Untouched The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,40
of robberies; three in the same incident. Every last one of them had been beaten to death.
The next file was from Chicago and detailed a rapist working the South Side that was putting every victim in the hospital and a few in the morgue by what the victims described as “one horrific punch.” And only one. Impossibly strong, the report concluded. The rest of the file laid out the evidence against the creep: the witness statements, the agent investigation. The final report was signed by Zack Davis.
I flipped through about fifty of them, not reading every detail but taking them all in. Every crime was like something you’d see in a movie or maybe a police blotter. Some of them were a decade old or more; some were very, very recent. They were from all over the country, and each one had a trail of evidence cataloged, indicating why the agent or meta investigating believed the person they caught was the guilty party. And almost all of them were slam-dunk obvious.
I closed the last file, a robbery/murder, and put it on the stack with the rest. I swallowed hard, wishing somehow I could scrub all that I had just read out of my brain, along with all the things Wolfe did to me and the things he’d shown me in flashes through his memories earlier. I felt a desire to run far, far away to a place where people didn’t do things to other people like I saw in those files and in Wolfe’s memories...and in my own. Too bad there wasn’t a place far enough I could run to find that. “Why did you show me this?”
“Because this is the ‘solved’ stack.” She reached behind Old Man Winter’s desk and pulled out another stack, almost as big as the first and lay it in front of me. The solved stack’s folders where manila; these were red. “These are unsolved, crimes where meta involvement was suspected but the perpetrator couldn’t be located because they didn’t make a big enough noise and we only have so many agents and resources.” She raised an eyebrow at me and opened the first folder. “Take this one, for instance...thirty-eight-year-old man dies in an attempted robbery. A witness said that the perpetrator seemed to have extra arms growing out of his sides that restrained the victim while the robber beat him to death.”
“That’s...horrible.” I was suddenly hyperaware of Old Man Winter looking at me. I felt like he was sifting me, trying to filter through to my core, and I suddenly didn’t care for what he might find there. The anger made me bite back at Ariadne, hard. “I’m sorry he died, but I don’t see how anything I do is going to matter. I have my own problems, and I’m only—”
“A little girl?” There was no accusation in her words, but they slapped me just the same. “A teenager with more strength than twenty men and a power that could keep any physical assailant at bay.”
“This isn’t my problem.” I wanted to be firm. I needed to find Mom.
“So it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t involve you?” That time there was accusation, and it stung. I wondered if my verbal lashings hit her half so hard as hers hit me.
I reddened. “I’m a teenager; I’m pretty sure it’s a biological imperative to think that way.”
“But you can be better.” Old Man Winter said it from behind his desk, leaning forward on his knuckles to look close at me. I didn’t cower from his stare, but I felt a bit of withering. Wolfe was nowhere to be heard, not that I felt like I could count on him for moral support. “You are not some schoolgirl whose blissful ignorance of the harsh realities of the world cloud her eyes with starry dreams of happy endings. Are you?”
“I’d like a happy ending,” I said. “But I don’t ignore the fact that the world can be cold and brutal and that there are people out there who exist solely to hurt others.”
“Then you know that someone has to protect ordinary people.” Ariadne leaned forward again and her red hair flared against the dull background of Old Man Winter’s office. “They can’t protect themselves against what waits for them out there. They have no defense because they don’t know what they have to defend against. Metahumans move too fast, hit too hard, for an unprepared person to fend