Here, kitty.

[Louis de Saint-Just]

Basil had already fished out his keys (secret pocket inside his shoe)by the time he reached the front door. He paid no mind to the steps (which looked almost as if they were falling apart, but weren't, actually. It was a tricky illusion to uphold, but he managed it just fine), and entered the key into the lock. He turned it swiftly, and there was one soft 'click' before a series of other soft 'click's, and then, he removed th ekey, and put it back into his shoe.

He swung the door open, and all that could be heard was a 'swoosh' as extremely well-oiled hinges managed to soundlessly hold the door up. The inside was far nicer than the outside appeared to be. In all of its majesty, the house did appear to be rundown, but again: it was all a part of the illusion.

Once inside, Basil placed both books onto the small table to the left of the door, before clearing his throat. The sound broke the gentle breezy sound that his house had: as if all of the air was being subtly sucked into the middle of the house. That would be his quiet air filtration system hard at work, lifting dust away, and generally making the spotless house even more spotless.

He still held the plant, and Basil was actually trying to find a place for it. There was hardly any window in his house that was not covered with shutters that kept out light as effectively as they kept sound both in and out.

The turret, he realized, was where the plant was going to have to go: it meant he would have to climb some stairs, but at least Greg would have some sunlight to look forward to. Benjamin was most likely sulking, having been tricked into staying inside, and Basil could almost feel the opressing sense of being watched by a cat.

"I had to go," he said, slipping off his shoes, and putting them beside the door. "It's not my fault. You remember what happened," he said, obviously talking to Benjamin, before he glanced over at Caden. "Come in already. It won't do to ruin all of my hard work by loitering out on the patio, boy."

[Maximilien Robespierre]

Caden stared.

Flabbergasted would have been a nice word for what he was feeling. The correct term, however, was:

What the shit is this?

At a loss for words, he walked across the threshold and into the Batcave. He stared. It was a place he had never dreamt of going. His mere presence seemed to be a profanation of the sacred separation of Basil's work and his private life. In casual speculation when they had been left at the office without Basil (i.e., most weekends, Mondays, and evenings), theories had included Basil's secret blissful home life, complete with blonde trophy wife, delicious baked goods, and cherubic children; Basil's secret meth lab, the source of all his wealth; Basil's secret harem, complete with plump eunuch to guard it; Basil's secret flower boutique; Basil's secret gay lover with thighs like iron; Basil's secret career as a stripper; Basil's secret career as a romance writer; and Basil's secret career as a superhero.

Basil was secretly a dirty old cat man who lived in a crumbling house, though it looked substantially less godawful on the inside. It was terribly dark, though, as Caden was half afraid that he would trip over something just standing in the dim hallway. He looked at Basil. "Shall I just stand here, then?"

[Louis de Saint-Just]

Basil glanced back, and raised an eyebrow. "Of course not. Go on. Explore to your heart's content. Do not," he said, holding up one finger in warning, and then he pointed said finger down towards the floor, "leave tracks on my floor. I am not joking, Caden. I can feel the dusty shadows already.
Leave your shoes next to mine, and try not to disturb anything.
If you go downstairs, do not touch anything.
Open no blinds."

He retracted his finger, and then, after a moment's thought, waved it again at Caden. "Don't touch the air filter. It's very sensitive."

He nodded, and then jabbed his thumb in a vaguely up-left-ey direction. "I'm going to the turret to put Greg down. If you happen to see Benjamin, tell him that I'm coming right back down. He's most likely listening right now, but I'm sure he'll appreciate the sentiment. You won't get another chance to see my house for a while, so enjoy it.
And you may not, before you ask, take any pictures."

With that, he turned around, and walked off.
He came back, however, peeking his head around the corner.

"Light switch is to your left. Make sure the door's shut before you turn it on."
And then, he left.

[Maximilien Robespierre]

Caden stood, half paralyzed in the hallway. Explore? Basil, have you lost your mind? The man was clearly losing his control freak touch if Caden was allowed to go anywhere. Of course, he might also be beginning to trust Caden, which was almost as frightening a prospect. If the past two years of employment had been him working without Basil's trust, what would having Basil's trust garner him? If he knew Basil (and he did), it would mean even more late nights than he wanted to think about.

And more importantly, why the hell did Basil live next to him?

He thought back to when he had first rented the house. Had Basil given him the name of the agency? He might well have. And what had the owner said? "Oh, yes, the neighbors come in and out at odd hours, but they'll never bother you and they don't have any loud parties." He had never —come to think of it— even seen his neighbors, but he had assumed that was his odd hours, not theirs. After all, a nice older couple would probably be asleep at the hours when he drove to and from work (of course, if he had really thought this through, it would have occurred to him that he had probably gone in and out at essentially every hour of day and night).

