Forensic Fantasy VII: Bones

“Sometimes, people ask why we’re doing this. Kind of a stupid question, I always thought…but maybe it depends who’s asking it. Or who’s being asked, I guess. I never really know what to say, when people ask things like that. I dunno why I’m doing it, that’s for sure. Well…maybe I do. We’ve got our reasons. We’ve all…done things. Stuff we aren’t proud of. Yeah, even me. Especially me. That’s my reason.”

A misty grey rain fell from the sky, slowing drenching Junon. Rain seeped down the building faces, staining them with dark, moody colours. In a long, wet alley, colder and damper than most, a solitary figure crouched, staring at the ground. A thin wisp of cigarette smoke rose slowly from the burning ember at the end of a cigarette and there was a long, slow intake of breath. A stream of smoke accompanied by a low whistle clouded the alley, illuminated by the narrow beam of flashlight.

“Well,” Reno said finally, trying to sound optimistic, “At least we know he’s dead.”

Rude gave a soft snort. “A two-year-old could tell you he’s dead. We’re doing just a little better. We know he was shot in the back of the head. Other than that…” Rude trailed off and gave a slow sigh. “This is pretty hopeless, Reno.”

Standing up Reno lifted his face slightly his eyes closed, letting the soft rain slowly form droplets that ran down his cheeks and seeped into the deep slashes on his cheekbones, the polluted rainwater making them burn slightly. “Yeah, I know,” he agreed finally. “But…”

Rude shook his head. “Don’t. Don’t even say it.”

“I didn’t say it. Tseng said it. ‘No matter what happens, never give up, because once you give up, you lose.’ I’m a pretty shitty loser, Rude.”

Rude folded his arms. “This isn’t about you. This isn’t a game. And, even if it were, you can’t win a game if you don’t know how to play.”

Reno shrugged, his narrow shoulders lifting for a second, then slumping back down. “I dunno. It…just doesn’t feel right not to do anything. This city’s in a state of total anarchy. I don’t like disorder. Plain and simple, it scares me. I’m used to being in a situation with order and control, crime and punishment. According to everything I know, this ain’t right.”

“This wasn’t personal. It had nothing to do with you. There’s no one out to put a bullet in your skull.”

Lifting his cerulean eyes, Reno met his partner’s gaze with a haunting question in his eyes. “How do you know?”

Rude sighed again. “So what do you want to do?” he asked finally.

“I told you, I dunno.” Reno shrugged again and gave a hollow laugh. “I just wish I knew more about corpses.”

“Reno, I don’t think there’s anything we can do.” Rude turned and started to head out of the alley. “Let’s just head home. Like you said, we don’t know the first thing about cadavers.”

Reno didn’t answer for a few moments, staring at the corpse in front of him. “I think I know someone who does.”

*

A soft, pink tinged mist washed over Nibelheim, eddying and swirling in slight currents through the town’s streets. Dawn was slowly making its way into the sky and there was no movement in the village’s quiet square. A pair of silhouettes appeared through the mist and entered the town, two of silent shadows.

They crossed the town square slowly, at an almost lackadaisical pace, proceeding slowly up a slight hill to the manor at the top of the crest. Easing open the rusty iron gate with a low creak, the pair headed up the walkway to the door. The mansion was old and forbidding, but a single light glowed in one of the upstairs window, indicating that someone was home.

“Well…here goes,” Reno muttered, reaching out and pulling a chain beside the door. The deep chime of a bell rang within the house and the light in the upper room flickered as someone came to the window. For a few moments, the dark shadow hovered in the window, then vanished.

Tapping his foot for a few minutes, Reno leaned against the doorframe and drummed his fingers on the rough wood. Behind him, Rude cleared his throat and rubbed his nose. Reno was about to reach out and ring the bell again, when the door opened.

“Can I help you?” The man in the doorway inquired, rubbing one hand on the leg of his jeans and holding the door halfway open with the other. Reno noticed that he hadn’t opened the door fully, or even really come out of the house. He leaned outside, about half his body still inside, wearing a plain, unbuttoned silver-blue coloured shirt, a little baggy in the sleeves, and covering a black t-shirt. His long black hair was tied back in a ponytail and his ruby eyes were curious, but cautious at the same time.

Reno held up a long bone that he’d been carrying. “Is this a tibia or a fibula?”

Vincent’s eyebrow arched slightly and gingerly took the bone in both hands. He looked at it blankly for a few seconds, then seemed to snap out of a private trance. “Uh…it’s a femur, actually. Where did you get this?”

“I found it in a dumpster, behind a bar in Junon,” Reno reported promptly. “Just sitting there, looking oh-so-sinister and very human. I don’t know whose it is, I don’t know how it got there, and I don’t know where it came from. All I thought I knew was that somewhere in the city of Junon, some poor sap was missing one of his tibial bones. Now I know that some poor sap is missing one of his femoral bones, which is a bit of a bigger deal than just a measly tibia.”

Vincent squinted at the bone for a few more seconds. “I think it’s female, actually, but that’s just my intuition talking. Two questions. Firstly, what were you doing in a dumpster? Secondly, why do you care that some poor Junon sap is missing a femur?”

“Oh, I’m over the femur. I figured out a long time ago that I’m never gonna know how that wound up in my dumpster. It’s just one of the many little things that continue to haunt my everyday existence. The femur’s pretty mild, compared to some other things. ‘The arm’, for example, was a pretty bad one, but not nearly the same calibre as ‘the head’, which gave me nightmares for weeks. Of course, that’s only parts of bodies. If we want to talk entire corpses, then I have plenty more stories.”

“I get the picture,” Vincent interrupted, still turning the femur over in his hands, a clawed finger of his prosthetic left hand stroking it thoughtfully. “And you brought this to me because…? Did you need femoral closure or something warped like that?”

Reno shrugged. “I don’t know much about corpses. I don’t know anybody who does. The closest person I know to an authority on the subject…”

“Is myself,” Vincent finished, eyeing the two Turks appraisingly for a few minutes. “Come in,” he said finally, turning around and entering the house. He retreated into the darkness, picking up a flickering candle from where he’d set it on a table beside the door and proceeding into the shadowy manor. “Watch where you step,” he cautioned absently, with a curt gesture over his shoulder.

Reno arched an eyebrow and headed deeper into the house, shuddering slightly. “Love what you’ve done with the place,” he commented dryly, ducking instinctively as a bat swooped low overhead.

“Don’t flinch. Bats can detect the pheromones that a human emits when it feels fear and they take it to mean an easy mark. Nemo hasn’t had human blood for a while now and I’d really rather he didn’t reacquire his taste for it.”

Rude gave a grunt and glanced at his partner. Reno could tell, even without seeing the expression in his partner’s eyes that he was having his doubts. “You have bats,” he observed casually.

Vincent pushed open the door to what was presumably a kitchen, though it was hard to tell in the minimal light that broke its way through the grimy windows. “Nemo is just the front hall bat. Selene, Tuomas, and Tallulah live upstairs.”

“And your bats have names.”

“How are you supposed to address someone who doesn’t have a name? Would you like some tea?”

Rude grunted again and if Reno hadn’t known better, he would have thought he’d heard his partner mutter the word “nutcase” under his breath. The taller man moved from the entrance of the room and pulled a chair from the table, sitting down with a huff and a cloud of dust.

There was a creaking groan and the chair suddenly gave way beneath Rude’s approximate eighth of a ton of muscle.

“And don’t sit on the chairs. They break,” Vincent added absently, filling a kettle with water from an old, lime encrusted tap and setting it on the burner of a wood stove in the corner.

Reno winced as he sensed his partner’s growing disapproval. Scuffing the steel-toed tips of his boots on the dusty floor, Reno ran his fingers through his hair and sat down on the table. “So…uh…that femur thing. How d’you know so much about this kind of stuff?”

Vincent shrugged and opened one of the cupboards, the cabinet door coming off in his hand. He dropped it on the floor unconcernedly and set three mugs on the counter. “I hope no one takes sugar or cream, because I don’t have any. I don’t entertain much.”

“That’s pretty obvious.” Rude cleared his throat. “What sort of tea is that?” he asked cautiously. “Hemlock?” he added under his breath, the barest trace of sarcasm in his tone.

“No, it’s snowberry,” Vincent retorted, a slightly acidic note in his voice. “Listen, I can tell you don’t want to be here, but for some reason, you came to me. A few months ago, I would have been more or less obligated to shoot you.”

“Well, we’re much obliged to you for not doing so now,” Reno interrupted hastily. “So…about that femur. How did you know what sort of bone that was?”

“It’s really not hard.” Vincent set the three mugs on the table and absently dropped a teabag in each one. Taking the kettle from the stove he filled each and leaned against the wall. “The femur is distinctive. It’s the longest bone in the human body, extending from the pelvis to the knee. At the end that connects to the knee there are two bony protrusions, the lateral and medial condyles. And then at the top you have the trochanter, which connects to the muscle tissue. Basic anatomy.” As he spoke, he indicated each part of the bone with the tip of a long brass finger, setting the femoris down on the table when he was finished and taking a sip of his tea.

“I’d never have known that,” Reno confessed. “Not in a million years. How did you learn?”

Vincent smiled ominously. “There are a lot of mixed up skeletons in the basement. I was bored a while ago and I decided to put one together. I ended up with two, actually, one male and one female. It’s remarkable what one can do with a lot of time and a textbook or two based solely on endoskeletal construction.”

“How long did that take you?” Reno asked, suppressing a slight shudder.

“A month, maybe two. I have a terribly poor sense of time.” Vincent eyed the Turk quizzically. “You’re asking an awful lot of questions.”

Reno shrugged. “Curious, is all. Where’d you find the time to do that sort of stuff?”

“How much do you know about me?” Vincent countered with a question of his own, with evident purpose behind it.

“Not much. Avalanche member, pretty good with a rifle, mediocre at magic, and some freaky ass transformation abilities Shinra didn’t have many details about. There’re also rumours going around that you spent thirty years in a coffin, you have fangs, drink blood, and that you don’t age.”

“And Reno is so diplomatically treading around the widely held opinion that you’re a vampire. Though that might be because he popularized the idea himself,” Rude added dryly, taking a cautiously appraising sniff of his tea.

Reno flushed slightly. “Go get stuffed,” he muttered sourly.

The barest hint of a smile touched Vincent’s lip. “Common misconceptions,” he said after a few moments. “I only spent about eight years in a coffin, most of the time I don’t have fangs, and I don’t drink blood except on special occasions.”

For a few seconds, Reno tried to divine whether the slight hint of amusement in Vincent’s crimson eyes indicated that he was joking, or that he was pleased at having two victims waltz right into his house and sit down for tea. “Uh…right. But according to Shinran records, your whereabouts were completely unaccounted for…for a time period of thirty years. Where were you for the twenty-two that you spent out of the coffin?”

“I was here, by merit of the fact that I didn’t want myself to get out and kill anybody, and that I’d decided that Hojo would be back one day.”

Rude nodded slowly. “So you spent over two decades sitting in a crumbling old mansion, plotting revenge and waiting for a madman?”

“Well, it’s not like I just sat there,” Vincent answered, sounding annoyed. “There are approximately twenty seven hundred and eighty three books in this house, in the library, the study, and the lab downstairs. I’ve read just about all of them.”

It took a further few moments for Reno to realize his jaw had inadvertently dropped open. He clicked it shut and swallowed. “What in the hell could you learn from all those books?”

“The lab taught me a lot about medicine. Both practically and academically. As morbid as this sounds, I had a lab full of tools and a room full of corpses. You do the math. The books in the study were almost all about law. And the books in the library were pretty much general knowledge and some literature.” Vincent closed his eyes and sighed. “And none of it did me any good when he did come back.”

Sensing that this was a touchy topic, Reno carefully steered the conversation into slightly less dangerous waters. “So let me get this straight. You’ve had…what, about seven years experience and training as a Turk, a further twenty-two years of education about just about every bloody thing on the Planet, and then a brief stint in a terrorist group?”

