Part One

Detective Gordon Reed sat down on the corner of the table, folding his arms as he listened to the confessions of Frank Kemp. Over the past two days, he had heard a number of bizarre murder confessions, but the longer Frank talked, the less likely his claims seemed.

His confession wasn’t helped by the fact that he just didn’t look much like a criminal. He was tall and muscular to the point of being bulky, and he carried himself with an air of confidence that was impossible not to notice. His wide chin and broad cheeks were clean shaven, and his short fade haircut gave him an almost military look.

Frank finally finished his confession, and Gordon looked up at the clock, noting that he had talked uninterrupted for over four hours, detailing an almost daily pattern of hunting down criminals to murder them and dispose of the bodies using thermite. His method of destroying the bodies made his claims seem more like a work of fiction than the actions of one person.

Taking out pack of cigarette, Gordon held the pack out and shook his head. “Well… that’s some story you’ve got there, Frank.”
 
His partner John Matthews nodded, his eyes narrowing. “Yes, perhaps you might try selling it to a publisher as fiction. It might fly better with-”

“It isn’t a work of fiction,” Frank said as he took a cigarette from the pack then leaned over to light it using the match that Gordon held out. He leaned back as far as he could with his wrist cuffed to the table and watched the detective light his own cigarette before he smirked. “You’re sitting in the wrong place. The good cop is supposed to sit in the chair.”

“We save the routine for people who are being resistant.” Gordon paused to give a strained smile to Frank. “You’ve been more than helpful in explaining yourself, and the only reason you’re still sitting here instead of going back in your cell is that we aren’t sure of why you would want to confess.”

“No one else has told you why either?” Frank watched both detectives nod and dropped his head back as he exhaled a plume of smoke. “Then I’m not sure why I would try to either, unless I was hoping to take a trip to an asylum.”

John leaned forward in his seat and waved for Frank to go on. “Maybe you can explain why we’ve seen a sudden spike in the number of criminals confessing.”

“I could, but you probably wouldn’t believe me.” Frank took a long drag from his cigarette and sighed. “If hadn’t seen for myself what was going on, I wouldn’t have believed it either.”

“Frank, you know we will need some proof of your claims,” Gordon said. “We’ve had all kinds of criminals confessing in the last few days, but you’d be the first to claim that you’re a vigilante.”

“Yes, it’s not the most popular area of crime. It doesn’t pay well, and nobody really appreciates what I do. Still, I can claim a higher rate of success than the police do, and until last night, I’ve never felt out of my league. Now I think I’d rather get off the streets while I still can.”

“Frank, will you excuse us?” Gordon stood up and walked to the door of the interrogation room.

“Sure, I’ll just hang out here then.”

Gordon waited for John to follow him out and closed the door. “What do you think?”

John shook his head, stuffing his hands in his pockets as he turned to walk down the hall. “I’m not sure. He’s confessed to killing over a hundred criminals, and he claims that he can provide proof. That much is consistent with everyone else who’s come in to confess over the last two days.” He stepped into a break room and headed straight for the coffee maker to fill himself a cup. “He is claiming to be a costumed crime fighter, and that… well it does stretch credibility a little bit. If he’s been working the town for a year like he claims, we should have seen something about him somewhere. Maybe an APB for an idiot in a black bodysuit, or at least a report of someone who had spotted him and called the local media.”

Gordon listened while he sipped a cup of coffee. He set it aside to fill another styrofoam cup and picked both up. “I’m still curious to know why he’s coming in. Maybe he is making it up, but something has him spooked badly enough to want to be in jail. We need to get him to talk about that.”

“He probably won’t. No one else has.”

“Sure, but we can tell him that if he doesn’t give us something more solid, we’ll be forced to…”

John followed his partner back down the hall. “Still waiting,” he said.

“Sorry, I was just thinking how crazy this is, but suppose we threaten to release him. Everyone who’s come in has been extremely keen to be locked up. We’re full, as are most other precincts in the city, and they aren’t all murderers.”

