The First to Know newsroom wasn’t the only place in Toledo where people went through Charlie Parker’s story in the Daily word by word.

Corporal Janice Watkins and Officer Rick Mattison didn’t see or even hear about the story when it hit the streets. They’d spent two days trying to run down the identity of the Amazon from their shaky knowledge of the old car. It turned out that there weren’t very many light-colored roadsters from the twenties and thirties registered in northwest Ohio. A few of them were museum pieces that obviously hadn’t moved out of their garages in years—but it was impossible to know which ones they might be, and sometimes the owners had been hard to track down. And after checking everything out, nothing fit. Not even close. It was a dry hole.

“Might have been registered up in Michigan, right over the line,” Rick speculated as Janice wheeled the patrol car into the station.

“It might not have been registered at all,” she snorted in reply. “Charlie’s dad has a bunch of old cars that he collects and restores. I don’t think he has plates for more than one or two of them. I’d bet money that on the rare occasions he takes one out of his yard on its own wheels, he swipes the plates off one that has ’em. He’d stand a good chance of getting away with it too. He’s not going to drive one of those things like an asshole. They’re worth too much, in both time and money.”

“I’m stumped,” he said. “I mean, I can’t think of anything else to try. I don’t know why Houston still has us working on this anyway. I’d think this is something detectives ought to be doing.”

“In theory,” Janice grumped as she parked the patrol car. “In practice, Houston told me that they’re so backlogged that there’s no way they can get to anything this low on the priority list anytime soon, which means never. Besides, you and I were the only ones who saw the car, except for RuthAnn. I’m going to tell him it’s a dry hole, there are no new leads, and we really ought to get back on patrol.”

“Been a nice break from the routine,” Rick observed as they got out. “But, yeah, I don’t like coming up dry.”

“Happens more often than not in my experience,” she replied as they headed into the station.

It took a minute to get to the duty room, but the instant they appeared, Houston’s sharp voice erupted furiously. “Where in hell have you two been? Lieutenant Turner wants to see you in his office. Now!”

Now what the hell? Janice and Rick exchanged glances and headed for the shift commander’s office, Houston following closely along behind. It was only a few steps down the hall. She knocked on the open door and said, “Lieutenant Turner? You wanted to see us?”

“Come in, Corporal Watkins,” he said firmly. That was enough to tell her that this was trouble. Like Houston, he didn’t mention rank unless the heat was on. Inside the office, there was a familiar looking man in a dark suit. “This is Nathan Burlew from the prosecutor’s office,” Turner explained. “I’ve been trying to explain the significance of this to him.”

“Of what, sir?”

“This,” he said sharply, sliding a folded copy of the Daily over to her. “This is the woman you’ve been looking for, isn’t it?”

Janice glanced at the picture, the headline. “Looks like it to me, sir. Honestly, this is the first time I’ve seen this story.”

“You know Parker, don’t you?” Turner asked. “Did he tell you anything about this?”

“Not a word, sir,” Janice replied, trying to get a hint of what was in the story at the same time. “I haven’t seen him since yesterday morning, and then it was only for a couple minutes.”

“Then can you explain how he can get an interview with this Hippolyta woman, and the department can’t come up with anything?”

“I don’t know, sir. Charlie has his own sources, you know that. Sir, if you’ll at least give me a chance to glance at this story …”

“Oh, go ahead,” Burlew said. “Lieutenant Turner, chewing on her isn’t going to get us any further along.”

Janice held the story over to the side, so Rick could read it over her shoulder. “That seems to settle that part of it right there,” she said only a little way into the story. “She contacted him.”

“I know it says that,” Turner said. “Why didn’t he tell you?”

“I don’t know, sir. I would think he had his reasons.”

“He’s a police officer,” Burlew snorted. “He knew you were looking for this Amazon creature.”

“He’s primarily a reporter,” Janice said in defense. “That’s his first responsibility. He’s only a part-time officer, and not on this department at all. For that matter, he may not know who she is, even now. That business about the ‘mundane’ name. If she was wearing that Hippolyta outfit, she could be his sister and he still might not know who she was.”

“You say you know him,” Burlew asked. “Do you think you could ask him?”

