Robert Crane - Untouched

“She was a high school senior who worked at the store at night to help make ends meet for her family.” Ariadne shook her head, a kind of muted rage present on her face that made her pause. When she went on, her voice cracked. “She had been through one robbery already and knew to give him whatever he wanted. She went with him into the back where he assaulted her and once he was done, he killed her.”

Ariadne paused, and I watched her face twitch as she struggled to maintain her composure. When she began again, her words came out strained. “Afterward he went behind the convenience store to the low-rent housing complex where he found Karina Hartsfield smoking a cigarette outside her patio door.” She moved to the last photograph. “He killed her and stole her car, leaving behind her four-year-old daughter alone in the apartment.” She pointed to the child in the photograph with Karina Hartsfield. “Odds are good that if he’d known she was there, he would have killed her too.”

“Seven people dead.” She reached back into the sheaf of photos and pulled out a half-dozen more, scattering them in front of me and causing me to hold my hand in front of my mouth as I heard a small gasp escape. They were photos of bodies, burned around the torso, the hands, the legs, burned so their insides showed and I nearly gagged from seeing them. “See, Darrell Seidell is what we’d call a fire jotnar—a fire giant, from the same Norse myths as,” she looked to Old Man Winter, “well, you know. Not nearly as potent as our friend Mr. Gavrikov, but up close, he’s the breath of hell brought to earth. Without anyone to stop him, he was free to keep driving west, leaving burned corpses and sundered families in his wake.”

She pulled newspaper clippings out of the stack. “Want to read his press reports?” They were emblazoned with headlines, “Killer Burns Family to Death One by One, then Kills Police Officer” and “Arson Killer Claims Two in Iowa.”

“What…” I felt myself speak in a hoarse whisper. “What happened to him?”

“That part isn’t in the clippings.” She reached into the file and pulled out another page, handing it to me.

It was a report, signed by Roberto Bastian, the head of M-Squad. I skimmed it then looked up to Ariadne. “Your people caught up with him halfway to Des Moines.”

“They wrecked his car, beat him to a bloody pulp,” she said with a haunted look, “and dragged him back here where we slapped him in restraints and sent him to Arizona to spend the rest of his life in a deep, dark hole in the middle of the desert.” Her eyes found mine, and I looked away first. “This is why we’re here. To protect people from this sort of monster.” She picked up another file from a stack to her left, slapping it onto the table in front of me, followed by another, and another. They weren’t loud, but the sound of the paper hitting the rock of the desk made me flinch each time. Finally she grabbed the rest of the pile and let them fall in front of me with a thud.

I stared at it, then pulled a file from the middle of the stack, opened it, and thumbed through. It was a series of reports from an incident in Birmingham, Alabama, that was handled by their Atlanta campus. A murder committed by a kid who was no older than me. Then another, and another. They caught him on his sixth victim. They were all committed in the course of robberies; three in the same incident. Every last one of them had been beaten to death.

The next file was from Chicago and detailed a rapist working the South Side that was putting every victim in the hospital and a few in the morgue by what the victims described as “one horrific punch.” And only one. Impossibly strong, the report concluded. The rest of the file laid out the evidence against the creep: the witness statements, the agent investigation. The final report was signed by Zack Davis.

I flipped through about fifty of them, not reading every detail but taking them all in. Every crime was like something you’d see in a movie or maybe a police blotter. Some of them were a decade old or more; some were very, very recent. They were from all over the country, and each one had a trail of evidence cataloged, indicating why the agent or meta investigating believed the person they caught was the guilty party. And almost all of them were slam-dunk obvious.

I closed the last file, a robbery/murder, and put it on the stack with the rest. I swallowed hard, wishing somehow I could scrub all that I had just read out of my brain, along with all the things Wolfe did to me and the things he’d shown me in flashes through his memories earlier. I felt a desire to run far, far away to a place where people didn’t do things to other people like I saw in those files and in Wolfe’s memories…and in my own. Too bad there wasn’t a place far enough I could run to find that. “Why did you show me this?”

“Because this is the ‘solved’ stack.” She reached behind Old Man Winter’s desk and pulled out another stack, almost as big as the first and lay it in front of me. The solved stack’s folders where manila; these were red. “These are unsolved, crimes where meta involvement was suspected but the perpetrator couldn’t be located because they didn’t make a big enough noise and we only have so many agents and resources.” She raised an eyebrow at me and opened the first folder. “Take this one, for instance…thirty-eight-year-old man dies in an attempted robbery. A witness said that the perpetrator seemed to have extra arms growing out of his sides that restrained the victim while the robber beat him to death.”

“That’s…horrible.” I was suddenly hyperaware of Old Man Winter looking at me. I felt like he was sifting me, trying to filter through to my core, and I suddenly didn’t care for what he might find there. The anger made me bite back at Ariadne, hard. “I’m sorry he died, but I don’t see how anything I do is going to matter. I have my own problems, and I’m only—”

“A little girl?” There was no accusation in her words, but they slapped me just the same. “A teenager with more strength than twenty men and a power that could keep any physical assailant at bay.”

“This isn’t my problem.” I wanted to be firm. I needed to find Mom.

“So it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t involve you?” That time there was accusation, and it stung. I wondered if my verbal lashings hit her half so hard as hers hit me.

I reddened. “I’m a teenager; I’m pretty sure it’s a biological imperative to think that way.”

“I guess you’re pretty normal, then,” Ariadne said, staring me down.

“But you can be better.” Old Man Winter said it from behind his desk, leaning forward on his knuckles to look close at me. I didn’t cower from his stare, but I felt a bit of withering. Wolfe was nowhere to be heard, not that I felt like I could count on him for moral support. “You are not some schoolgirl whose blissful ignorance of the harsh realities of the world cloud her eyes with starry dreams of happy endings. Are you?”

“I’d like a happy ending,” I said. “But I don’t ignore the fact that the world can be cold and brutal and that there are people out there who exist solely to hurt others.”

“Then you know that someone has to protect ordinary people.” Ariadne leaned forward again and her red hair flared against the dull background of Old Man Winter’s office. “They can’t protect themselves against what waits for them out there. They have no defense because they don’t know what they have to defend against. Metahumans move too fast, hit too hard, for an unprepared person to fend them off. Only someone who’s well prepared—and armed, actually—stands a chance against them, and then only if they don’t get taken by surprise.”