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  “That’s only for cars,” Chaz mumbled, arms full of suitcase. He cast around for a place to drop it and settled on the floor in the corner.

  “I can get you more chairs,” O’Leary said apologetically.

  Lau nodded. “Much appreciated,” she said, crisp and professional. You’re imitating Falkner, she realized abruptly. Cut it out. ”We’re going to be mostly in the field anyway today, I think.”

  “You want to see the last robbery site?” O’Leary said, a little too eager. A robbery detective who wants to be a murder detective; check. Sure, let him have it; she watched CSI too.

  “Exactly,” she said, and turned to the rest of the team. “Danny?” In charge or not, calling him SSA Brady was just plain weird.

  “Sure thing,” he said, and picked the regulation government car keys back up off of the regulation government desk.

  Lau turned to Hafidha and found herself at a loss. She knew every agent on her team was a resource. She knew how they were best deployed. But not better than they did; not better than they could feel out their own strengths.

  And knowing that is your strength, she told herself mildly, and squared her shoulders. “What’s your first line of inquiry?” she asked.

  “Let’s see that security camera footage,” Hafidha said, and snapped open the clasps on the first metal suitcase. “I bet we can get a good facial composite if I click real slow.”

  “Oh, we have a composite as well,” O’Leary said, and fumbled through his folder. “We had our witnesses sit down with one of our sketch artists and work up a portrait. She got rid of the makeup to approximate the facial structure underneath, and here’s what she turned out.”

  Huh, Lau thought. A robbery detective who might just make murder detective, if he stayed that proactive on all his cases.

  Detective O’Leary held up the sketch. It was pencil shaded, bereft of clean lines. A long chin, narrow cheekbones, dark eyebrows. Two fuzzes of simulated shadow highlighted the gauntness of the cheeks.

  “One of ours,” Daniel Brady said.

  “Or a Morlock,” Hafidha replied, still connecting USB cables to hardware the same way some people cleaned and assembled a shotgun.

  “Or a supervillain,” Arthur Tan said, and Lau quirked an eyebrow. He quirked one right back.

  “I do not want nerds with gamma powers,” Hafidha muttered, and hit the power button on her rig pointedly with her finger. “I know nerds. I am nerds.”

  O’Leary glanced between them with a faintly puzzled expression on his broad face, but said nothing. They were federal agents. Clearly they were contractually obligated to crack wise.

  “In that case, I’m gonna follow the money,” she said, with a glint in her eye. “Detective, has the bank provided a list of serial numbers for the large bills?”

  “I can get that for you,” he said, and the confused lines smoothed out of his forehead into a more intent expression: complete mental note-taking. Follow the money; check.

  Lau cleared her throat slightly; another Falknerian mannerism creeping right in. “Chaz?”

  Chaz unfolded the map he’d been marking up on the plane. “Going to do the geographic profile. Here’s the area he’s sticking to: the Loop and the Near West Side.”

  “Armed robbers know better than to shit where they eat,” Brady said. “That is, if they want to keep robbing banks today.”

  Chaz nodded. “He’ll be close enough for those neighborhoods to stay accessible, but that’s not where he lives.”

  “There’s an easy way to find out where he lives,” Lau put in, and turned around the map.

  “Oh?” Brady asked.

  She pulled a green marker from the side of Chaz’s bag. “How do you and Agent Tan feel about finding some comic stores?”

  Two steps into Punch in the Face Comics, and Arthur Tan was convinced the door was hooked up to his childhood. Specifically, 1989 in Columbus, Ohio, two minutes before Batman #428 made its way into his backpack. Same gray institutional carpeting; same walls upon walls of shelving, wrapped tight around a floor covered in chest-height longboxes crammed with single-issue runs.

  Agent Brady’s nose wrinkled. Tan grinned. “Ah, fanboy funk,” he said, and sniffed appreciatively. “Some smells you never forget.”

  “I can see why,” Brady said.

  “Jock,” Tan replied cheerfully, and picked his way around the longboxes to the front counter.

