Crispus Allen stood solemnly over the dead girl's body. He always took a brief moment before examining each crime scene body, partly out of respect for the dead, and partly in order to begin focusing on the task at hand.
A female voice echoed from the end of the alleyway.
"Detective! The boy's here."
Crispus glanced down the alley and saw his partner, Renee Montoya, standing next to eighteen-year-old Bruce Wayne on the other side of the police tape.
"Let him in."
Bruce and Renee both ducked under the tape and moved to meet Crispus.
"Detective," Bruce said with a polite nod. "Another one?"
"Yeah. Third this week."
Bruce knelt beside the body. "Blonde hair, mid-twenties, about 5'7''. Just like the others. Any ID?"
"Whoever killed her didn't take the wallet this time. Her name's Joanna Harper. A student at Gotham U."
Bruce narrowed his eyes. "The killer didn't take her wallet?"
"Nope. What does that tell you?"
Bruce took a few seconds to think it over.
"Either the killer was interrupted and had to run, or he was never after the money in the first place."
"Not after the money? How do you figure that?"
"This is the third girl of the exact same age, height, and hair color found in an alley with her throat slit inside of a week. This is serial-killer work. He finds girls who fit very specific parameters and murders them in the exact same way every time. Whoever's killing these girls is doing it out of a pathological obsession, not greed or desperation. There's no reason for him to take their wallets unless he just feels like it, or if he's trying to throw us off."
Crispus felt proud of his unofficial student. "Good thinking," he said.
He glanced at Renee. She seemed a bit uneasy. Thinking about it, Crispus guessed that he really should be, too. Bruce seemed to have a kind of intuition for criminology, the kind that meant he was either brilliant or horribly twisted. Or he just watched a billion of those damned CSI shows.
Bruce only nodded slightly in return, straight-faced.
Crispus, more than most others, recognized the flat, jaded look that Bruce often wore: the look of someone who's lost everything. Crispus knew what had happened to Bruce's parents; it was the only reason he'd agreed to let Bruce shadow him on these cases. If Bruce kept along this path, he'd probably make a great detective one day.
Bruce's phone beeped.
"Sorry; I need to run. I'll catch up with you in a few hours."
Bruce turned and quickly left the alley the way he'd come.
Crispus shook his head. Then again, if Bruce kept up that kind of behavior, he'd be lucky to graduate above beat cop.
On the edge of the city, near the docks, a gigantic red tent stood next to a ferris wheel. Haly's Circus, one of the last true traditional one-ring traveling circuses, was enjoying an extended stay in Gotham.
Bruce drove up and parked around the backside of the tent. The last show of the day had ended three hours ago; the place was deserted aside from the circus workers themselves. Bruce walked inside the tent and was immediately greeted by a redheaded girl.
"Bruce! Hey!"
Bruce returned a smile. "Hey, Mary."
Mary's boyfriend, a black-haired boy named John, did a backflip off an overhead balcony and landed in front of Bruce and Mary.
"Bruce! Didn't think you'd make it tonight," he said, shaking Bruce's hand.
"I was on the other side of the island; sorry I'm late."
John glanced at a clock. Bruce was two minutes late. "Um, yeah, you're fine. You ready?"
Bruce nodded.
"Watch your balance. Spread your arms a bit more."
Bruce struggled to stay balanced on the tightrope. He'd been told by Zatara that he had incredible balance, but on an inch-thick rope that didn't matter much. As Bruce wobbled nervously, John walked effortlessly across the rope to meet Bruce in the middle.
"See here? Hold your hips a little more to the right. Keep your knees a little bit loose."
Bruce adjusted accordingly, and he stabilized.
"Good. Now try to stay on the rope while I jump."
Mr. Haly, the circus owner, a red-haired rotund man in his late forties, walked up beside Mary, who was watching from the floor.
"How's he doing?" Haly asked.
"Really well, for a beginner," Mary answered. "He's still really shaky, but he's already learned around a couple years' worth of gymnastics."
"In just the three weeks he's been here?"
"Yeah. It probably helps that John and I are putting him through the crash course and everything, but he really does have a gift for this sort of thing. Are you sure he doesn't want to become a performer?"
"You can ask him yourself, but yeah. He said all he wanted was to learn gymnastics from the best, but he didn't want to join up. I asked if he wanted to go to the Olympics or something; he said no, he just wanted to learn. And he's paying us a ridiculous amount of money for it, so I left it at that."
"Huh. Well that sucks. We could really use another one. A trapeze act with only two people isn't as much of a crowd-pleaser."
Haly gave Mary a wry smile. "Well, if you and John would just get hitched and start making more little acrobats, we wouldn't have this problem."
"Mr. Haly!"
Mary blushed, but couldn't stop herself from smiling like a mad person.
Up above, John backflipped, sending a bounce across the rope. Bruce wobbled horribly and fell off, landing in the net sixty feet below. Mary, Haly, and John all laughed at him. Bruce wasn't amused, but that made it all the funnier.
The next evening, Bruce decided to go see one of the circus' shows. Bruce was never one to be impressed by anything, but he had to admit that he was very impressed with everything he saw. John and Mary, of course, were amazing. The animal trainers were masters at getting a reaction both from their animals and from the audience. The clowns were decidedly less incredible, but then again, they were clowns. Cheap laughs are what they're for.
As the show came to its climax, all the acts went on at once. The clowns drove their tiny car in circles around the ring, while the fire-breathers, animals, and everyone else intermixed in the center. John and Mary did flips across the open air above. As the crowd roared with applause, Bruce could barely hear a muffled bang.
One of the clowns that hung out of the tiny car's open door fell to the ground and laid there, perfectly still. As the seconds passed, a few others near him started to look down with worried faces. From this distance, Bruce could barely see a red stain on the clown's white shirt.
The crowd began to gasp and chatter immediately. A woman somewhere screamed. Bruce realized what was happening and instantly began searching furiously for where the shot had come from. He looked upward, toward the wooden beams at the top of the tent, and saw a glint of bright metal next to a large gun-barrel held by a figure in silhouette. Bruce scanned the rest of the support structure and found a path across the beams. Bruce shoved his way through the crowd as fast as he could, keeping his eyes on the man in shadow. He climbed up onto a horizontal beam near the top of the tiered seats and began making his way toward the shadowed man. The man quickly turned around and jumped out a slit in the side of the tent; Bruce began to run. He focused. I can't miss this, he told himself. This isn't the time to fall. He jumped to another beam and kept running; bounced off a vertical beam and landed right on the tiny wooden platform that the gunman had been sitting on. He put his head through the slit in the fabric and looked down. The man—who, as if to be as stereotypical as possible, was wearing a trenchcoat and hat—had just landed at the base of the tent, and began working his way into the crowd. Bruce jumped out of the tent and slid down its side, landing and crashing into a woman at the bottom. He tossed a half-hearted apology her way as he got back up and tried to follow the shooter's path. Unfortunately, word of the shooting had now spread outside the tent, and the entire crowd was now rushing towards the parking lot. Bruce nearly got trampled in the swarm of bodies, and completely lost track of the shooter. Whoever he was, there was no way to find him in this chaos.
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