Chapter 207 — Sausages

It was like watching sausages get made, Dan thought. He wondered if Vigi-Buster fans knew how hollow and fake their favorite show really was. The security supervisor didn't seem to mind, but he was too busy being star-struck to examine the situation. The whole ordeal was incredibly synthetic. From start to finish, not a drop of reality intruded into the script. The two show hosts feigned surprise and excitement well enough, but it still required twenty takes before they were satisfied with the scene of them 'stumbling upon' crucial evidence.

There wasn't much to see through the grainy Metro cameras, but the Vigi-Busters picked out a colorful smudge moving amongst the crowd and declared it to be the vigilante. It was a young girl, hair done up in a bun, wearing a backpack. The massive jacket was gone, presumably stuffed into her backpack. Instead, she wore a bright pink sweatshirt and Daisy Duke cut-offs. She walked differently, more confident and aggressive, and her entire body was bobbing and weaving to a beat. The only thing she had in common with the previous video was her black sneakers, dark enough to stand out even on this pixelated recording.

She was boarding the rail, heading back the way she'd come. If she stayed on it, she would pass right through the station the vigilante had originally boarded, like completing a lap of an urban racing circuit. It was as close to a confirmation of his railway theory as he could reasonably get. The vigilante was a young teen using public transportation as convenient markers for her patrol routes. She would exit one station, make her way to another, then ride it right back to the first. The reason she was popping up randomly across the city was because the rail covered it all. It made sense to Dan, given the information he had.

The question Dan had now was how did the Vigi-Busters come to the same conclusion?  He'd used Carver and the FBI, her contacts in the police department, random internet detectives, and direct surveillance video to get this far. The two reality TV hosts had loitered in an alley for an hour and found a bit of jacket thread from a would-be mugger. How did they know to come to the Metro? Because Dan was sure they were correct. They'd pointed out the right person. Presumably, George, the subway supervisor, had given them the timestamp, but they would've had to provide a description of what he was looking for. The girl wasn't even dressed the same!

Nevertheless, it was the D.C. Vigilante, the same girl from the alley video, and from the other Metro. The shoes did match, and the backpack, even if she'd changed her outfit otherwise. But Dan was only certain because he'd seen her original clothes, the ones that matched the alley mugging video. He was pretty sure her shoes weren't even visible in that footage. How did the Vigi-Brothers know? He didn't have an immediate answer, so he just let the question settle into the back of his mind as he watched the crew review their latest take.

Once that was done they filmed a scene interviewing the supervisor. The man giddily introduced himself to the camera as George Hughes and told a series of increasingly outrageous lies that cast him as an alert, concerned government employee and the vigilante as a suspicious, dangerous stranger. He was asked a few leading questions about the state of the Metro and the possible consequences of vigilantes riding it. The interview ended with the strong implication that the D.C. Vigilante was planning some kind of city-spanning attack like she was an unhinged terrorist instead of a dumb high school kid.

And then it was over. Filming complete, job done, firm handshakes all around. 

"Let's get the footage cut up and splice in our close-ups!" the taller Vigi-Brother declared, clapping George the supervisor on the back. "Thanks for the help. You'll look good on camera, I promise."

George beamed. 

"Here. You'll need this." Vigi-Brother number two handed the flash drive containing a copy of the surveillance footage to the film guy, who tucked it into an inside pocket of his bag. Dan watched the man fold up his camera and put it into the same bag. It was a digital camera, more advanced than most in Dan's home dimension, and it used a small data drive for storage. As soon as he sealed the bag up, Dan's veil swooped inside and swiped both drives. He felt bad for the cameraman, but the Vigi-Brother had seen him pack it up, so hopefully he'd make it out okay.

"Get it edited by the end of the night," the shorter Vigi-Brother ordered. "With any luck, we'll find out where this vigilante lives by tomorrow morning and I want a seamless transition."

George tittered and clapped his hands in the back of the room.

Dan watched them pack up their gear, their lights, their little chairs. He watched them leave the surveillance suite and swagger out into the Metro station, looking for all the world like men who'd just won a war. He watched the whole entourage stride up the stairs and out onto the street. He watched them pack up their vans and leave, conquering heroes one and all. Dan eyed the two data storage devices in the palm of his hand. Things weren't going to work out like the Vigi-Brothers hoped. 

