DET. ARNOLD: See, everyone thinks that New York doesn't do anything about "the mutant problem". But I can tell you right now, that ain't true. Let me tell you about something that happened to me when I was catching a case from Detective Sutton at MERT.

Detective Grant Sutton

A Character page by Jason Corley

It's out on the East Side, nice little place, bars on the windows, thick door, lots of buzzers. Landlady said she thought she heard a fire alarm go off late last night, but she didn't see what time it was and it didn't last very long. She figured someone had burned a pizza in an oven or something.

On the way up the stairs, Sutton talks a little about spontaneous combustion, a little about pyrokinesis, and a lot about the Mets game. If she just blew up, he says, we file it as a weird accident and don't worry about it. If someone was there...then we have to do a little more investigating, maybe bring them in for testing. "It's a bitch hunting mutants." he says. "Half the time they don't even have to touch the victim." He turns the knob carefully with gloved fingers. "But they do have to touch something."

I didn't ask him, since I knew, that he was a mutant too.

The room was a wreck - the ME had already taken the body away, but the smell lingered in the air, sweet and awful, like an unfamiliar cigarette. The first thing I looked for was an ashtray by the bed, but it was over on the other side of the room and it was empty. "Clean girl." I said.

Sutton was looking at the ceiling. "Look at that." he said. The smoke alarm was a twisted hunk of useless plastic. "No wonder it didn't go off for very long."

I rummaged through her sock drawer. Socks. Sutton said "It's a homicide." I looked up. Sutton added, "The smoke alarm is on the other side of the room from the bed, and there's no fire damage underneath it. Someone started a fire, heard the alarm, and then silenced it."

I pressed the 'play' button on her answering machine, but nothing happened - broken in the intense heat. I bagged it for later analysis. Sutton turned on her computer and flipped through the files aimlessly. "College student." he said. "Not much here except work. Hang on, phone list." He ran off a copy on her printer. It rachetted loudly in the room.

I looked at one charred shoe - it was high-heeled. "She was dressed up." I said. Sutton looked down. "Yeah...and it had to be someone she knew, or else they couldn't have gotten in."

"Let's get to work on this list." Sutton said. "Maybe she mentioned her hot date to someone." I'm not sure if he knows the joke he just made, so I don't laugh. He slides on his sunglasses, and we leave.

I spend a couple of hours on the phone talking to shocked study partners, tearful distant relatives and a few ignorant ex-boyfriends. Sutton gets on the phone with the lab to analyze the tape. "I'm not askin' ya for any favors." he explains, tossing a yo-yo off his fingers to spin lazily at the ground. "Just gimme a reconstruction."

Then he's got the ME on line two. "Test for semen." he says. "In the stomach, too. And I've got some shoes for you to look over." Then I get a lead. A former roommate remembers her talking about having a date - we knew that - but she mentions it was with someone from her chemistry class.

"Great." Sutton says. "I'll get the University to fax over the class roster, we can start matching names."

"Sorry." he says. "I've worked so damn many Central Park scenes and they all look alike: burn marks everywhere, sometimes rads, sometimes just a bunch of dead people."

"What about this one?" the LT says, indicating the file in my hand as I approach. Sutton shrugs. "Looks like your garden-variety ameteur teen meta with some kind of fire or temperature ability. He comes over, they have a fight, he blows up, she blows up, he leaves. He's not a pro, or else he would have torched the whole place and called the fire department himself. He was probably too freaked out to even try to cover it up. If we get him today, we ought to have a confession by evening. If we miss him..." He shrugs. "People can justify a lot of stuff to themselves if they have enough time."

I say "He's running out of time - the warrant's gone out and we should have the class list soon."

Sutton says "Great. How about I finish up calling these people and you go down and push the physical evidence around so we have something solid to take to him." I guess he wasn't afraid to do a little boring legwork himself.

"Who's that?" I say, indicating the name.

"That's our boy." he says. I notice there's no check mark by the name, meaning he hasn't called him yet.

"How can you be sure?" I say.

