Nighthawk: A Superhero Story (closed for Siobhancan99)

[siobhancan99]

Monica's fingers curled again and again along her spot, stroking them as her palm rubbed Gabi's swollen clit "good girl" she cooed. "that's a good girl" she flicked her tongue along Gabi's ear "you're so wet, corazon. You must have really enjoyed that show" she rubbed herself against Gabi's back, grinding herself against Gabi's round ass. She tugged firmly at Gabi's nipple "bet you'll be rubbing one out to that for a long time."

 

[Halcyon638]

“Yesss.” Gabi let out a high-pitched gasp as her frame grew taut against Monica’s. Her breath caught in her throat for a few moments. Then, body shuddering with release, Gabi moaned and pressed herself back against her girlfriend. She did her best to stifle the sounds as she came.

Finally, she inhaled deeply and reached up to stroke the side of Monica’s face. “Ohh. Fuck, querida. I needed that so bad.”

 

[siobhancan99]

"I know baby," she muttered as she curled Gabi in against her. She held her for a bit, then got up, brushed her teeth and got ready for bed. She turned off the TV as Aidan dozed in front of it, then curled back up with Gabi, not quite falling asleep. She thought about that agent creep at the bar, and how to put him to good use. Make some money, maybe control her image.

 

[Halcyon638]

The next morning, a Wednesday, Hadley was looking and acting more herself. As forecasted, though, the weather had taken a turn and a steady spring rain was falling, a pattern that was expected to continue for most of the week. As they sat at the table eating their breakfast, the theater major said, “Sorry for bailing on you guys. Again. This time I really really didn’t want to. I swear to god, I passed out by, like, 10:00. I’ll make it up to you. We can get as touristy as you want.” Glancing around as if scanning for eavesdroppers, Hadley added, “Ooh, and a friend of my is tending bar at this LGBTQ nightclub tomorrow night and he’s promised to hook us up with all the drinks.”

 

[siobhancan99]

Monica chattered with Hads a bit, and the girls made plans to do some "touristy bullshit" around the City, as she and Gabi were most certainly tourists. The week went by faster than they wanted it to, and by Saturday when they were getting ready to head back it seemed like they'd only been there a few days. Monica carried her bags and Gabi's as they headed out "Pretty hard to accept going back to Prospect City now that we've been here" she joked, but to be honest she was itching to get back to some of her night time work. Maybe something had developed with the drone situation.

 

[Halcyon638]

As Monica reconnected with the news on the bus ride back to Prospect City, she found a number of troubling developments. Another Prospect City native who was in town to visit his sick father, Matt Hennebeck, 24, had been targeted and killed by what witnesses described as a single drone the night before Monica and Gabi had left for NYC.

Earlier that week, another drone attack had killed a former Prospect City resident now living in a suburb of Philadelphia.

DRONE SLAYS LOCAL WOMAN IN ATTACK POSSIBLY LINKED TO PROSPECT CITY KILLINGS

“Philadelphia, PA – A military-grade drone potentially linked to three homicides in Prospect City is suspected of killing Philadelphia resident Katie Diamond, a stay-at-home mother, late Wednesday night. Police received reports of gunfire and screams at approximately 9:15 PM in Devon, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. Arriving on the scene, officers found Diamond, 25, unresponsive and suffering from multiple gunshot wounds.

Reports from eyewitnesses alleged that the attack was carried out by a drone fitting the description of those used in recent slayings in Prospect City. The first such victims were Prospect City Councilman Jordan Kelleher, 45, and his assistant and lover, Rachel Randle, 24. Initially, Prospect City police suspected Kelleher to be the primary target, questioning the Councilman’s wife, Farisa Kelleher, who reportedly suspected her husband’s infidelity. However, the assumption that the politician was the primary target has since been called into question by the killing two days later of Matt Hennebeck, a former friend and classmate of Randle at Hamon Academy, an elite private high school in Prospect City.

Diamond, a mother of a 2-year-old, was also part of the same graduating class as Randle and Hennebeck. Diamond’s friends and family members confirmed that she, Randle, and Hennebeck were friends during high school, though they were reported to have lost touch over the past two years. “Katie and Rachel and Matt did everything together,” Diamond’s younger sister, Molly, a Prospect City resident reported. “She was completely destroyed by the news [of their killings].”