“I could ask him, sir,” she said. “That doesn’t mean he has to tell me if he doesn’t want to.”

“He’s a police officer!” Houston snorted. “Why wouldn’t he tell you?”

“As I said,” Janice replied, getting angry at the dense heads unable to see a point if it was stuck in their eye, “he’s primarily a reporter. Ohio has a strong shield law so reporters can protect their sources. He doesn’t have to tell me if he doesn’t want to. I might be able to approach him as a friend and find out something. I know Parker well enough that if I tell him he has to tell me something, he’s likely to tell me to go to hell, and it would be his right.”

“That’s true,” Burlew conceded. “We don’t have to like it, but that’s how it is. I think our only option is for you to be nice to him.”

“Sir,” Janice asked, just a touch more relaxed. “We’ve been told for several days now to get a lead on this woman. Just so I have my facts straight, what is the prosecutor’s interest in her?”

“We want to talk to her,” Burlew said. “Primarily, if this comes to trial, her testimony might be crucial.”

“I can see that,” Janice agreed. “But it strikes me that this woman has a number of good reasons to stay anonymous. Did you see my note that this Ferguson perp is a reputed WarLord? Maybe she doesn’t want her home or family to be the target of a drive-by. I can think of several other reasons, not the least of which is that she may be facing prosecution or civil action herself.”

“This is a crock,” Burlew snorted. “The bottom line is that she’s a dangerous nutcase, armed with multiple deadly weapons. She got lucky in saving that woman’s life, true, but we can’t have someone like her running around loose. Corporal, I want you to tell Parker to come clean before it goes past looking like it just stepped out of the pages of Marvel Comics and she actually gets hurt, or she hurts someone she shouldn’t.”

“I can tell him, sir, and I’m sure he’ll tell me where to fly my kite.”

“You’re refusing to cooperate?” Burlew said in a hard voice.

“No sir, I said I can tell him that. But if we want to find out anything, I think I’ll have to do it in my own way. And then we still may not find out anything. As I said, he may not know her identity either.”

“All right, Corporal Watkins,” Burlew snorted and pointed at the phone. “Try it your own way.”

“Sir, I may not be able to settle this in one phone call,” she protested, but with an interesting grin coming across her face. “I may only be able to set up a meet. It may take a while to get anywhere at all.”

“Try it,” he ordered.

Janice shrugged and picked up the phone. She knew the number for the Daily and Charlie’s extension. “Parker, Police Desk,” she heard him say.

“Charlie,” she said cheerfully. “I just caught your story on the front page. Do you believe me now when I said that gal is something else?”

“That she is. She’s a real piece of work, and I mean that in a good way. But Jan you can get all I’m going to tell you for fifty cents at any newsstand.”

“I know, Charlie,” she said, glancing up at the several eyes that were watching her, and shaking her head. “Business is business, after all, and I’m getting tired of hearing about it, especially after the way that idiot from Channel 5 has been spouting off.”

“I can understand that,” Charlie’s voice came from the other end of the phone. “Jan, I told you not to go out there.”

“I know, I know,” she said. “And I’m even tired of just thinking about it. Charlie, you got anything on tonight?”

“Not really,” he said. “Have a couple beers, read a book, maybe.”

Janice looked around again, and couldn’t help but blush. Damn, it had been a long time since they’d played at boyfriend and girlfriend, but what she wanted to say had to be done in private, rather than with three men behind her, hanging on her every word. Instead, she simply said, “Charlie, let’s meet for dinner at Sluggy’s about eight tonight.”

“Okay, oops, gotta run, Jan, see you later.”

“Catch you around, Charlie,” she said. There would be something good coming out of this anyway. She hung up the phone and said, “He says that we can find out all he’ll tell us at the newsstand. But the show’s not over. I’m meeting with him tonight, and I may be able to get something out of him then.”

“See what you can find out for us,” Burlew said, frowning, presumably at the delay.

Their relationship had begun years before, when both she and Charlie were going through divorces from their respective spouses. She’d come home early from her shift one night to find Kurt in bed—with another man. Not a smart idea when the one cheated on is carrying a .40 caliber Glock automatic … no shots were fired, but both male parties left the house stark naked in sheer terror, never to return.

