THE WIDENING GYRE (Part 1)

The woman was a little surprised that even in a city as large as New York at this early hour of the morning the streets were pretty empty. Despite the January cold and faint morning light, there were a few people walking along the sidewalks, but the only cars she saw for several blocks were the ones parked along the street. There was a slight breeze and she tightened her red cloak around her. She passed a young couple and heard the young man say, “Happy New Year, baby.” The woman stopped for a moment. She had lost track of how long she had been on the run. She had not realized it was New Year’s Day. Another year had passed with a broken family, another year that she missed seeing her children age. She wondered briefly what her husband looked like now. She imagined him to still be the dashing pilot she had married, but with a head of gray hair. Distracted by these thoughts, she did not notice the black town car drive up from behind her until it was right next to her, the passenger side window opening. She saw the rifle, and somehow she couldn’t get her feet to move. She only vaguely registered the people reacting around her, some running and some screaming. She saw the muzzle flash and thought of her family. She would never know that her youngest, her daughter, had barely survived being pushed out a two story window. She would never know that her middle son was shot dead protecting her eldest. She would never know that just yesterday her eldest son had been in a warehouse two miles away desperately searching for her. By the time she collapsed on the sidewalk, she was dead.

~*~*~*~*~

Sara Pezzini sat in her office at an ungodly hour on a Monday morning doing the unthinkable: she was organizing her desk. The Christmas holidays were always busy and the files were starting to pile up. There was sign out in the bullpen declaring “Tis the Season” and, in their heads, all the homicide detectives automatically added “for murder and suicide” – it was grim, but it was true. For good or bad, that also meant that the majority of those cases had closed pretty quickly. She had reached the last file at the bottom of one pile; it had a small Post-It note on it with Jake’s neat handwriting: More Bckgrnd on D’Angelo

They had closed that case a few weeks ago – Sara had killed the murdering Sullivan brothers with the Witchblade in self-defense. The official report said they had been killed by a sword found at the scene. Sara was fairly certain Nottingham had covered her ass on that one. She frowned, realizing that she would have to be more careful but not sure how to go about it. With the case closed, she hadn’t bothered looking at the info Jake had dug up on D’Angelo, the fertility doctor who had sired the Sullivans.

“Read it.”

Sara jumped at the voice. “Dammit, Danny!”

The ghost of her dead partner smiled at her. “And good morning to you, too.”

She gave him her patented, exasperated glare. “Do you really have to spook me like that?”

“Do you really want me to make the ‘spook’ joke?”

Sara tried not to smile. Instead, she showed him the file. “The case is closed…or is there another homicidal Sullivan out there?”

“Just read it. You never know when the info may come in handy.”

Sara glanced at the file, and when she looked back up, Danny was gone. She whispered, “Happy New Year, partner.”

She sat back and began to read. There wasn’t much about D’Angelo in the file; it was mainly employment information. He had run a fertility clinic in Manhattan; before that, he had worked at another fertility clinic in Atlanta, Georgia called The NuGenesis Family Group. Her focus on the words blurred for an instant…

A red file folder with only an identification number on the tab.
A test tube full of blood.
A boy’s voice saying, “Cree craw toad’s foot, geese walk barefoot.”

Sara let out a breath, as the visions subsided. She didn’t understand what the visions meant. Did they have something to do with her or with another case? Had her biological parents gone to this fertility clinic? If they had, did she care? Or was this not related to her past at all? And who was the little boy?

She kept reading; towards the bottom of the page was some financial information on NuGenesis. It was owned by an international corporation. Sara flipped to the next page, predicting it would say that the international corporation was Vorschlag, but she was wrong. It was a company called The Centre, headquartered in Blue Cove, Delaware. The name triggered only faint recognition in Sara – she thought she had seen the name either on the side of a building or as a sponsor on PBS. It was a large corporation, but it didn’t advertise itself.

The door to her office opened and Sara looked up to see a moderately surprised Jake come in with two cups of coffee in his hands and a slip of paper in his mouth. He handed her a cup then took the paper out of his mouth. “You’re here early.”

