on the up and up because the yacht owner had been doing it this way since the beginning. It was on record that the first two shipments had been thoroughly inspected at the time of loading onto the yacht and had been exactly what it claimed to be—art and artifacts purchased from some local art collectors, the museum, and from other museums across the country. After that the contents had not been inspected before loading again—just locked in the special room and sent on the way.