Web of the Weaver: Sidestory, Mysterious Death in a Gray Boy Zone! The Investigator Prepares!

The PRT booked a business flight up to Boston. I could have taken the bus, but they insisted. And then the flight attendants, quite coincidentally, upgraded Taylor Hebert, ordinary student, to first class.

Yes, I think I could safely assume that “The Investigator” was about as open a cape as you could imagine.

On the short flight over, I took time to look at the information the PRT had provided to me.

A suicide in a Gray Boy zone.

Suicides around Gray Boy zones, both spatially and in terms of those who knew the victims, were not uncommon, to the point that some estimates had them outnumbering the actual direct victims. Gray Boy, after all, kept the suffering going. There was no ability to accept that your loved one was dead.

Because the loved one wasn’t dead.

There were no names or other identifying information in my file, just serial numbers, the date of their bubbling, length of the time loop,  their location and…

LCC. Last coherent communication. The date when the victims lost the ability to interact, driven insane by their torment.

Most of the list had that notification. Sometimes days after their bubbling, sometimes years. But everyone knew it was just a matter of time.

But Michael O’Grady wasn’t a relative. That had been the first thing they’d checked. Not a parahuman, not related to any parahuman gang. And yet, he’d managed to climb the barrier, and disemboweled himself in front of Gray Boy Victim #1007.  LCC…. Well, it had been a long time since they had been coherent. The loop was… thirty seconds. Enough maybe for a few comments.

If they had been coherent.

Was he trying to find something out about them? 

There had been rain the night before, the soil being soft. The other six victims hadn’t been visited, scattered around the little park where a Sunday outing had turned into utter horror so long ago. A crack in the rear wall had given him purchase to climb over it, an oversight that was seeing all other Boston zones checked. I looked at the photo.  The crack was narrow, and didn’t permit direct observation of any bubbles. But an athletic individual, like a football player, could get over it. Behind was an overgrown lot on a slope, a home that had been abandoned after the attack—like most of the homes in a block’s radius, the miasma of the Nine leaving a part of the city where even the homeless didn’t tend to go.

Such an intrusion was unusual for another reason.

The Butcher.

At least four of the Butchers had either had family members or friends who had been taken by Gray Boy. As a result, the Butcher took disrespect to the victims of Gray Boy quite personally indeed.

It would be praiseworthy if the Butcher’s response to such disrespect didn’t tend to be incredibly disproportionate and often had terms such as “body count” and “blast radius” associated with it.

And beyond the fact I doubt a teenager would suicide to piss off the Butcher, this wasn’t publicized.

So I could probably rule out any direct involvement by the immortal murderer.

He climbed the wall, using the crack for purchase. Came down, sat down…and after a certain amount of time, killed himself. He was out of range of the cameras…

Which were mainly set up in the entrance. After all, nothing could damage a Gray Boy loop and anyone who could do it, wouldn’t be coming in the back door; they’d have a parade escorting them in the front door. Even if it only released them into the peace of death, breaking a loop would be one of the great achievements of the decade.

I wouldn’t be permitted in the zone itself. The PRT didn’t have the month’s worth of psychological evaluation that was the minimum required for any interaction with a Gray Boy victim.

Even the pictures didn’t show them, just shots of the ground, the foot prints, a set of football shoes, and other items. A few incense sticks.

Ritual then? I flipped over to the BPD report. Interviewed the parents, parents were uncooperative, case ruled a suicide, no further involvement… It included some thinly veiled comments that if the PRT wanted to spend money from their obviously bigger budget to confirm an open and shut case, they could be the BPD’s guest.

And not having one of their detectives have to get close to a Gray Boy site was just the icing on top.

But he climbed—difficult, but doable. Then he had incense sticks. Ritual?  Something he thought the victim would want? But the victim went LCC years ago. And the victim’s family had moved away from Boston years ago.

People who committed suicide sometimes had reasons that only made sense inside their own minds. In other cases, they did so for reasons that were obvious in retrospect. I opened two more windows in the laptop and started looking at Michael’s life. He had gone to Victory Highschool, was a member of the football team. Junior. A year older than I was.

The PRT had merely verified how he had gained access. By climbing. The BPD had determined that it had not been murder and the rest…

The rest fell into the vague region between parahuman and normal crime that was mostly ignored…

And that’s where we’d  find the evidence, if it existed.

I closed my laptop and made a call on the number I’d been given.

“Investigator? This is officer Stimmons, can I help you?”

“How much investigation was made of the plot of land where Mr. O’Grady gained access to the zone?”

“Uh… yeah, we checked it for possible evidence of parahuman activity. The BPD sent a car around, but it’s un-fenced and reverted back to the city, so legally, people can enter it so long as they don’t attempt to climb the containment wall. The wall is 15 feet high so…” I filled in a shrug on his end of the call. “We didn’t expect anyone to climb it, not without the kind of equipment that the interior sensors might note.”

“And the crack?”

“It didn’t compromise the wall’s integrity and it was impossible to view any Gray Boy bubbles from it.” There was the sound of shuffling paper. “So it’s low priority. The last time… it was going to be fixed, but then the budget had to go to cleaning up the mess the Butcher left at Avandale Mall.”

“Thank you.” I paused. “I can speak to the parents today, and this afternoon I’d like to investigate the exterior site.”

“We can do that.”

“And then tomorrow, there’s a football game. I think it would be an excellent time to interview his fellows.”

“I thought you were going to do that on Monday?”

“When they expect it? No. Tomorrow.”

I didn’t think there was any nefarious plan, but if there was…

Well, no sense in letting people get their stories straight.