Resurgence - Bigby, Philip, Noriko
Aug. 29th, 2014 06:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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om_mainThe three of them make it to the latest crime scene and follow Bigby's nose.
Noriko was, even for her, unusually quiet as they walked out of the parking lot where they had just left the school car. Her gauntlets sat in the backpack slung deceptively casually over one of her shoulders (one of her arms was laying just as deceptively casually over it, to make sure no one could snatch it), although she was seriously hoping that she would have no reason to put them on. Then again, she'd never gone to the City to look for a serial killer-slash-vigilante that seemed to have a thing for her - or whatever the case might be, here - so she wasn't focused on hope so much as pragmatism. She might have reason to put the gauntlets on. Or really, need.
She was really glad of the company she was in. Bigby seemed reliable, and she wanted to trust her guts about him. And Philip was reliable, more so than anyone else she could think of.
They were only a short five minutes' walk from the latest crime scene, and walking fast. "It's been a few hours," Noriko stated, meaning since the murder, with a look at Philip. "Police still likely to be around, or would they be done by now?" She had no idea how long it took to process a crime scene.
"It's hard to say," Philip said as he locked the car and pocketed the keys. Feeding the meter was next, nothing to see here, nothing at all. "It'll depend on how much of a mess it was. If they're still there, we can just blend in with the gawkers, any crime scene will have them. It might be useful to see what they want blocked off anyway."
He was completely relaxed as he looked around and looking entirely unlike the face he wore at the school. The months of trips with Noriko had given him a new set of body language to learn, he was still in better shape than most of the kids she knew, but he stuck out far less than he used to. Added to the scruffed up hair, the plain dark t-shirt and battered jeans and boots, he was just another teenager in a crowd.
Bigby was his usual kind of quiet. His expression unreadable, but his body language relaxed, unconcerned. He’d almost feel right back in his element... If it weren’t for everything being so different. It was the first time he’d been back in the city since he’d left for the school and his senses were alive with hundreds of thousands of smells, sights and sounds.
“Let’s hope they’re not,” Bigby remarked. “I’d like to get a close look if I can.”
"Yeah," Noriko nodded agreement. She was really hoping that Bigby could get something out of the crime scene, anything really that could point them in the right direction. Whatever was happening, the sooner it stopped, the better. "You ever lived around here?" she asked Bigby, just to get an idea of how well he knew the neighborhood. You never knew.
“Yeah,” Bigby confirmed and he looked off to their right. “There’s an empty building about a block from here I used to crash in.” He paused at the end of the sidewalk and then started to cross the street.
That was good to know, and Noriko nodded acknowledgement. They rounded a corner and were now able to see that the alley of the crime scene seemed devoid of a crowd of gawkers; cops were probably done, in that case, which would make it easier on them. Also good.
The alley looked just like it always did. Dirty, messy, and full of too many dark corners at night. Not that it was night yet, but it would soon get there. Noriko drew instinctively closer to the Surge tag on the far wall, then looked at the place where she knew the body had been. No chalk outline like in the old movies. The graffiti yielded no more clues to her from up close, the font was too classic to point to anyone in particular, and way too many kids knew her codename anyway. It might even be someone she had never met; she was still back regularly, often with Philip, trying to bring stuff to the kids or help out in any way she could. She'd become an oddity, not quite one of them anymore, but close enough that they trusted her as much as they trusted other street kids.
She shook herself out of her thoughts and turned to the two boys, eyebrows raised. "Anything?"
“The body was here.” Bigby gestured to the spot and then, careful not to disturb anything, walked around it to the tag. His wolf-like senses taking everything in while his brain tried to keep up translating it all.
The paint was definitely new. Even if the lack of chipping and fading hadn’t given that away, he could smell it. “Paint’s new. Can’t be much older than the victim.” He turned and looked down at the ground where said victim had laid. “He wasn’t killed here. The smell of blood isn’t strong enough, so he was probably killed somewhere else and his body was dumped.”