Just a few days later Charlie had a very similar experience, coming back from an evening patrolling in Waterville. The only difference was that his wife was in bed with another woman, and he, being a little old-fashioned, was carrying a M1911A1 Colt .45. He did put one round into the ceiling, and the end results were the same.

It was not a happy time, and the divorces were more than a little messy. Though they were already friends of a sort, both she and Charlie had good reason to doubt their appeal to the opposite sex. In time they worked those doubts out with each other. Both had learned from their otherwise unhappy marriages that marriage really wasn’t for either of them. Both were a lot alike in that they had take-no-shit cop personalities—not a recipe for a happy marriage, and both of them knew it. But that still left them with certain animal needs, so without even any real planning in that direction they’d found themselves getting together every now and then to take care of those needs. It was an arrangement that had gone on for some years, and as far as they were concerned it wasn’t broke, so there was nothing to fix.

“Charlie, do you remember me telling you about that night of the rape fantasy?” Janice had been on the scene, although not a principal participant. One night, 911 got a frantic call from a guy over in East Toledo, saying that he’d seen someone carrying a kicking and screaming neighbor girl from her house and lock her in the trunk of his car before driving off. It was a cold February night, and every loose patrol car in town headed for the area. There was a good description of the car, and it was soon found and pulled over. About five other cars and eight patrolmen, including Janice, surrounded it with riot guns and assault weapons. They opened the trunk of the car to find the girl naked and tied at her wrists, knees, ankles and her mouth taped—and madder than a wet hen. They got the tape off her mouth and found out why she was mad … how did the cops dare to break up their carefully plotted abduction/rape fantasy? It took some time, and a lot of embarrassment all around, but nobody could figure out any good reason to hold the two. It was a story still told and laughed about late at night in patrol cars around the city.

Charlie hadn’t been there, but he’d heard about it from a dozen different sources, including Janice. “Actually, I can see how it could be sort of fun if it was done right,” she’d opined over a beer in a quiet bar a couple nights after the event. “I mean, naked, trunk, and February seems a little extreme, but I used to have fantasies about some of those elegant scenes in old Gothic novels about the helpless heroine getting ravished by the evil villain.” So it was a little kinky, so what? It was just between the two of them, and, if kept to once in a while, Charlie seemed to have about as much fun as she did.

“Thanks, Jan. I was afraid you wanted to get together to pump me about that story today.”

“I don’t want to,” she said. “They wanted me to ask, though.”

“Who?”

“Turner and Burlew, from the prosecutor’s office.”

“What do they want?”

She shrugged. “Burlew wants to talk to her, he said mostly in case they have to take Ferguson to trial.”

“Good God, they’ve got enough on him that any idiot with two minutes in law school should be able to convince him to cop a plea. Or was Burlew just being his usual asshole self?”

“Burlew sure was at times, but not always. Turner seemed reasonable sometimes too, but he was also more insistent than I liked.”

“Jan, you know as well as I do that Hippolyta has a lot of good reasons to be anonymous, running from the prosecutor’s office to the WarLords, with several stops in between, including some you may not have figured out. What’s it worth to the prosecutor to talk to her, maybe get her to testify?”

“Worth?” Janice asked. “They didn’t say anything about that.”

“Then they can buzz the hell off. If you don’t want to tell them to, I will. If they’ll talk something worthwhile, like immunity from prosecution for last Sunday, and cooperation in keeping her anonymous, then I might be willing to contact her. Otherwise, forget it.”

“You can contact her?”

“Sort of,” Charlie told her. “Do you read enough spy novels to know what a dead drop and a flag are?”

“Yeah. A dead drop is where you leave a message. A flag tells the recipient that the message is there.”

“Let’s just say I can ask her to contact me. Whether she does or not, and how long it takes for her to see the flag and respond, can be issues. I’m not going to bother unless I have something that I think is worth her time.”

“They could lean on you, Charlie,” she said.

He snorted and said, “Let ’em try. I’ve got the shield law on my side, and if they get through that, well, I still don’t know anything they can use. There’s nothing on paper, and the only thing on any computer is the story in the paper. Burlew has needed to be taken down a notch or two for a while, anyway. Like I said, you don’t have to be the one to tell them. I will if I have to.”

