The thought arrived late, the way embarrassing realizations tend to.
He'd had Rick's Wraith Form available the entire time. One activation and he could have phased through that strike without taking a scratch. He hadn't even thought of it.
He crouched and picked up the tufts of black hair from the sewer floor, rolling them between his fingers. Dry. Coarse. The individual strands were stiff enough that the cut ends were actually sharp.
"...Close to dog hair. Something in that family."
He looked at his clothes. The sewer had left its opinion on all of them.
Good timing for a change of identity.
---
He borrowed the unconscious officer's uniform on the way out and left a reasonable amount of cash folded into the breast pocket as compensation. A cheap hotel two streets over gave him a shower and twenty minutes of privacy. He came out in a police uniform that was slightly large through the shoulders but otherwise passable, the officer's credentials confirming the name for him.
"Lafite." He looked at the ID photo. "Sounds a bit like mine, actually. Funny."
He swapped the photo for one he had prepared in the cover documents, finished arranging everything, and was about to head for the city's public university when the life band lit up.
Evelyn's signal. He accepted it.
"I've finished on my end." Her voice came through clear, the particular calm she used when she was working. "The victim at the outlying site was a public school bus driver. Still active as of yesterday. Middle-aged, divorced, the children went with the ex-wife. Chronic alcohol use, repeated drug abuse, probable dealing."
The sound of paper in the background, the Profiler ability organizing as she spoke.
"He had a substantial history. Multiple accusations of harassment and assault against female students, all the way to formal court filings.
The most serious recent case came in about a week ago, allegations of abduction, assault, and homicide against a student named Laura. All previous accusations were eventually dropped.
Unknown pressure in each case, the families withdrawing complaints. The most recent one was still active."
Raphael opened his mouth.
"I ran the supplementary check already," Evelyn said. "
The Laura case is the center of it. The nature of it was severe. Her body was found in a suburban area not far from the school.
Prior to death she had been subjected to prolonged abuse and severe physical trauma."
A pause. Something quiet moved through her voice when she continued.
"Students who knew her said her family had very little money. She lived in a remote outlying area and depended on the school bus for transport. She was always the last passenger dropped off."
Raphael said nothing and let her finish.
"After the first hearing, the driver filed an appeal. Before the second could conclude, Laura's family withdrew the complaint without explanation.
Local police traced a substantial anonymous deposit into their account shortly before they left the city."
He turned the two cases over in parallel and looked for the joint.
Then he thought about the state of Martina's body. The specific targeting. The way the damage had been distributed.
"Evelyn. The bus driver's remains, what condition?"
"Not at the scene. But the news coverage at the time was detailed enough to reconstruct. His lower body had been largely destroyed, blunt force, repeated, consistent with stoning. Sharp rocks found at the scene. Fingernails removed. Every finger broken.
The major joints, elbows, knees, all dislocated or snapped. The nature of the injuries prior to death was explicitly retaliatory."
A pause.
"Your victim was similar?"
"Close enough." He gave her a brief account of the Martina scene, the condition of the remains, the missing limbs, the cleanup attempt, the handkerchief. When he finished, he added what he'd concluded.
"The way this reads, the Demon's true form is operating in a narrower target profile than a random predator would suggest.
This level of specific retaliation doesn't come from general principle.
The perpetrator had a close personal connection to Laura, and that connection intersects with Martina's social circle somehow."
They talked through the structure of it for a few minutes and came out with a split plan.
Raphael would work the remaining two incident scenes, tighten the suspect range, establish a clearer perimeter around whoever they were looking for.
Evelyn would go into the university under her journalist cover and talk to students. Two threads, running simultaneously.
He didn't take long to rest. The borrowed uniform would stop being useful the moment someone ran the real Lafite's location, and that window was already closing. He had a few hours at most to move inside it.
---
At six in the evening he knocked on the door of Martina's home address.
Her husband answered. When he saw the uniform, the expression that came over his face was the specific exhaustion of someone who had been answering the same questions for too long and had run out of the energy to be polite about it.
"You people again. I've told you everything I know..."
He reached behind him without looking and grabbed a high-heeled shoe off the entryway cabinet.
He threw it at the floor with enough force that the heel snapped clean off, leaving a small dent in the wood.
"Can't you leave me alone for five minutes?! I just lost my wife. Before that, I lost my child. I don't know anything else, and if you keep pushing me like this, you'll have another body on your hands, and it'll be mine!"
He was shouting before Raphael had finished stepping through the door, the volume escalating without much gradient in between.
He pushed at Raphael's shoulder, once, then again, not hard enough to accomplish anything, just enough to have somewhere to put the force.
Lost his child...Raphael's attention caught on that. If that was accurate, if it was recent, there was a reasonable chance one of the other incident scenes had already answered the question of how.
He stood there and let it run. Didn't speak, didn't back up, didn't try to redirect any of it.
He watched the man shout and throw things and run out of steam by degree, the way grief-fueled rage always does, until the movements became slow and the voice dropped to something hoarse and the energy was simply gone.
Then he spoke.
"Please cooperate with the investigation."
Martina's husband stared at him. Something between a wince and a bitter laugh crossed his face.
"Are you a machine? Fine. Fine. I don't have anything new. What I know, I've already said."
Raphael produced a fresh notepad and a pen, opened to the first page, and held them in a way that suggested he intended to write things down.
The Profiler ability had been quietly active since the conversation began.
"Our review of your previous statement identified some inconsistencies. Could be errors, could be omissions, we don't know yet. We need you to go through it again from the beginning. If the account matches, you're cleared and we don't bother you again.
If it doesn't match, we need you to come to the station with us." He met the man's eyes. "For your own sake. And for whoever killed your wife."
The husband sat down heavily on the entryway step. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and stayed like that for a moment.
Raphael let the silence stay where it was.
When he finally spoke again, his voice was still flat, still measured, but something had shifted slightly underneath it. A degree of warmth that he didn't announce.
"...Anger doesn't change anything."
The husband looked up at him.
Raphael was still watching him with the same quiet steadiness he'd had since the door opened, not cold, not performatively sympathetic, just present. Waiting.
The man's shoulders dropped another inch.
"...Alright. From the beginning."