Sutton shrugs. "Well, it mostly adds up to him. A couple of people remembered his first name, he's in the chemistry class, and the descriptions of the person she'd been seen with the most match up more or less to him."

I nod. "Well, we can at least get an interview with that."

Sutton puts on his coat and checks his gun. He carries this Sig Sauer FBI thing. Me, I like my little revolver. It shoots straight and with a quickloader, it's everything I need.

The roommate was shocked. "That's right." he said. "Has something happened?" Just then I notice that someone who was coming down the hall towards us has done a sudden about-face and is walking away. The roommate notices me noticing and Sutton notices the roommate noticing. So Sutton and I break into a run and the guy who is walking away breaks into a run - he starts pounding down the stairs. Sutton yells "Stop!" He points towards the back stairs and starts hustling down behind the kid, fiddling with his cell phone. Calling for backup on an unarmed 19 year old?

Before I knew it I was back on the ground floor. I yanked open the door back towards the front of the building and the kid was right there, charging towards me. He screamed, and I felt everything just go white-hot, I can't really describe it, it was like a sandstorm. Yeah, in New York, in the middle of April. I still don't know exactly what happened. I remember hitting the kid on the side of the head awkwardly as he went past. I remember seeing the door...the back door being red-hot. I remember seeing Sutton's gun drawn. And that was it.

I woke up in the burn unit, I'd lost all the hair on my arms and my hand was burned pretty badly, though there wasn't any permanent damage. Sutton told me when he visited that they had caught the kid, a couple of patrol officers had responded to the backup and were waiting for the kid out in the alley - they ambushed him and knocked him out there.

The kid took a plea the next day. I just keep thinking back to see if we did anything special, but we didn't. Sutton didn't. I mean, he figured out who it was from the list, but that was just being a good detective. Right? Anyway, I certainly didn't do anything special. I don't see why we gotta have all this SHIELD and all this junk about how, oh, the police can't do anything. Because that kid could melt frickin' steel. And we caught him like we'd catch any other punk kid with a flamethrower in this town. And the next day Sutton and I were back at our regular jobs, doing the same thing all over again.

That's why I don't get it when people say New York doesn't do anything about this so-called mutant problem. I like New York a lot but sometimes I can't figure out what it wants. Does it want us to bust the metas? Or just to fight 'em in a big flashy show in Central Park? Because any jerk can get into a fight. You gotta have the skills if you're going to get some of these people, and Sutton, whatever else he's got, has the skills.

Logs

• Club Zanzibar scene. Grant investigates a murder/disappearance at a local night club.
• Nightmare. Grant investigates Illyana and Nightmare.
• Dawn's Logs of the HFC Party in which Grant learns many interesting things.
• Coffee Talk. Gran hassles Jenny and Illyana over coffee.
• Interviewing Kelly. Grant talks over the Zanzibar Club slaying with Kelly Hiraga, witness.
• Grant and Hanover. Grant investigates yet another weird mutant occurrence in Central Park.
• Grant's Apartment. Two agents of SHIELD surprise (?) Grant in his apartment.
• Strange Hospital Encounter. Grant interviews Dr. Strange about being attacked by a werewolf.
• Bobby Drake, agent of SHIELD. Grant talks over the Lee murders with a SHIELD agent.
• Delivery. Grant receives a Twin-Peaks-esque delivery from SHIELD about the Aura case.
• Arraignment. Sena's arraignment and aftermath. With a special guest appearance by Wilkes & Schoonover.
• Mystique. Grant meets with a disguised Mystique in Central Park.
• Station Meeting. SHIELD comes to tell Grant to quit bugging them about Sena.
• Sleepwalk. Selene meets Grant in the Dreamlands after Elizabeth disappears.
• Insanity Clause, Sena's sanity hearing.

More Sounds

• Is Grant Extraordinary? (102 K)
• Bricks Shy Of A Load? (92 K)
• Coming In On Radar (74 K)
• Who did this? (75 K)
• Who Do I Look Like? (443 K)