“No, I better try first,” she said. “I can say ‘yes, sir’ and things like that. Burlew will just piss you off, then you’ll piss him off worse. If my way doesn’t work, I’ll send them to you.”

“Fair enough.”

“Okay,” said Janice, “now it’s time to go and practice being boyfriend and girlfriend.”

Nathan Burlew was already in Lieutenant Turner’s office when Janice arrived on shift the next morning, and she was called back to the office the first thing. The mood was just a little lighter, though, and Janice was feeling rather mellow.

“So what’d he say?” Burlew asked. “Are we going to get to talk to her?”

“Maybe,” Janice said. “He says he doesn’t know who Hippolyta really is. He can leave a message for her to contact him, but that’s all. He says he’s willing to talk to her about being interviewed, and possibly testifying.”

“That’s a step in the right direction,” Burlew nodded. “If we can get that far, maybe we can put this comic-book superheroine shit to bed.”

“It’s not that easy,” Janice told the two. “Charlie said he’s not going to bother her unless it’s worth her while.”

“Worth her while?” Burlew frowned. “What does he mean by that?”

“He specifically said immunity from prosecution for last Sunday night, and cooperation in helping her stay anonymous. We didn’t get into details, but I took that to mean he’s talking deposition if it comes down to a trial.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Burlew snorted.

“It might be, sir, but it’s also the best deal we’re going to get out of him.”

Burlew got a mean look on his face. “Just whose side are you on in this, Corporal?”

“You want the truth, sir? Right now, I’m not so sure I’m not on her side.”

“Just what do you mean by that?”

“It was a gutsy, foolhardy move, especially for a civilian to make,” Janice said calmly, trying to settle Burlew’s anger. That was a faint hope, but someone had to be the grown-up here. “But apparently she does know what she’s doing with a sword. She was right when she said that Mrs. Richardson could have been dead by the time Rick and I got there. I don’t think we should be discouraging that kind of behavior. They say it on TV all the time. Fighting crime is everybody’s responsibility.”

“She’s still a nutcase carrying lethal weapons,” Burlew snorted.

“Lethal? Yes, sir. She could have gutted Ferguson like a chicken with that sword. She didn’t. She used enough power to disarm him and hold him for our arrival, and no more. I think that shows sufficient restraint.”

“There’s still the gun,” Burlew said, unwilling to give up.

“Yes sir, there is. It’s beside the point. Officer Mattison and I have talked it over since we saw that picture in the paper yesterday. Neither of us recall seeing her carrying a firearm Sunday night. What’s more, we went back over the security camera tape. She didn’t have a gun holstered, and with that outfit, there’s no way she could have concealed a .357 under her clothes. It could have been in the car, but she didn’t have it it the store. Now just suppose she did have that magnum instead of the sword. Ferguson was swinging his gun toward her. She’d have had every right to shoot in self-defense. Don’t you think she’d have done more damage than she did with her sword? I mean is Ferguson better off alive or dead?”

“All right, all right,” Burlew shook his head and dropped his voice a notch. “I’ll concede the point. She still is a dangerous nutcase, however you look at it.”

“I’ll concede the nutcase part of it,” Janice said, realizing that she’d actually made Burlew back down! “Dangerous? I wouldn’t want to be the creep who attacked someone in front of her. But she hasn’t been going around stabbing men for the fun of it, and from what Charlie said I don’t think she’s gonna start.”

“All right,” Turner spoke up. “You’ve convinced me. Corporal Watkins, did you watch the local news last night?”

“Uh, no, sir,” she said. These two didn’t need to know about the boyfriend-girlfriend part of their deal. “I spent a good part of the evening wheedling Charlie Parker for info.”

“We got beat on,” he said. “We got beat on pretty bad, by all the stations. The message was the same: despite being dressed like she just stepped out of a comic book, she was an honorable citizen doing the right thing, so lay off trying to treat her like a criminal. The Blade has an editorial to that effect this morning. I suspect the Daily will have one this afternoon. And I think they’re right. Would you please tell Mr. Parker that we’re ready to deal on his terms?”

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