When asked whether Prospect City police have identified any suspects among Diamond, Randle, and Hennebeck’s friend group and classmates, Chief of Police Robb Bell stated, “We are currently working closely with the Philadelphia PD and the FBI to investigate all potential suspects.”

Prospect City police have also been investigating possible links to the Prospect City-based defense contractor, First Line, as some of the technology used in the specialized attack drones is reportedly based on proprietary designs created for the company. Earlier this week, a former First Line employee and engineer, Drew Easton, 41, was questioned by detectives and has since been cleared as a person of interest.

Diamond is survived by her daughter and husband, a restaurateur and Philadelphia native.

 

[siobhancan99]

Monica hmmmed and sat at the computer, looking over the news about the drone strike. The tie to first line was interesting. In a few weeks she'd be able to maybe snoop around when her internship started. For now she had to content herself with a little internet sleuthing. She wondered how the fuck batman did this shit. they never showed the slog of intelligence gathering in the movies. Just fights and clowns. She sipped her Dr. Pepper and made some notes about her thoughts. The deaths being a group of high school friends meant the answer was probably something that occurred at the school itself, and so she'd need to look into their backgrounds and incidents at the school. She had two working theories. Either in horror movie fashion the trio had been involved in something terrible and an anonymous killer was taking them out out of vengeance or the three had just been shitheads in high school and the drone operator was someone tortured by them as part of normal bullying, and was exacting some sort of disproportionate vengeance. She thought a bit and added a third possibility to the list. The three had information about something or someone that they needed to not come out. They were too old for that Patterson kid to be involved, but somebody like him might be paying to have loose ends taken care of.

She tapped her pen against her lip and tried to think about how to access what the cops already had. She also set about trying to find the victims socials to see what other mutuals they might have that might be future victims or potential witnesses. Lastly, she started tracking down the sister, Molly, to see if she could find her and maybe speak to her in person.

 

[Halcyon638]

Monica’s search, though prolonged, yielded a substantial haul of information. It didn’t take her long to locate an address for Molly Diamond, the recently deceased woman’s younger sister: a dorm room on the Prospect University campus.

As far as Monica could tell from social media posts, the three dead Hamon Academy alumni were part of a core friend group of about 6 students who were photographed together constantly and were regularly posting about one another around 6-8 years ago. From their designer clothes, conventionally attractive appearances, and vacation destinations, it was clear they were all quite popular and seemingly all well off (or at least able to give off the appearance of wealth).

The 6 women were:

• Rachel Randle (deceased assistant to Councilman Kelleher)
• Katie Diamond (deceased, stay-at-home mom from outside of Philadelphia)
• Liza George (still living in Prospect City)
• Cameron Calvino (wellness influencer living in Tampa, Florida)
• Coda Kirkman (died 8 years ago after senior year)
• Violet Zhang (still living in Prospect City, high-end realtor)

Matt Hennebeck appeared to have been the boyfriend of Cameron Calvino. Other guys appeared in the photos, but he seemed to be the most frequent male presence.

Digging deeper, Monica turned up information on Coda Kirkman’s death. She had died by suicide in the fall of their senior year, a fact alluded to in some of the friend group’s posts, some urging their followers to donate to mental health charities.

Going back in Kirkman’s history, though she blended in seamlessly with the rest of her friend group for the most part, it was evident that the woman had gone through a long awkward phase—pasty, pock-marked skin, unflattering glasses, ballet recitals and academic decathlon trophies marking her earlier photos. She was mostly photographed alone, with her mother, or with one other presumably unpopular friend, a girl with dark, curly hair and thick black eyebrows named Sophie.

Monica felt Gabi’s hands on her shoulders. “Baby, do you think you might be able to look over my bio lab report?” she said. “Grammarly’s done all it can but I want to make sure it makes sense to an actual human. Or, um, Centauri.”

Glancing down, she saw one of the final photos of Kirkman in which the auburn-haired young woman was smiling widely. “Hmm. That is a fake smile if I’ve ever seen one. What’s all this?” she asked, likely seeing the several dozen tabs Monica had pulled up.

 

[siobhancan99]

"I think it's the cause of the drone murders." Monica sipped at her drink and tugged Gabi into her lap. "So." She gestured "these three are dead. All part of the same social group in high school. " she ran her hand along her girl's back "Rich kids." She gestured at the girl with the fake smile "she killed herself right after high school. She was in their orbit. Probably not the most popular." She pointed "these three are still alive. two in prospect city."

