Crime Spree [Gordon]

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Before tonight, Robin wouldn’t have glanced twice at the neat little brownstone. It was in a relatively nice Upper West Side neighborhood – low crime area, considering that it was in Gotham, quiet streets, good school district, upper middle class all around. There was a wreath hanging on the front door and fairy light twined around the railings of the front stoop as well as the bushes to either side. But before tonight, there wasn’t any evidence of an ambulance come and gone, no sign of the police officers and CSU who had left only a bare fifteen minutes earlier. Before tonight, there had been no crime scene tape blocking off the door just underneath that wreath.

It was the eighth incident like this in just under five weeks. The third that had landed someone in the hospital. Whoever was responsible, they were escalating quickly, not just in the frequency of their crimes, but in violence – they’d gone from bruising and a split lip to a concussion to beating Wilson Peterson into the ICU, and Robin was dead set and determined to put a stop to this before it became a straight-up murder.

He landed silently on the brownstone’s roof, then dropped down into the backyard to have a look at the back door. Splintered wood along the lock, loose knob… Robin lifted his glove to inspect the imprint in the wood. Oh, yeah. It was the same gang, alright. He backed off, leaving the police seal on the door intact in favor of a nearby window, landing in a darkened kitchen. The thirteen year-old closed the window behind himself and hit the night vision on his domino.

The kitchen was a mess of debris: drawers pulled out and left hanging, cabinet doors swinging on broken hinges, cookware, silverware, and shattered ceramics across the floor and counters. The contents of what was most likely a junk drawer was strewn across the island in the middle. Robin moved carefully through the room, snapping photos and documenting everything interesting. From the kitchen, he moved to the laundry room, then the downstairs bathroom. It was slow going, and the better part of an hour had all but vanished before he moved towards the front of the house. He’d start in the living room, Robin decided grimly. That was where the Petersons had been held.

The shades were still drawn in all the windows, blocking the view of the street outside. The room was marginally neater than the ones he’d already passed through, so it most likely hadn’t been searched for valuables. The furniture had all been shoved to one side, however, the cord of the house phone ragged where it had been torn from the wall. Bloodstains over near the back corner. Robin turned his night vision off and pulled a miniature flashlight from his belt to take a better look at the area.

Medium velocity impact spatter; blunt force trauma. Baseball bat, most likely, given the evidence from the last few cases. Cast-off indicated the suspect was standing… Here when the first few blows were struck. Hm. Robin snapped a few more pictures, then switched back to night vision to finish. He didn’t want to risk his light being seen around the edges of the shades by having it on too long – even if they were pulled, it was dark inside and out, and this house was going to be under scrutiny by just about everyone for a while. Not worth the risk, no matter how small.

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The door on the black sedan Gordon drove slammed shut. He listened to it echo in the winter’s night and glanced down the rows of brownstones lining the street. It wasn’t the first one he’d been called to in the past weeks and that was important.

He carefully navigated his way around his vehicle, feeling and knowing of the ice beneath his shoes. He was dressed warmly and his feet crunched against the snow that had yet to be swept from the sidewalk, but it at least it was momentary protection from the frozen ground beneath. His breath misted in the bitter air as he took in the scene: quiet, unassuming. No one would have known if it had not been for the police cars that had come with lights and sirens that anything had happened here. Gordon stared calmly at the fluorescent yellow tape that marked the place beneath the jolly reef that had yet to be removed from the door. He went up the stairs.

As Jim searched his pockets with clumsy, gloved hands he went over what he knew of the case. It was the eight home invasion that only targeted brownstones in more than a month, but it was the third that had ended up with someone from the target home in the hospital. The latest victim, a Mr. Peterson was currently in Gotham Central ICU. Gordon imagined his family pacing much as he had when both his son and daughter had been born as he found the key and inserted it in the lock. This was much worse than awaiting a child, though, there was no comparison. What it did mean was this was becoming more and direr of a situation. The crimes were getting more violent and the band of men, for men they had been reported to be needed to be identified and arrested before someone ended up in a coffin.

He’d been planning to go in the front, but something stopped him. The report wasn’t that the intruders had entered in the front, but the back. He pulled back from the front door and off the stoop. His shoes made prints as he walked through the snow, but suddenly he wasn’t interested as much as reviewing the crime scene. There were other foot prints disturbing the snow leading to the busted back door.

He slid his coat out of the way and took up his pistol. After unlatching the safety, he busted into the door and aimed in the darkness of the kitchen. He looked behind the door. No one.

Light flooded the room as he flipped on the light switch. He took in the disarray of the kitchen, but cautiously treaded across the room. He checked the connecting pantry and laundry room before he moved into the living room. There the Commissioner stopped.