  The man behind the counter was tall and spindly looking; the kind of guy you’d think you could take in either a fight or thumb war before you saw the lumpy muscle in his arms. He had a dark, prickly beard going on that mercifully stopped before the neck. Good on you for fighting the war against stereotypes, Tan thought, and waited to catch the guy’s eye.

  “Help ya?” he said, and as if they’d even thought about planning it, Brady and Tan pulled out their badges.

  The guy behind the counter went white. Whiter. He was already plenty white. “Look, is this a bust?”

  Brady stopped, looked down at him. “Is there something we ought to be busting you for?”

  “The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund thinks not, G-man,” he said hotly.

  Brady stepped back, buffeted by the force of sheer nonplussedness. Tan felt the entirely inappropriate urge to giggle. Not at any point in all his years had he been called a G-man.

  He kind of liked it.

  The guy behind the counter was turning red under his beard. “I’m tweeting Neil Gaiman right now. I’ll do it, buddy,” he said.

  Brady blinked. “Who?”

  The guy looked quite literally down his nose at him. “God,” he said, disgusted. “Really?”

  “Really,” Tan said. “Sorry.”

  “You should be,” he said, and put his hands on the counter. “This isn’t a bust, is it?”

  “It’s not,” Tan said, and put away his badge. “We’re canvassing the neighborhood to identify a suspect in a robbery.”

  The clerk’s mouth pinched tight. Considering all the single issues in here, and the way the really articulated models and busts were tucked safely into locked glass cases, he probably had a serious opinion on the word robbery.

  “We just want to know if you recognize this man,” Brady said resignedly, and held up the sketch. It fluttered in the air-conditioning.

  The guy peered at the sketch. “I don’t think so. Maybe,” he said, sounding doubtful for the first time, possibly, in his life. “Let me ask Kelly.” He cupped hands around his mouth, called across the store: “Kel?”

  A twentysomething girl with bottle-red hair swung out from the back room, a huge box of comics balanced on both arms. “Oh hey, original art? Is that David Mack?”

  “Police sketch,” Tan replied, beyond flappable now. “Does the person in it look familiar? Like a customer you might have seen? He’s about yea high”—he mimed with his hand—“and really, really thin.”

  The redhead put down her box and squinted. “Oh. This one. I know this one,” she said, and jumped to the computer on the desk. “He kept calling me ‘my dear’ like he was some cut-rate Doctor Doom, and he never picked up his pull list.” The look on her face was as close as civilians could get to Agent Brady’s fanboy-funk expression. Tan genuinely couldn’t read which listed offense she considered the greater crime.

  “Do you have a name or contact information for him?” Brady asked.

  The redhead—Kelly—tapped a few more keys on the computer. “Right,” she said. “Dan Morrison. Tried to tell me his name was Danny Dare, but lucky for you, we take ID for pull lists bigger than fifty bucks a week. What’d he do?”

  “He’s wanted for questioning in a string of robbery cases,” Tan said.

  “Oh,” the redhead replied; intrigued. That car-crash kind of intrigued. “Wouldn’t have thought ol’ Danny had it in him.”

  “Well, they don’t know he does, yet,” the beardy clerk put in, looking a little bit put out.

  “Here’s his cell number,” she said, and scribbled the digits on a
piece of scrap paper. Pushed it across the counter toward Tan and Brady. “If he’s not a master criminal, tell him to pick up his damn comics.”

  Tan and Brady pushed out the door into the sunlight, and Tan said, “Not bad.”

  “Not bad at all. To the Batmobile,” Brady said, swinging into the driver’s seat.

  “No, no,” Tan said, and then dropped his chin, and said in an entirely different voice, husky, hoarse, dark, and familiar, “to the Batmobile.”

  “Nerd,” Brady replied, and shut the car door.

  They had swept the broken glass off the tree-lined sidewalk, but Nikki Lau still heard little crunches beneath her toes as she walked up to the bank branch. She picked up one leg and examined the sole of her shoe; if there were still glass fragments there, they were too small to see.

  Chaz Villette strode ahead of her, angling his head to inspect what were once the weatherproof joins on a wall of safety glass windows. They had covered the empty holes left with plastic sheeting. It billowed and crackled in the Windy City wind.

