She only shook her head and declined. "I wouldn"t win anyway."
"How can you be so sure of that?"
"Well what are the odds anyway?"
Vladimir let out a breath and mumbled, "With thoughts like that you would be a shoe in."
"What?"
"Nothing," he sighed again.
"No, what"s the matter?"
He withheld his opinions and told her they should be on their way.
"No," she stopped him. "Listen, if it really is that big of a deal to you I"ll do it." She wrote her name, email, phone number, and address on the card and slipped it into the box next to the stand. "Is that better?"
"This has nothing to do with the contest Rachel."
"Then what"s this about? Why"re you acting strangely?"
"I am not comfortable with the way things are right now."
She blinked. "What are you talking about?"
Vladimir looked away from her and asked why she never told Jordan about the trip. "If you told him I was going to join you today, he would have said something to either withhold you from going or he would have accompanied us. You never wanted him to join us though."
"I did."
Vladimir shook his head and whispered, "You are lying."
"No I"m not!" she shouted. "d.a.m.n it Vladimir, who cares if it"s just you and me? Who cares about what Jordan thinks? He"s never showed any interest in what I like unless its drugs or partying and this falls well outside of those relatively small areas."
"Rachel"
"This isn"t about him at all."
Vladimir looked her in the eye and told her that it was. "I cannot be a part of a life where you want to go behind your boyfriend"s back to be with me."
Rachel glared at him and said she wasn"t. "We"re not doing anything"
"But it will become something if this persists." He took a breath and apologized and told her he needed to leave. "I cannot come between you and him. I won"t."
"Vladimir."
He told her to stop. "Rachel, please, just leave this alone." He started to walk away and apologized again. "I"ll see you in cla.s.s on Monday."
Rachel watched him leave and bitterly told herself that he was wrong. She didn"t move though, as his words and their conversation echoed through her head. As much as she hated the allegations Vladimir placed upon her, she knew he was right. Jordan hadn"t ever been the greatest boyfriend but Rachel knew he didn"t deserve to be cheated on or lied to. She wouldn"t want him to sneak around behind her back either. Rachel cursed under her breath and slowly headed for the exit while she contemplated what to do about the two boys she felt so strongly about.
7:45 PM.
Baltimore, Maryland Officer Maguire struggled to endure his workday without calling Mia to update her about the investigation. His thoughts raced from point to point in the investigation and finally after his shift ended he quickly found himself at her door. Bryce took a breath to compose himself (as well as catch his breath, since he walked to and from work on a daily basis and as such ran to her home), and knocked.
She answered after a few seconds and was surprised to see him. "What do you want Maguire?"
Bryce smiled and said, "I just wanted to drop by and tell you that there"s been a development in the case."
Mia looked very cautiously at him and asked what it was.
"We think a guy named Joaquin Hernandez is the fourteenth victim," he started to say, but quickly corrected himself, "Er...we think it"s him. We"re not entirely sure, since we weren"t the first ones on the case. I mean, we haven"t even seen the body or confirmed the scar, but, well, we"re pretty sure it"s him."
Mia let out a breath and told him it was Joaquin Hernandez. "I drove out to the site and spoke with the detectives as soon as I"d heard about it. They didn"t want to say anything about their case, but I managed to find out that he does have the crescent scar on his arm."
Bryce blinked. "Um...Well, I guess you really didn"t need me to drop by." He wasn"t sure what to do or say next, but asked, "Why"d you go out of your way to figure out whether it was him or not? Especially on your day off."
Mia shrugged. "Probably the same reason you went out of your way to drop by and tell me about him."
Bryce nodded and searched for the words he should say next. "I guess I"ll see you tomorrow then."
Mia said the same and shut the door.
He didn"t move for a moment. Crows flew behind him and sirens wailed off in the distance, but Bryce wasn"t sure what to do. He hadn"t expected her to welcome him into her home with open arms and a warm beverage, but their meeting felt terse. Bryce turned around and head back toward the streets, but stopped when he saw a homeless man next to a payphone.