Vincent shrugged. “That sounds about right. But they prefer the terms ‘rebels’ or ‘activists’. Barret used to say ‘freedom fighters’, but I always thought that was pushing it. It’s just that ‘terrorist’ has a bit of a nasty ring to it.”

“And now you’re just going to sit in your mansion, not aging, not doing anything, until the end of time?” Reno asked, slowly forming a conversation strategy.

“Well, I’m not doing nothing,” Vincent corrected. “I’m only through about eighty-five percent of those books. I’ve just started reading about entomology. I really don’t know much about the subject yet, but it promising to be a fascinating study. Yuffie was actually surprisingly well-versed in entomology,” he added absently. “Certainly better than I am.”

“But you aren’t really applying any of this knowledge?” Reno prompted. “You’re totally qualified as a scientist, but all your gonna do is sit here and read books for the rest of your goddamn eternal life?”

Vincent blinked and his eyes narrowed slightly. “I’ll admit I don’t spend much time with people and I’m not the best at conversation, but I know when someone’s driving at something. What do you want from me?” he asked curtly, sounding a little perturbed at Reno’s accusation.

Reno grinned. “I was wondering when you’d ask. I been doing the job for six years now and I know for a fact that two Turks don’t show up on your doorstep without a reason.”

“And what’s yours?”

Rude coughed. “I just want it understood from the outset that this is all Reno’s idea. I’m just trying to keep an eye on my partner.”

Vincent’s crimson eyes looked slightly intrigued, but still extremely cautious. “Fair enough. What do you want?”

“I want your help,” Reno answered, folding his arms across his chest. “Why did you go with Avalanche?”

“For personal reasons. Vengeance, mostly. What do you care?” Vincent answered guardedly, still sounding suspicious.

Reno shrugged. “I’m just wondering what it’d take to get you to go along with one of my crazy ideas. I’m not quite as insane as Shinra’s psychologists made Cloud out to be, but some of my schemes are still pretty damn harebrained.”

“What’s your idea?” Vincent questioned, curiosity evident in his tone.

“Do you know what borderline anarchy is like?” Reno questioned, shuddering slightly. “The feeling that there’s no one really in control of the population, and if they got stirred up enough, complete and total chaos could ensue? Midgar wasn’t like that.” Reno’s eyes grew distant, a fading memory in his eyes. “Midgar had order. Midgar was quite possibly the greatest city ever built, in terms of political and social structure. It worked because of the segregation of poverty and wealth, not the equalization of everything. The lower plate had perfect anarchy; the upper plate had perfect civilization. In precise balance.”

Vincent shifted slightly from where he’d been standing, leaning against the wall. “I’d tend to disagree with that. No city is perfect. There are always flaws.”

Reno shook his head. “It’s not as simple as that. Yes, Upper Midgar had its problems. However, in its perceived perfection it was flawed, and through those flaws it was truly perfect. I guess you don’t understand what I’m trying to say?” he asked apologetically.

“Explain it. Paradoxes intrigue me,” Vincent admitted. “I’ve never heard this theory.”

Reno smiled dryly. “You can’t find it in a book. Well…I suppose what I’m trying to say is that the perceived concept of a perfect city would be a city with virtually no problems. Complete utopia. But perfection is an absolute and absolutes don’t exist. What Midgar achieved was sort of a abstraction of perfection, brought about by the perpetual correction of perpetually existing problems.”

Vincent nodded slowly, sinking into deeper thought. “I might be starting to understand what you’re getting at. You’re saying that Midgar achieved its status by always having problems to be corrected, which made the people have solid faith in what they thought to be the perfection of their city, when the problems were corrected.”

“Sort of, yeah. There may have been a high crime rate, but it always appeared to be dropping, because the problem never got ahead of the police. Two, three days after a murder, they’d always have caught the guy. One day, if they wanted to boost the public’s opinions. Maybe a week for a serial killer, to make people begin to question the ability of the city, then restore their confidence as soon as they caught the guy.”

“Even that’s flawed,” Vincent observed after a few minutes silence. “No criminal justice system in the world doesn’t have cold cases. There’s always one that gets away. I know for a fact that Midgar has cold cases.”

“But does it?” Reno countered slyly. “This system has always fascinated me and I’ve studied since I first began to understand it. Sure, Midgar has cold cases. And every so often, it takes one out of the freezer, and it gets miraculously solved.”

Vincent’s eyes narrowed. “Wait. The way you’re talking about things so far, you almost make it seem as though the city is deliberately playing out a drama for the people. Leading them through a sort of freakish play on human existence and civilization.”

“Keep going,” Reno encouraged, eyes gleaming. “Follow that line of thinking.”

“The city maintains the illusion of perfection by always giving the citizens what they want,” Vincent said slowly, constructing his idea as he went. “People don’t like problems unless they’re being solved. If problems are constantly being solved, then the people are happy. It’s not just criminal either, is it? Economics, politics, social equity…things like that. Problems of that nature, always being solved…”

“But for problems to always been solved with one hundred percent certainty, they would almost have to be…” Reno prompted.

“Predetermined,” Vincent murmured, comprehension growing deeper and deeper. “Are you saying that Midgar actually created problems for itself to solve?”

Reno nodded triumphantly. “In a manner of speaking, yes. They weren’t true problems, because they came with prefabricated solutions. False problems with true solutions. All of Midgar’s ‘issues’ were illusory, existing only to be solved. You could even go so far as to suggest that the entire political system was pre-structured. Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that, but it’s a distinct possibility.”

Vincent was silent for a few moments, digesting the information. “But crime doesn’t work that way. Even prefab crime. Humans are greedy and self-serving. ‘No servant can serve two masters, for he shall ever hate one and love the other’,” he quoted. “You can’t have a murder who both serves and defies the laws of the city. Human psychology simply doesn’t allow for that kind of loyalty. The first priority in the criminal mind is self-preservation.”

“Exactly!” Reno agreed, grasping the edge of the table and dangling his long legs off the edge. “So the criminal problems are true. Shinra didn’t control the criminal world, but there’s evidence to suggest that the underworld was structured. It’s never been proven how, but there must have been some sort of reverse hierarchy. Anyway, if false problems have true solutions…”

A slight shock and realization dawned in Vincent’s gaze. “Then true problems must have false solutions. If Midgar couldn’t control the source of the problem, they’d have to control how it was solved…which amounts to illusory justice!”

“That’s what I think, at least,” Reno agreed. “Of course, not all the justice was false. It isn’t impossible to find the true solution to a true problem; it’s just a little more difficult than creating a false solution. However, when Midgar couldn’t find true solutions, to cold cases for example, false solutions were all they had to fall back on. So every once in a while, they’d nab a murderer and lo and behold, he’d also have been responsible for the Sector Four serial rapes in ’97.”

“But that could be completely untrue…so they must have manipulated evidence to support their theory?” Vincent questioned. “That is very, very unnerving. I’m thankful Midgar’s been levelled.”

Reno didn’t answer for a few moments. “I’m not,” he said quietly, staring at the floor. “I lived my whole life in Midgar and now it’s been reduced to a pile of rubble. All because of one stupid little pack of terrorists the company couldn’t catch. President Shinra started to let things slide when he began to believe that Mako was more important than preserving what the city had. Problems started to overcome solutions, because he gave one problem complete priority over the others.”

Rude cleared his throat after his long period of silence. “I had never suspected you of thinking this deeply, Reno,” he remarked.

“Yeah, well, you don’t give me enough credit,” Reno retorted. “I miss Midgar.”

“I suppose the loss of one’s home must be hard,” Vincent observed neutrally. “And it’s a fascinating theory that you should write down somewhere, but I fail to see your point. What do you want?”

“There’s nowhere else in the world like Midgar. Junon is a city of almost the same size, but it’s the total opposite. The classes are mixing, there’s crime all over the place, I don’t even like to think about the political system, and everything’s just so unimaginably screwed up…”

“That’s the nature of a true city,” Vincent remarked. “Nowhere’s perfect.”

Reno shook his head. “I know. And I’m not saying I want Junon to be perfect. It just scares me so badly that Junon is so far in the other direction. We’re talking about tens of thousands of people here. A good ninety percent of them are totally innocent, but there’s ten percent that are screwing the city over, because there’s no structure to the justice system.”

“I’m still not sure of your point. Are you talking about spearheading a political crusade to tell Junon that its situation is shit? Because they probably know that already.”

“No, that’s not what I’m talking about,” Reno answered, standing up and stretching his legs. “I don’t believe in words without action.”

“Which is exactly why we’ve been sitting here talking for the past half hour,” Vincent muttered sarcastically, starting to get impatient. “All right, fine. In your eyes, what’s the greatest problem in Junon right now?”

“Murder,” Reno answered promptly. “And that no one does anything about it. It’s practically become a natural cause of death, like how if you drink too much your liver’s gonna kill you. I think that’s the biggest problem.”

Vincent nodded. “Ok. So it upsets you that a lot of people are getting killed and no one’s doing anything about it. What do you propose as a course of action? Vigilantes? It seems to me that the system of a vigilance committee often amounts to more false justice than even Midgar could dish out.”

Reno started to look slightly agitated in his turn. “You’ve missed my point. Only a small portion of Midgar’s justice was actually false. Yeah, that’s a pretty terrible thing, false justice, but the true stuff was all good!”

“False justice is better than no justice, is what you’re trying to say?”

“No! Well…at least an attempt towards justice is what Junon needs. The police don’t do anything, because they don’t know how…things were different in Midgar…”

“Midgar had the budget to solve crimes,” Vincent countered. “Junon probably doesn’t. Have you got any idea how expensive it is to acquire the equipment to run a criminal lab? There were only two in the world, and now there’s only one.”

Reno blinked. “I was only aware of one to begin with…where’s the other?”

Vincent shrugged. “In the basement.”

*

“Shit. Holy shit,” Reno murmured, standing in the doorway of the elaborate lab in Shinra Mansion. He’d seen Midgar’s criminal lab before, and he’d known the place had been relatively large. In this lab, only about a thousand feet square, it was as though everything was condensed. He didn’t recognize all the equipment, but he could tell what was essential. “Where the hell did you get all this stuff?”

Vincent shrugged and wandered over to a small machine. “Midgar, mostly. Black Market dealing. I haven’t been completely cut off from the world, but I had to be extremely careful when conducting these dealings. Elaborate procedures, to eliminate contact between the dealers and myself. Too dangerous, most of the time. I…had very poor control over my abilities for a very long time. I suppose eight years in a coffin gave me some time to contain myself. If necessary, more could probably be salvaged from the ruins of Midgar.”

“Right,” Reno agreed absently, examining a machine on one of the tables, looking extremely out of place (as did all the high-tech equipment) in the antiquated lab. “D’you know how to use all this stuff?”

“Most of it, yes. Like I said, I had a lot of time to play with. I don’t know how up to date all of this stuff is, but I know it serves its purpose.”

Reno glanced up. “Could I learn?”

“Anyone could learn,” Vincent answered evenly, meeting Reno’s gaze with a faint spark in his eyes. “Is this your point?”

“Kinda,” Reno admitted, suddenly feeling awkward. “I know, it’s kind of a crazy idea. But I always figured that if I tried hard enough, it could work…”

Vincent nodded, the expression in his eyes thoughtful. “And your next question is ‘are you in?’”

Reno shrugged sheepishly. “I was hoping to lead up to that a little more carefully. After all, we did spend the last little while trying to kill each other, and I really don’t know what you care about Junon.”

Vincent sighed and wandered over to one of the machines, running a hand over it thoughtfully. “I think I’ve lost all ability to carry a grudge. Meaning to say, I’ve expended all my hatred towards a single person and he’s dead now.”

“So what’s the verdict?” Reno asked hopefully, sliding a hand into one of his pockets and crossing his fingers.

Vincent was silent for a long few minutes, looking distant. “Can I bring my bats?” he asked finally, looking up with the tiniest glimmer of a smile in his eyes.