"Typical," Philip murmured, quiet to not disturb Bigby. "That kind of black bag drop makes a point. They weren't dumping the body to hide it, they were doing it to draw the right kind of attention. We're out of the 'nice' traffic, but the kids would come across it easily and we're close enough to the respectable areas that cops and reporters would swarm."
It was looking more and more like someone was sending Noriko a specific message and Philip for the life of him couldn't figure out why.
Noriko nodded at Philip's assessment of the location, frowning thoughtfully, then looked back at Bigby. "Any way you can get us to where he was actually killed?" She needed to figure this out - and put a stop to it before more people died, and before anybody noticed the graffiti.
“I think so.” Bigby had never tracked a person in the city before, but the victim’s scent, and the accompanying smell of death, were strong and hung thick in the air. It should be easy enough to follow.
Bigby tilted his head and took a sniff. “This way,” he said, starting down the sidewalk.
Noriko nodded at him, acknowledgement that she did trust him with her back, and then some, before falling in stride after Bigby. His nose led them to another alley that would be dark after sunset, so any minute now, but one that was definitely farther away from what Philip had called the respectable areas. Despite the poor cleaning job that had been attempted (traces of blood remained), the cops clearly hadn't found it yet.
"Anything new?" Noriko asked Bigby. Anything that could give her a hint who this might be, what was going on. There was a squat a couple blocks away, so clearly heading there next was the plan, to ask if anybody had seen anything, unless Bigby could direct them somewhere else.
“Piss. Vomit in that corner over there. A dead rat behind the dumpster.” Bigby’s eyes swept over the alley. “And a woman was here. Probably around the same time as the victim. She came in the way we did, so I’m guessing either she was meeting him, or she’d known he was going to be here and cornered him.” He found he was enjoying this. He liked working through this, figuring things out.
"No sign of blood from the woman?" Philip asked. "Or could you tell if she'd gotten any on her? Or if there were any drugs around the blood? Sorry," he said with a sigh. "If I'm getting rude, tell me, I just don't know what your capacities are. I can think of a few different ways this could have gone depending on the answers."
"Whatever you can tell us," Noriko confirmed, really disliking the way her stomach was in knots over this.
If Bigby was annoyed by all the questions, he didn’t show any sign of it, his expression as unreadable as it usually was. “No blood from the woman,” he answered. “I can’t tell if she got any on her—It doesn’t work that way. And I don’t smell any drugs.” He sniffed and then looked past them at the mouth of the alleyway. “I can tell you where she went.”
The corner of Philip's mouth twitched in a frown but he nodded. This was looking worse and worse. "Let's follow as long as we can. And be careful. Signs are pointing to this woman being responsible and it's looking like she's good.” Taking down two adult men with no injury to herself, men who were already criminals even if they were on the dealing end, not the enforcing end, and doing it up close. He'd have been less worried if she was a shooter, even if that seemed odd.
Then again, he was pretty familiar with both skill sets.
Noriko nodded grimly; she was half tempted to put her gauntlets on, just in case. But the last thing she wanted was to attract attention to herself - to the three of them - by pulling on metallic gloves, no matter how stylish Tony and Kitty might have made them. "Anything you can tell about her?" she quietly asked Bigby as she fell in stride beside him, trusting his nose to lead them - and Philip to have her back.
Anything at all he might be able to tell from her smell, Noriko wanted to know. It might seem irrelevant, but the mystery woman knew her (or of her). If Noriko knew her, she might be able to figure out who it was.
Bigby paused at the entrance to the alley, sniffed, and then took a left. “Cigarette smoke and sweat. Mold, maybe. Something musty,” he answered as they walked. It was surprising how much like tracking a rabbit this was. “I can’t smell any soap, so she hasn’t bathed in awhile. No deodorant.”
"Good odds that she's living rough," Philip muttered as he followed. He wasn't neglecting to look up either, watching fire escapes and rooftops where he could.
"Meaning better odds that I know her," Noriko stated quietly, resisting the urge to shove her hands in her pockets and close off her body language. Even as she instinctively kept an eye on their surroundings, she was going through the street kids she knew, trying to pinpoint who the mysterious girl might be. There weren't that many who she thought might have the guts for this - or the mental instability, but a lot of them were fucked up in their own ways.
