Superhero Detective Series (Book 2): The Missing Exploding Girl Read online

  I nodded. I almost said I also performed at parties, but it seemed too glib in light of what Mrs. Barton was going through.

  “There’s no need to apologize for your husband,” I instead said. “Not everyone is a fan of Metahumans. Some of us have given people ample reason to not be fans. Some Metas have justly earned the title of supervillain.”

  Mrs. Barton shook her head emphatically.

  “That’s still no reason for John to be rude to a guest in our house,” she said. She started to wring her hands again. It seemed like a nervous habit, like toe-tapping or knuckle-cracking. “It’s no excuse, but Clara turning out to be a Metahuman has been hard on him. They have never had the best of relationships, especially as Clara got older. But her getting powers pushed things over the edge.”

  “When did her powers manifest?” I asked.

  “A little over a year ago. John and Clara got into an argument, and John grounded her and made her go to her room. She stomped into her room and slammed the door behind her. A few seconds later, boom,” Mrs. Barton said, pantomiming an explosion with her hands. Her eyes were wide at the memory of it. “The explosion completely destroyed Clara’s room, not to mention damaging other parts of the house. When John and I went to her room to find out what in the world had happened, Clara was gone. We thought maybe someone planted a bomb, or something. But, as we stood there, Clara materialized out of thin air before our eyes. She looked as shocked as we were by what happened. After the shock wore off, we eventually realized Clara is a Metahuman.”

  “Can she control her abilities?” I asked.

  Mrs. Barton nodded.

  “Somewhat. John forbade her to use her powers. I think he was hoping if she did not use them, they would just go away. But Clara used to sneak off to the woods to practice using them. I didn’t tell John, but I encouraged her to practice. I did not want her to explode the next time she got mad or irritated. What if she hurt or killed someone? Fortunately she’s gotten to the point where she won’t explode without meaning to.”

  “Your husband is wrong, Mrs. Barton,” I said. “Ignoring Metahuman powers won’t make them go away. Once they manifest, they are there for good, like it or not.”

  Mrs. Barton nodded again.

  “I know. I think John knew it too. Wishful thinking, I guess. Our religion teaches us Metahumans are evil,” she said. She looked up at me earnestly. Fresh tears formed in her eyes. “My daughter is not evil, though. She’s stubborn and willful and doesn’t always do what she ought to do, but she’s a good person. I know she is. That’s how I know she’s not responsible for that bombing in D.C. She wouldn’t hurt all those people.”

  “Have the police connected her to the bombing? If I were investigating it and a Metahuman who was on file as having the power to explode was at the scene, she would be the first person I would look at,” I said. I saw the guilty look on Mrs. Barton’s face. I made an educated guess.

  “You did not register her as a Metahuman, did you?” I said. Under the United States’ Hero Act of 1945, all people with Metahuman powers were required to register with the federal government. Under the same law, it was illegal for Metahumans to use their powers unless they first became licensed Heroes. The licensing of Heroes was done by the Heroes’ Guild. The Guild was to Heroes what bar associations were to attorneys.

  “No, we didn’t register her. We knew it’s against the law to not do it, but John didn’t want anyone to know we have a Metahuman daughter. I guess he’s ashamed and embarrassed,” she said. She blushed. “To be honest, I kind of felt the same way. At least at first. But, the more time I spent with Clara after she developed her powers, the more I realized she is the exact same person now as she was before she got them. She’s not evil, she’s not a demon, and she’s nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed by.” She said it firmly, as if she was convincing herself as much as she was convincing me. “I want to find her and bring her home.”

  “Why do you think she’s missing?” I asked. “Did she leave voluntarily or do you think someone took her?”