*

The mayor of Junon was a very sedate man. Which was a difficult thing to achieve; especially when one’s city is crumbling down around one’s ears. An election was coming up soon, but Mayor Cameron Alexander Rodriguez wasn’t unduly concerned. It wasn’t as if there were any other candidates. And besides, it wasn’t as though there weren’t attempts to improve the city’s condition. Certainly, it could never match Costa del Sol in terms of how happy the residents were, or Corel in terms of economics, or a village like Mideel for healthcare, or Icicle Inn for tourism, but, as was Mayor Rodriguez’s new favourite saying, “It’s a hell of a lot better than Midgar!”

Which is perhaps why Mayor Rodriguez conceded to admit three men who had shown up in the city council building one day and demanded to speak to him. His secretary had announced them, then voiced the opinion that she thought they should call security. However, Mayor Rodriguez was rather bored and in the mood to talk to someone interesting. So, with a dramatic sigh, he had bid his secretary to admit the trio.

The first man to enter his office gave the Mayor quite a start and made him begin to question how effective it would have been to call security anyway. The tall, bald man in a dark, tailored suit and with black sunglasses hiding his eyes was built like a brick wall. He looked around the office a few times, then grunted and stepped out of the doorway, sitting down in a chair beside the door, folding his arms across his muscled chest.

The second, an apparent colleague of the first man because of the similarities in their apparel, was decidedly less threatening. He was not nearly as tall, quite skinny, and had long, vibrant red hair that stuck up in all directions and was tied back in a ponytail that draped over his shoulder. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his slightly wrinkled suit and he slouched a little, eyes darting about the room before coming to rest on the Mayor for a few moments, before flickering around the room again, examining everything.

And the last man to enter was apparently the mildest of the three, dressed in jeans and a loose jacket, long black hair tied back in a ponytail. He was about as tall as the red head, but a little better built. His skin was pale and his features were slightly drawn, giving him a rather weary appearance. There was a definite spark of life in his eyes though, deep wells of crimson that slowly scanned the room, with more caution then his colleague. It was he who spoke first. “You’re the mayor?” he questioned rhetorically, fixing the older man with a serious stare.

Mayor Rodriguez chuckled, a little unnerved at how such a quiet voice could be so penetrating. “That I am, my boy. And you are…?”

“I’m Vincent Valentine. That’s Reno and that’s Rude,” Vincent responded, pointing to the two Turks in turn.

“A pleasure,” the Mayor said, his voice mockingly cordial. “And what brings you gentlemen to my office?”

“Mr. Mayor…I’m certain you know of certain…shortcomings that this city has,” Vincent said carefully. “Now, this is not taken as a reflection on your abilities as a city administrator…”

Reno snorted quietly to himself and started looking at the books on a shelf. There were a lot of familiar titles, and many of them appeared to be about law.

Vincent cast a sharp glance at the redhead, then continued. “But we thought several matters should be brought to your attention.”

“Indeed,” the Mayor drawled, looking highly amused and little concerned. “Such as?”

Reno reached up to pull one of the books from the shelves and made a disgusted noise as he discovered it was just a painted block of wood. He turned around and leaned against the wall, scowling slightly.

Vincent cast another warning look at Reno, and cleared his throat. “Well, we’re mainly concerned with the criminal activity. In the past week, there have probably been about three murders, and nothing’s been done by the city to catch these people.”

“Well, I’m sure our boys in blue are doing the best they can,” Rodriguez said placatingly. “You must understand, as a concerned citizen, that this is a very big city and that the police can’t be everywhere at once.”

“Sir, with all due respect, Midgar was about this size and their criminal justice system ran fluidly. I think it’s probably possible for a forensics lab to be created in this city, which would be able to service the needs of the population adequately. I don’t mean to imply that your police force is inept. It’s just that in the case of many crimes, the police force is simply not up to catching criminals.”

“Uh…huh. And just how much would this ‘lab’ cost?” Rodriguez asked mockingly.

Vincent shrugged. “A quarter of a million Gil would probably be good for a start. Then we’d probably require that amount biannually to build on the foundations.”

“Absolutely not!” Rodriguez said brightly, chuckling to himself. He apparently found the whole situation very amusing.

“Mr. Mayor, with all due respect, your city is falling apart,” Vincent said seriously. “We’re quite willing to try and help you.”

Rodriguez nodded slowly, apparently considering this. He grinned widely. “Well, it’s a hell of a lot better than Midgar!”

“God, you’re an ass!” Reno finally exploded, green eyes flashing. Irritated, he pushed past Vincent and splayed his hands out on the desk, leaning forward. “I mean, shit. How did an idiot like you ever get to be mayor? Are you fucking blind? Or just illiterate? From all the goddamn blocks of wood you keep on your shelves I’d have to assume so. The only people who are happy in this town are the papers, because they feed off human misery. How in the hell can you be in the middle of a cess pool like this and not even notice what’s going on?”

The Mayor’s face purpled slightly. He was obviously unused to backtalk from random strangers. “Young man, do you know whom you’re speaking to?” he asked dangerously.

“Yes! A big fat ass of a man who’s the last person on earth who should be holding the office of mayor!” Reno ran his fingers through his hair, looking agitated. “Mr. Mayor, with all due respect, which is incidentally very little, go take a walk by the waterfront and see if you don’t come back a changed man. There are innocent people being hurt every goddamn day and you don’t do anything about it!”

Mayor Rodriguez’s eyes narrowed and he pressed a button on the underside of his desktop. “I’m quite content with this city’s status,” he said dangerously, glaring at Reno. “And I don’t believe you fully appreciate the condition of the city’s criminal system. Maybe an evening or two in one of the cells across the street would do you some good.”

The door opened and four uniformed security guards entered the room, weapons drawn. “All right everybody. Hands where we can see ‘em,” one of them ordered sternly.

Vincent sighed resignedly and rubbed at his eyes with his right hand, allowing one of the men to handcuff him. Rude stood up and the muscles of his chest bulged slightly as two security guards approached cautiously with a pair of handcuffs. Reno’s green eyes blazed indignantly and he clenched his hands into fists.

“Y’know, one of these days, someone’s gonna slit your fat throat,” he hissed dangerously as one of the security guards snapped a pair of handcuffs around his wrists. “And you’re gonna regret not having us around.”

*

“I told you we should have left him outside.” Rude’s quiet comment echoed around the empty holding cells of Junon’s Police Station, which was right across from the mayor’s office. The bald man was stretched out, semi-comfortably, on one of the bunks in the bare cell, leafing through a small, battered looking bible.

“Shut up,” Reno muttered, leaning against the corner wall, his hands grasping two of the bars of the cell and staring into the empty cell across the narrow corridor. “Just…shut up.”

Vincent was sitting on the floor in the corner, legs crossed and his elbow on one of his knees, resting his chin in his hand as he kept his gaze fixed on the floor. His left hand absently carved designs and symbols in the dust.

“Well, it’s true,” Rude insisted. “You should’ve just kept your mouth shut. If you’d just held your temper…”

“Shut up!” Reno snapped again, resting his forehead against the vertical iron bars of the cell. “At least I care about what’s going on. You don’t even seem to give a damn,” he accused.

“Who’s to say I care any less than you do? I just have a better hold of my emotions. And maybe I realize that this whole idea is probably hopeless.”

Reno turned around and glared daggers at his partner. “Are you trying to start something here?”

“Both of you, be quiet,” Vincent scolded distantly, still tracing symbols on the floor. “We’ve got another sixteen and a half hours of each other to endure, so let’s try to keep this civil. Reno, you’re too emotional. Rude, you give up too easily. Now, shut up and let me think.”

Sullenly falling silent, Reno continued to stare moodily out of the cell and into the corridor, dead quiet except for the snoring of a recovering drunk in the cell closest to the door. “Y’know, the prisons are probably as empty as this too,” he called over his shoulder.

“No, the prisons are full of the falsely convicted,” Vincent corrected, not looking up from the floor. “But we aren’t concerned with the past.”

“Hmph. Easy for you to say,” Reno muttered, trying hard not to reflect on his own past. “So what do we do now?”

There was a long silence before Vincent looked up, looking a little startled. “What? Oh, you were talking to me? Who says I know what to do?”

“Well, you’ve been bloody sitting there, scribbling on the floor for seven and a half hours. Surely you’ve come up with something.”

Vincent appeared slightly taken aback by this remark and glanced up at the barred window, trying to gauge the depth of darkness outside. “It’s been seven hours? Who told you that?”

“You did!”

“I don’t recall saying anything like that…” Vincent murmured to himself, resuming his scratching on the floor. “Did I say that?”

“Yes! You said we had another sixteen and a half hours to go! That works out to us having been here seven and a half hours,” Reno explained patiently, the irritation in his tone showing through.

“Oh. Well, I also told you I have a wretched sense of time. For all I can tell we’ve only been here half an hour.”

Rude looked up from his bible. “One thing about Reno. Can’t keep him in one place for too long, or he starts to go stir crazy.” He cast a glance at his partner, who was rattling the bars of the cell and cursing.

“Duly noted,” Vincent acknowledged, continuing to scratch on the floor. “Reno, maybe you should try and go to bed. See if you can sleep for six hours. Then, if you manage to do that, try to go another six. You can make it a game. I find it’s really quite easy, if you do it in sixes.”

“I don’t want to go to sleep, I don’t want any bloody games, I want to get out of here, now.” Agitatedly, Reno threw his lean frame against the bars and slumped half-heartedly to the floor, looking immensely depressed when they didn’t give way. “Can’t you think of any way for us to get out of here?”

“I haven’t been thinking about getting out of here. I’m perfectly content to serve out this little sentence, and think about more important things. It’s probably a positive thing, think of it that way.”

Reno stared at the dark haired man before him, who still sat, calmly scratching designs and symbols on the floor, completely unperturbed by the fact that he was spending the evening in a cell. “WARDEN!” he suddenly yelled at the top of his lungs. Getting up, he went over to the wall where a small sink and toilet were. Pulling the dingy grey towel that hung beside the sink off the towel bar, he grabbed the flimsy piece of metal and started yanking at it, attempting to pull it loose from the wall.

For a few minutes Reno wrenched and pulled at the flimsy looking bar, not having much luck prying it from the wall.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” Rude cautioned, not looking up from the bible as his partner muttered more curses under his breath and grunted with exertion.

Vincent looked up from the floor and watched Reno for a few seconds. “You’re going to get in trouble for that, you know.”

“Don’t…care…” Reno panted, letting go of the bar for a second and tugging his jacket off. Loosening his tie slightly and rolling up his sleeves, he attacked the towel bar with renewed energy.

Rude grunted finally and stood up, grabbing the back of his partner’s jacket with a massive hand and pulling him back. Reaching out with both hands, he jerked the towel bar once and it came loose with a shower of dull grey paint flecks and mortar. Presenting it to Reno, he returned to his bunk and reopened his bible. “Y’know, I’m getting the impression that if you’re in prison, Christ comes to visit you. Or is that only for special cases?”

Vincent watched dispassionately as Reno started slamming the metal bar into the bars of the cell, making a loud banging noise that echoed all the way up and down the corridor. “And what’s Reno, if not a special case?”

“Hey, what’s all the noise in here?” a loud voice boomed down the hall. “Only five minutes to lights out…you boys’d better not be actin’ up.

Reno dropped the towel bar with a clang, dropped to his knees, and started rattling the bars again, as a uniformed officer appeared outside the door of the cell. “Lemme out! Please, for Christ’s sake, lemme out! I’ll never do it again, I swear! I’ll go crazy in here, Warden, I’m tellin’ ya!” Scrambling to his feet again with the towel bar in hand he crossed the room, grabbed the back of Vincent’s collar, and lifted the metal bar above his head menacingly. “Lemme out now, or I’ll brain the vampire!”

*

“Happy now?”

There was a self-pitying whimper from across the darkened corridor and the mournful clanking of handcuffs that were attached to cell bars.

A flutter of pages and a soft thud, followed by a grunt and a snore indicated that Rude had fallen asleep and for a while the only sounds were his soft snoring and the persistent scratching of metal on concrete. A patch of silver moonlight traveled across the floor at an imperceptible speed, three parallel shadows cast by the bars in the window.

“Vincent?” Reno called softly after a long silence, and there was a slight rustling that indicated he had changed position.

“Hmm?”

“Will it still work? My idea, I mean. Is it still a possibility?”