"I'll, um, pass on the message," he said. In a gesture of courtesy, he took his camera off and put it on the small table in the foyer. He then shut the door as he was told to, plunging the room into complete darkness. He shuddered and groped along the wall, searching for the light switch. Swearing under his breath when he bumped into the tiny table, he went back to the door to let in some light, so he could find the switch. To his chagrin, he found that it had locked. He stared at the infinite darkness in front of him.

"Fuck."

He began the search again along the left wall. This time, his hand painfully hit the switch. He flicked it. He leaned back against the door. What in hell's name was he going to do? He shuffled over to the living room, and then he realized that either Basil was hiding his secret housewife (or secret gay lover, as it might be) or he had a terrifying penchant for interior decorating. Caden, for one, wasn't making any bets.

[Louis de Saint-Just]

Basil, after having made his way up the (very) many steps that were necessary to get into the turret, had to put down Greg, and make his way back down. He sneezed once, and then gulped down two more allergy pills before walking back downstairs.

He stopped just before the door, and sighed. After he pushed it open, he cleared his throat. "I know you're waiting for me to come out, Benjamin," he said, with his hands in the pockets of his trench coat. "You can't pounce on me today. They found another body, and this one happened faster than the last one. We've got to hurry, and there can't be any unnecessary delays."

After a moment, the cat came walking out, his tail high in the air. Basil nodded, and closed the turret door behind him, before heading off towards the front door. "Caden," he called, stopping on his way to adjust the position of a (the only) painting in his house.

"I've got Benjamin. We're leaving now. The door locks automatically, and you'd better shut the light off before you close it." He stopped, in the living room, and then walked on, figuring that Caden could follow him with competance.

[Maximilien Robespierre]

Caden scrambled up when the detective and the cat entered the room, realizing the camera was in desperate danger of being knocked off a table by quick paws. Stay away from the camera, fluffball. He eyed Benjamin warily. He might not like dogs, but he didn't like cats much either. There was something very fussy about them, and they went wherever they liked, and while he didn't get the same emotional castoff from them as he did from humans, people knew not to touch his camera. Benjamin was another story.

And there was the fact that Basil liked Benjamin better than Caden. He might have resented that.

He caught up with Basil in the foyer. "Are there any details on the murder yet, Basil?" He asked, as always, not because he cared or particularly wanted to know but because if he was about to walk into a crime of passion, he had better steel his stomach for the nauseating power of postmortem emotions. They simply felt wrong. It was that impossible to describe quality of wrongness that was particularly arresting. He didn't faint or throw up or embarrass himself, but it was unsettling, like reaching for a cup of tea to discover that it had gone cold.

[Louis de Saint-Just]

Benjamin completely bypassed Caden, apparently feeling no feline urges on this fine day to douse his paw in the vat of acidic emotions. Basil, on the other hand, paused to think for a second, before he shook his head.

"No. It is the same man as the last time. Now, I haven't gotten to talk to anyone about this," he said, clearing his throat, and shoving his hands into the pockets of his trench coat, "But this man does not kill with guns."

He stopped for a moment, not quite sure if Caden would need a moment for this fact to sink in. He decided that Caden didn't, however, and continued talking. "The coroner pathologist, Doctor Bates, mentioned something about the man's heart. I don't have any founded evidence, because we haven't noticed anything about hearts before this, but it might be a new clue.
Of course, it's entirely possible that the man simply had his heart explode while the bullet entered his brain. In fact, it's more than probable. But ignoring anomalies is not something that I am willing to do."

Basil nodded, and then, fater a second of hesitation, marched out his front door, and began to dig in his pocket for the keys to his car.

[Maximilien Robespierre]

Caden didn't bother raising his eyebrows at the pronouncement. He had adjusted to having to accept that Basil would always know first, without any apparent explanation, and without necessarily being able to give one. Well, he could cope with that. However, "this man does not kill with guns" was not something he could cope with. "Basil, Doctor Bates's head isn't even on the right way. For the love of God, I've photographed every one of these cases, and there's no other markings on the victims. No ligature marks, no cuts, no bruises. There is, however, a very, very large hole where a bullet went through. When you hear hoofbeats, do you think giraffes?" He didn't bother to even give him a skeptical look. What he was saying might as well have gone unsaid because Basil clearly had an idea in his mind, and it was going to stay there with or without Caden's giraffe.

Walking quickly out of the living room, he stood, wavering, a few feet behind Basil. He suddenly didn't want to know if he'd called anyone else. He didn't want to know if Basil thought it was appropriate for him to drive Caden there and for them to show up together. He certainly didn't want to know why Basil lived next door to him, and he didn't want to think about how many opportunities Caden had given him to copy his house key.

Fuck.