  He held the sheeting aside and peered up into the bracket that had once held the windows. “The adhesive didn’t fail. There’s no adhesive left,” he said.

  “I wonder what industrial adhesive turns into when you add a basic chemical reaction,” Lau replied.

  Chaz dropped the sheet and made for the door. “A basic magic chemical reaction,” he tossed over his shoulder. Lau wasn’t sure whether to sigh or snicker. She followed.

  The crime-scene techs were still working over the surface of the vault door with fingerprint brushes and tweezers, hunting for the slightest hair that might net them an evidence chain. One of them, brown hair twisted back under a ball cap, slight and short in her uniform, stood up and nodded at their badges. “Detective O’Leary told us you’d be by. Jane Townsend.”

  “Nikki Lau,” she said, and stuck out a hand. This one didn’t need syllables. “This is SA Charles Villette.”

  “Pleasure,” she said, consummately professional. “So you want to see the mystery?”

  She led them through a gauntlet of hunched, crouched, whispering techs inspecting every angle of the marble-floored bank like art restorers. Pens and documents lay scattered where they had fallen: a day’s business flash-frozen and abandoned along the suddenly patio-style east wall into the street.

  The vault was open and, Lau assumed, rumpled out of order; she hadn’t seen the insides of enough bank vaults to say what they looked like when they were feeling good. A gray folding table had been set up in its centre: evidence-sorting station and command center, all in one. Townsend grabbed a small sample bag, one of dozens filled with specks of white powder, and handed it to Lau. “This is it.”

  She peered down. She had thought it would be bigger: a tiny puddle of calcium carbonate the techs had scraped out of the steel vault door. Chaz took another baggie, held it up to the light, and squinted. “Could I get a pair of gloves, please?”

  There were gloves. Crime-scene techs were the portal through which all nitrile gloves flowed. Chaz snapped them on and dipped a finger into the powder. It shifted like a pile of fluffier sand. Lau looked up at the door: the hole in the vault from whence the powder had come was long, and spread out like tree roots, lined with white dust that faded grayer and grayer the farther back she looked.

  Lau put down the bag and surveyed the rest of the evidence buffet: a few hairs, tweezed gently into sealed plastic; a pile of statements, hastily taken; a huge evidence bag folded up on itself, and inside it, undyed burlap. Lau picked it up and flattened it to its original size, and there it was: a giant dollar sign, markered onto the side of the rough-woven sack.

  “Hey, Chaz,” she said, and his eyebrow rose.

  “We dusted it for prints, Agents,” a tech said, brushing latex-gloved hands on his pants. “It came up negative. They wore gloves.”

  “That’s not the point,” Chaz said, excited, and took the fat plastic bag from Lau. “They made money sacks. For their heist. Even though waving this around means they’re that much more likely to get caught by a roadblock, or on the street. It was more important than not getting caught.”

  Lau studied the smudgily markered lines. “He really does think he’s a supervillain.”

  “You totally called it.”

  “I was joking,” she said, although she’d only been halfway. Nothing was ever more than halfway funny when you worked for the ACTF.

  “Joke about a decent taco joint for me next time, too?” he said, and Lau’s jacket pocket lurched in a familiar way. Phone ringing.

  She fished it out, hit the button with her thumb. “Lau.”

  “Hey, babycakes,” Hafidha’s voice came, blurred, through the line. “You on your way back soon?”

  Lau rearranged the phone against her ear. “We’re nearly done here.”

  “Might want to make that double-time,” Hafidha said. “We’ve got mail.”

  Nikki Lau’s phone beeped, loud. She pulled it away and thumbed open the picture Hafidha had just flicked onto her screen.

  The front steps of the police station, covered in playing cards, every single one of them jokers wild.

  Act III Chicago PD hadn’t been able to hold back the press. Lau and Chaz edged their way into the station past a murder of sharp-eyed reporters, their cameras at the ready, prepping on-air live segments for the six o’clock news. The steps were littered with playing cards, the doors locked, the whole front of the station surrounded by a ring of yellow police tape and grim-faced officers.

  Lau held up her badge discreetly at one of them; his eyes widened, and he motioned them around the side.