Vincent looked up for a few minutes, his crimson gaze seeing through the darkness, to the anxiety in the eyes of the young Turk. “What makes you think it wouldn’t be?”

“W-well…it’s just…I screwed everything up pretty badly, today, didn’t I? If things fall through, it’s gonna be because of me. Rude’s right…if I’d just held my temper…is it like Rude says? Hopeless?”

“That depends what you’re referring to when you say ‘hopeless’. If by hopeless you’re referring to us getting a city grant, setting up a half-decent lab, and recruiting sufficient staff to run this thing, and completely solving Junon’s criminal problems, then, yes, things are looking pretty hopeless.”

“Shit,” Reno sighed forlornly. “I’m sorry about this…”

Vincent shrugged. “I never said it was completely hopeless. It’s just not likely that this operation will begin as a civically funded project.”

“Oh.” Reno was silent for a few moments. “What does that mean?”

“Reno, what sort of shape are your morals in?”

“Uh?”

Vincent resumed tracing things on the concrete floor. “Do you believe that morality and legality always coincide?”

Reno didn’t answer immediately, rolling over on his bunk and staring up at the ceiling. “No,” he said finally. “You can break the law and still be morally right.”

“Good. Then I’ll outline our situation, as I understand it. We have all the basic equipment we need to start a lab. I have enough informal training to provide some sort of basis for this idea. You’re eager to learn and Rude is willing to go along with this. Not quite as willing as you, perhaps, but still. We lack a location, we lack the transportation to get the equipment we need from Nibelheim to here, and we lack the capital to acquire either. So what it boils down to is that we’re going to have to start out as a private organization with no money.”

“How’re we gonna get money?” Reno asked, yawning drowsily.

“We’ll figure that out in the morning.”

*

Junon was bustling in the morning, as people headed off to work and the city started to pulse with life and commerce. A waitress hurried into the restaurant and shrugged off her coat, tying on her apron and clocking in. Slipping right into the routine, she tucked a pencil behind her ear and pulled a notepad from the pocket of her apron. Calling a greeting to the cook, she proceeded to shark around the restaurant, spying an unattended back table and bustling over.

“Good morning and welcome to Mom’s Country Diner!” she said briskly. “May I take your order?”

There was a good deal of paper rustling and various newspapers, maps, diagrams, and sheets of scrap paper with number scribbled all over them were folded and whisked away.

“Uh…sure. Let’s see…” The redhead who had spoken first yawned widely and rubbed his sleepy eyes. “I need coffee. And…I dunno, whatever’s on special. Rude?”

The bald man who the redhead had addressed gave a noncommittal shrug and pushed his sunglasses up his nose. “Coffee. And maybe an omelette or something. Surprise me. Vincent?”

“Tea.”

The waitress nodded, scribbling on her notepad. “Ok, so we got two coffees, a tea, one special…how d’you want your eggs, honey? And white, brown, or rye toast?”

“Oh…uh…over easy, I guess. And white toast,” the redhead answered, yawning again and massaging a red area on his wrist, where the skin had chafed and blistered.

“Uh huh…and what about you?” she asked, addressing Rude. “What sort of omelette?”

“Western. And rye toast,” Rude answered, reaching back under the table and pulling out a newspaper.

“Ok, got it. I’ll be back in a minute with your coffee.” The waitress bustled away from the table and vanished behind the counter.

With a moderate amount of rustling the paperwork came out again and covered the table. Rude continued to leaf through the newspaper, calling out coordinates to Reno, who was poring over a map and marking X’s at the designated spots. Every so often, Rude would also call a price to Vincent, who had both a piece of paper and a different newspaper, was marking coordinates on a different section of the map, and was taking down prices and factoring them into calculations, muttering numbers to himself.

“Gentlemen, has it occurred to anyone else what a massive undertaking this is?” Rude asked, flipping to another page of the newspaper.

“Yep,” Reno answered, still scanning the map in front of him. “It’s gonna be a lot of work.”

“Mmm,” Vincent agreed, gaze distant, more focused on his current task. “Do either of you know anything about ‘Continental Shipping’? It seems like a pretty well-represented company and they’ve got reasonable prices…”

“Yeah, sounds good to me…” Reno nodded and rubbed his eyes. “We’ve got a lot of warehouses to look at. And we’re talking some pretty huge price tags. I dunno how the hell we’re gonna get this money.”

Vincent glanced up as the waitress returned to the table with a tray of hot drinks. Shuffling some papers around, he cleared an area of about four inches square and set the teacup the waitress handed him down. He then returned to work.

Reno swallowed about half of his coffee and yawned. “A warehouse might not be the best option. We probably don’t need something quite that huge…maybe a maximum of two thousand square feet.”

“S’cuse me?” the waitress piped up. “Didn’t mean to overhear, but you boys are lookin’ for a warehouse?”

Reno’s drowsy expression vanished and was replaced with a brilliantly charming smile. “We certainly are. D’you know of one…Sadie?” he questioned, glancing briefly at the woman’s nametag.

Sadie nodded, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Sure do. My brother’s been havin’ a hell of a time selling his, down on the wharf. It’s a runty little place, so it’s goin’ cheap…”

“Thank you very much,” Reno said sincerely. “Could we get his address?”

“Sure, hon. He’s down on the waterfront, like I said…” she scribbled an address on her notepad and handed it over. “Now, it ain’t exactly the nicest lookin’ warehouse in the world, but it’ll hold up.”

Reno took the paper and marked the address on the map, smiling brightly again. “Thanks, so much.” Reaching into his pocket he pulled out about fifty gil and pressed it into the woman’s hand. “Really.”

“Any time, darlin’.” Sadie left the table, tucking the money in her pocket and Reno leaned forward eagerly, looking at the address again.

“Now that’s luck! And only a hundred and fifty grand…that’s a steal compared to the other places we’ve looked up,” Reno asserted cheerfully. “Almost makes a night in jail seem worth it.”

Vincent appeared slightly more reticent. “We’re still going to look at a few others. We’ll take that one last. Rude, I’ve got a slightly bigger job for you. Do you have any cash on you or in the bank?”

“A few grand,” Rude shrugged. “What do you want me doing with it?”

“Go to Continental Shipping and contract a truck to go up to Nibelheim and pick up all the stuff from my lab. Make sure you get all the books, too. Oh, and get my bats. They shouldn’t be too hard to catch. I’ll also give you the deed to the house an the address of the guy who’s been trying to buy it off me for the past three years.”

Rude arched an eyebrow. “Seems like a pretty heavy duty assignment. That could take me at least a week. And cost a fair amount.”

“You’ll get it all back out of the value of the mansion. It’s worth a good quarter million. The next little while is going to be a whole lot of really tight budgeting.”

*

Reno slumped down dejectedly in the back seat of the cab they’d been using to get around the industrial section of Junon. In the past three days, they’d visited over forty warehouses for sale and none of them had met Vincent’s standards, which were apparently very high. Rude had also called with the bad news that the manor had only brought a hundred grand, severely narrowing their options. “What do we do if we don’t find a place?” he questioned tiredly.

“If we don’t find a warehouse?” Vincent looked out the window as the cab cruised down the waterfront, boats bobbing at the pier on the left and dingy, rusting warehouses to the right. “Well, then we’re going to have to look into a commercial building. Which I really don’t want to do, but I’ll take it as an option.” He lowered his voice slightly. “You have to understand that the more discreet we are about this, the better. A lot of what we’re doing is going to have to be illegal, to start off with. So the further we are from the public eye…”

“The less likely it is we’ll be caught,” Reno finished. “This is going to be tricky.”

The cab pulled over in front of another warehouse, outside of which a nervous looking man stood, rubbing a hand over the top of his balding head and wiping his other palm on his grubby coveralls. Reno got out of the cab and stretched, while Vincent handed the driver a carefully calculated fare and circled round the back of the cab.

“G’morning!” Reno called cordially to the man. “This your place? Your sister told us to come here, said you had a good price…”

“Oh! You’re the ones she was talking about…” the man rubbed his hand vigorously against his coveralls and held it out politely. “I’m Earl.”

“Reno.” Shaking the man’s hand, Reno cast his gaze over the face of the warehouse, dwarfed slightly by the two that flanked it. It was very nondescript, no name on the front, windows boarded up. He glanced at Vincent, trying to read his expression, but he couldn’t divine anything.

“How much are you asking for this place?” Vincent asked, hands in his pockets, looking totally unconcerned.

“Oh, a hundred and twenty five grand,” Earl answered, trying and failing to match his client’s casual manner. “She’s a good twenty-five hundred square feet, with a catwalk and old offices on top.”

“Hmm.”

Vincent continued to pose questions and Reno scuffed his shoes in the dust, used to the routine. He glanced out over the water and saw a ship on the horizon, absently wondering if it might be the one Rude was on. Silently, he prayed they’d have a place to put the contents of Vincent’s lab before their ship came in.

“Could we take a look inside?” Vincent asked finally.

Reno glanced up hopefully. Vincent rarely got as far as asking to see the interior of a warehouse. He’d usually dismissed the place as a possibility in under ten questions.

“S-sure,” Earl agreed, seeming to sense that this was a positive thing. “Just lemme unlock it…”

As the squat man turned to unlock the padlock on the front doors, Vincent turned around and stared out over the choppy ocean. His gaze fell on the ship on the horizon, but his expression didn’t change.

“So?” Reno whispered, pretending to be staring out to sea. “This one’s looking good?”

“It’s sounding like it will be sufficient,” Vincent agreed slowly. “It’s small, for one thing, and that’s to our advantage. Completely bare, though. We’ll need to set up dividers and counters and all manner of things…It’s no substitute for a real lab, that’s for sure.”

“But it’s better than nothing,” Reno asserted, turning around as he heard the sound of the heavy padlock unlocking.

“W-well…here she is…” Earl threw the doors wide and stepped back to let his customers in.

Vincent entered first his ruby eyes narrowing slightly. The interior of the warehouse was dark, too dark to see the far end, and very little light got in through the grimy and boarded up windows. “Could we get some light?”

Reno entered and coughed, gagging slightly. “God, it stinks in here!”

Earl looked embarrassed. “It’s the waterfront. The smell usually isn’t this bad…”

“I vote no,” Reno muttered under his breath, leaning out the door and facing away from the inside of the warehouse.

“Uh…I’ll just get the lights,” Earl offered, flustered. He turned around and heaved upward on the rusty switch. Fluorescent lights hanging from the high ceiling of the warehouse slowly blinked on, illuminating the front of the warehouse first.

Reno jumped and turned around when he heard a sudden yell of horror and a sharp intake of breath from Vincent. At the far end of the warehouse, dangling from the edge of the catwalk with a rope around its neck was a stiffened body, the eyes bugging out of its face and the mouth twisted in a silenced scream.

For a few moments, there was a stunned silence from the owner and Reno suppressed the familiar sick feeling of finding yet another body in Junon.

“We’ll take it,” Vincent said suddenly, red eyes gleaming brightly. “It’s absolutely perfect.”

Earl’s eyes widened. “B-but…there’s a dead guy…I d-don’t even know how he got here…”

“Hey, liability comes with the territory. We take this place, he’s our problem, and you knock twenty-five grand off the price.” Vincent didn’t wait for an answer, climbing nimbly up the ladder and walking quickly down the catwalk.

Earl stammered for a few minutes, then turned to look wild-eyed at Reno, who was more or less as shocked as he was. “I didn’t have nothin’ to do with it!” he insisted, panicked note in his voice. “He wasn’t here when I come t’ check yesterday…I swear, mister, I got no idea…”

“No one’s blaming you,” Reno interrupted quickly. “We’re happy to take the place off your hands. You just keep your mouth shut about this, and there won’t be any trouble. Trust me, Earl, I have experience in this kind of thing.”

Earl nodded slowly, some of the colour returning to his cheeks. “You guys’d do that for me? I don’t even know who you are…”

Reno flashed a charming grin. “And we don’t know who you are.” He winked devilishly. “We never met. This entire transaction took place over the phone, got it?”

“Write him a check and get him out of here!” Vincent called from across the room, leaning over the catwalk and examining the body that dangled from the railing.