  “I don’t know. She’s run off before, but has always come back after a day or two. She and John fight all the time. I’m ashamed to say it, but it got to the point where I kind of liked it when she ran off. When she was gone, the house was peaceful for a while. As long as she was safe and came back, it wasn’t a big deal. But, when she was gone for four days and I didn’t hear from her, I knew something was wrong. I’ve called her cell more times than I can count, but it always goes to voicemail. I’ve spoken to the cell phone company about if they can track the GPS in the phone, but they told me the phone must be turned off or disabled.”

  “Did you report her missing to the police?” I asked.

  “Yes, and they told me they would look for her,” she said. She shook her head and let out a half-snort and half-sob. “I get the feeling they aren’t looking very hard for her, though. When Clara first started running away, I reported her missing a couple of times. Because of that, I don’t think the police are taking Clara’s absence very seriously. It’s the whole girl who cried wolf thing.”

  Mrs. Barton looked up at me imploringly with her red-rimmed eyes.

  “I know something is wrong with Clara,” she said. “I feel it in my bones. If there wasn’t, she would have come back by now. I know John insulted you, but I still want to hire you to find Clara and bring her home.”

  “You husband made it clear he doesn’t want to hire me, though,” I said.

  Mrs. Barton balled her fists at her side.

  “I don’t care what he thinks,” she insisted. I did not believe her. She lowered her voice a bit when she said the words, as if she was afraid her husband might hear them. I had a feeling Mr. Barton dominated her so thoroughly Mrs. Barton did not know where her husband’s thoughts and beliefs ended and her own began. It was an act of supreme courage for her to defy her husband by continuing to talk to me.

  Mrs. Barton shook her head in anger and frustration, whether at herself or her husband, I didn’t know.

  “The problem is I don’t work and John controls the finances,” she said. “I have a little money squirreled away that John doesn’t know about, though. I skim some off of the money John gives me for groceries sometimes, mainly so I can have money to give to Clara when John won’t give her any. It’s not much, but you can have all of it. I just want my baby back.”

  I thought about how scared and confused I had been when my powers first manifested themselves when I hit puberty. How much worse would it have been if I had John Barton as a father? I also thought about how much courage it took for Mrs. Barton to defy her husband and try to hire me. I admired courage. I liked to encourage it when I found it, which I too infrequently did. Finally, I thought about the fact my bank balance was sufficiently padded I was not in any immediate danger of missing any meals.

  “Do you have any money on you?” I asked Mrs. Barton. She looked startled for a moment, and then reached for her pockets. When she checked a third pocket, she found something. She pulled out a folded up piece of paper. I took it from her, and straightened it out. It was a dollar bill. It was ragged and faded and, from the looks of it, it had been washed inside of Mrs. Barton’s pants once or twice.

  I folded the dollar back up again and put it into my jacket pocket. I would try to not blow it all in one place.

  “You’ve just hired yourself a detective,” I said. “Do you want a receipt?”

  CHAPTER 4

  The next day, I pulled into the employee parking lot of the Astor City Times. The Times had one of the highest circulations of all the newspapers in the country. That perhaps was damning it with faint praise. Being a high circulation newspaper was no great trick anymore. Newspaper circulation had dropped so much that having three subscribers made one a high circulation newspaper. Newspapers seemed to be dying and rapidly being replaced by television shows which chased ratings instead of the facts, social media sites which were more interested in who slept with whom than actual news, an
d bloggers who wouldn’t know a journalistic ethic if they tripped over one.

  I still had a subscription to the Times and read it every day, but I was in a dwindling minority. If I died, I feared the Times’ subscription base would be dealt a mortal blow and the paper with die with me. Since I did not have children, it was nice to have something to live for.

  In addition to my habit of reading newspapers, I also preferred to read an actual book or magazine instead of a computer tablet, and I thought three dimensional movies were a cheap gimmick. I was Truman Lord, the last of the dinosaurs. Hopefully the same thing that happened to them would not happen to me.