  “That’s one thing for not wearing a uniform,” Chaz muttered as the doors closed behind them. “Reporters somehow forget to put you in a choke hold for the details of today’s special.”

  “Says you,” Lau said. Their footsteps echoed up the metallic gray steps of what looked to be an old service stairwell. “Once they find out we’re here, you’ll never see me again.”

  A small handful of playing cards were scattered on Hafidha’s claimed gray desk, the evidence bags that encased them reflecting the boiled light above. Detective O’Leary leaned over them, in a posture a sculptor might describe as determined puzzlement. He greeted them with a little wave from his big, long-fingered hand. “The plot thickens.”

  “Apparently,” Lau said. She picked up a baggie, examined the card inside: pristine, corners unbent; a little man in a tasseled cap riding a red-and-yellow bee. “This fits with what we saw at the latest crime scene; it looks like our UNSUB really is playing supervillain.”

  Easiest to call it playing. Some local liaisons saw enough, knew enough already to take the truth and not have it throw them off stride. Lau couldn’t tell yet if O’Leary’s eagerness went that far. Sometimes ambitious cops wanted off the farm, but only so far as the suburbs.

  “Oh, and we looked into the stolen bills,” Hafidha added. “I’m about halfway through the list, but so far, interesting thing: Mr. Riddler McPenguin here hasn’t spent a dime of his loot.”

  “Guy’s a pro,” O’Leary said from his corner: a whole complicated smoothie of professional respect and personal disappointment. “He knows we can trace the serial numbers.”

  “Guy’s not that much of a pro,” Danny Brady said, pushing through the door just ahead of Arthur Tan, and both of them with a little bit of a strut on. “He still leaves his name and number at the neighborhood comic shop.” He dropped a piece of paper on the desk as if it were a royal flush. Scrawled on it in red pen: Dan Morrison, and ten precious digits.

  O’Leary’s head came up, eager and sharp once again, all the fatigue draining away. “I’m going to run this,” he said, and swept the scrap of paper off the desk on his way out the door.

  Lau nodded at them. “So you found something.”

  “We found something,” Brady said, and sat in the spare chair. “One of the clerks at the third place we tried recognized him. Apparently he doesn’t do much to avoid sti
cking out. If the guy had a moustache, he would twirl it.”

  “Thing is, the more I think about this the less it fits,” Tan said, thoughtfully. “He’s careful with the rest of the operation: stolen cars, masks, not firing a shot in the direction of a human body. Why be that sloppy on the back end?”

  “He’s not being sloppy,” Hafidha said, a little light kindling in her eyes: Eureka. “It’s his mythology. If the boy thinks he’s a supervillain, in the world in his little head, slapping on some clown face and a snappy hat is enough of a disguise to fool anyone. He probably looks in the mirror when he’s got that makeup on and sees a whole different face.”

  Tan’s own face changed a little. “Superman and Clark Kent,” he said.

  “Exactly,” Hafidha added, and then grinned. “He probably thinks his identity’s a big old secret.”

  You didn’t need a magnifying glass to read the subtext. And that means he won’t be expecting us.

  “I was thinking this was suspiciously easy,” Tan said. He almost sounded disappointed. Arthur Tan, Lau decided, would not stop at the suburbs if he ever decided his career wanted to be on Broadway.

  Hafidha shook her head. “Honey, it’s easy for us. We’re thinking like a hungry gamma supervillain who cares less about the money than about playing sock puppets and making small children cry. It’s a lot harder to crack when you think like a bank robber who’s trying to get rich.”

  She saw the thing in Tan’s head click. “They called us because they had the wrong profile,” he said.

  “Right,” Lau added. “And had no way of getting the right one.”

  “Says something for Dad’s approach, doesn’t it?” Chaz said, and Lau glanced over sharply. He shrugged, a whole inch of movement. Yes: they’d just keep getting the wrong profiles, as long as most of the world didn’t know what to look for, or where.

  Nobody’d ever said the ACTF didn’t come with killer job security.

  O’Leary opened the door again, all that investigative spark sucked right out of him. “The phone number goes to a burner,” he said, and five people collectively let out their breath. So much for home by suppertime. “Back to the traffic cameras, I suppose.”