“Ah…right,” Reno dug in his pocket and pulled out his checkbook, a little startled at hearing Vincent raise his voice. Hastily writing the check and postdating it for a few days later, Reno tore it from his checkbook and handed it to Earl. “There you go. Here, take an extra hundred and get a cab.”

Still stuttering, Earl accepted the check and shook Reno’s hand firmly. “Th-thanks for this…”

“No problem,” Reno said easily, returning the gesture. “Glad to help you out. You take care of yourself, ok?”

“Wait a minute.” Vincent had come soundlessly back across the catwalk and down the stairs, and caught Earl’s shoulder with his left hand. “Could we get a receipt?”

“A receipt?” Earl echoed blankly. “Uh…sure. Here, just a second…” Digging in his pocket, Earl pulled out a scrap of paper and scrawled a record of the transaction on the back. “That good?”

“Perfect, thank you. Have a nice day,” Vincent responded distantly, taking the receipt in his left hand and wandering over to the back of the warehouse.

Reno opened one of the double doors and ushered Earl outside. “Bye, Earl!” he called cheerfully, waving and slamming the heavy door. Sighing deeply and gagging at the smell again, he slipped his hands in his pockets and looked around the warehouse, slightly bemused. “I toldya it’d be this one in the end!” he called jovially to Vincent, who was crouched beneath the body, examining the dusty floor from a few feet back. “Tough luck about the suicide dude, but at least he knocked the price down.”

Vincent didn’t answer, still staring at the floor intently. “Don’t come any closer,” he murmured, not turning around as Reno approached. “In fact, go up to the catwalk.”

Slightly bewildered, Reno backed off and climbed up the ladder, leaning over the railing and watching Vincent. “What’s up?”

“I think we might have our first murder.”

*

“Well, I had rather thought you two going to wait for me before starting,” Rude called sarcastically from the entrance of the warehouse, striding across the floor, stopping a few feet from Vincent, who was staring up at the body, and folding his arms across his chest. “Interesting way to store our customers, though. Where’s Reno?”

Vincent started slightly and turned around. “Hmm? Oh…yes, I sent him to do some shopping. We’re going to need a few things.”

Rude grunted. “So who’s our dangling friend?”

Shrugging, Vincent sighed. “I don’t know yet. I’ve been waiting for Reno to get back so we can cut him down and stick him in the fridge in back.”

“We have a fridge,” Rude approved. “Step in the right direction.”

“Can’t have an illegal morgue without a refrigerated chamber.” Vincent rubbed his eyes. “I just wish I had a coroner.”

Rude chuckled. “Well, you seem to have everything else. Your lab is here. Oh, and your bats.”

Vincent looked a little less disheartened and nodded. “All right. We’d better start bringing things in…I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we lack interior walls. So nothing’s going to start until we’re set up properly. And that could take at least a week…and we can’t talk to contractors until we get rid of our dead guy.”

“It’s a step in the right direction…now…we own this place? How much?” Rude questioned.

“A hundred thousand,” Vincent answered shrugging. “Compared to some of the others, we got it cheap, but that’s only because the dead guy knocked of twenty percent.”

Rude nodded. “Not bad. Well…we’d better go start moving boxes. They’re in a truck outside. We have until ten tomorrow morning to get that thing unloaded.”

Vincent paled slightly. “That’s all? I had thought we’d have at least…”

“Yeah, well you thought wrong,” Rude interrupted, glancing at his watch. “And we’re wasting time. Let’s get to work.”

Reluctantly pulling off his jacket, Vincent looked around for somewhere to put it, then dropped it on the floor resignedly. “All right,” he agreed dubiously. “I hope you managed to pack everything with some semblance of order.”

Rude grinned. “Yeah. Order. I was working with teamsters. You’re lucky nothing’s broken.”

*

At about midnight, after about three hours of serious unpacking, a car pulled up in front of the warehouse and Reno climbed out, stretching and slapping the side of the moving truck outside the warehouse. “Anybody home?” he called cheerfully, climbing onto the tailgate and leaning against the wall.

Rude was sitting on top of a crate in the back of the truck box and looked up from mopping his face with a towel he’d procured somewhere. “Hey,” he said, kicking Vincent, who sat on the truck floor with his eyes closed, leaning back against a stack of boxes, in the ribs. “Your personal shopper is back.”

Vincent started and sat up, rubbing his eyes and looking around blearily. “Huh?”

“Working hard?” Reno called sarcastically. “Come help unpack the car.”

“You come help unpack the truck,” Vincent retorted sourly, getting achingly to his feet and stretching.

“The car needs to be back by nine tomorrow morning,” Reno answered, dangling a pair of rental car keys. “D’you know how hard it is to find a cabby who’ll transport a guy carrying nitro-glycerine?”

“Oh, fine,” Vincent agreed sullenly, climbing off the tailgate and wandering over to the car. “Did you get everything?”

“Pretty much,” Reno answered, opening the passenger side door and handing Vincent a cardboard box that rattled slightly. “Those’re all the chemicals you wanted.” He slammed the door and opened the trunk. “And here’s all the ‘miscellaneous stuff’,” he continued, lifting the box out with a grunt. “Where d’you want it?”

“Just inside. We’ve been trying to get the damn truck unpacked. I hadn’t realized how much stuff I have.”

Reno nodded and followed Vincent into the building, mimicking his action and setting the box he carried down on a larger crate. Looking around the warehouse, he noticed that there were a good number of boxes and a small cage, in which four bats were sleeping. “Well, at least a good deal of it is inside,” he remarked optimistically.

“Yeah, that’s something,” Vincent agreed, wandering over to the stack of crates where the cage was sitting. “They’ll like it here,” he observed, speaking half to himself.

Reno shuddered slightly. “How’re you gonna feed those things?” he questioned. “They aren’t…they’re fruit bats or something, right?”

Vincent shook his head, looking almost affronted that Reno would suggest such a thing. “No, they’re pureblood vampires. Of the Desmodus Rotundus strain. The Shinra mansion was probably the only place in the world you could find such a true breed. And don’t call them ‘things’. They’re not so different from regular pets.”

“Isn’t it…kinda creepy that you keep vampire bats for pets?”

Giving Reno a slightly quizzical look, he crouched down slightly and reached the tip of his finger through the tight bars of the cage. The bat nearest made a very soft, high-pitched noise and shuffled along the bar it clung to until it was close enough to nuzzle its furry cheek against Vincent’s finger. “They really aren’t so bad. Just…sort of misunderstood, I guess. Really, this bunch is quite affectionate. Right, Selene?”

Reno stepped back a pace and cocked his head to the side, watching the odd little scene before him. For the briefest few moments, it seemed almost sweet rather than sinister. He had to it admit, despite their leathery wings and pointed incisors, the bats were rather cute. “So how will you feed them? If you let ‘em out they could suck the blood from our friend the corpse,” Reno suggested.

Vincent shook his head, turning his hand slightly so the knuckle was bared to the small bat. She made another high-pitched noise and gently sank her teeth into his flesh. Vincent didn’t flinch, smiling slightly and stroking the creature’s head with a fingertip. “Selene is really quite sweet, for a bat. They only drink warm blood. I have lots to spare. I’ll feed them until we get the windows boarded up so they can hunt for themselves.”

“Uh…hunt…what?” Reno questioned, nervously watching the little bat daintily lapping up bright red blood, and rubbing the back of his neck subconsciously.

“Rats,” Vincent answered simply, drawing his finger away from the cage and waiting for the blood to clot. “This warehouse is simply teeming with them. If I can catch one, I’ll drop him in there and they can get him for themselves.”

Reno paled slightly. “R-rats?” he stammered, glancing fearfully over his shoulder. “I didn’t see any rats when we got here…”

“Of course not. They aren’t used to people yet. After we’ve been here a few days, they’ll start to get bolder and they’ll be everywhere.”

Looking slightly sick, Reno sat down on one of the crates and shuddered. “Great. Just great.”

Vincent gave him an odd look. “Do you have a phobia of rats?”

Flushing slightly, Reno shrugged. “Uh…well…I wouldn’t call it a phobia, per se…they just freak me out a little, y’know?”

“Ah. Well, they’ll be no match for these four.” Vincent touched the wire mesh of the cage affectionately. “Selene’s the smallest, but even she can make quick work of a rat. It’s fascinating to watch, really.”

“Uh…yeah. Whatever.” Swallowing nervously, Reno glanced over his shoulder as he imagined he heard a scuttle in the darkness along the wall. “Let’s…get back to work,” he suggested promptly, a shiver running down his spine.

*

The dawn that filtered through the cracks in the boards over the windows of the warehouse, and through the patches that were yet untouched by grime had little to no affect on those within. A total of twenty-seven boxes and crates had been moved into the warehouse, the job finishing at about three-thirty in the morning.

If a casual observer were to enter the warehouse, it would appear at first that a small genocide had taken place. Reno, sleeping on a wide board that had been perched precariously between two stacks of crates, was quite apparently dead to the world. Rude had once again fallen asleep in the middle of a book, his cheek pressed against the pages of “1001 Poisonous Herbs and Fungi”, snoring softly. Competing for the title of “most corpselike” were the corpse that hung from the back railing, swaying softly in the morning breeze, and Vincent, stretched out comfortably on his side, with one finger pressed against the mesh cage where his bats were kept, several neat bite marks indicating that the small community of bats had eaten their fill.

Reno woke first, unfortunately, rolling over and falling about five feet off the top of the pile of boxes, to land unceremoniously on the floor with a small cloud of dust and a inordinate amount of cursing.

This in turn, woke Rude, who pushed himself up stiffly, peeling the book off his face and rubbing a hand over the stubble that was growing on his skull. “You all right, Reno?” he called sleepily, getting up and stretching.

There was more muttered cursing and a self-pitying groan as Reno got to his feet and rubbed his eyes, seeming to remember something and looking frantically around the room before relaxing slightly. “Well, I’m not dead,” he answered sullenly.

Rude nodded and bent over Vincent, shaking his shoulder. “Up n’ at ‘em,” he urged, when Vincent’s red eyes blinked open drowsily and he yawned.

“G’morning Mr. Bloodletter,” Reno piped cheerfully, climbing back to the top of the pile of crates he’d claimed as his bed and glancing over at the swaying corpse. “And good morning to you, Cadaveric!”

Vincent rolled his eyes, sitting up and shaking his right hand to get the blood circulation to pick up again. “Shut up, Reno.”

“I’ve given him a name,” Reno informed his comrades innocuously. “I kind of like it. ‘Cadaveric’. It has a nice ring to it, like ‘Maverick’.”

“Yes, you’re very clever,” Rude agreed dryly, sitting back down. Rubbing the back of his neck, he glanced over at the gently swaying body. “So…what’s the game plan for that guy?”

Vincent was silent for a few moments. “All right. Here’s where it starts to get illegal. We aren’t going to report this guy until we’ve processed him. Now…uh…how can I put this…we’re a private organization. An illegal private organization, but a private organization nonetheless. So we’re going to need to get our hands on the city’s records, Midgar’s old criminal database, all sorts of electronic stuff. Are you all right with that, Reno?” he asked seriously, eyeing the redhead.

“Oh, sure! Hell, I’ll even hack the system myself!” Reno offered cheerfully. “Hey, it’s a blow against the city council, right? So I’ll be glad to do it.”

Vincent nodded. “In that case, we need computers. I think three of a fairly high quality should be good for a start. D’you have what you need to get those?”

Reno nodded vigorously and hopped down from the top of the boxes. “Sure! I have to bring the car back anyway…I’ll swing by my place and do a few things, then grab our computers and be right back, ok?”

“Right,” Vincent agreed. “Is it right if Rude and I start to take a look at our dead guy?”

“Sure,” Reno agreed. “I’ve seen more than my share of dead guys, and it just means Rude’ll get a bit of head start in learning about this junk.”

“Fair enough. Now…I just need you to tell me where you put a couple things,” Vincent questioned. “Did you get a decent digital camera?”

“Uh…yup…” Reno rummaged in one of the boxes and pulled out a digital camera, handing it over. “What else?”

