Afterward…

By the time Kevin arrived in the Crypt, Danny had removed the costume he wore during the meeting with Gracie and returned it to its place among the other high-tech battle suits of the Crimson Wraith. He looked up from the Crypt computer wearing jeans and a basketball jersey for the Titan Hoplites.

“Well, that’s that,” he said. “Looks like we’re really doing this.”

“It does indeed.”

“She say anything when she passed you on her way upstairs?”

“Just ‘goodnight.’” 

“Not a lot to read from that.”

“No, but there was a difference in her. Since she arrived, she’s seemed scattered and desperate. Now, she’s got something to hold onto. She knows there’s hope.”

“Ok, then,” said Danny, “My hope is that she turns out to be worth it.” 

“You don’t seem too big a fan of hers.”

“Kevin, man, she’s a hard case, walking around here like she invented trouble. I mean, yeah, she’s in a tough spot right now, but can she ease off the attitude?” 

“She’s lived a different life than either of us. It’s made her a different kind of person.”

“Yeah, well, if that kind of person wants our help, she could make giving that help a little easier. We do have other things going on right now.”

“That we do. You said you noticed something in the scans of Edward’s apartment?”

“Sure did. Take a look. This was the last image before the cameras got shut down.” On one of the monitors of the Crypt’s computer array, a grainy, grayscale image appeared from the security camera in Edward’s apartment which had been pointed toward his kitchen. “And these are the scans you captured with the Haunts.” Another image of Edward’s kitchen appeared, this one in full color and more crisply detailed.

“What are we looking at?” Kevin asked.

“The refrigerator door. Took a lot of flipping back and forth between these to notice.” Danny zoomed in on both images.

Just as another man his age might have photographs of children and grandchildren held to his refrigerator by magnets, Edward Burton, former Crimson Wraith, kept images of his extended crime-fighting family from over the decades. 

The oldest showed him as a young man, standing beside his adoptive father William Finn and William’s new bride on the day of their wedding. Decades later, a photo of a middle-aged Edward sat shirtless beside a similarly younger Stephen in a canoe on a pond, both smiling at whoever was taking their picture from the shore. 

A laminated newspaper-clipping, yellowed with age, marked the death of Officer Adam O’Neill of the TCPD with a photograph of the deceased. Yet that photograph bore a suspicious resemblance to an older man in another photograph, his appearance obscured by a beard and sunglasses, standing beside Edward and Stephen and a dark-haired young man in cap and gown for his college graduation. 

Some years later, that college graduate leaned against a motorcycle with arms folded grimly in a blue-jean jacket and his hair grown out into a shaggy mullet appropriate for the 1980s. In another photograph, that young man sat with Edward and Stephen at a small delicatessen, eating sandwiches piled high with sliced meats. 

Finally, he appeared on a magazine cover that read:

The 90s are NOW! Finn Industries CEO Michael Conroy envisions ‘limitless horizon!’

His mullet had been trimmed, and he wore a blazer and tie but still a pair of blue jeans. 

What appeared to be the most recent photo showed an unsmiling blonde man in his twenties wearing a trenchcoat and red, circular sunglasses in the Finn Manor rear lawn. Beside him, beaming for all she was worth, stood none other than a teenaged Esperanza Villagrana in a black rock band t-shirt, cut at the waist to show her midriff, her hair pixie short. She was giving the camera a peace sign.

Looking from one screen to the next, Kevin said, “In the scans from the Haunts, the photos have shifted slightly.”

“Bingo.”

“And what shifted them…”

“Had to be our killer. That makes sense, right? You said it’s probably someone who knows us, someone with a personal vendetta. He must have recognized some of these faces. Hell, maybe all of them. So, something he saw caught his attention, makes him feel some type of way, and he decides to take a closer look. I’m thinking I could write a program to measure the pixel displacement, find out which photo moved the most. Just need a few hours and a decent caffeine drip…”

Kevin pointed. “It’s that one.”

“That one?” Danny looked harder at the image Kevin indicated — the photo of Edward, Stephen, and a young Michael Conroy sitting at a deli. “You sure?”

“The photos around it moved more, but that’s because they were obscuring this one. In the scan, it can be seen more clearly.”

“Damn, you’re right. What’s so special about it, you think? I mean, you got Edward, Stephen, and Michael all in other photos as well. Maybe something about that day? Something about that place?” 

“It has one face that doesn’t show up anywhere else. Look.” 

In the background of the photograph where the kitchen could be seen just barely, one cook stood out, a big man whose white t-shirt and apron strained to hold his heavyweight boxer’s build. He was the only member of staff looking right at the camera.

“Is that… Hank?” asked Danny.

“That’s Hank,” said Kevin.