She pointed at the other girl, sophie "im gonna guess, at the end of the day, that this girl is involved. I need to track her down, but also before that I need to actually talk to the two here in prospect city. I think there's a sister here in the City as well of one of the dead women. Katie." She ran her fingers along the small of her girl's back "I'll bet this is some... 'I know what you did last summer' kind of shit, where the kids did something awful and there's some revenge going on."

 

[Halcyon638]

“Ugh. I’m so glad we didn’t really have a mean girls clique.” While they’d known their share of assholes, the popular girls and guys they ended up hanging out with in high school had been for the most part, laid back and friendly. “It probably also didn’t hurt that most of the other girls were afraid of you after the Ashlyn Davidson thing,” Gabi said, referring to a girl who’d picked on her because of her heritage until Monica had confronted her after gym class and put a permanent end to it.

“Let’s do a reverse image search.” Within a few seconds, they had pulled up some information on Sophie Stavropoulos. There were two addresses, one in Pasadena, California and one in the Prospect City suburbs, though no indication of which was the more recent one. She had graduated from Cal Tech with a major in robotics 2 years ago. Other than announcements of her graduation from college and from high school, though, there was very little information about her online.

“The cops are probably, like, watching out for these other girls, right?”

 

[siobhancan99]

Monica nodded "though it might not hurt to check them out. If they cop to what happened it might be the key to getting Sophie to come in peacefully." She hmmmed "I feel like I want to go into the conversation with her better prepared. Maybe talking to the sister of the recently dead girl might be a good call. Might not be though." She thought "alright, i'm going to try to do some recon of the suburban house. See if she's there, if I can get inside get inside. At least I might be able to rule her out either way." She pointed at Sophie "though I feel like it's gotta be her, or at least she's involved."

 

[Halcyon638]

Gabi curled in against Monica, stroking her hand as it rested on the brunette’s stomach. “Okay. Just be safe."

Gabi threw together a basic stir fry for dinner and had Monica read over her lab report focused on planarian regeneration. As usual, the bio major’s writing was pristine, with just a few areas where the wording needed a bit of clarity. Monica had some of her own homework to get caught up on for those instructors who disregarded the sanctity of spring break. Soon enough, night was falling.

 

[siobhancan99]

Monica ate and went over her changes with Gabi. She came out and got into the sliver, heading first out to the suburbs to investigate the address she had for Sophie. This seemed like her most solid lead. She parked the sliver in a small group of trees nearby, then made her way through the neighborhood to look for the house itself. She kept to the shadows, trying to not draw much attention to herself.

 

[Halcyon638]

The house was 2 stories and huge, with spacious grounds surrounding it. As Monica’s Centauri vision adjusted, she could make out two vehicles in the driveway: a high-end, hybrid SUV and a slightly beat-up crossover. Both vehicles sported Cal Tech decals, peeling and cracked. The SUV also bore University of Connecticut and Zion National Park decals while the crossover bore Dr. Who and Avengers stickers. There were lights on both upstairs and downstairs.

Moving closer, Monica caught a glimpse of Sophie through a curtain in one of the downstairs rooms, walking along carrying a bag of chips. She also spotted movement in one of the upstairs windows briefly.

 

[siobhancan99]

Well she had confirmation Sophie was in the area, giving credence to her theory. She made a circuit of the house. She couldn't exactly go in right now, with people home. That's how people got hurt and also clued in. Instead she looked around the property for a shed our outbuilding. She made a circuit of the grounds, trying to stay out of the light.

 

[Halcyon638]

Monica slowly made her way around the property. The backyard contained a gazebo, an in-ground swimming pool, and a small structure not far from the pool. She could make out a series of flood lights, likely triggered by motion. If she wanted to approach more closely, she would have to hug the walls and likely get low. Off in the distance, she heard loud music and cheers, as if a party was being thrown somewhere in the neighborhood.

 

[siobhancan99]

Monica hmmmed. the party down the way might draw sophie out.... or not. It was hard to tell if it was a blessing or not. It might also provide her some cover if the lights went on. She decided to wait a bit and see if those inside made their way down the street. if not, she'd wait till the party turned a little more raucous... hopefully... then she'd make her way to the back building.