“Meat thermometer?”

Reno nodded and pulled out a small metal device. “Quick-read, digital display. Nothing but the best.”

“Hmm…good…latex gloves?”

A strange expression crossed Reno’s features and he nodded slowly, going over and opening the lid of a box, full of smaller boxes of latex gloves. “Uh…yeah. You asked for a lot of these. I’ll tell you right now, you do your own personal shopping. The clerk looked at me real funny. I had to tell her my girlfriend got off on latex…which, actually…one of my old girlfriends did, so no harm no foul.”

Vincent sighed and rolled his eyes. “Right, Reno. All right. If we need anything else, we’ll find it for ourselves. You go get shopping, ok?

“Okey dokey,” Reno agreed brightly, heading out of the warehouse with a slight spring in his step.

“He’s pretty gung-ho about this, isn’t he?” Rude observed, once the warehouse doors had slammed shut and the roar of the car engine indicated that Reno had torn off down the waterfront.

“He’s your partner, you tell me,” Vincent replied, opening one of the boxes and pulling out a single latex glove, tugging it onto his right hand. “Shall we go get started, then?”

“No time like the present,” Rude agreed, taking a pair of gloves for himself and snapping them tightly onto his hands. “How do you propose we start?”

Vincent held up the camera. “Pictures. Of everything near this corpse. Especially the ground beneath him. I’ll leave that to you. I have to figure out how we’re going to get this guy down and what we’re going to do with him once he’s down…”

Rude nodded and got right down to snapping pictures. Vincent watched for a few moments, until it was evident that Rude knew what he was doing. Wandering over to the crates he sat down and leaned back against one of the boxes, thinking.

In about ten minutes, Rude came over and announced he was done. “I’ve got at least fifty photos here. I hope Reno gets a computer with decent harddrive space.”

“I’m sure he will. You got pictures of the knot, right?” Vincent questioned, getting up and climbing up to the catwalk with Rude close behind.

“From three different angles,” Rude confirmed. “I also think I spotted a wallet in his pocket. So we’ve got ID at least.”

Vincent nodded distractedly, stopping when he was inline with the swaying rope. “Good. Do you have a knife on you?”

Rude pulled a pocketknife and handed it over silently. “Here you are. That’s it? You’re just going to cut him down?”

“No. You’re going to pull him up,” Vincent answered, deliberately starting to saw through the rope.

“Shit,” Rude grumbled, bending over and taking hold of the rope as Vincent started to make progress cutting through it. “This is gonna be like two-hundred pounds of dead weight,” he complained, grunting slightly as he pulled up on the rope. “And in a damn hard position to lift. You’re lucky I pump iron.”

Vincent smiled slightly, but didn’t answer, the rope fraying further as he changed position and forced it through the last of the fibers.

Rude gave a sharp grunt as gravity took affect and the body threatened to plummet, but he managed to pull upward and keep it from slipping. “You think you could give me a hand?” he asked through clenched teeth, heaving upward.

“Mmm? Oh, yeah, I suppose.” Taking the rope and pulling upward with a strength that belied his slender build, Vincent helped Rude haul the corpse over the railing and gently set it on the floor. “Let’s move him to the office at the end of this hall. We can take a closer look at him there.”

Rude grunted in response and helped Vincent carry the stiff cadaver down the hall to one of the offices. Carefully, they set him down on top of an old, dust-covered desk. Stepping back as Vincent bent over the body and started to examine him, Rude cleared his throat. “So what do we know?”

“For starters, this wasn’t a suicide,” Vincent informed the bald man. “That much is obvious. Can you tell why?”

Taken slightly aback, Rude shrugged. “Uh…no. If I looked at him, I’d say he’d killed himself.”

Vincent shook his head. “Nope. The nature of it is wrong. He was strangled, and probably in such a manner that making it look like a suicide would be easy, but this definitely wasn’t a suicide.”

“I don’t understand,” Rude confessed, taking off his sunglasses and swapping them for a pair of wire rimmed lenses. “How do you know that?”

“What do you think he did? Typical suicide, he knotted the noose around his neck, tied it off to the railing, then jumped, right? However, that type of death would imply a breakage of the cervical spine, which is what kills someone. There’s no evidence of a break though. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t strangulation that kills a hanging victim; it’s the breaking of the spine. Actually, back in medieval times, when they hung murders and such, it was known to happen that the breakage of the spine wouldn’t kill the person, it would merely paralyse them. Being the extremely accurate source of confirmation that it is, the church then deemed the murder in question deserving of being buried alive for his crime. Sorta like he’d earned it, for not being lucky enough to die when his neck snapped.”

Rude swallowed nervously. “Uh…huh. So…what does the fact that this guy was strangled tell you? Other than that it was a murder?”

“Well, the way we found him was just too convenient. Did you see the footprints, beneath him and to the left? The dust is thick, because this warehouse has been empty for a long while. There are only three sets of footprints within a ten-foot radius. Yours and mine, leading to and away from an area in about a five foot radius of the body, and another set that are very interesting. Small shoes, which created a scuff pattern indicative of someone heaving on the rope and moving backwards as they pulled.”

“Whoa. And we don’t even know who he is yet…” Rude muttered, looking slightly impressed. “I wasn’t sure this whole thing was gonna work, but you really know your stuff.”

Vincent shrugged. “I have twenty-two years of study to my name. You learn things.” Reaching into the dead man’s front pocket, he gingerly withdrew a wallet. “Let’s see who our cadaveric friend is…” Opening the small leather wallet, he peered at the driver’s license and pulled out a business card. “Dr. Nathan Laurence. Hmm. What would a doctor be doing in a warehouse?” he murmured thoughtfully. “More importantly, what sort of doctor carries a business card?”

Rude didn’t answer immediately, unsure whether Vincent was talking to himself or not. “Uh…maybe someone he knows works here?” he suggested cautiously.

“Perhaps. But it’s not good to make judgements now. We don’t have nearly enough information. Devising a theory before there’s evidence leads one to try and make the evidence fit the theory, which is dreadfully bad form.”

“What else can we find out?” Rude asked, holding out a hand for the wallet. “This is a pretty light wallet, for a doctor.”

Vincent nodded, closely examining the dead man’s shirt. “Lipstick…?” he murmured inquisitively. “That’s interesting…very interesting. From the wife, I wonder? Or is our doctor indulging in the pleasures of the extramarital? Get some pictures. Are there many cyprians in Junon, do you know?”

“Uh?” Rude rubbed a hand over his scalp again and snapped a few photos. “Many what?”

“Cyprians. Demimondaines, prostitutes, whores, working girls…can you think of a politer word for hooker?” Vincent asked tartly, turning up the doctor’s collar and running his finger underneath the edge.

“Uh…I really don’t know…Reno would. Much as he hates the place, Reno knows Junon,” Rude answered guardedly. “Or, better yet, Reno knows hookers.”

Vincent looked up, giving Rude a penetrating stare that looked as though it would be succeeded by a question but all he said was, “All right.” Reaching with two fingers around the back of the man’s neck he frowned slightly and pulled out a long, red acrylic fingernail. “Ah…hmm. This is certainly not something one would find on a doctor’s wife.”

“Why not?” Rude questioned, slightly bewildered. “A fingernail is a fingernail, isn’t it? And how do you know he’s married?”

“Wedding ring. This is fake. Cheap, gaudy, self-applied…not something that our doctor’s wife would wear. No, a doctor’s wife could afford a professional manicure. We’re looking for someone of the working class, minimum wage.”

Rude nodded, terribly unsure what to say. “I really don’t think I’m cut out for this sort of work,” he admitted. “Noticing things was always Reno’s skill.”

“Mmm. Well, we’ll figure that out later. If you’re getting bored with the body you can go start organizing my library.”

“Uh…yeah. Yeah, I’ll go get started with that,” Rude agreed. “You…uh…you don’t mind?”

“Not at all. I’ll be another hour or two. If Reno gets back, send him up and I’ll walk him through the process. Oh…and go get me a notepad and a pen. I’m going to have to record my findings.”

Rude nodded, suppressing a slight shudder and deciding he wasn’t cut out to handle corpses.

*

“Hey!” Reno yelled, upon entering the warehouse to find Rude cataloguing books. “Where’d you guys put Cadaveric? Aww…shit, don’t tell me you got rid of him? I wanted to say my g’byes and stuff…”

Rude sighed and rolled his eyes behind his sunglasses. “No, both the corpses are upstairs.”

“Both?” Reno echoed, confused.

“Dr. Nathan Laurence and Vincent are upstairs,” Rude clarified with a shadow of a smile.

Reno laughed. “Oooh, that was a rim shot, buddy. Heh, and you call me an asshole. So…what’s he doing?”

Rude shrugged. “An informal autopsy. He knows his stuff, Reno. You’re going to be getting a crash course in this subject. He wanted me to send you up when you got back.”

“He wants me?” Reno questioned incredulously. “I don’t know the first thing about corpses! I didn’t figure…I don’t think I’m quite ready for this kinda thing yet…”

“You’d do better than me,” Rude said honestly, shuddering. “This freaks me out a little too much. He’s quite meticulous.”

“Well…I’ll go try,” Reno conceded. “Just take a look, or whatever. Hell…how much can you figure out from a dead body?”

Rude laughed dryly. “A lot. A hell of a lot.”

“Uh…right.” A little nervously, Reno climbed up the staircase to the catwalk and walked past the two empty offices and knocked on the closed door of the third.

“Come in,” Vincent called, voice muffled by the closed door.

Reno took a deep breath and opened the door, slipping inside. “Hey,” he greeted Vincent quietly, hanging back a bit. “You almost done?”

“Ah, you’re back…hmm. Come look at this guy and tell me everything you know about him.”

“I’ll try,” Reno agreed, coming slowly closer and tucking his hands behind his back. He was silent for a few minutes, his eyes roving over the body before him. “Everything I know?”

“Everything you observe is probably more accurate,” Vincent agreed, nodding. “Do you want gloves?”

“Not just yet. I’ll see what I can figure by just looking at what I can see. Y’know, look don’t touch?”

Vincent smiled slightly. “Fair enough. What do you see?”

“Hmm…white guy. About forty or forty-five…Rude told me he was doctor and I can see how he’d come to that conclusion…”

“How did you?” Vincent questioned, his tone belying nothing.

“Me? Oh…well…his tie clip,” Reno explained, pointing to the gold bar that held the man’s tie in place. “It’s got the name of a hospital on it. My sister got something kinda like that…I forget why…like ten years of service or something? Except it wasn’t a tie clip for her…it was like a ring with an inscription.”

“Hmm. Good. Keep going. Did you want gloves yet?”

“Not yet,” Reno repeated, examining the man’s hands. “Wedding ring…and a pretty nice looking watch. So he’s sure not doing too badly. Wife and a kid…”

“A kid?” Vincent questioned. “How do you know that?”

Reno nodded. “A pretty young kid, too. Look at the inside of his pocket…actually, I’ll take the gloves now.”

Vincent wordlessly removed a pair from his pocket and handed them over. He covertly scribbled something on the notepad he had with him and cleared his throat as Reno pulled on the pair of latex gloves.

“Right here…” Reno murmured, reaching into the man’s pocket and peeling a brightly coloured band-aid from the inside. “There. An adult doesn’t wear this kind of band-aid and I don’t see any cuts on this guy’s hands, anyways. So he’s probably got a kid.”

“Or he’s a paediatrician,” Vincent countered.

Reno nodded slowly, his eyes growing a little sad. “I hope he didn’t have kids…” he said quietly, closing his eyes. “Yeah…yeah, he’s probably a paediatrician.” Clearing his throat slightly and shaking his head, Reno gently pulled back the folds of the man’s clothing and withdrew a wallet, opening the billfold. “No cash,” he observed, glancing at the driver’s license. “Nathan Laurence…forty-seven…lives uptown. Nice neighbourhood.”

“Rude said the same thing,” Vincent remarked, watching Reno closely.

“Yeah, well, Rude knows Junon a hell of a lot better than I do,” Reno answered absently, flipping through the contents of the wallet. “Credit card, bank card, business card…he’s a specialist…a paediatric specialist in neonatology. Which means…?”

