Unidentified Human Remains & The True Nature of Love: Part 2
by Amanda Sichter
Wisdom put the phone down slowly, carefully. 'There's been another one,' he said, his back turned towards her, his voice low with despair.
'Oh.' There seemed little else Kitty could say.
'I'm going to go have a look,' said Pete.
'I'll come with you,' said Kitty.
He turned and gave her a long, steady look, his eyes bloodshot from his hangover. 'You sure?' he asked, eventually.
She nodded. 'I can help you with this, Pete,' she said. 'I need to see.'
He grunted his assent and grabbed up his trench-coat. Kitty hurried to catch up with him as he headed out the door.
* * * * *
It was half an hour into the drive that Kitty decided she couldn't stand it any more. The air in the car was thick with tension and they had not spoken a word to each other since starting off.
~We can't work like this,~ thought Kitty. ~If we're going to solve this, we need to work together, to share all our thoughts, our feelings on what's going on. We're not helping anyone if we sit here and scream at each other without any words.~ It was what it felt like to her - that their bodies screamed at each other, even while they weren't speaking.
'Wisdom,' she began.
He grunted an acknowledgment of her, his eyes never turning from the road.
'About Rigby Fallon,' she said and watched as his knuckles grew white as he gripped the steering wheel as tightly as if he was strangling it. She suddenly realised that having this talk while Wisdom was driving may not have been the most sensible thing to do.
But there was no backing out now. She drew in a deep breath and then, 'I couldn't see him, Pete. Everything hurt too much after you left - too much to chase after anyone else. And afterwards, when I had a chance to think about what I did - I realised how much I hurt you. I was young and stupid and testing my boundaries, but none of it excuses what I did to you, Pete. I'm so sorry I hurt you.'
He didn't say anything for the longest time, his gaze fixed on the road. At first Kitty worried, but then she realised that his grip upon the steering wheel was slowly relaxing, and the tension between them was slowly lessening.
Finally, without looking away from the road, he said, 'Apology accepted, Pryde. The problem is - I never could stay mad at yer.'
She let the smile creep over her face gradually. ~Now, now,~ she thought. ~Now we can work together to stop this bastard. And we'll do it. We're coming for you, you bastard, and we're a team and we're good. You'd better be ready.~
She sat up and let her keen gaze focus out of the windscreen and onto whatever lay ahead.
* * * * *
Her keenness lasted until she saw the corpse and nausea decided to take its place. She managed to quietly retire when no-one was looking and empty her stomach. One good thing about being able to phase was that you could throw up inside a tree and no-one was the wiser.
'Feeling better?' asked Pete, as Kitty drifted back to the group that surrounded the body.
~Okay,~ thought Kitty. ~No-one the wiser except Wisdom.~ It wasn't like that was really a surprise.
'Yes,' she replied aloud.
'Good,' grunted Pete. 'Now, are you seeing what I'm seeing?'
For a brief moment Kitty closed her eyes. Inside her head she wailed, ~I don't want to see, I shouldn't have to see, no-one should have to see, oh Pete, how can you stand it, how can I stand it, help me.~ And then she opened her eyes and let herself take in what was before her and knew that her world had become a darker place.
But her mind worked like her beloved computers and even as her soul shrank back from the vision, her eyes took the pictures in and her mind ran them against the photos she had seen and connections snapped and sparkled inside her head.
'It's different,' she said. 'The wounds are different. The face . . .' She looked at the face and felt her insides quail inside her again. Resolutely ignoring her nausea she walked to the tree-branch where the face of the victim was hanging. She peered at it closely for a moment and wondered that something that had once been so human could look so empty, so sack-like now it was attached to nothing at all. She turned back to Pete. 'The killing wounds weren't in the face,' she said. 'It's been taken off - peeled off, but the slashing kill wounds aren't there.' She looked down at the torso before her. 'It slashed open his stomach instead.' ~He died slowly,~ she thought, and her mind shuddered in horrified compassion.
'Why, Pryde?' asked Pete, and his gaze was steady on her face and she knew he had already made the connections, knew what the difference was. Her mind groped frantically, trying to see what he saw.
She shaped it in her words, the connections he sought. 'It's not the killing,' she said. 'The killing isn't the thread - it doesn't need to kill the same way - that's not the thrill - the thrill is in the trophy - what it takes away - that's the important thing - it kills through the face because you die quicker - it didn't want the face of him - it takes the bones - it wanted his bones - his skull.' She looked at Pete in almost-triumph. 'It wanted his skull,' she said, suddenly sure of what Pete had seen. 'It couldn’t kill him the same way because it would have smashed the skull and that's the trophy it wanted.'