  The Times was housed in sprawling one story dull brown brick building. The windows could stand to be washed, the shutters were in need of painting, and some of the bricks looked like they were crumbling. The building had seen better days. The same could be said of the paper itself, which used to be read by every man, woman, and child in the country. Even though the Times was no longer in its glory days, it was still a serious journalistic organ that took gathering the news and fact-checking seriously.

  I walked up to a glass door that was on the back side of the building. The stenciling on the door read “Employees Only.” Without breaking stride, I opened the door and walked in. The door closed behind me with a loud squeak. If confronted, I would claim I could not read. Why should I be any different than the rest of the country?

  I walked into the newsroom bullpen. A sea of brownish-yellow cubicles extended in front of me. The room hummed with activity: computer keyboards clattered, people spoke earnestly into telephones, and reporters argued with editors. The only way the scene was different from a movie newsroom was a haze of cigarette smoke did not hang in the room the way it always seemed to in the movies. These days, if someone pulled out a cigarette and tried to light it indoors, he would probably be publicly executed.

  No one paid me any mind as I made my way through the maze of cubicles. It made me question both their nose for news and their good taste. I was dressed in dark blue jeans, black waterproof leather boots, a brown turtleneck sweater, and a black leather jacket. It was my private detective winter weather chic look. I had a nine millimeter semi-automatic pistol in a shoulder holster concealed by the partially zipped up jacket. If a supervillain sprang out at me, it would take me an extra second or two to extract my gun due to the jacket. It was a risk I was willing to take in the interest of not drawing too much attention to myself by wearing an exposed gun. On the upside, if I did get ambushed by a supervillain in the newsroom, there were plenty of people around who could write my obituary.

  I had been in the newsroom several times before, and knew exactly where to go. Neither a supervillain nor a fashion photographer sprang out at me as I threaded my way to the cubicle of Stan Langley. Stan was one of the associate editors of the paper.

  I arrived at Stan’s cubicle, which was located next to the far wall of the newsroom. Stan was staring at his computer monitor, busily typing away. He did not look up at me. It was his fashion loss.

  “Writing a story about me?” I asked. “Both ‘handsome’ and ‘intrepid’ are spelled with one D each.”

  Stan continued to look at his monitor.

  “As a matter of fact, I am writing a story about you,” he said. “How many S’s in ‘asshole’?” he asked.

  Stan had not changed since the last time I saw him about a year before. He was still built like a bowling pin that had sprouted arms and legs. His steel grey hair was cut short, and his blue eyes were unadorned by glasses even though he read more every day than the head of the Library of Congress. His teeth looked like brown tombstones, stained by years of coffee and smoking. He had been threatening to retire for years, but I suspected he would die at his desk, straightening out some reporter’s mangled syntax and pissing off some wrongdoing politician.

  “How unkind,” I said. “Now you’ve gone and hurt my feelings.”

  “If you ever had feelings, Truman,” he said, “they would have been knocked out of you years ago with all of the tilting at windmills you do. To what do I owe this dubious pleasure? Run out of supervillains to beat up on?”

  “I want to talk to you about the explosion at Dupont Circle in D.C.,” I said.

  For the first time since I had arrived, Stan stopped typing. He looked up at me with his piercing blue eyes.

  “You’re involved in that?” he asked. “That’s one of the biggest stories of the year, if not the biggest. What can you tell me?”

  I shrugged.

  “Not much other than what I see in the news, which is why I’m here. I was hoping you can fill me in on what the authorities know about the explosion so far. I figured if there is something about the explosion worth knowing, you’d know it,” I said. The last bit was a blatant attempt at flattery, but it also happened to be true. Stan had been a newsman a long time, and had a knack for separating the wheat from the chaff.

  Stan leaned back in his chair. He laced his fingers over his big belly.

  “Who are you working for?” he asked.

  I smiled enigmatically. I was not in the habit of volunteering the names of clients.

  “What’s his interest in the Dupont Circle explosion?” Stan asked.

  I continued smiling my mysterious smile. The Cheshire Cat had nothing on me. I was Truman the Tongue-Tied.