Raising the cup, Sara nodded her thanks. “Couldn’t sleep.”

Jake held up the paper. “We got a body.”

Sara stood and grabbed her coat. She shook her head, muttering, “Too damn early.”

Jake nodded and said a little sadly, “Happy New Year.”

~*~*~*~*~

Sara was glad that Officer McGrath had been the first on the scene. He was a good cop and had done everything by the book. A perimeter had been set up, witnesses were corralled off to one side giving their statements to another officer, and the forensics gang was bustling about.

Jake and Sara walked up to McGrath. Sara, as always, took the lead. “Hey, McGrath. What you got for us?”

McGrath led them behind the police tape. “Victim is a woman, early sixties, shot once in the heart. No ID on her.”

He raised a hand to the small group of people talking to another uniformed officer. “Witnesses say a black town car drove up, she was shot and it drove away. License plate was either blackened out or not there, dark windows, no one saw the shooter or the driver. I put an APB out on the car, but nothing yet.”

Sara nodded. “Nice work.” Sara looked around the scene and spotted Danny standing over by the body. “Jake, why don’t you start talking to the witnesses and I’ll check out the victim.”

It wasn’t really a question, and Jake complied. Truthfully, she preferred for them to interview witnesses and go over the scene together, but if Danny was loitering near the body, she wanted to check it out on her own. When she looked back towards the body, Danny was gone.

The ME on the scene was Pete – he was nice guy, despite being way too cheerful in the early morning hours. Clipboard in hand, he stood next to the body writing notes and glanced up as Sara approached him. He gave her a bright smile. “Morning, Pez.”

She smirked. “I’m glad you didn’t put a ‘good’ in front of that. What have we got?”

“Female, early sixties, gunshot wound to the chest. Large caliber. She died right away.” He checked his watch.

“About forty minutes ago.”

Sara squatted down by the body and pulled back the tarp. The woman was a strawberry blonde and going gray. Her long hair was tucked into a bun, and she wore no makeup. Sara’s vision blurred, triggered by a set of visions…

The woman outdoors, with a head of red hair and bright blue eyes and arms wide open, “I’m the proudest mommy in the whole world.”

The woman, old again, on a boat, in the same red cloak, clutching her wounded arm, “Forgive me, Lord, forgive me.”

Sara waited a moment for her vision to focus again. The hole in the woman’s chest left no doubt as to the cause of death. Sara looked around and didn’t see a purse, only a transparent evidence bag lying next to the body. She looked up at Pete and indicated the evidence bag. “That all she had on her?”

Pete nodded. Turning the bag over in her hands, Sara examined the contents – some small bills and a wedding ring. The wedding ring was plain with no inscription. Given the amount of money she had on her, she may have just been out for some coffee. So she might be local. Sara would have to ask McGrath to coordinate some uniforms to canvas the area. The visions suggested the woman had a child and the ring suggested maybe a husband, so someone might recognize her description or report her missing. Sara set the bag down and covered her body again. She stood, facing Pete once more. “Don’t need to autopsy.”


“Nope,” Pete confirmed. “The wound is pretty self-explanatory. We’ll take some blood and tissue for analysis and do an external examination. With the backlog, results might take a few days. We’ll get you fingerprints, too.”

“Thanks, Pete.”

Sara sighed and headed over to join Jake with the witnesses. She hated Jane Does.

~*~*~*~*~

It had been a long day. After Sara and Jake had spent a couple of hours researching missing persons and investigating who could pull off a hit like the one on Jane Doe, they had gotten another call. It was a domestic dispute that had evolved into a murder-suicide. It was the first (and hopefully last) “holiday double-whammy” this season; the case was essentially closed, but that only meant a little less paperwork. Jake had then run off to do more canvassing on the Jane Doe case. Sara had headed back to the office to start on the reports for both cases. She really didn’t mind writing the reports; it had always helped her organize her thoughts about a case. That it gave her an excuse not to go door-to-door with Jake was a bonus.