Caden seriously had to be less trusting. This shit was ridiculous. He grabbed his camera off the table in the foyer and possessively restored it to its place of honor around his neck. Patting it as if to reassure it, he lingered behind Basil, wondering what Basil was thinking. "Should I turn the lights off?" Despite himself and his twenty one years, Caden turned a very bright red.

[Louis de Saint-Just]

Basil turned around, and held up a finger, a bit of triumph on his face. "Ah, but see, Caden," he said, getting to explain his theories after all. "He just reached in there, and blew up the heart, if what I'm thinking is right. And since he didn't insert anything into them, and the heart just exploded, we have to assume that he's not at all human. How does he kill like that, though? We don't have a catalogue of all of the supernatural occurences in our town, nor do we know everyone who isn't human."

He paused for a moment, actually stopping just before the railing hit his back. "Yes. I don't want my energy bill spiking all of a sudden. It's high enough as it is."

He stopped, trying to regain his train of thought. "Where was I?" he asked nobody but himself, and turned to the side so he could march off of his veranda and towards his car. "Right! Hurry up, Caden, you're lagging behind. So, anyways, as I was saying, this killer might just have a perverse love of shooting people in the brains, but if he accidentally missed a bit, then he might not kill them completely, so he might finish them off firstly by dousing the beating fire of their hearts, and then shooting them in the brain just as their hearts finish pounding. As for the blood on the crime scene, if he's sick enough, he might keep large vats of his victims' blood, and pour them around the crime scene. Why anyone would go through all that trouble is beyond me, but he's an insane serial killer after all, and I'm sure we can't really expect much more from him."

He put his hand back into the pocket of his coat, managing to dig out the keys of his car, from where he pressed the automatic unlocking button.

[Maximilien Robespierre]

Caden stared at him. You've got to be fucking kidding me— "Basil, that's a little, um, overblown, don't you think? Wouldn't a heart attack be simpler? Dr. Bates didn't say anything about the earlier victims, did she?" Like that means anything. I doubt she tells us half of what she finds. She's such a weird fuck. "It's only reasonable that this one was, well, an anomaly. He probably had a previously undiscovered heart condition, or maybe he was just sensitive or terrified, or have you considered that this is a copycat? I mean, none of the victims have any connection. He could be his own case. A revenge killing, maybe."

Half jogging to keep up with Basil, he held the camera tightly to his chest, so it wouldn't joggle about. "Nothing has said deranged madman about this serial killer. He seems fairly moderate. Dispassionate." Caden thought back to every one of the crime scenes. He had felt— nothing. Nothing at all. No anger, no fear, nothing. The idea that the man had had a heart attack was ridiculous, ridiculous wishful thinking. "Maybe, he isn't sick. Maybe, he's working for someone. Or several someones. Maybe, it's a series of cases with different motives but the same killer and M.O."

He stood on the sidewalk, shifting from foot to foot and waiting for Basil to produce the keys before darting into the passenger seat. Caden was a SoCal pansy; it was official.

[Louis de Saint-Just]

Basil sighed, as he continued to walk towards his car. He resisted the urge to get in front of Caden, and managed to keep a somewhat calm exterior. Once inside the car, he did up his seatbelt, and turned the key in the ignition.

"Look, Caden," he said, as Benjamin steadied himself on Basil's shoulder (and definitely not shooting looks of contempt at Caden). Basil's car pulled out effortlessly from the curb, which was good, since Basil was lost trying to find the right words amidst the jumble of information inside his obviously superior brain.

"It's my job to cling onto any little clue I get. In normal cases, hardly any of the information that we have right now would pertain to the case at all, but our case is special. The gun the man has been using isn't registered, and the bullets don't come from any stores that we can find. He leaves no traces of himself, no fingerprints or anything, except the trademark bullet, and an occasional message carved into the dead skin of the victims. He's slowly killing off the people in Shawl, Caden, and there is no other way to figure out how and why than to imagine that any little anomaly can be a clue.
You're right: it could have been a heart attack. It's easier to imagine it as such as well, but we just can't afford to... to have any more people die. He's already knocked off ten people, and there's no reason to believe that he'll stop. The man died in the way that all of the others did, so we have to assume that he's a part of this case, because that gives us another lead, even if we can't figure out what it is."

Basil's jaw tightened as he turned left, working out the directions in his head as he tried to explain his motives, although he really didn't know why he was bothering. "If he's working for somebody, or several somebodies, we have no real way of figuring it out. There are no visible connections between the cases: it's as if the killer just chooses someone at random, and takes care of them. We have family men, businesswomen, old pansies who rarely venture out of their homes...Hearts have always been normal up until now, but that's no reason why we can't start to investigate them."

[Maximilien Robespierre]

Caden studiously avoided eye contact with Basil; it was bad enough that he could feel his irritation, let alone have to actually face it. He was hardly going to tell Basil how to do his job, especially a job that Caden had never particularly had any interest in and which he did because it paid better than anything else he was going to get based on the few marketable skills he had and because of, well, Basil. Caden was fond of the bastard.