Wisdom's face didn't change from his flat, grim stare, but he nodded at her. 'It took his skull,' he said. 'It's hard to tell, because it scattered the pieces of him around, but that's what it took.' Pete looked down at the torso at his feet and suddenly squatted down beside it. With one gloved hand he turned the body over and Kitty suddenly gasped as she saw the other hideous atrocity that had been committed. 'The skull and the spine,' said Wisdom, starkly, and Kitty grimaced as she saw the bloody line where the victim's spine had been ripped through his flesh. 'They'll find it,' he said, waving his hand at the cops who were watching him. 'They'll catalogue everything that's here and in the end they'll tell us it took the skull and the spine.'
'But the wounds tell you that,' whispered Kitty and she wondered how she had forgotten how good Wisdom was at this. 'You already know what it wanted.'
He stood up again, brushed his hands unconsciously together to try and clean them. 'That's why they hire me,' he said. 'But it's not enough, Pryde. I can tell them what I see in front of me but I can't tell them who the monster is.' He turned eyes like lasers, like burning ice, on her.
'That's what you're here for.'
* * * * *
'Jeremy Daniels.'
Pete flicked the photo over her shoulder expertly, so it landed on the keyboard in front of her.
Kitty picked it up and found herself protesting instinctively. ~No,~ she thought. ~It couldn't be him, he couldn't be the one who needs blood, not this sweet-faced man with the laughing eyes and bones you could kill for,~ and the connection was made in her head and she knew who he was.
Bones you could kill for. Bones he had died for.
Her fingers traced the shape of him lightly, the high cheekbones, the perfect chin and nose, the smooth line of his brow. Not a perfect face - he wore a scar below his left eye - but a perfect skull.
'He would have been popular with the girls,' she said, very softly.
'Not any more,' replied Pete. 'Not unless they've got some serious sexual deviancy problems.'
Kitty grimaced at Pete's words but she didn't comment. He had been working on these murders for far longer than she had and it was already starting to affect her nerves. She couldn't imagine what was going on in Wisdom's mind.
'It's been days, Wisdom,' she said. 'Why has it taken so long to identify him?'
'He had no ID,' replied Pete and she could hear the weariness in his tone. 'There was no wallet, no nothing on him - and they couldn't exactly do dental checks. His mother put in a missing persons report a couple of days ago. It took a while to make sure, but it's definitely him.'
Kitty turned from her keyboard to face Wisdom and her heart skipped a beat as she saw the terrible pain in his eyes, pain he was too weary to even try concealing from her. 'Does his mother know?' she asked.
'They told her he's dead, that he was murdered,' replied Wisdom. 'She doesn't know most of the rest.' He ran his fingers through his hair, turning it into an unruly mop. 'You know the worst thing, Pryde?' he asked.
'No,' she said quietly.
'The worst thing is that while we've been identifying him, that bastard is out there somewhere with its little bits of things that once were humans, and it's making its plans for who it's going to take next. A few days, Pryde, that's all we've got and then we'll be finding bits of some other poor kid all torn to pieces and we haven't got a fucking clue as to who's doing it.' Pete's fists clenched with impotent anger.
Kitty looked at him, helplessness in her wide brown eyes as she realised there was nothing she could do to help, no words of comfort she could give. All she knew was that Pete was right.
The waiting was the worst thing.
* * * * *
Finding them was the worst thing.
Wisdom looked down at the horror in front of him and knew that he fooled himself when he thought the waiting was the worst. While you were waiting you could at least convince yourself that there was some hope - that the murders would stop, that the murderer had what it wanted, that it had died, that it would be caught before it killed again. But when you found them, hope died.
Wisdom looked over at Pryde, standing beside him, her jaw tight against the nausea that tinged her cheeks green. He felt an instant of pride in her, that she could stand so strong, hold herself together in the face of horror.
'What do yer think, Pryde?' he asked.
'It's different,' she said, softly. 'Different from the last one, different from the others.'
Wisdom nodded for her to continue. He'd seen it already, seen the difference, because the files of all the other murders were imprinted in his soul. But he wanted her to find it, wanted her to learn how to interpret what she saw in these scenes, wanted her to see enough to be useful to him.