  Stan sat up straight again and returned his hands to his keyboard.

  “If you don’t have anything to share, then buzz off,” he said, returning his gaze to his monitor. “I’ve got more important things to do than to be your personal Google search.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I’m working for the mother of a girl who was last seen on the surveillance cameras in the Dupont Circle subway before the explosion. The daughter hasn’t been seen or heard from since.”

  “She probably died in the explosion,” Stan said flatly as he deleted a page of text someone had likely toiled over for an hour.

  “Try to avoid sobbing into your keyboard. You’re one of the last great humanitarians and bleeding hearts,” I said, shaking my head. “Whether or not the girl is dead is one of the things I’m here to try to find out.”

  “The casualty list was published not only in our paper, but in just about every newspaper in the country,” Stan said. “You did not have to come here in person to get a list of the dead.” He looked up at me again and stopped typing. “But, you already knew that. The fact you’re nosing around this thing tells me there is some sort of Metahuman involvement with the explosion.”

  I shrugged. Stan had not been born yesterday. It was no accident he had managed to become an editor at one of the world’s major papers.

  “Honestly, I’m not sure if there is Metahuman involvement in the explosion or not,” I said. “That’s one of the things I’m looking into. Look, let’s make a deal. You tell me everything you know about the explosion and give me access to everything the Times has turned up in its reporting. I’ll in turn give you an exclusive scoop when and if I find anything.”

  Stan looked at me for a moment.

  “You’re a royal pain in the ass sometimes, but you tend to get results and your word is good,” he finally said. “So, it’s a deal. Pull up a chair.”

  I grabbed a chair from an unoccupied neighboring cubicle and brought it back to Stan’s. I considered using it to part Stan’s hair for calling me a “royal pain in the ass,” but the Heroes’ Guild frowned on licensed Heroes bashing civilians over the head with chairs. So, I instead put the chair down in the cubicle entrance and sat down.

  “Let’s start with whether the authorities know what caused the blast,” I said.

  Stan shook his head. He was facing me now, with his fingers again laced together on top of his stomach. He looked a bit like a whiter, more cynical Buddha.

  “They’ve found no evidence of a bomb or any other kind of incendiary device. But, with the force of the explosion, all of the debris and the mechanical and electrical stuff that is a part of the subway
itself, fragments of the bomb could be there but they just haven’t been able to identify them as such, yet,” he said. “Some people have floated the idea of Metahuman involvement and that maybe there was not a bomb—or, at least not a man-made one—but that’s just a theory.” He looked at me closely. “The fact that you’re sitting here asking me questions makes me think there may be something to that theory.”

  I did not respond. I was the soul of discretion. I personally thought I was also the height of wit, but enough people disagreed with me that I did not claim that distinction as well.

  “How many casualties were there?” I asked.

  “Thirty-four people were killed. Hundreds were injured, in many cases quite seriously. The property damage is in the millions,” he said.

  “Does anyone have any idea of who was responsible for this?”

  Stan shook his head ruefully.

  “That’s what’s so fucked up about this whole situation,” he said. “There used to be a time in this country when something bad happened, everybody denied having anything to do with it. These days, the minute something goes down, every knucklehead and his brother comes out of the woodwork to claim responsibility for it. The KKK says they bombed the Dupont Circle subway to punish America for embracing multiculturalism. The BLA says they did it to kill as many white people as possible and prove that the white man and the black man can never live together in peace. The AOG says they did it to end abortion. The MLF says they did it to force the government to end the oppression of Metahumans. A few other groups have taken credit for it as well.” Stan shook his head again. “It’s a regular alphabet soup of evil stupidity.”

  I knew most of the terrorist organizations Stan had named. The AOG was the Army of God; the BLA was the Black Liberation Army; the KKK was the Ku Klux Klan. Their collective idiocy was matched only by their disregard for human life. One group he mentioned I did not know of, though.