#0: Lustmord, Prelude (Charlton / Alvey)

It was nights like these that made Jim Gordon question his faith in humanity. How one person could be capable of performing such an act upon another…? As if the human body was only a husk of meat fit for butchering…

His boys were all over the alley, securing the crime scene, but the forensics team had yet to arrive. Lights from the patrol cars swirled red and blue, illuminating a ghastly display of violence: the prostitute lay on the floor of the alley, opened up like a gutted fish. The acrid smell of vomit was still on the air from the rookie beat cop who had discovered her…

Gordon sighed, and as if by instinct, looked up to see the flutter of dark wings.

He climbed the fire escape, and found the Dark Knight waiting for him on the rooftop.

Preferring the shadows, Batman was perched on a nearby ledge, with a gymnast’s balance, by a weather-worn gargoyle, his cowled face turned down into the alley.

A little out of breath from the climb, Gordon noted: “Everyday, I think I’ve seen the worst this city has to offer. Everyday, something else proves me wrong.”

“This is the third girl this month.” Batman remarked, in his harsh whisper of a voice. “Same modus operandi. A prostitute, sliced from groin to throat. We have a serial killer on our hands, Gordon.”

The police detective nodded, lighting up a cigarette. “When the papers get a hold of this, we’re going to have a panic on our hands. I assume you had a look at the scene before we arrived…?”

“Yes. This one put up a struggle, seems she actually fired a gun at him. Your boy’s will find the bullet embedded in the far wall eventually. The gun is missing, but she has powder burns on her hand. There’s a lot of blood in the alley, so it’s impossible to tell if she hit him before the lab does their analyses. It’s unlikely, though. Her resistance only appears to have made his assault more vicious. This one’s the worst, yet. Unlike the others, which had all the earmarks of surgical precision, he got messy with her.”

An involuntary shiver ran up Gordon’s spine, and he did his best to blot out the vision of that poor girl below. She was not much older than his own daughter Barbara…

“Anything else?” Gordon got back to business.

The cowl turned to face him this time, the stark white eye slits as unnerving to him as the hosts of Gotham denizens he terrorized.

“One more thing. Further down the alley, there is a word scrawled on the wall in fresh blood, presumably the victim’s. Lustmord. Does that mean anything to you?”

Gordon frowned, shaking his head slowly.

“No. But it doesn’t sound good.”

Batman grunted. In one graceful movement, the Dark Knight stood up, his grappling hook in his gloved hand.

“Unless we stop him, he’ll kill again.”

With that, he hurled the grappling hook, and swung away into the night, leaving Gordon by himself on the rooftop.

The Rolls Royce pulled up to the iron gates of the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, where even the sun seemed to retreat behind gray clouds.

Impeccably dressed, Bruce Wayne emerged from the car, trying not to scowl. He hated this place. Perhaps it was a necessary evil, but it was still evil.

Inside, he was met by the director, Dr. Jeremiah Arkham, who shook his hand glumly.

“I must admit, Mr. Wayne, your phone call still has me a little confused. I wonder about your sudden interest in funding our hospital... I had no idea your philanthropy was so… embracing.”

Squeezing the smaller man’s hand perhaps tighter than he should have, Bruce forced himself to wear a banal smile.

“Yes, well, my contributions would be completely tax deductible I’m told, so…”

“Hm. Yes.” Sniffed Arkham distastefully. “Anyway, you’ve asked to speak with our new chief psychotherapist, I believe? He’s just finishing up a session with an inmate, allow me to escort you.”

He led Bruce down the wood-paneled hall, past the security checkpoints and into the heavily fortified areas of the old Tudor mansion, talking all the while.

“Professor Strange was actually quite a coup for us. He was one of the most eminent practitioners in Europe; practically put the University of Munich on the map, as a matter of fact.”

“How did you manage to lure him over?” Bruce feigned a disinterested yawn.

“Well, let’s just say that Arkham Asylum has a reputation for the most fascinating subjects a psychotherapist can find.” Was that pride in the fool’s voice? “Believe it or not, Professor Strange approached us…”

After a few minutes, and a descent down a flight of broad steps, they came to a hall lined with cells, fronted not with bars, but with inches of impenetrable plexisteel. As they made for the office at the end of the hall, Bruce stared steadily at some familiar faces through the transparent walls: a straight-jacketed green haired albino who blew him a kiss, giggling soundlessly, a terrified scarecrow of a man who cowered in a corner of his cell, gibbering…

Voices came through the door at the far end of the hall.

“… but until you do, Mr. Druitt, the dreams will keep coming back, each more vivid and disturbing than the last…”

Arkham held them by the door, but Bruce could see into the well-appointed office. It was comfortable, all of wood and red leather, and the doctor sat back easily in his thick cushioned chair, a bald man with round spectacles and an old fashioned beard with no moustache. His patient sat with his back to them, a man with defeated, slumped shoulders and graying hair.