"Basil," he said, trying to stuff as much exasperation and annoyance into the one word, so it wouldn't end up in any of the others, "I don't want to second guess your instincts. Far from it." He peered out the windows at their houses, silhouetted in the subtly brightening sky. Don't look at him. "We both know that I'm not half the detective you are."

"You're over-stressing this one throw-away detail. Just because it's all we've got doesn't make it anymore important than the rest. It's so entirely ridiculous. It's just— just— absurd. We aren't investigating Jack the Ripper." He swallowed hard and fought down images of the ten corpses, the spreads of photos, the smooth expanses of bloodless bellies with words carved carefully into them with their perverse elegance. After that second body with its flesh-and-blood message, he had promised himself that, the moment he started to find beauty in his job, he would quit. Little girls splayed out on the pavement and old men shot in the rocking chairs. What the hell was he doing in the car of a maniac of a detective with too much money and too much drive and too little sense of propriety?

"How many of those bodies have already been returned to the families? Or, worse yet, cremated at state expense because they have no family? If there's anything wrong with the heart of this next victim, I'll be at your beck and call for a week. I'll even give you the number for my private landline, so you can call me up at three in the morning, even when my cell's off." And then Caden realized that he had offered Basil a bet over a case, and was there really anything stupider he could have done?

Probably not. Oh, well. Basil owned him anyway.

[Louis de Saint-Just]

Basil looked over at Caden, an amused expression on his face. A bet?
Basil almost wouldn't have pegged Caden for a gambling sort of man, but he was always ready to have his expectations of people dashed unexpectedly. However, this was a bet over a case, about his crazy and most likely useless theory.

And of course, Basil was more than ready to fight for his theory. He turned his face towards the road for a minute, and then a smile crept onto his face. "I know this isn't Jack the Ripper," he said, flicking on his turn signal. "But it is no normal murderer either. He's some sort of vicious killer who seems to have no pattern. We checked medical records, and none of the patients seem to have been particularily sick, especially in the way of heart disease. So the fact that this guy's heart just stopped..."

He pulled to a stop, and checked the street sign. He had to squint in the fake light of the city, and then nodded. "Your phone number, huh?" he asked, and then turned towards Caden. "I'll take that bet. That something's wrong with the heart of this next victim. Now, what happens if I lose?"

[Maximilien Robespierre]

Caden bit his lip, trying to come up with something. Well, trying to come up with something that Basil would find acceptable. Somehow, firing Daphne, the new, favored poster child among underlings, didn't strike him as a wonderful way to endear himself to his boss. Of course, if Basil still put up with him after all of the recent mess (and he did or at least seemed to), there was very little that could possibly get to him.

"No pattern is a pattern in itself," Caden said weakly. "There has to be something we aren't seeing. I mean, there's never really no pattern unless— What if it's something they do? They do something and it sets him off and then he feels like he has to kill them." He shrugged at Basil's comment about patients' records. "So the hospitals keep bad records or he had bad doctors or it just never got diagnosed. He had a heart condition. Besides, there are plenty of documented instances where people die of fear or surprise or whatever. There's no explanation, but it happens." I saw it on a CSI episode once.

"If you lose, I get your, um, your—" He thought fast. "I get an explanation of why you've lived next to me for years but never told me." You creepy fucking stalker of a boss. What the hell is up with that? Caden shivered. Just that he's been watching him for years— What the hell? You'd think that he didn't— But no. There's got to be a good explanation for this. A good, sensible explanation. And maybe— No. Of course not. Not Basil.

[Louis de Saint-Just]

Basil thought for a moment.

He had been so secretive for so long, and had really always wanted to share all of his secrets. He had small delusions that everyone would be very impressed with him, and maybe they would want to elect him mayor...

Of course, there were the reasons why he hadn't shared any of his personal information with anyone. Basil, as catcher of many criminals, was obviously a wanted man in the underground (or at least, he thought he was). And this meant that he had to keep his living situation, and phone numbers, and all sorts of things like that private from any people who may want to kill him.
Of course, this was slightly dramatic, but it was better to be paranoid and alive, than dead.

And the secret of his home was his favourite secret of all.
He especially loved the computers in his basement. He treated them like special children: almost as he treated his underlings, although he never imagined throwing his underlings against walls.

But Basil, only slightly against his wishes, said "Deal" before he realized what he was doing.
He supposed it wouldn't be too bad, telling Caden why he was living beside him and hadn't told him.
Although he might get several odd looks, and Caden might choose to quit as a detective.
In hindsight, this had probably been a bad idea.
But Basil wasn't the sort of person to go back on his word, usually.