"Spare some change mister?" he asked Bryce.
He would have said no, but the payphone caught his eye. It was covered with a message that read in red paint, "MIA STOP CLADIS." Bryce looked closer at the message and noticed that the paint was relatively fresh, and that the words were painted over a poorly painted coat of gray.
Bryce asked the man how long he"d been out there. The man scratched his bearded chin and said the whole day. "Did you see someone paint this message here?"
"What message?"
"This one," he said while he showed the booth off to the beggar. "Did anyone use it and leave this message behind?"
He scratched his ratty hair and said, "Most people just walk by me and don"t use the phone. There was this one guy who looked as bad off as me who used it for a moment."
"What"d he look like?" Bryce asked.
"He was in tatters and rags," he said, "Just like me."
"Yes, but what did he look like?"
The man only shrugged and admitted that he didn"t get a good look at his face.
Bryce thanked him, gave him a few bucks for his help, and raced back to Mia"s apartment. He dashed up the stairs, pounded on her door, and tried his best to catch his breath before Mia answered.
"What?"
"Did you..." he tried to catch his breath once again, "Have you seen the phone out there?"
"What about it?"
"Did you see what"s painted in there?"
Mia frowned and asked what it was. He told her about the message and she swore. "I just painted over that a few days ago and it"s back now?"
Bryce only looked at her and asked, "You knew about that?"
She said she did.
"Why didn"t you ever say anything?"
"It"s not important," she told him. "Was there a homeless looking guy there when you saw it?"
Bryce felt his heart miss a beat. "What about him?" he asked.
Mia swore again and ran outside and to the street to see if he was still there, which he wasn"t. Bryce caught up to her and only saw the few dollars he"d given the man on the sidewalk where the man sat before.
She rubbed her eyes and told Bryce to follow her back to her apartment. "I need to show you something."
They walked back up to her apartment and though he had a lot of questions, the list only grew exponentially once he saw the sorry state of her apartment. Mia"s apartment had worsened. The walls were plastered with papers, most of which were photos, short bios on the victims, testimonies of witnesses, and notes throughout the room. She had the same sticky notes Detective Sage used, with questions posted throughout the room and next to individual victim"s lengthy areas of her wall. Her kitchen counter had four short, disorganized piles of papers labeled from "heroes outside of Baltimore" to "locations and possible meanings."
Bryce looked around and found a vastly expanded version of the victim"s wall in Detective Sage"s old office along with nearly a hundred different images from all around the city. Her floors, counters, couch, and he guessed her bed were all covered in clothes, garbage, doc.u.ments she"d obviously discarded, and dozens of other items.
"What the h.e.l.l happened?" he asked without thinking.
"I don"t really have time to pick up right now," she told him. "Listen," Mia looked him in the eye, "Do not breathe a word of all of this to anyone, alright? Not to Sergeant Murdock, Detective Felton, and especially not to the chief, okay?"
He slowly agreed. "You know they said we weren"t supposed to take notes right?"
"Does it look like I listened to them Maguire?" she asked rhetorically while she cleared a small walking path toward her kitchen to access some of the doc.u.ments on her counter. Mia dug through the stack of heroes outside of Baltimore and asked if Bryce knew of any hero closer to Baltimore than Doctor Diet in Philadelphia.
"No, sorry." He waited a moment and asked, "What"s that got to do with the case?"
"There aren"t any true heroes in the city, considering Cladis seems to kill anyone with any semblance of an ability within the first few days of them gaining their ability. I originally had a theory that there was a pattern similar to the one here that would show when people would gain abilities elsewhere, but I"ve since disregarded the idea since numbers aren"t growing exponentially and multiple cases across the world are impossible to manage from here."
"You could use REFOIA," he suggested.
But Mia said she didn"t have time to. "This is just an alternative avenue I"d like to manage in case it ever becomes vital to the case, but I doubt it ever will."
"Is there anything you need me to do?"
"Not here," she said. "I need you to act like you"ve never seen this before and to keep your mouth shut about that phone booth and the homeless guy, okay?"