 

[Halcyon638]

As Monica waited, she eventually heard the celebration growing louder. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to attract the attention of anyone within the house. Making her way toward the small building beside the pool, she managed to set off one of the automated lights. No one appeared at any of the rear windows of the house, though, and before long, she was standing in front of the door to the structure just as the lights turned off again. The door was locked.

 

[siobhancan99]

Monica set about looking to see if any of the windows were open, and if not she'd try to pick the locks. If she was up to no good and hiding it from Gabi and they owned a pool house, that's where she'd hide things. So she gave entry a try to see if she'd find a weird drone factory or something.

 

[Halcyon638]

Neither of the building’s two windows turned out to be open, though Monica could get a partial glimpse of what was inside despite one of them being partially blocked by some kind of trellis. There appeared to be mainly lawn care and gardening supplies, along with some pool supplies.

Breaking out her lock release gun, she quickly opened up the simple lock and made her way inside. A closer look yielded similar results: a half-empty bag of mulch, pool tablets, rakes and a garden spade. There were no signs of a hidden compartment or staircase underneath.

She heard what sounded like a sliding glass door opening. The automated backyard lights came on, and Monica glimpsed what appeared to be Sophie walking onto the back deck walking a small dog.

 

[siobhancan99]

Crouching, Monica kept herself out of view. Unfortunately, that meant she couldn't see Sophie either. Still, it was best at this point to keep a low profile. She could break into the house later when they were asleep, or wait for a day they weren't around. What was importnat was knowing Sophie was here so it could still be her behind the attacks. For now, she concentrated on not being seen.

 

[Halcyon638]

Monica heard the small dog begin to bark in an agitated tone. The sound grew a bit closer. “Mikey. Mikey!” Sophie’s voice called out sharply. “Just do your business and get back in the house, okay? Mikey.”

The 20-something cajoled the animal more, and eventually the barking subsided. A few minutes later, Monica heard the sliding glass door open and shut once more.

Seconds later, the backyard was bathed in darkness once again.

 

[siobhancan99]

Discretion was the better part of valor. She knew Sophie lived here, and she could always come back. She decided to get more information about motive before accusing the woman of being involved in anything. That meant tracking down the sister, and the living potential victims in the City. Maybe the cops had put this together, but maybe not. Heading back home she decided to see what she could dig up on them.

 

[Halcyon638]

Gabi was intently focused on playing some computer RPG when Monica arrived home, or at least on creating a character that looked suspiciously like her girlfriend.

Monica turned to her own device and began another deep dive. From what she could gleam, Molly Diamond, the latest victim’s sister and Prospect U student, was unremarkable: boyfriend on campus, a social media feed where she mostly talked about books she’d read recently, and a recent post where she briefly alluded to going home due to her sister’s death.

As for the two women remaining in the friend group still residing in Prospect City, Monica pulled up addresses and more details for Liza George and Violet Zhang.

George had apparently had a rough patch between high school and present day. Over the past few years, she’d been arrested for possession of a controlled substance (Ativan and Xanax), and for attempting to forge a prescription. She’d spent some time in Parting Clouds Rehabilitation Facility just outside of the city. Her most recent social media post was from around 2 years ago, and the toll of her addiction was evident in her photos, going from a baby-faced, curvy young blonde woman to a young woman with slightly sunken eyes and angular cheekbones.

Violet Zhang’s online presence seemed meticulously maintained. She was employed by her father’s real estate firm and many of her posts in the last year or so were about closing the deal on multi-million dollar sales within the city. Every image was tasteful, carefully filtered, and displayed expensive and fashionable clothing, Zhang's make-up and hair looking like the work of a professional. In photos from 5 months ago, Zhang, George, and their other friends can be seen at a high-end restaurant indulging in drinks, Zhang expressing her utmost gratitude at the reunion.

It was a little past midnight when Monica finished.

 

[siobhancan99]

George would be the weak link, she thought. Whatever it was that happened had clearly stayed with the woman. Guilt, trauma. it was written on her arrest history. Remorse might be enough for her to confess, particularly to someone that might be able to help her. Also, her lifestyle meant she might be just coming home from the bar despite the lateness of the hour. She slipped back out and got into the sliver, heading to the address she had for George. She'd observe the woman's dwelling for a bit and if it seemed like she was home, she'd head to the door.