He reappeared next to Carver, who was scowling in a corner beneath the stairs. 

"They left," she said, eyeing George the supervisor who was staring forlornly up the stairs. She turned to Dan. "You get what we need?"

Dan held up the two data drives. "Need is a strong word, but at least one of these should help. Looks like we were right about the girl, though. She got on the rail and headed back to where she came."

Carver took the two drives, frowning. "We can't just go station to station, checking every camera. Or rather, we could but it's a terrible idea if you want to keep this quiet. Even that dick head transit director will catch on to what we're doing sooner or later, and then he'll be bombarding my office with official reprimands and inquiries. It'll draw attention to the vigilante, which seems to be the opposite of what you're going for."

Dan grimaced, thinking again of the Vigi-Busters. Stealing their footage would set them back a day, but realistically they would just come back and re-film everything. He needed to find the vigilante before them, and ideally throw them off the trail somehow. Dan hoped to use this new vigilante as bait, either for the People or whatever remnants of the Evo Church were still floating around, but the Vigi-Busters stampeding onto the scene would ruin everything.

"We need a new approach," Dan decided. Confirmation was good, but surveillance footage could only get them so far. They now knew how the vigilante was planning her patrols. There was quite a bit they could do with that. "We can't ID her from her rail pass?"

"Even an FBI badge won't get that kind of information without an official request," Carver replied wryly. "Doing this on the down-low makes everything harder."

Not like Dan could complain. It was his request.

"Let's go back to your office," Dan said. "I want to work up a profile of the girl, now that we know her general age."

They left the station, passing George the supervisor without a look or comment. The man was still moping. They got into Carver's car, and she pulled out of the parking lot and headed down the street at a languid clip. Dan could've just teleported himself back, but he figured it would be rude. Instead, he used the time to think.

His target was young. High school, he hoped, because that would really narrow things down. But she probably didn't own a car given how often she used the Metro. That meant anytime she went on one of her little patrols, she was boarding the rail to and from. But they couldn't request that information without an explanation, and Dan didn't want any eyes on this. 

Problem. 

He opened his phone and started scrolling through the internet. He was browsing a forum dedicated to vigilante sightings, with a sub-forum for Washington D.C. He sorted them by most recent and started flicking through comments. It was mostly paranoia, made-up stories, and shitposting, but every now and then he found a thread that seemed to genuinely describe the D.C. vigilante. 

It was often obscured by human error and biases, but there were bits of truth sprinkled in here and there. One poster described a wraith, flashing across a rooftop trailing black shadows. Another spoke about a multi-armed apparition yanking his drug dealer skyward like some kind of enormous spider. There was an ornate love poem written by some unhinged person thirsting after what she described as a bipedal tentacle monster.

Little bits of truth, and almost all of them came with an address. That was the point of the forum, after all.

Enough data points to make a map, Dan thought. Useless on its own. They were splattered all across the city. The dot map would resemble a Jackson Pollock painting. But the Metro connection changed things. It gave a second reference point. It turned static points into lines. It turned individual incidents into reference points. Enough lines, enough overlap, and you have a grid.

"You can't get rail pass info," Dan said, breaking the silence of the drive. "What about high school attendance lists? With names and faces and addresses?"

Carver's brow furrowed, and she took a moment to answer. "Public schools, sure. In D.C.? Flashing my badge will be enough. Those poor people don't get paid enough to argue. But it won't do us any good. There are something like sixty or seventy of them now. They keep making new ones; I have no idea why. And each one will have hundreds of students. I don't have the time or inclination to go through that many faces, especially when we're matching it against pixels."

"We can cross-check with the upgrade database," Dan said. "She probably has a hair control upgrade, and didn't report her mutate status."

"Probably," Carver agreed, "but do you have any idea how many high school girls have that upgrade? It's a lot."

"Still thins the pack, doesn't it?" 

She had to nod. "Sure. But it doesn't solve the original problem. There are too many schools to look into."

Dan hummed as he scrolled forum posts, drawing a map in his head. "I think I can narrow it down."