“In newborns. He specialized in the care of newborn,” Vincent informed his protégé. “Where’s his office located?”

Reno squinted at the card. “Across town from his house. Probably a private clinic, right?”

“Right,” Vincent confirmed. “Anything else in the wallet?”

Carefully withdrawing a last piece of paper, Reno sighed. “Well…no kids, at least. Just him and his wife. She’s a nice looking lady…” Glancing down at the body, Reno tilted his head to the side. “I wonder if she knows…” he murmured absently. “It’s been…what, a day or two? How long before you figure it out? Maybe it’s easier in some cases. If I was gone for a couple days…well…I used to drop off the face of the earth for weeks at a time, when I was younger…but I always used to come back. I wonder if anyone ever worried I was dead…”

Vincent didn’t respond, his gaze cast to the floor. After a long silence, he finally spoke. “I think that’s enough for today. You can look over my report later. Did you get the computers I asked for?”

Reno’s distant expression brightened slightly. “Yup. Sure did. Excellent computers. Three, top of the line notebook laptops, one for each of us. Of course, that’s just until I can figure out how to get better ones. You know, personal computers. These things are just for the interim.”

“Good. Let’s see,” Vincent prompted, ushering Reno out of the office. “How’s it going, Rude?” he called to the bald man, who was surrounded by stacks of books and was making note of their titles in a notebook. “Is that my entire library?”

Rude grunted and nodded. “You need a secretary, I think,” he said sarcastically, laying the clipboard down. “How did Reno do?”

Vincent shrugged and glanced at the redhead, who stuffed his hands in his pockets and grinned awkwardly. “Certainly better than I expected.”

Reno’s grin grew slightly wider, but he tried to make it look as though he were shrugging the praise off. “Ah, whatever. It wasn’t a big deal. Wanna see the computers I picked up?”

Without waiting for an answer, he headed out to the rental car he’d gotten for another day and picked up three, wafer-thin, extremely light laptops. Humming cheerfully to himself he returned to the warehouse and passed them out. “Nice, huh?”

Vincent nodded slowly and flipped his over, eyeing a label on the bottom. “Property of the Junon City Council Building,” he read, looking up at Reno. “How’d you get these?”

Reno grinned again. “For all your towering intellect, you’d think you’d be able to figure that out.”

“What he means to say is that he stole them, of course.” Rude had opened his notebook and was typing on the keyboard. “It’ll take a little bit of doing to wipe all the files from these things,” he observed, browsing through the diminutive computer’s files. “None of it looks dreadfully useful.”

Vincent rolled his eyes and sighed. “I suppose the irony of stealing to solve a murder is rather lost on you?” he asked wryly.

Reno laughed. “Why d’you think I did it, if not for the irony? Well, that, and we’re a little short on cash, but that’s not as important. What do we do now?”

“We’re going down to the police station to report our dead guy.” Vincent looked down at the computer in his lap. “But first you’re going to hide these things. The last thing we need is a cop showing up and discovering a crime ring.”

“Why’re we going down to the station?” Reno questioned directly, prying the lid off a box and gently setting his newly acquired laptop inside. “Can’t we just call them up here?”

“I’ll explain when we get there,” Vincent said shortly, tucking his computer into an inch of space between two crates. “Just trust me.”

*

Reno clenched and unclenched his fingers on the steering wheel of the sleek rental car, pulling into a parking space beside the police building. “So you’re saying you want me to figure out the frequency of their radios so we can get all the latest on fear and loathing in Cannon City, plant a bug so we can listen in to conversations, and swipe a police officer’s badge to make illegal counterfeits? All after chewing me out about swiping a few measly laptops?” he asked slowly, giving Vincent a narrow-eyed glance. “I don’t get you, man.”

Vincent sighed. “Firstly, I did not ‘chew you out’. I merely explained that it would have been just as easy to do legally. Secondly, this is important. We’re talking about murders here. A police radio gets us news of what’s crucial. A bug in the office gets us more minor information, lesser crimes, maybe details we wouldn’t have access to otherwise. The badges’ll get us access. We need you to do this, Reno…”

“I never said I wouldn’t do it…I just said I don’t get you,” Reno answered evenly, leaning forward and draping his arms over the steering wheel. “Mmm…lemme think. We’re talking three difficult tasks here. Can we drop one? I’m sure I can get the frequency some other way. The bug…now that could be a little difficult, because I don’t know the layout of this office yet. I’m gonna have to figure it out once I’m in there, and that’ll be kinda tricky. The badge presents the most interesting challenge.”

Rude snorted from the backseat. “Typical, Reno. Exaggerating how tough a job’s gonna be. Did you used to do that when you were a Turk, Valentine?”

“Of course not.” Vincent’s stoic features wavered and he smiled to himself for a fleeting second before his expression flickered back to an aloof disdain. “No. We were old school. A job was a job. Except…there was the odd occasion…never mind.”

“What?” Reno pressed, attention captured. “The odd occasion of what?”

Vincent shook his head, turning away to conceal a flash of a smile. “Well…some agents…I never did of course…back then, we used to get paid on a ‘shots fired’ policy. Every bullet was a hundred Gil. A reload was five hundred. If it took you twenty rounds to hit a guy, that was two thousand in the bank. And that isn’t counting reloads. I knew guys who’d go into a fight with six clips, each with a single round in them. Six bullets, six reloads, works out to thirty-six hundred.”

Reno laughed. “Were machine guns allowed?”

“Nope. No automatics. Nothing that couldn’t be fitted with a silencer. That’s how a Turk’s supposed to work.”

Rude chuckled. “What’d you pack?”

“Pardon?”

“What sorta gun were you packing?” Reno clarified, giving Vincent a shrewd glance. “A professional bastard like you doesn’t carry the standard pistol. Naw, I’d peg you owning a specialty weapon. So what was it? A Colt? Luger?”

Vincent coughed. “I’d been known to carry a single shot derringer,” he admitted. “Just for special jobs. You know, the odd businessman who needed to be silenced, that sort of thing. Once in a while I’d use it for a fire fight.”

Reno laughed. “A derringer. You can’t be serious. You can’t kill a man with a derringer!”

“You can kill anyone with anything if you keep at it long enough. Shoot once, reload, shoot once, reload…I could rack up a grand five times faster than the average Turk.”

Reno smiled, a sort of wry, half grin. “We’ve come quite a ways in the other direction, eh? There used to be a time when I wouldn’t think twice about a dead guy…now…things are different.”

There was a strange silence that somehow seemed to indicate that the feeling was mutual, before Vincent cleared his throat and shook his head. “Times are different. So let’s do this.”

Abruptly dismissing the dark line of thinking, Reno nodded. “Yeah…yeah, I think I know what to do. Just not the police radio. The other two things I can handle. Where’s the bug?”

Vincent reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, round microphone. “It’s a fairly good piece of equipment. It should pick up everything in the room if you put it in the right place.”

Reno nodded and took the device. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve dealt with these things before. Approximate position should be the centre of the room, or as close as I can get.”

“How’re you gonna do this?” Rude asked. “You gonna need help?”

“Naw. I got this one,” Reno declined. “Thanks anyway. I’ll go in and report it myself. You guys wait here.”

Vincent looked slightly hesitant but nodded anyway. “All right. Be careful and don’t get us arrested.”

Flashing a debonair grin, Reno opened his door and stood up smoothly. “Yup. Don’t worry about it, boss. You might wanna get in the driver’s seat. I’ll be back in a minute. No worries.”

Vincent nodded slowly as Reno sauntered up to the police department, hands in his pockets and looking unconcerned. “Why am I so worried about this?” he murmured aloud, leaning back in his seat.

Rude chuckled. “You can trust Reno. His methods can be a little crude, sometimes, but he always gets the job done. It’s usually best just to leave him to his own devices and let him work on his own accord.”

“I suppose you’d know best,” Vincent agreed dubiously, shifting over to sit behind the wheel and drumming his fingers on the moulded rubber edge. About fifteen minutes later, Reno was back, exiting the police station looking extremely smug and absently buttoning up his shirt.

He opened the passenger door and slid into the seat with a grin. “All done. Let’s head back.”

“Where’s the badge?” Vincent asked, holding out his hand. “You did get it didn’t you?”

Reno winked and pulled it out of the pocket of his jacket. “Right here. I said I’d get it, didn’t I? I always get the job done. Remember that.”

Rude snatched the badge neatly from his partner’s fingers and examined it closely. “A woman,” he observed neutrally. “A blonde.”

“What about my bug?” Vincent questioned. “How many officers were in there?”

Reno grinned wolfishly. “Just the one. The rest were on lunch break. Just one, solitary policewoman, sitting at her desk doing the crossword. Looking kinda lonely.”

“So where’s the bug?” Vincent demanded again.

With a lackadaisical shrug, Reno ran his fingers through his hair. “Oh, somewhere between the closet and underneath her desk.”

“I’d wondered why you had lipstick on your collar,” Rude said dryly, handing over the badge. “I thought you didn’t like blondes?”

Assuming a pious expression, Reno rubbed a smudge of lipstick off his cheek. “One must make sacrifices. She got lipstick in a lot of other places too.” He cast a glance at Vincent. “I hope you’re happy. She bit me, you know. On the shoulder. I’ve never met a police chick who didn’t like it rough.”

Vincent sighed. “We’ll be lucky if she doesn’t report you,” he muttered darkly, pulling out of the parking space and easing the car out of the parking lot into traffic.

“Oh, she won’t.” Reno laughed. “She gave me her number.”

Rude grunted. “Typical. So now what?”

Vincent changed lanes and glanced briefly in the rear-view mirror. “Rude, you’re going to wait at the warehouse for the cops to show up and take that body off our hands. Reno and I are going to our guy’s house.”

“Why?” Reno asked, massaging his shoulder. “Cops have sharp teeth,” he muttered to himself.

“We’re going to wait for the police to show up and break the news to his wife. Then, once they’re gone, we’re going to ask her a few questions of our own.”

Rude grinned slightly. “A question for you, Reno…what’d you have done if it’d been a guy in there?”

“One must make sacrifices,” Vincent offered mockingly, before Reno had a chance to answer.

*

In a quiet suburb in uptown Junon a sleek black sedan sat, parked unobtrusively in the driveway of a plain white house, whose owners were out for the day. Vincent sat in the front seat, leaning back slightly and watching the house across the street with half-closed eyes, partially dozing. “Any news from Rude?” he asked suddenly.

Reno looked up from his laptop, which he’d been busy with for the past two hours. “I had an email from him a little while ago.” Fingers flickering quickly over the keyboard, he opened a window. “He says the police’ve picked up our dead guy and probably taken him to the morgue. They’ll probably send an officer around pretty soon, I’d think. Heh, thank god for wireless internet, eh?”

“Mmm.” Vincent nodded and leaned forward slightly, trying to see around the bend in the quiet lane. “What time was that?”

“Oh…about twenty minutes ago. So…we should be expecting our cops any time now.” With a few more keystrokes, Reno shut his laptop down and folded it up, sliding it neatly under the seat. “We’re gonna need a car at some point in time,” he observed. “This thing is nice, but we can’t do much of anything with it.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Vincent responded calmly, straightening in his seat as a police car came into view. “Here we go…”

The car pulled up in front of the stately house and two officers got up, walking up the driveway. The scene played out in silence, but Reno could imagine the sound of the doorbell ringing, and the confusion of the woman who answered the door. He felt a slight twinge of compassion for the woman as her hands flew to her mouth and her eyes filled with tears. “Are they going to tell her that he killed himself?” he asked, watching the police officers mutter apologies, then walk back down the driveway to their squad car.

Vincent shrugged. “More than likely. To a cop, a guy with a rope around his neck in a warehouse that was due to be condemned committed suicide, plain and simple.”

“But…that’s gotta feel horrible. I mean…hearing from some cop that your husband killed himself and not knowing why or how…especially since it isn’t true,” Reno protested.

“I suspect it’s a pretty terrible thing, yes,” Vincent agreed, watching the squad car pull away from the house and drive down the street. Getting out of the car, he stretched slightly and sighed. “But it makes our job no less difficult.”