“This isn’t the place for you,” Jim said. He holstered his gun back at his hip and turned on the light. He stared at Tim and sighed. He knew Robin wanted to help, but he was young. Even he thought some things were too violent to get Batman’s wards involved. And this was one of those times, especially if the crimes began to leave bodies.

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Robin grinned crookedly at Gordon, kicking one hanging foot idly. The sound of the car pulling up and the crunch of footsteps across the lawn had been more than enough to alert him to the new arrival, and it hadn't taken much investigation to figure out it was Commissioner Gordon. Curious why the commissioner would be here - this wasn't exactly a high profile case, particularly since no one had even died yet, and Gordon had to have bigger things on his plate right now - the teenager had hopped up to perch on the stair banister, well away from the actual gore of the crime scene. From there it had just been a matter of waiting.

"You know, you're not the first person to tell me that, Commissioner," Robin joked, thankful he'd turned off the night vision. He'd have gone blind with that flashlight, otherwise. "Though it's usually put a lot ruder and followed with an assault. The change is kind of refreshing."

His grin faded and he tilted his head a little, an unintentionally birdlike quirk of movement.

"I could always come back after you leave if you don't want to deal with me," the vigilante offered more soberly, tone sincere and slightly apologetic. "I was under the impression that the GCPD was done here for the night."

There was a question there, if Gordon chose to hear it. If not, then that was fine; Robin was willing to ask what the older man was doing here more directly if it came to it. 

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Could Gordon say he was really surprised to find Robin here? No and entering he shouldn’t have acted so suspicious, but with scenes like this and in a place like Gotham, one couldn’t be too careful. It was a habit he’d gained in the army and his decades in the police department had only further conditioned the response to finding someone in the house. He clicked his flashlight off and instead turned the room light on and held his ground staring at Tim. Was it really surprising that he was here, though? Of course he didn’t register that Tim was surprised at first. Yet this was one home invasion out of more than five. It was serial and of course he was going to be involved. No one had died yet, but he was here to be sure no one would.

He looked around the scene and gave a grunt to the crime fighter. Tim should expect he’d often be told he wasn’t to be somewhere, and it was probably usually by the criminal. He glanced back at him. “Well my argument is more that no one your age should be involved in something like this. I don’t think anyone should.”

Gordon actually considered his words, but if he was just going to come back there was no use in sending him away. Either way he was going to get into this. “I’m going to have a word with your guardian,” he said with sigh before he crossed his arms. “But if you’re just going to come back, what would be the use of sending you away?” He shook his head, “Serial home invasions, growing in violence. They need to be stopped before someone’s killed.”

There was the answer to the question he’d been asked.

“I didn't know Batman was interested in home invasions.”

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"Batman is interested in pretty much everything. Especially when people are getting hurt," Robin replied, hopping neatly to the floor. His cape closed around him as it settled, the heavy black fabric nearly touching the floor and enshrouding him completely as he moved up to stand with the commissioner. "This is my case, though; I've been working it since the initial burglaries."

He hesitated for a second as he drew even with Gordon, then added, almost gently, "This is my job, too, Commissioner. I can't just not do part of it because of my age. And I hate to say it, but... It's pretty unavoidable anyway."

The vigilante shrugged apologetically, cape shifting a bit with the movement. He'd seen far worse than this during regular patrols, honestly, not to mention what he'd seen when helping Batman with Gotham's rogue gallery. There was really no comparison to watching Killer Croc eat a man, let alone what the others could do - the Joker deserved a special mention here - but even regular humans could be horrifyingly cruel to one another.

"Batman tries to keep me from the worst of it when he knows it's coming, I think. If that helps."

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That was one similarity between the caped crusader and himself. Both Gordon and Batman were interested in any sort of crime and especially when people were being harmed as a result. He took another glance around the room as Robin jumped down from his perch. He put his hands in his pockets and his glasses caught the light as he turned back to him. “Sorry it had to escalate like this,” he said.

The gentle tone was unneeded. Gordon understood and simply nodded to Tim. “I know, just doesn’t make me wish any less you didn’t have to or that it wasn’t unavoidable.” And it was true. Any to non-crime fighters this sort of thing could be unavoidable.

Gordon had seen worse too and so the apology was accepted without a word. Domestic violence, arguments between friends, muggings, premediated crimes. All of them could have scenes worse than this and that was just the normal people. The special people who donned costumes and gimmicks? They could almost always counted on to deliver the gruesome. So it was unavoidable. Jim sighed. “I’m sure he does,” was all he said for a while. Because no, it didn’t make him feel better, not that he considered Batman at fault. Finally, though, he let all that go.

“So,” he said to Tim, “what do you know about all this?”