~Why? Why teach her?~ The thought beat butterfly wings inside his brain. ~You'll find the murderer, you'll catch him together, and then she goes back, back to her beloved X-Men, back out of your life. Why do you want to teach her to work with you?~ Wisdom pushed the thought to the back of his brain and refused to answer the question.
Kitty was continuing. 'The last one was different - it wanted the skull, so the MO was different. It's gone back through the face this time. But there's something . . .' she trailed off, her eyes roaming the room, trying to find the difference that nagged at her.
Finally she did.
'It's there,' she said, pointing, and Wisdom felt the sudden leap of triumph in his heart that she had seen it. 'It always dismembers the corpses - but it only takes out the bones it wants and takes them away. But this time it took out her spine and it left it behind.'
'You're getting good at this, Pryde,' said Pete and saw the sudden glow that lit in her eyes at his praise. 'And it's getting sloppy. It's made its first mistake now.'
His eyes lit with a joy that was almost savage.
'It's given us a fucking clue.'
* * * * *
Kitty gripped the sides of her chair with hands that trembled as she talked herself into believing that smashing the crap out of her monitor was not going to assist the situation any.
'You're useless,' she hissed at the screen, careful to keep her voice low. Pete had finally fallen asleep on the lounge behind her and she didn't want to disturb him. 'You're not giving me any help at all.'
She had worked so hard to set up a series of comprehensive databases so she could cross-match everything and now she was getting exactly zero return for her effort. She couldn't find anything that matched, anything that indicated a pattern.
There was no commonality in the victims - male, female, different counties, different jobs, different lifestyles, no common interests, no common clubs, nothing. There was nothing that matched in the murders - locations ranged from the victim's home to alley-ways, forest clearings, car-parks, a hotel room. There was nothing that matched in the positioning of the victims' bodies, no ritualistic dispersal of body-parts, nothing that gave a clue as to why. All there was in common was the blood and the pain and the terrible wounds - and the pieces it took away.
In desperation, and something approaching sleep deprivation, Kitty played a game. She opened up the database containing the details of the pieces stolen from each victim and hooked it up with another of her programs. Idly she watched as graphic representations of each stolen body part flipped and rotated on her screen and with a quickly-typed command she watched as they began to piece together.
She watched in almost-boredom as the pieces started to meld, but as they joined she found herself sitting upright in her chair. Excitement began to tingle through her veins.
'Pete,' she said suddenly and, when he didn't wake immediately, she threw an eraser at his head, unwilling to leave her screen.
'What?! What's up, Pryde?' half-shouted Wisdom as the missile found its target on the side of his head and jolted him awake.
'Come here,' said Kitty, tersely. 'Come and see what happens when you add up all the bits it's stolen.'
Wisdom's training with Black Air had never left him - he went from sleep to full wakefulness in a few seconds. He crossed the space to stand by Kitty's shoulder and watched as the computer program put body part together with body part.
His voice was low as he asked, 'Did you ever see Silence of the Lambs, Pryde?'
Kitty snorted. 'With Hank 'Jodie-Foster-may-I-have-your-children?' McCoy living in the mansion? Yes, I've seen Silence of the Lambs.'
'He was building himself a woman-suit,' said Wisdom. 'But this one - this one . . .'
'This one's building itself a whole body,' Kitty finished off the sentence, watching as the final pieces fit into place - most of a skeleton built, an organ here and there, a few patches of muscle on thigh and arm.
'God, Pryde, you're wonderful,' said Pete, and he dropped a quick kiss on her brow. She glowed up at him. 'There's a reason, now, you've given us a motive.' He looked down at his watch and grimaced. 'It's two o'clock in the morning, though. Time you turned this off and got to bed. We'll tell the DCI about this in the morning.'
Kitty's mouth made of moue of displeasure at the thought of having to stop, now that she finally felt she had accomplished something, but she realised the sense in Pete's words. She shut down her computer system and then stood up and stretched until her back cracked.
'I just wish I didn't have to go back to the hotel,' she groused at the thought of having to get a taxi at this time of night.
'You can always spend the night here,' replied Wisdom.
For one crystal moment, Kitty felt as if the world held its breath, as if everything had gone still about her in the sudden grasp of infinite possibilities. If someone had tapped her at that moment, she felt like she would chime.