Reno climbed out of the back seat and leaned against his door. “So…we just go and talk to this woman? What do we tell her?”

Vincent shrugged and started down the driveway, crossing the quiet street with Reno close behind. “We tell her the truth. We tell her what we know, what we need to know, and what we plan to do about all this. And then we hope that she’ll give us leave to pursue justice.” He walked up the driveway to the small front steps and rang the doorbell.

“What’re we gonna do if she doesn’t answer?” Reno murmured, leaning forward to peer in the window.

“Nothing we can do,” Vincent said simply. “She might not feel like talking to us and we can’t force her.”

Nevertheless, the door opened slowly and a well-dressed woman of about forty stood in the doorway, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy. “Y-yes?” she whispered, practically hiding behind the doorway.

“Mrs. Laurence?” Vincent asked, his tone a lot quieter and the look in his eyes far less haunted.

The woman cleared her throat awkwardly and passed a hand over her eyes. “I am…I mean…yes, that’s me…”

“I’m Vincent Valentine and this is my partner, Reno.” Vincent made a brief gesture over his shoulder at Reno, who lifted his hand in a muted greeting. “We’re here about your husband.”

Mrs. Laurence’s breath caught slightly and she pressed her hand to her mouth again, a few tears trickling down her cheeks. “F-forgive me,” she stammered, regaining partial composure. “It’s just such a shock…”

“We’re very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Laurence,” Vincent answered quietly. “May we come in?”

“Are you with the police?” she asked tremulously. “I…I talked to them already…I don’t want to hear any more…no more. They told me…oh, god…I can’t believe Nate would…would take his own life.”

“Ma’am, we don’t believe he did,” Reno interrupted. “Please, may we come in? We’re not police officers, but we want to try and find out what really happened to your husband.” His voice dropped slightly and took on a gentle coaxing note. “Please, Mrs. Laurence. If what we believe is true, there’s someone in this city who needs to be brought to justice. Anything you can do to help us…” Reno trailed off and his large green eyes met the older woman’s gaze imploringly.

For a few minutes, Mrs. Laurence was silent, her expression distant. “Come in,” she said finally, turning and entering the house. “Just…you can sit down in the kitchen, if you’d like…I’ll make some tea…” she murmured distractedly, leading the pair into the house, into a bright, airy kitchen with white and black chequered tile and beautiful appliances.

Vincent sat down at the kitchen table and covertly took out a notebook and rested it in his lap. Reno didn’t sit down immediately, watching the older woman for a few moments as she started to move around the kitchen, picking up a teapot, her hands trembling visibly. “Here,” Reno offered, moving forward and taking the pot from her. “I can do it. If you could go talk to my partner…?” Setting the delicate china teapot down, he took Mrs. Laurence’s elbow and gently steered her to the kitchen table.

Mrs. Laurence sat down gratefully. “Oh, thank you…I don’t even remember your name,” she admitted awkwardly. “It’s just such a shock…”

“I’m Reno, ma’am.”

“Thank you,” she repeated, touching his hand thankfully. “You can call me Kate. Nate…My husband, Nathan…he always used to.”

Reno nodded. “Right. Well, you just talk to my partner and he’ll have a few questions for you.”

Vincent cleared his throat slightly. “Mrs. Laurence…Kate. When did you last see you husband?”

Kate sniffled and covered her eyes with a hand. “Two days ago…when he left for work. He was fine…he seemed just fine, the same as always…”

“He didn’t seem worried or concerned about anything?” Vincent asked, making a few notes. “Had anything out of the ordinary happened?”

“No…nothing. Everything was the same as always.”

Reno quietly finished making tea and set a cup in front of the older woman, passed one to Vincent, and sat down at the table.

“Thank you,” Kate murmured, not moving to take any tea. “You’re a good boy.”

“Were you worried when he didn’t come home?” Vincent continued.

Kate shook her head. “Sometimes, there are emergencies at the hospital and they call him, since he’s a specialist. He usually doesn’t have enough notice to give me word. I’m used to it. I was a little concerned, after a while…but he’d been gone for long times before so I didn’t worry.”

Nodding, Vincent continued to make notes. “We found him in a warehouse down by the waterfront…can you think of any reason he would have gone down there? To meet someone, maybe?”

“No…Nate hates the waterfront. He doesn’t like the smell and being near the sea makes him nauseous.” She gave a faint laugh. “We went for a cruise, one year…he stayed in his cabin the entire trip, sick as a dog…”

“Mrs. Laurence, did your husband have any enemies? Anyone who would have wanted to hurt him?” Reno asked carefully.

“Absolutely not,” Kate said firmly. “My husband is…was…a wonderful, well-respected member of the community. He was a doctor. He took care of babies, newborns. He’s saved the lives of hundreds of children.”

Vincent’s gaze grew shrewd. “But surely there were those he couldn’t save?” he prompted. “Sometimes, though they do all they can, doctors simply can’t save some of their patients. Would he have been blamed for that?”

Kate looked slightly flustered. “W-well…certainly, there have been cases…but it wasn’t Nate’s fault! He’s a wonderful doctor, he’s never done anything less than he’s capable of!”

“Nonetheless, Mrs. Laurence. It’s a distinct possibility. Could we possibly see his records?” Vincent pressed.

“W-well…I don’t know…” the woman hedged, twisting the tablecloth in her hands.

“Please?” Reno appealed. “Someone killed your husband, Mrs. Laurence, and we can’t let them get away with it. Murder is what’s ruining this town. We want it to stop and we’ll do everything in our power to bring this person to justice. But we need your help. Please.”

Kate met Reno’s earnest eyes and held his gaze steadily for a few moments. “You said you aren’t police?” she said slowly.

“Call us…freelance investigators,” Reno offered. “We aren’t official. Technically, we aren’t even legal.”

Vincent gave the younger man a sharp glance and chewed his lower lip anxiously, keeping silent.

“W-well…then how did you know…?”

“It was our building that they found him in. We were looking for somewhere to set up a criminalistics lab and…well…things just sort of went from there. And we want to help.”

“Why?”

Reno shrugged. “We have our reasons. We want to help Junon, for one. If we can catch this first guy…well, we’ll prove to ourselves that we can do it. We’re starting from nothing here. Which is why your help is so important. Give us a few days and we’ll have enough information for you to hire a lawyer and prosecute whoever did this.”

Kate was silent staring into her teacup and Vincent looked torn between being grateful to his partner and throttling him. “All right,” she said finally. “I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Laurence,” Reno said sincerely. “I’ll just go get my computer so we can back his records up onto my drive. I promise you, we’ll find whoever did this.”

*

“I really don’t know if you should have done that,” Vincent sighed, once they were back in the car and driving to the waterfront. “You might’ve compromised this entire operation.”

Reno rolled his eyes, taking then off the screen in front of him for a brief second. “I don’t think so. She wants to know what happened, I can tell. And we’ll find out for her. I think we’ll get more help than harm out of this.”

Vincent didn’t answer, sighing again and pulling onto the narrow street that led down to the waterfront. “Gotten anything distinctive from those records yet?”

“Well, I know he was organized. He’s got all the information we’d need here. Names, patient history, everything.”

Shifting uncomfortably, Vincent glanced at the computer screen. “We’re violating some pretty strict laws on doctor-patient confidentiality here.”

Reno shook his head. “Nope. This one I’m sure on. My sister’s a doctor. When a physician dies, his or her records are open to those with the authority.”

“I assert again, we’re breaking some pretty strict laws on doctor-patient confidentiality here,” Vincent repeated, parking the car in the alley beside the warehouse. “We aren’t exactly an ‘authority’.”

“I also have a sister who’s a lawyer,” Reno informed him, closing up his laptop and getting out of the car. “If we get in a jam, she’ll get us out. Protera may not like me much, but I’m family.”

“Just how many sisters do you have?” Vincent questioned, arching an eyebrow.

Reno sighed despondently. “Four. All older than me. Cura, Protera, Esuna, and Regen.”

“You’re the youngest?”

Reno nodded sullenly. “Yeah. My parents wanted five little girls, five years apart, and they wanted to name them all after restorative magics. Forty-one years ago, Cura was born. She’s the Surgeon General, now. World’s most renowned authority on medicine. Then Protera, she’s thirty-six. Criminal lawyer. And then Esuna, who’s a chemical scientist of some sort. She’s thirty-one and working in Gongaga. And then Regen.” Reno paused. “Regen isn’t so bad. She’s twenty-six, only two years older than me. She’s a doctor.”

“You kind of broke the pattern, huh?” Vincent remarked.

“Don’t remind me,” Reno muttered bitterly. “If I’d been a girl, I would’ve been ‘Slowga’. Can you fuckin’ believe that? Slowga.”

“Well, you are a little…”

“Shut up,” Reno interrupted. “A little slow. Yes, I’ve heard it before. My entire bloody life. Cura goes to med-school, Protera goes to law school, Esuna goes to pharmaceutical college, Regen goes to med-school like Cura. And I blow town at sixteen and wind up in Midgar, scratching out a living by slitting people’s throats.”

“Your parents weren’t pleased, I trust?”

Reno shrugged. “They didn’t care. I think I was a bit of a lost cause. Not like I didn’t see my family from time to time. I ran across Regen, once. Fell out of a car on a mission…well…I say ‘fell’. Thrown is probably more accurate, but we aren’t dealing with semantics here. Broke my arm and smashed some ribs. Next thing I know, I’m at the hospital and my big sister’s patching me up.”

“How old were you?” Vincent questioned.

“Oh…maybe nineteen or so. Regen was an intern. I was just a kid. We kept in touch after that. I didn’t mind Regen,” he said thoughtfully.

“Mmm. Well, whatever. We have work to do. You sort through those records. I’m going to try and track down whatever I can about the building’s employees. We’ll cross reference what we have when we’re both done.”

*

Rude sat in the office at the end of the catwalk, patiently listening to the various conversations that flickered back and forth across a police scanner he’d picked up while Vincent and Reno were out. The office was bare, with only an old desk and a few chairs, but it got almost perfect reception. There was nothing too outstanding yet, but the night was young. There was a sneeze from the doorway and Rude glanced up at his partner. “Tired?”

Reno shrugged and wandered into the bare office, sitting down in a chair with a slender file folder. “A little.”

“You always sneeze when you’re tired,” Rude agreed, leaning back in his chair.

“D’you know how many patients this guy’s had in the past five years? Fifteen hundred and seventy three. Can you imagine that? That’s three hundred people a year…like…almost one a day! It’s gotta be crazy to be a doctor. Turks never deal with more than…I dunno, four people a week? And we never get repeat visits from our patients.”

“Wild,” Rude nodded, taking off his sunglasses and rubbing his eyes. “I wonder how often we’re going to have to be on this thing. The radio, I mean.”

“I dunno,” Reno shrugged again. “Probably a few hours every day. Each.”

Rude grunted. “Well, whatever. Don’t you figure you’d better go talk to our fearless leader about your findings?”

Reno sighed. “Yeah, I suppose. One hundred and thirty seven babies he couldn’t save. All one file, all their parents are potential suspects. I don’t know how he hopes to narrow it down.” Getting up, he stretched. “What’s the time?”

Rude glanced at his watch. “Almost midnight. I’ll probably turn in soon.”

“Yeah, me too. I’ll just go drop these off with Vincent.” Reno waved the file in his hand and sneezed. Blinking, he glanced at his partner. “I do sneeze when I’m tired, don’t I?” Exiting the room and continuing to the second office from the end of the wall, Reno knocked lightly on the door and pushed it open.

Vincent glanced up from his own computer, the glow of the screen casting shadows over his pale features. “Got anything good?” he questioned.

Reno shrugged. “Dunno. Got almost one hundred and fifty people who lost kids at Dr. Laurence’s hands. And they’re all potential suspects, right?” Dropping the folder on the desk, he gave a brief wave over his shoulder as he turned to leave the room. “Have fun.”

“Hold it.” There was a note of stern command in Vincent’s tone that reminded Reno eerily of a drill sergeant he’d h