“Yup,” Bigby agreed honestly. He paused at a crosswalk, looked for incoming cars, and then started to cross. “Know of anyone who’d do something like this?”
"Kill them, yes," Noriko answered with a frown. She could have, back in the days, although they would have ended up electrocuted, rather than stabbed, and it would not likely have been a conscious decision. "But I don't see why anyone would call me out."
"Put that aside for the moment," Philip said quietly. "Think about who you would know that would actually do this, come up to someone and stab them with that much intent. I know there's a lot of casual violence out here but..." he shook his head, trying to make the words work and hoping that neither of them would end up horrified. "Guns are easy, bad drugs are easy. Knives are visceral. It takes a certain kind of mind to do that, to actually be in arms reach when you end someone, to have their blood literally on your hands."
"I don't know," Noriko shook her head, glancing at Philip before reporting her attention to their surroundings as they kept following Bigby's nose. "There were a lot of unstable kids." Including herself, which meant that she didn't know how far to trust her perceptions of the time. She had had enough judgement to manage to stay alive and out of jail, but it had been a close call a few times. "But this is different. This amount of planning, the willpower needed..."
Bigby gave Philip a look as he tried to explain it to them gently. As if he and Noriko didn’t know about knives. They knew better than most. He’d held knives before with the intent to kill if he had to. Living on the streets was about survival and it was ugly.
“Well, we know it’s probably a woman given the scent,” Bigby said, trying to help her narrow it down. “She’s smart. This took planning. And she’s probably good with knives. These were strong men who were not nice people. Catching them by surprise would not have been easy.”
Philip just shrugged a little in apology to Bigby, he wasn't trying to talk down to them, but there was no way in hell he could admit why he knew what he did. There was only one person at the school who could have the slightest inkling and even seeing decorative vegetable carving in a dream was too damn close. "Only one scent?" he asked instead. "If she's working alone, that makes it even harder."
"I wonder if she's one of us," Noriko stated quietly. That would potentially make the kills easier. And there were a few kids that knew what she could do; it was how she'd gotten her street name, after all. Too bad being a mutant didn't come with its own specific scent.
“She could be,” Bigby agreed, taking a right into an alleyway that cut between two buildings to a small parking lot that was unused and overgrown. “If she is, it isn’t a mutation that gives off a smell. Not like yours does.”
Noriko frowned as they reached the parking lot. One of the buildings across from them used to be a squat, but she didn't know if it was still in use. It certainly didn't look inhabited. "Does the scent lead there?" she asked Bigby, with a nod towards the derelict old building.
Bigby stopped in the middle of the parking lot and sniffed. The wind was in their favor, blowing toward them and bringing scents with it. “Yeah,” he answered. “And it’s stronger too. Either she spends a lot of time there, or she might be there now.”
Noriko frowned, trying to pull back her memories of that building. It was tough; she hadn't been there often. "Beds were set up on the first floor." High enough not to be hit first, but not so high that there weren't easy ways out through the windows. "Out of order elevator in the middle, staircase to its... right? I think." She hated not being certain, but it had been too long, and she couldn't do any better.
"Sounds like we need to take a look then," Philip replied. If it was another mutant, the last thing he wanted to do was leave it for anyone else, especially police, that just made for complications. Plus, if they knew someone was looking for them, chances are good they might go to ground. "I've got your back, just concentrate on finding her."
“I’ll lead,” Bigby said, even though it was a given. “Stay close, and stay quiet. A building like that is old and will make a lot of noises. If someone is in there, I should be able to hear them.” He’d smell them too, but it was hearing that would stop anyone from getting the jump on them.
"Give me a second," Noriko added, setting her backpack down on the ground and crouching in front of it. Yeah, she was putting her gauntlets on; she was wearing the oversized jacket that she was because her hands could easily fit in the pockets, even with the metal gauntlets on, which would allow for a modicum of discretion, if needed. Better safe than sorry, although she really hoped she wouldn't be able to justify putting them on. "OK," she added after closing up her bag and slinging it back on her shoulders. "Let's go."
