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girl wonder. chapter eight
DICK flashes his police badge as an officer approaches his car.
"She's with me," Dick states, gesturing towards me. The man raises a skeptical eyebrow at me, but I stride past him and join Dick's side.
Snowflakes land on my face and in my hair and my breath clouds as it hits the frigid air, so I shove my hands in my pockets, shivering slightly.
There are paramedics and police officers rushing about, not to mention sirens wailing.
Dick is silent as he stops to observe the crime scene.
At first it appears to me as an explosion; bricks and ash scattered across the snowy floor. Then as I my eyes find the interior, I find an almost perfectly intact cubicle, which makes no sense. The cogs in my brain turn as I try to form more theories.
I turn to query Dick, but he's already turned around and trudges over to two coroners. I jog after him, gasping at the sight of a body being zipped up in a body bag. It's hard to tell it was once a human — for a moment I doubt it even was. The flesh is dark, the colour of charcoal, and it's melted and moulded into an inhuman shape.
My mouth hangs open as the two latex-gloved men finish zipping up the bag and wheel the body away. With a deep, shaking breath to recompose myself, I follow Dick inside of the gas station and to the back, where we enter an office. He scans the small room, which contains nothing but a world map on the peeling, off-yellow wall; a desk with an open laptop and some stationery.
"Can you keep an eye out, real quick?" he asks, taking a seat in the chair that's tucked under the desk.
"Oh, sure," I reply, leaning against the wall at the entrance.
He shoves an odd-looking USB stick into the laptop, and it begins to glow a neon green. He tilts his head up at me and raises an eyebrow, so I glance outside of the office.
"All clear, sir," I smirk.
Dick forms a smile that lasts half a second, before the laptop chimes. He pulls the stick out and shoots up to his feet, stalking out of the store and back to his car.
When we're back in our seats, he reaches over to the glove compartment and pulls out some sort of flat device. My eyebrows furrow inquisitively as I watch him attach the stick to the tablet. He glimpses outside ever so often and I begin to wonder if perhaps this is something he shouldn't be doing.
Eventually, he shoves the stick back in his pocket and taps the screen of the device, angling it a little towards me. On it shows CCTV footage of the parking lot of the gas station we're at. He skips ahead until he spots two figures, one of which is familiar to me. He pauses the footage and zooms in, where Rachel climbs into a car with the woman that Dick described to me earlier, the one who was seen at Rachel's home in Michigan. He zooms in further, onto a clear image of the car's license plate.