After finishing up her report on the murder-suicide, Sara found herself once again holding the file on D’Angelo in her hands and debating whether to look into her past. She slapped the file down on her desk. James Pezzini was my father, she thought angrily. That she was even thinking about finding her birth parents was sign that she was tired and should go home. But what if they know something about the Witchblade? How am I related to Elizabeth Bronte? Her mind kept going back to those questions, questions that Sara considered traitorous to the memory of her father.

An hour later Sara sat at her dining table, staring at the items in the box her father had left for her: a bullet with a bull engraved on the side, an empty plastic film canister, a blank cassette tape, an empty videotape case, a sheet of paper with three rows of numbers on it, a St. Catherine of the Hills prayer card, and several pictures of Sara as a little girl. She wondered if the cassette had been purposely erased and, and if so, whether anything could be recovered from it. She wondered where the film and the videotape were – did Joe have them? Did her father hide them? And if he did, did she want to find them?

She was a little disappointed that Danny hadn’t popped in with words of wisdom and mildly grateful that Nottingham hadn’t let himself in for a chat. She put all the items back in the box and closed it.

~*~*~*~*~

Sara sat at a bar. The first thing she noticed was the haze from the cigarette smoke and the unintelligible murmur of the crowd. She turned in her seat and saw men and women dressed in 40’s era clothes. The soldiers’ uniforms were not American. A man with a British accent introduced the band that began to play an upbeat swing tune.

“Hello, Sara,” said a woman’s voice on her right.

Sara turned towards the voice to find Elizabeth Bronte sitting on the barstool next to Sara. Elizabeth was perfectly coiffed, her demeanor regal and elegant, but there was this twinkle in her eye...as if she had a secret she was dying to share. She is, Sara thought, everything I’m not. How can she be where I come from?

As if reading Sara’s mind, Elizabeth said, “We are related, but not in the way you think. We’re the same person.”

Elizabeth then smiled at her with such warmth that Sara felt tears well up in her eyes.

When Sara awoke the next morning, that was all she could recall of the dream.

~*~*~*~*~

For Gabriel Bowman, it was just another Tuesday morning. Well, late Tuesday morning. He had coffee and cold pizza leftovers then checked the Talismaniac email account – follow-ups to some inquiries for future purchases, a couple receipts from last night’s purchases, one email from one of his various nut-job clients requesting an item that made Gabe cringe, but would no doubt bring in quite a bit of money…nothing unusual. He had a couple of client meetings late in the afternoon, but otherwise his day was free. He debated whether to play Halo or to dust and organize the inventory. He chose Halo, so that he could look busy and “professional” when his clients arrived later. It was nice to be your own boss.

He grabbed a soda and a bag of chips (essential supplies for game playing) from the kitchen. Just as he was settling in and starting up the game, a window popped up telling him someone had entered the shop.

The dark haired man walked towards Gabe. He wore black jeans, black t-shirt, black leather jacket which caused a little alarm bell to go off in the back of Gabe's head. Was this one of Nottingham’s goons? Gabe had been warned not to talk to Sara about the Witchblade, but he had. He had guessed that Sara had “taken care of it” because he hadn’t seen Nottingham since that day. Shit.

The man looked around the shop as he walked closer to Gabe, but didn’t seem to be particularly rushed or particularly threatening. As the man approached, Gabe could see his eyes – brown, friendly but…tired? Gabe prided himself on his instinctual judge of character. It had provided him with good friends and good (i.e., profitable) clients. His instincts were leaning toward “trustworthy” but hadn’t quite made a decision…maybe because the dark hair, the dark eyes and the dark clothes reminded him too much of Nottingham. And Nottingham scared the crap out of him figuratively and almost literally.

He went with his instincts. Gabe said, “Uh, welcome to Talismaniac. I’m Gabriel Bowman. Call me Gabriel.”

The man smiled and offered his hand. “I’m Jarod.”

*~*~*~*~*

To be continued..