Noriko was, even for her, unusually quiet as they walked out of the parking lot where they had just left the school car. Her gauntlets sat in the backpack slung deceptively casually over one of her shoulders (one of her arms was laying just as deceptively casually over it, to make sure no one could snatch it), although she was seriously hoping that she would have no reason to put them on. Then again, she'd never gone to the City to look for a serial killer-slash-vigilante that seemed to have a thing for her - or whatever the case might be, here - so she wasn't focused on hope so much as pragmatism. She might have reason to put the gauntlets on. Or really, need.
She was really glad of the company she was in. Bigby seemed reliable, and she wanted to trust her guts about him. And Philip was reliable, more so than anyone else she could think of.
They were only a short five minutes' walk from the latest crime scene, and walking fast. "It's been a few hours," Noriko stated, meaning since the murder, with a look at Philip. "Police still likely to be around, or would they be done by now?" She had no idea how long it took to process a crime scene.
"It's hard to say," Philip said as he locked the car and pocketed the keys. Feeding the meter was next, nothing to see here, nothing at all. "It'll depend on how much of a mess it was. If they're still there, we can just blend in with the gawkers, any crime scene will have them. It might be useful to see what they want blocked off anyway."
He was completely relaxed as he looked around and looking entirely unlike the face he wore at the school. The months of trips with Noriko had given him a new set of body language to learn, he was still in better shape than most of the kids she knew, but he stuck out far less than he used to. Added to the scruffed up hair, the plain dark t-shirt and battered jeans and boots, he was just another teenager in a crowd.
Bigby was his usual kind of quiet. His expression unreadable, but his body language relaxed, unconcerned. He’d almost feel right back in his element... If it weren’t for everything being so different. It was the first time he’d been back in the city since he’d left for the school and his senses were alive with hundreds of thousands of smells, sights and sounds.
“Let’s hope they’re not,” Bigby remarked. “I’d like to get a close look if I can.”
"Yeah," Noriko nodded agreement. She was really hoping that Bigby could get something out of the crime scene, anything really that could point them in the right direction. Whatever was happening, the sooner it stopped, the better. "You ever lived around here?" she asked Bigby, just to get an idea of how well he knew the neighborhood. You never knew.
“Yeah,” Bigby confirmed and he looked off to their right. “There’s an empty building about a block from here I used to crash in.” He paused at the end of the sidewalk and then started to cross the street.
That was good to know, and Noriko nodded acknowledgement. They rounded a corner and were now able to see that the alley of the crime scene seemed devoid of a crowd of gawkers; cops were probably done, in that case, which would make it easier on them. Also good.
The alley looked just like it always did. Dirty, messy, and full of too many dark corners at night. Not that it was night yet, but it would soon get there. Noriko drew instinctively closer to the Surge tag on the far wall, then looked at the place where she knew the body had been. No chalk outline like in the old movies. The graffiti yielded no more clues to her from up close, the font was too classic to point to anyone in particular, and way too many kids knew her codename anyway. It might even be someone she had never met; she was still back regularly, often with Philip, trying to bring stuff to the kids or help out in any way she could. She'd become an oddity, not quite one of them anymore, but close enough that they trusted her as much as they trusted other street kids.
She shook herself out of her thoughts and turned to the two boys, eyebrows raised. "Anything?"
“The body was here.” Bigby gestured to the spot and then, careful not to disturb anything, walked around it to the tag. His wolf-like senses taking everything in while his brain tried to keep up translating it all.
The paint was definitely new. Even if the lack of chipping and fading hadn’t given that away, he could smell it. “Paint’s new. Can’t be much older than the victim.” He turned and looked down at the ground where said victim had laid. “He wasn’t killed here. The smell of blood isn’t strong enough, so he was probably killed somewhere else and his body was dumped.”
"Typical," Philip murmured, quiet to not disturb Bigby. "That kind of black bag drop makes a point. They weren't dumping the body to hide it, they were doing it to draw the right kind of attention. We're out of the 'nice' traffic, but the kids would come across it easily and we're close enough to the respectable areas that cops and reporters would swarm."