"Who was that?"
She told him she was working on that as well.
"Do you think it"s Cladis?"
Mia stopped what she was doing and looked at him crossly. "Why the h.e.l.l would Cladis waste his time to tell me to find him? If Cladis had any interest in me it"d be to simply find and kill me, and since that hasn"t happened yet there"s no reason to think it would be him."
"Okay, then who do you think it is?"
She sighed and said she wasn"t sure. "It could be someone who read about all of this on REFOIA and is messing with me because they know I"m a cop."
"Do you think someone could be"
Mia cut him off and told him, "What I need you to do for me, Maguire, is to look into how many of the victims were buried and how many of them were cremated, okay?"
"Sure, but why?"
"You remember that Detective Sage"s corpse was stolen, right?"
"Of course."
"Well, so was Jenna Bell"s, and as one of them was the twelfth victim I can"t help but wonder whether the rest of the victim"s bodies were stolen or not."
Bryce frowned, "But wouldn"t someone have noticed multiple grave robberies?"
Mia shook her head, "I don"t think the bodies ever reached their graves." She went on to briefly explain that it would be simpler for Cladis to remove the bodies before they made it into the grave, otherwise someone would notice. "Just let me know how many were cremated and how many were actually buried."
"Do you think this will make a difference in finding him?"
Mia let out a breath and said she wasn"t sure of anything. "Just do that for me, alright?"
Bryce agreed and said he"d let her know. "What does that mean though?"
"I don"t know Maguire," she snapped. "It could mean this guy"s collecting the bodies like trophies, he could be eating them, I don"t know! Stop asking me questions neither of us has an answer to. If you really do want an answer, find it for yourself, okay?"
Bryce only apologized and said he"d let her know while he headed for the door.
8:18 PM.
Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean Drake sat in a private jet on a return flight home. When he was arrested, his thoughts, his concerns were centralized on the meetings he would miss because of the interruption, but his father"s company was the furthest thing the pondered on the flight home. What concerned Drake was why his father and Victor were killed by the same individual.
A young stewardess walked toward him and asked whether he wanted a drink. Drake simply nodded and asked for a generic orange soda he knew his father had stocked on the plane for him. He watched the woman turn around and walk back toward the tail end of the plane. Drake watched her walk and studied how she slowed down ever so gradually to the point in which she nearly remained still. The world outside continued to fly past him, though at a slower rate. Drake returned his gaze to the frozen woman and allowed her to resume her task, though he sped her up to the point in which when she returned within what Drake felt was a second, he"d missed her comment entirely. He let the world return to its normal pace, thanked the stewardess, and took his drink.
He discovered his ability while in prison in Tokyo and quickly discovered he had the unique power to age anything he touched, but more importantly, that it was rooted in a much greater skill, which was time manipulation. Drake fooled the authorities by only revealing the portion of his powers that would allow him to return to the United States as a free man. He never told them he could manipulate time though, as Drake knew it would further incriminate him. Upon release, Drake dealt with the press, scheduled a flight home, and tried to push the level of his powers.
He learned that his time manipulation allowed him to completely control the flow of time, be it accelerating, slowing, or even stopping time altogether. Drake discovered that when time was frozen he could walk on water, yet rain or other forms of moisture in the air did not hinder him, and additionally, he could continue to hear and see in that realm (although there was nothing to hear when he stopped time, aside from his own voice). Initially Drake a.s.sumed light and sound would cease to function, but to his astonishment the two senses seemed to continue unhindered. Drake could not however jump forward in time or fully control the extent of his expeditions into the past. He"d only been able to move backward in time but did not end up when or where he"d originally hoped to. The limitations to his powers bothered him and Drake eagerly wanted to test them.
Drake asked one of the flight attendants how long until they landed, then mentioned his plan to sleep through the rest of the flight, and asked not to be disturbed. Once he made himself comfortable and pretended to sleep, he accelerated the flow of time and made the rest of his trip in what felt like only a minute to him. Time resumed its normal pace, he woke up, and readied for landing.