The Law of Averages

Book 2: Chapter 40: Patience is Not a Virtue

"So what do you do when you needed to track someone down?" Dan asked eagerly.

It was literally his first question, and Tawny already seemed exasperated. "You shouldn't go looking for murderers, Daniel."

Dan tried to look innocent. "I'm just asking a theoretical question here, Teach. I'm not that irresponsible."

He was bestowed with a glare that Anastasia would've been proud of, but Tawny grudgingly answered the question.

"You start with something that you know about them." He paused, then shook his head. "Well, no. You start with a physical description. You need that, at least. Then you can start scouting places that you know they frequent, or asking questions in places that they've been. Most of my job was just... sitting and waiting around for someone to show up."

"I'm not very good at that," Dan stated with disappointment.

Tawny shrugged. "All the more reason to let professionals do their job."

"How do you find someone if you don't have a description of them?" Dan pressed on, ignoring the comment.

"If you know where they were at a certain point in time, you start there," Tawny replied. "It was pretty rare for that to happen to me, though. Usually a client could at least provide a description of a target, if not an actual picture."

"I don't have either of those," Dan said, drumming his fingers against the table. "Whoever hired me did it from a freshly created email account, and the storage facility he sent me to apparently has close to zero security. No cameras, and a single guard that works graveyard shift."

"Then you're fucked," Tawny informed him cheerfully. The officer ate a slice of pancake, humming contentedly at Dan's misfortune.

"If I'm fucked, so are the police," Dan pointed out. "It's not like they know any more than I do at this point."

Tawny jabbed a fork at him. Syrup splashed against Dan's shirt as the officer spoke, "Yet. They don't know any more than you do, yet. And that might already be untrue. We have access to resources well beyond yours, and therefore have far more options available to us. An officer is missing. High command will spare no expense in finding him."

Dan wasn't so sure. The police in Dimension A were extremely hesitant to release information to the public and press. He had seen nothing on the news about a missing officer, nor even the bodies discovered at the storage facility. It wasn't an attitude unique to the APD, either. The feds hadn't released anything about their escaped prisoner, and even the attack on the FBI Field Office had been hushed up, though the rest of the gang war had obviously been covered.

Dan hadn't given it much thought, but there was a mind-boggling level of apathy going on in the press. And most people seemed content being blind to it all. It's not like the police or feds were even trying all that hard to cover things up. The field office was a ruin; the storage facility had been swamped by cops for hours. Dan hadn't seen a reporter anywhere. They'd swarmed the strip mall, in the aftermath of the Crew's attack on James Webb. Did the police have some kind of signal they sent out, saying it was okay to investigate things? Or was it something else?

There were no tip lines. There was no America's Most Wanted. There weren't even faces on fucking milk cartons, as far as he could tell. Would sending a photo of the missing officer, or the names of the murdered individuals, to the local news asking for any available information make a difference? Dan didn't know, and he wasn't sure if he should ask.

"Well," Dan said slowly, "what about when you're out of options? What are you left with?"

Tawny shrugged. "My upgrade. When all else fails, I try to use my upgrade to find out what I can." He gestured to his face. "Why do you think I chose this upgrade? The aesthetic appeal? My enhanced senses have helped me on more than one occasion."

Dan blinked. "But I don't have enhanced senses."

...Did he? He kinda did. His veil basically gave him limited clairvoyance around him. But it wasn't great at tracking people down. He couldn't see or hear any better than the average person. He especially couldn't smell any better, which he assumed was the easiest way of finding an individual's trail. Sure, he could sense the composition of whatever his veil touched, but that didn't help him track down people.

Did it?

He glanced at Tawny, who was nonchalantly devouring his pancakes. The man was clearly just humoring Dan, without any intention of actually helping. Dan couldn't blame him; it was probably the responsible thing to do. He couldn't even find it in himself to be annoyed. Tawny was just trying to help in his own way, and the conversation had just lead Dan towards a new idea.

He mulled it over. His power was incredibly versatile, but there really wasn't much it could offer in the way of tracking. He'd already tried just willing himself to people that he knew. Unlike locations, his navigator couldn't seem to pick out individuals and drop Dan beside them. He assumed that the same protections that prevented him from using his veil directly on others, kept them safe from his navigator's senses. It was possible that Andros Bartholomew could be vulnerable while using his smoke form—that was how Dan had injured the mad scientist in the first place—but Dan wasn't about to spend hours upon hours attempting to teleport to the side of a literal supervillain.

That was a great way to get dead.

His power couldn't help him track down whoever had hired him for his ill-fated delivery, but it could be useful elsewhere. Dan couldn't see the forest for the trees; he didn't need to find the man who hired him. He already knew, deep in his gut, that it was Andros Bartholomew. Dan wasn't a court of law; reasonable doubt did not exonerate the man. He needed to find Bartholomew, and therefore he needed to find the men who had rescued him.

Cornelius claimed that the city was locked down tight, and Dan knew it was true. Ostensibly, the checkpoints surrounding the city were for gang members who might be trying to flee, but he hoped that the state troopers had at least been given Bartholomew's picture to look for. He also believed that the mad scientist was too insane and too vindictive to leave without doing something horrible to Dan, and anyone else he thought had wronged him. He'd still be in the city, as would his rescuer, the massive matter manipulator, who'd walked through walls like they were water.

The man's power, for he was surely a Natural, had left a distinctive mark on the materials that he'd affected. Dan's veil could pick out the difference based on the warped feeling of the material, but he hadn't really given that much more thought. It seemed obvious, at the time, that anything the man used his power on would obviously look as twisted as it felt. If he'd left a trail to follow, the feds would have easily tracked him down. That, Dan realized now, had been a terrible assumption.

Dan had only seen him use his power the once, on the side of the cargo trailer. He remembered seeing the wall melt, twist like taffy, and cling to the Natural's skin like armor. He remembered ripping it into t-space. He didn't remember what the rest of the trailer looked like. By the time he was paying it any attention, it'd been shot to shit, frozen solid, and covered in fog.

What if the warping effect that Dan's veil felt wasn't visible at all? What if the consequences of the man's power were only overt when he wanted them to be? What if it was only Dan's unique sensory abilities that had allowed him to discover this aspect of the man's abilities? Naturals were so esoteric that it was certainly possible.

Had the villain used his throughout his escape? He'd certainly used it to rip through walls, but once he was in the sewer, had he kept it going? Was it even something he could turn off? The man had been practically naked when he'd emerged from the trailer. Barefoot and bare chested, with only shredded jeans for modesty. Was that because of some aspect of his power?

Too many questions, and only one way to answer them.

Dan smiled cheerfully across the table, then dug into his meal.