John nodded. “Yeah, I know. We get the homicide confessions, but everyone is booking in confessions instead of driving out to do investigations.” He made a tiny smile as he stopped by the door of the interrogation room. “If it weren’t so damned eerie, I’d almost look at this as a good thing.”

“Right, well since we do need to lean on him a little bit, why don’t you do the honors?”

John nodded and opened the door. “Mister Kemp-”

“Frank.”

John sighed. “Frank, don’t take this the wrong way. We’d love to book you tonight, but the problem-”

“The problem is, I sound like I’m full of shit,” Frank interrupted him. He took the other cup of coffee from Gordon and sipped it. “I wouldn’t blame you either.”

“Well, your story is a little incredible by itself, and you haven’t explained why a successful crime fighter would just decide to confess.”

“I can offer you proof.”

“Yes, you’ve said as much.” John leaned over the table and frowned. “Frank, if you can’t help us out here, we may be forced to release you.”

For the first time, tension registered in Frank’s dark blue eyes. “You can’t be serious.”

“I’m afraid he is, Frank,” Gordon said and sat down on the corner of the table. “You’ve given a rather neat story with no loose ends. But one thing which you haven’t explained is why you would need to get off the streets.”

“You really wouldn’t believe me anyway. Why do you suppose that out of all these confessions, no one has bothered to explain their reasons for coming in? It’s because what they saw was crazy, and there’s no way it could be real. Until you saw it with your own eyes, you wouldn’t believe it either.”

“Look, just give us something here, Frank,” Gordon said.

Frank looked down at his coffee and emptied the cup in one long pull. He set the cup aside and leaned back as his expression became thoughtful. “Let me try something of an analogy to explain what’s going on. Will that be all right with the two of you?”

“Try us,” John said.

“Okay… first, I want you to think of society as a body, and of every person as a cell which serves some kind of purpose. As the police, you represent one part of the body’s defenses. Crime would be a disease which either develops within the body, or is contracted from an outside source.

“For the most part, the body of society has a certain acceptable limit for any disease. If burglary were exceptionally low, you would for the most part focus your efforts on other areas, like rapes, murders, and missing persons reports. In other words, you would consider a small burglary infection as being not worth your attention.”

“This is going somewhere, right?” John asked.

“It is, but please bear with me. What I represent is a disease which you have virtually ignored, and that’s due in part to the lack of competition in the field. I have no partners, and most of society is unaware of my presence. You could think of me as a free radical, or as a diseased cell that attacks other diseases.”

“Something new is out there,” Gordon said, watching the vigilante nod.  “It’s something that’s got the attention of the criminals, but we haven’t noticed it yet.”

“Yes, and if you’ll allow me to stretch that analogy a final time, the body of Dallas has just contracted Ebola.”

***

Captain Janice Turner set down the phone and rubbed the bridge of her nose tiredly. A knock sounded at the door of her office, and she heaved a low sigh. “Come in.”

Gordon opened the door. “We’ve just finished up with the vigilante. He didn’t give us much more than any of the other criminals have, but he has at least confirmed that there is something on the streets bad enough to cause this mass panic.”

Janice nodded and gestured for the detectives to sit down. “I was just finishing a call from the mayor’s office. They’ve been going over the crime statistics for the last three days.”

“Well it should be easy reading, what with all of the stats going down,” John said.

“Some of them are, but not all of them, ” Janice said. “They’re going to need a few more days to confirm this, but while most petty crimes have diminished, there’s been no decline in violent crimes or missing persons reports. In fact, missing persons has seen a huge spike in reports over the last two days.”

The door of her office swung open. The thin woman who stood panting at the door was unfamiliar to Janice or either of the detectives, but for a moment, she wouldn’t speak as she tried to gain control of her breathing. “I’m sorry for the intrusion. I’m lieutenant Martinez, and I work in missing persons. I know you’re probably swamped, but we’re going to need everyone you’ve got available.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“I think we’ve found the missing people, and they’re all dead.”

Janice sat up stiffly in her seat. “Where?”

“In an office building on north Akard street. The officers who first reported it said there had to be at least six hundred bodies.”