It was looking more and more like someone was sending Noriko a specific message and Philip for the life of him couldn't figure out why.
Noriko nodded at Philip's assessment of the location, frowning thoughtfully, then looked back at Bigby. "Any way you can get us to where he was actually killed?" She needed to figure this out - and put a stop to it before more people died, and before anybody noticed the graffiti.
“I think so.” Bigby had never tracked a person in the city before, but the victim’s scent, and the accompanying smell of death, were strong and hung thick in the air. It should be easy enough to follow.
Bigby tilted his head and took a sniff. “This way,” he said, starting down the sidewalk.
Noriko nodded at him, acknowledgement that she did trust him with her back, and then some, before falling in stride after Bigby. His nose led them to another alley that would be dark after sunset, so any minute now, but one that was definitely farther away from what Philip had called the respectable areas. Despite the poor cleaning job that had been attempted (traces of blood remained), the cops clearly hadn't found it yet.
"Anything new?" Noriko asked Bigby. Anything that could give her a hint who this might be, what was going on. There was a squat a couple blocks away, so clearly heading there next was the plan, to ask if anybody had seen anything, unless Bigby could direct them somewhere else.
“Piss. Vomit in that corner over there. A dead rat behind the dumpster.” Bigby’s eyes swept over the alley. “And a woman was here. Probably around the same time as the victim. She came in the way we did, so I’m guessing either she was meeting him, or she’d known he was going to be here and cornered him.” He found he was enjoying this. He liked working through this, figuring things out.
"No sign of blood from the woman?" Philip asked. "Or could you tell if she'd gotten any on her? Or if there were any drugs around the blood? Sorry," he said with a sigh. "If I'm getting rude, tell me, I just don't know what your capacities are. I can think of a few different ways this could have gone depending on the answers."
"Whatever you can tell us," Noriko confirmed, really disliking the way her stomach was in knots over this.
If Bigby was annoyed by all the questions, he didn’t show any sign of it, his expression as unreadable as it usually was. “No blood from the woman,” he answered. “I can’t tell if she got any on her—It doesn’t work that way. And I don’t smell any drugs.” He sniffed and then looked past them at the mouth of the alleyway. “I can tell you where she went.”
The corner of Philip's mouth twitched in a frown but he nodded. This was looking worse and worse. "Let's follow as long as we can. And be careful. Signs are pointing to this woman being responsible and it's looking like she's good.” Taking down two adult men with no injury to herself, men who were already criminals even if they were on the dealing end, not the enforcing end, and doing it up close. He'd have been less worried if she was a shooter, even if that seemed odd.
Then again, he was pretty familiar with both skill sets.
Noriko nodded grimly; she was half tempted to put her gauntlets on, just in case. But the last thing she wanted was to attract attention to herself - to the three of them - by pulling on metallic gloves, no matter how stylish Tony and Kitty might have made them. "Anything you can tell about her?" she quietly asked Bigby as she fell in stride beside him, trusting his nose to lead them - and Philip to have her back.
Anything at all he might be able to tell from her smell, Noriko wanted to know. It might seem irrelevant, but the mystery woman knew her (or of her). If Noriko knew her, she might be able to figure out who it was.
Bigby paused at the entrance to the alley, sniffed, and then took a left. “Cigarette smoke and sweat. Mold, maybe. Something musty,” he answered as they walked. It was surprising how much like tracking a rabbit this was. “I can’t smell any soap, so she hasn’t bathed in awhile. No deodorant.”
"Good odds that she's living rough," Philip muttered as he followed. He wasn't neglecting to look up either, watching fire escapes and rooftops where he could.
"Meaning better odds that I know her," Noriko stated quietly, resisting the urge to shove her hands in her pockets and close off her body language. Even as she instinctively kept an eye on their surroundings, she was going through the street kids she knew, trying to pinpoint who the mysterious girl might be. There weren't that many who she thought might have the guts for this - or the mental instability, but a lot of them were fucked up in their own ways.