“Sometimes… in the daytime… the voices aren’t so loud… and I can think clearly… clear enough to tell myself they’re not really there, telling me to do those awful things…” Said the patient in hopeful, trembling tones.

“Excellent, Montagu!” The doctor reached over and patted his patient encouragingly on the knee, causing Druitt to flinch. “Well, that should be enough for today. We’ll talk again tomorrow!”

A guard that Bruce had not noticed before, uncuffed Druitt from the chair, and escorted him by the elbow from Strange’s office. As the patient passed Bruce, he gave him a long, plaintive look, until he was led out of sight, back to his cell.

“Gentlemen, gentlemen, come in!” Hugo Strange gestured emphatically. He spoke with only the slightest trace of an accent, just enough to make him sound foreign. He shook hands with Bruce, but merely nodded to Dr. Arkham cursorily.

“Dr. Arkham has told me of your sudden interest in our institution, Mr. Wayne! Tell me, how can I satisfy your curiosity and our budgetary concerns at the same time?”

With a polite smile, Bruce took the seat that Montagu Druitt had just vacated, as Arkham excused himself and Hugo Strange resumed his own seat.

“Well, doctor, to be honest, I’ve already decided to donate a sizable sum to upgrade the security measures here; I have a passing interest in keeping Gotham as safe as possible. But, if I may say, psychology and the study of human nature is something of a hobby of mine, and when I saw that you’d accepted a position here at Arkham, I had to find a reason to talk to you, the foremost practitioner of psychotherapy in the world today.”

“Naturally so, naturally so.” Strange nodded with a genial smile. “Well, you see, I predicate all of my work on the susceptibility of the human mind to unconscious desires, and the exercises necessary to re-shape those desires…”

Bruce let the doctor go on for several minutes about his latest research and theories, and about the various cutting-edge methods he employed to rehabilitate the psyche. After several minutes, when Strange paused to take a breath, Bruce cleared his throat and interjected: “Actually, doctor, I am very curious about the concept of lustmord. You wrote an article about it some years ago…”

The professor’s face darkened a little.

“Ah, yes. It is a German term: the joy of murder, or pleasure killing. There are some depraved individuals who derive their greatest satisfaction from personally snuffing out life. Usually, it is closely linked to a destructive sexual drive, but not exclusively. The twin urges of procreation and violence are not precisely antithetical in such individuals. This is a very serious mental disorder, but there have been very few actual documented cases…”

Bruce pulled out the article he clipped from the Gotham Gazette from inside his coat.

“What do you make of this, professor?”

“Ah, yes, that ‘Gotham Ripper’ story.” He barely glanced at it before setting it on the desk. “Let me differentiate between your garden variety sociopath and the concept of lustmord. Most killers do their bloody deeds because of some deep-seated neurosis: their daddy beat them for wetting the bed, their childhood sweetheart scorned them at the prom, or for a hundred different reasons. These people do murder as an expression of this disconnect from societal norms: their own version of psychotherapy, if you will. These people are criminals who make mistakes, and often subconsciously want to be caught. The lustmord killer is a completely different animal. He kills for the pure ecstasy of it, for the orgasmic joy he experiences in the taking of another life. This is not a power issue, to be sure! Or a revenge issue. It is pure, unadulterated gratification! And he will never give it up. If our Ripper is indeed a victim of this disorder, he will, perforce, do anything in his power to be allowed to continue his murderous rampage.”

Real Name: Bruce Wayne
Occupation: President of Wayne Corporation
Base of Operations: Gotham City
Age: 30
HT: 6' 2”
WT: 210 lbs
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Black

Super Powers and Special Abilities:

While he has no super-powers, Batman is a superb athlete and martial-artist, and is perhaps one of the world's greatest detectives. His coustume is bullet-proof and fire-resistant; his cape is weighted and his cowl outfitted with night-vision technology and communication devices. His utility belt contains, among other things: batarangs, jumplines, grapnels, torches, microlights, smoke pellets, re-breather and a detection kit. In addition, he has access to the vast resources of Wayne Corp and the gadgets of their R&D Dept.


History:

In the years since he first donned the cowl, Gotham's Dark Knight has fought an endless war on crime, turning a noble mission into a dangerous obssession. Time after time, his enemies return to wreak havoc on his beloved city, giving the Batman no rest.
But he has not always been alone in his crusade. When gangsters killed his parents, 13 year old circus acrobat Dick Grayson was taken in by Bruce Wayne, and fought at his side as Robin. And Barbara Gordon, the young precocious daughter of Batman's only ally in the otherwise corrupt GCPD, Detective James Gordon, donned a cowl herself and took to the streets as Batgirl.
But recent events have caused a rift amongst the defenders of Gotham, resulting in Dick and Barbara leaving town, and a grimmer, more focused Batman to once again wage his lonely one-man war on vice and villainy!