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Robin considered Gordon for a moment, head tilting slightly. Mm... Later, then.

"This was the eighth incident carried out by this crew," the vigilante started, crisp and professional and not very much like a young teenager at all as he led Gordon back to the kitchen. Robin pointed at the back door. "They're practiced at it by now - entry through the back, solid hit with the top of a baseball bat to weaken the lock; second hit to break it. The forensics I ran on the last scene confirmed it: X10 alloy scraped off onto the knob, most commonly used for aluminum baseball bats. That makes one of the perps a baseball player, and he came in first. Surprised the wife, who was at the counter there - "

Robin pointed toward the overturned stools at the island -

"Chopping vegetables for dinner. Daughter was at the table doing homework. There." 

He nodded at the seat in question.

"The rest of the gang followed immediately, mother and daughter were subdued and dragged directly into the living room, where the son was also subdued and held by at least two of the perpetrators. Mother got one of the intruders with her knife, but from the amount of blood, it was accidental and a minor injury at best. But it will be DNA, once we have suspects to compare it to. The rest of the gang proceeded to ransack the kitchen, then came this way."

Robin brought Gordon through the kitchen towards the downstairs bathroom, pointing out the opened medicine cabinet. 

"A raid of the family medicine cabinet scored them desoxyn
 methamphetamine, benzodiazepine, and barbiturates, as well as several over-the-counter medications - all moneymakers, and all a heck of a lot less traceable than the traditional valuables. Which they also took in here."

He gestured to the broken, open drawers in the dining room. "Preliminary tests suggests silver. Flatware is a reasonable assumption."

Back to the living room. 

"While the others ransacked the rest of the floor, the remaining two perps barricaded themselves in here - pushed the furniture out of the way to clear themselves space and putting the family at the far back corner, away from the windows and the phone. The father came downstairs on hearing the commotion, and the perpetrators met him halfway, with the first blow coming right about... There." Robin pointed a little further than halfway up the staircase, where the staircase turned and the wall gave way and opened up to the living room. He walked the rest of the path across the living room as he described it. "Best place for an ambush. They then dragged the victim down the stairs, across the floor - there are faint scratches in the hardwood from the victim's struggle - and over to the rest of the family. Blood spatter indicates the victim never made it back to his feet."

He gestured to the wall grimly. "Medium velocity. They used the bat. When the perpetrator who administered the beating was finished, he took a couple of extra swings towards the wall to get rid of the excess blood. The family was in the way; most of it hit them. The three who'd been searching the house did upstairs during the assault, and all five left the way they came afterwards. Let me take a look outside and I'll be able to tell you more about that."

Sighing, Robin shook his head and looked at Gordon, concerned. "You know, this was really sharp escalation. When I first ran into these guys, they were just pulling burglaries. The first robbery was an accident, and they didn't even hurt the homeowner. This is just their fifth job since then. I think the next one is just going to be a straightforward homicide of at least one of the victims."

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Gordon said nothing as he followed Robin.

Instead he took in the information, scribbling it down to compare to his own notes at a later time. He held off any questions as they went through the scene, waiting until the end to ask. So this was spree operation. That wasn’t surprising to Gordon. He had walked into several of these invasions. So he knew they had been gaining experience, but the number was surprising and he couldn’t hide the way he paused at the number eight. Still he was back and on track fast enough to not miss anything. He took in the door, scribbled a question, and with nod moved on to taking in the mess near the kitchen island and then at the table.

Mother first, daughter second. He could follow that from the door. You work from the outside in.

Gordon stepped carefully back into the living room and he could see the scene clearly. He grinned at the prospect of DNA. It wasn’t the best news because it was great to have physical evidence, but without anyone to compare it to it was useless until then, still it was something. They’d messed up and that was a sign.

When they got to the bathroom, Gordon couldn’t hold back his question. “How do you know exactly what sort of medications they took?” He couldn’t tell that, though yes it was in the interview with the family that weren’t so severely injured.

He noted the flatware, however, and nodded. Yes, the wife had said silver had gone missing. Family heirlooms.

And then they got to the part that had brought EMS there. The attack on the father. Jim looked up the staircase and nodded. “Yes, the blood splatter on the wall, staircase, and floor confirms that,” he spoke of the attack. The furniture also told the other part of the story.

He wrote down the rest of the events which yes, collaborated with what their crime scene technicians and the family had said. He nodded grimly as Robin stopped speaking of the chronological events. “Sharp escalation. They’re more confident, brutal. They’re more cocky.” He looked at Robin. He knew how right he was and that made him feel worse. Someone his age shouldn’t have to know that. “You check outside then…and,” he said, “with this arrogance, they’ve bound to have made more mistakes.”

He couldn’t let a homicide happen next.