“Yup,” Bigby agreed honestly. He paused at a crosswalk, looked for incoming cars, and then started to cross. “Know of anyone who’d do something like this?”
"Kill them, yes," Noriko answered with a frown. She could have, back in the days, although they would have ended up electrocuted, rather than stabbed, and it would not likely have been a conscious decision. "But I don't see why anyone would call me out."
"Put that aside for the moment," Philip said quietly. "Think about who you would know that would actually do this, come up to someone and stab them with that much intent. I know there's a lot of casual violence out here but..." he shook his head, trying to make the words work and hoping that neither of them would end up horrified. "Guns are easy, bad drugs are easy. Knives are visceral. It takes a certain kind of mind to do that, to actually be in arms reach when you end someone, to have their blood literally on your hands."
"I don't know," Noriko shook her head, glancing at Philip before reporting her attention to their surroundings as they kept following Bigby's nose. "There were a lot of unstable kids." Including herself, which meant that she didn't know how far to trust her perceptions of the time. She had had enough judgement to manage to stay alive and out of jail, but it had been a close call a few times. "But this is different. This amount of planning, the willpower needed..."
Bigby gave Philip a look as he tried to explain it to them gently. As if he and Noriko didn’t know about knives. They knew better than most. He’d held knives before with the intent to kill if he had to. Living on the streets was about survival and it was ugly.
“Well, we know it’s probably a woman given the scent,” Bigby said, trying to help her narrow it down. “She’s smart. This took planning. And she’s probably good with knives. These were strong men who were not nice people. Catching them by surprise would not have been easy.”
Philip just shrugged a little in apology to Bigby, he wasn't trying to talk down to them, but there was no way in hell he could admit why he knew what he did. There was only one person at the school who could have the slightest inkling and even seeing decorative vegetable carving in a dream was too damn close. "Only one scent?" he asked instead. "If she's working alone, that makes it even harder."
"I wonder if she's one of us," Noriko stated quietly. That would potentially make the kills easier. And there were a few kids that knew what she could do; it was how she'd gotten her street name, after all. Too bad being a mutant didn't come with its own specific scent.
“She could be,” Bigby agreed, taking a right into an alleyway that cut between two buildings to a small parking lot that was unused and overgrown. “If she is, it isn’t a mutation that gives off a smell. Not like yours does.”
Noriko frowned as they reached the parking lot. One of the buildings across from them used to be a squat, but she didn't know if it was still in use. It certainly didn't look inhabited. "Does the scent lead there?" she asked Bigby, with a nod towards the derelict old building.
Bigby stopped in the middle of the parking lot and sniffed. The wind was in their favor, blowing toward them and bringing scents with it. “Yeah,” he answered. “And it’s stronger too. Either she spends a lot of time there, or she might be there now.”
Noriko frowned, trying to pull back her memories of that building. It was tough; she hadn't been there often. "Beds were set up on the first floor." High enough not to be hit first, but not so high that there weren't easy ways out through the windows. "Out of order elevator in the middle, staircase to its... right? I think." She hated not being certain, but it had been too long, and she couldn't do any better.
"Sounds like we need to take a look then," Philip replied. If it was another mutant, the last thing he wanted to do was leave it for anyone else, especially police, that just made for complications. Plus, if they knew someone was looking for them, chances are good they might go to ground. "I've got your back, just concentrate on finding her."
“I’ll lead,” Bigby said, even though it was a given. “Stay close, and stay quiet. A building like that is old and will make a lot of noises. If someone is in there, I should be able to hear them.” He’d smell them too, but it was hearing that would stop anyone from getting the jump on them.
"Give me a second," Noriko added, setting her backpack down on the ground and crouching in front of it. Yeah, she was putting her gauntlets on; she was wearing the oversized jacket that she was because her hands could easily fit in the pockets, even with the metal gauntlets on, which would allow for a modicum of discretion, if needed. Better safe than sorry, although she really hoped she wouldn't be able to justify putting them on. "OK," she added after closing up her bag and slinging it back on her shoulders. "Let's go."