And then Pete continued, 'I've got a spare bedroom you can move your stuff into. It'd make more sense if you stayed here,' and the possibilities collapsed around Kitty and she suddenly wondered what she had been thinking of. Of course Pete was just being courteous. And, yes, it was very sensible. And she would move her stuff over here tomorrow.
She refused to acknowledge at all the fact that the first emotion she felt had been disappointment.
* * * * *
'He wasn't exactly thrilled with our news,' grumbled Kitty as she and Pete walked out of Scotland Yard.
Wisdom shot her a half-amused glance. 'He's the supervising officer on the biggest and most gruesome murder investigation in Britain in years. He hasn't got a clue as to who's doing it. He's copping shit from every direction. And you think he'll be thrilled because we tell him the murderer's trying to build itself a body? Not likely, Pryde.'
Kitty could see his point but refused to be mollified. 'I thought we'd get some kind of thanks for giving them something to go on,' she pouted. She wasn't used to being yelled at when she'd done something that she thought was rather clever - if she did say so herself.
Pete laughed suddenly. 'We are getting thanks, Pryde. It's called a consulting fee.' She shot him a glare and he toned down his amusement. 'Think about it, Kitty. What have we given him? Okay, the motive is that the murderer's trying to make itself a body. Brilliant - that reduces the pool of potential victims down to - oh, the entire population of Great Britain. That's a lot of help.'
'So why did we bother telling him then?' asked Kitty, somewhat sourly.
'Because it's my job, Pryde,' replied Pete. 'They pay me to find them clues and patterns and murderers. I tell them everything I can and they give me access to all the help they can.' The good humour had drained from his voice. 'It's a long, painful, bloody awful frustrating job to have, but I'm damned good at it.'
Frustration. She could empathise with frustration. Kitty's blood boiled in her veins even now at the sheer amount of time it was taking to do anything on this case. It snapped out in her voice as she said, 'We've done this before, Wisdom, we've tracked down a serial killer and it wasn't like this - it didn't take so long.' Unconsciously, she clenched her fists by her sides.
Pete snorted. 'He was writing a letter to God. You're going to do that, you're going to leave clues absolutely everywhere. Of course he was easy to find.' He swung round to face Kitty, forcing her to stop. 'These murders aren't like that. There isn't a motive or a pattern or a clue. This one we'll have to work out by sheer brute brain-power.' He sighed suddenly. 'This isn't Excalibur or the X-Men, Kitty. There's no action here, no adrenalin, no fights with defined enemies on declared battlefields. Shit, I remember the days when my enemies had names - now they're called things like 'possible suspect', 'alleged murderer', 'sexual psychopath'. You're going to have to learn to deal with the fact that it can take months to track some of these people down, years to get an arrest. No quick wins, no crisp battles. Just the long fight.' His eyes bored in to hers, trying to see if she understood, if she could cope.
'Why do you do it, Wisdom?' asked Kitty, softly. 'If it takes so long and hurts so much, why do you do it?'
'Because there comes a day,' Pete replied, equally softly, 'a day after you've arrested some bastard murderer and you're walking down the street and you pass someone who fits the victim profile and you think - their life, it's their life I saved - their life and a hundred others like them. That's why I do it,' he finished.
Pete's eyes shone with something, something Kitty desperately wanted to understand, desperately wanted to feel. And then she remembered what it was.
Passion.
Clean passion.
It had been so long since she'd felt the clarity of clean passion that she had almost forgotten what it felt like. The X-Men were changing around her - there were fewer lines of dispute, many more elements of politics. Sometimes it felt like they spent all of their time fighting their friends and cozening their enemies. Sometimes it felt that they were fighting on the wrong side. And what had happened between her and Piotr - it hadn't just poisoned her feelings towards being in a team with him, it had also changed the way she looked at personal relationships. She hadn't felt a clear, clean passion like the one that shone in Wisdom's eyes for a very long time.
She hungered for it, longed for the taste of a battle where good and evil were clearly defined, where you knew you were on the side of right. Her eyes shone with a sudden, renewed desire for the fight.
'I'm ready,' she said. 'I can cope.'
Wisdom looked down at her, down into her shining eyes and something stirred within him. He leaned forward until his forehead touched hers.
'I'm glad, Pryde,' he whispered. 'I need you. I need your help.'
Then he had straightened away from her and she had to hurry for a couple of paces until she could catch up with him. She slipped her arm through his.
'C'mon, Wisdom,' she said. 'Let's go find us a clue.'