***

Gordon moved his flashlight around the office while he tried to count bodies. It was almost a futile effort for the sheer number. At a glance, he was sure that there were far more bodies in the building than there were missing persons reports. He knew there had to be, because just in the office where he stood, there were at least one hundred bodies.

He sniffed the air again, still feeling perplexed by the lack of the odor of decay. Stepping closer to a stack of bodies, he lifted his flashlight to look at the woman on the top of the pile. Like all the others, she was nude, and her skin was a pale white color.

 That by itself sent up red flags in his head. He expected to see bruising from where blood had settled in the body after death. But then he’d expected to see some kind of wound to explain how the woman had died. Instead, her white skin was flawless and unbroken. None of the bodies seemed damaged in any way, and it only added to the creepy feeling of being alone in the room.

The woman’s eyes were open, and she had no color to her irises, nor a set of pupils. He flicked the beam of light over her face, which picked up a faint outline of the outer ring of the iris, and then the outer ring of the pupil. But it appeared as though the liquid inside the eye had also become milk white somehow. The only thing which had not been bleached was her dark red hair.

Gordon spun at the sound of a door opening then relaxed when he saw his partner wave to him from across the office. “Did the feds show up?”

“Yeah, and they’re clearing us out before they start taking pictures.” John shuddered as he started walking down the hall toward the stairwell. “I feel like I should be waking up from this nightmare any time now.”

“Yeah, that’s how I’d describe it too. I want to go home and call it a day. I’ve worked two days in a row, and I’ve had less than three hours of sleep in my chair between confessions.”

“But we can’t go home yet, can we?”

Gordon shook his head. “No, we’ve got to go talk to Frank Kemp again. Somehow, we’ve got to gain his trust enough to get him to open up.”

“Why? So he can bore us with more analogies?” John quipped.

Gordon stopped and turned to frown at his partner. “Hey, look around you. Walk over to any office door and look at a stack of bodies. Once you’ve got that image locked in mind, think about the analogy again. If this is just the prelude to something bigger, I think it was a rather fitting comparison.”

***

Frank smiled as the cuff was locked down to the table again. “Well, let me see if I can impress you with my own minor skills of detection. The two of you look much paler, and neither one of you looks ready to play the bad cop this time. So you either saw something bad enough to rattle you, or you’ve run a really thorough background check on me.”

Gordon watched the uniformed officers leave and turned to study the vigilante before he moved to sit down in the chair. “We saw something. A police patrol found a building filled with dead bodies, and we were sent over to watch them until the FBI showed up.”

“Yeah, that can take the wind out of your sails.” Frank looked from Gordon over at John. “I am mildly curious… did you find the bodies in a warehouse on the south side?”

“No, this was a two floor office building not far from here,” John said. “Do you think this is another pile of bodies?”

“It would be hard to say without checking out the warehouse again, but if that clock is correct, I think the sun set about two hours ago.”

“Yeah, but what-” John began to ask.

“I’m not going anywhere until tomorrow,” Frank said. “I’m sure at some point that daylight isn’t going to mean much, but for now, your new threat prefers to work the night shift. There’s less witnesses at three AM.”

“You won’t tell us what you saw yet, will you?” Gordon asked.

“I’d love to, but you aren’t ready for the truth. You’ve seen only the first glimmers of evidence. I could take you out tomorrow to show you where I saw a collection of bodies, but I’m going to suggest something which I realize may sound crazy. I believe the warehouse will be empty when we arrive.”

“Right, and someone just moved all those bodies across town,” John said.

“It wouldn’t be so hard. I’m sure you noticed there wasn’t any odor of decay. More than that, you had to have noticed the lack of wounds on any of the bodies. So it isn’t like they’d leave behind a trail of genetic evidence by moving the stack, right?” Frank glanced between the detectives in the following silence. “Right, it’s the same pattern that I noticed. So tomorrow, it should be easy for me to convince you to take a little road trip with me.”

“We could make you leave with us tonight,” John threatened, his lips tightening in a frown when the vigilante laughed.

“You could try, but you don’t know which warehouse to check, and I can always button up and leave you to sort this mess out on your own.