Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The scents were suffocating and many, mingling within a shifting haze. This room, wherever he was, swam with an all too familiar miasma, a known mixing with a more potent unknown that turned his stomach.

A hard blink steadied the scene momentarily. His feet felt miles away from him as he willed them to step forward toward a dim light in the distance. Damp wood registered vaguely beneath his soles. Another blink and something else registered.

The most vibrant shade of red he’d ever seen.

“It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

The source of the sickly-sweet voice wasn’t obvious to his tiny ears. It echoed, bouncing around him, as though coming from everywhere at once.

He opened his mouth to say something but no words would come out. They stuck to his tongue, to the roof of his parched mouth like it was lined with flypaper. He gulped back air; a metallic taste coated his throat. A broken picture came in flashes out of the low light in front of him. A slowly writhing mass of fur. A red river, and two golden stars, fading like candles. It was beautiful, and horrible. Tears trickled down his cheeks. 

“Oh no, now, none of that. This is nothing to be sad over. We’re making something exquisite today, you and I. That’s what you always wanted, isn’t it?”

A looming shadow moved closer. “It’s okay. I know it’s scary, but change always is.” 

The river of red met a waterfall of liquid light and all the tears in his eyes evaporated in its radiance. He thought at first that everything had gone so wrong, but in the face of this brilliance he could only count himself so lucky. What had he done in his mess of a life to be worthy of witnessing such magnificence?

“You understand, don’t you?” He gave a vigorous nod, understanding nothing and everything all at the same time. “Of course you do. You see what she is capable of becoming. Something once so beautiful, now just a plain, faded ornament for a drab, visionless critic. She’ll become so much more. And so will you.”

He nodded harder at the voice, reaching his paws out. Yes, let him become something beautiful, more than he is, was, could ever have been on his own. A hot, shining blade was thrust into his paws, scorched and bonded them together with a kind of heat he had never felt before, never wanted to be without again.

“Come here. Step lively, and give me your best warrior’s face. You’re about to become something amazing. By the time I’m done, you’ll be a work of art.”

There was a squeak, a momentary rush of cold before warmth surrounded the artiste. The palette squirmed, then thrashed as the creativity flowed out of it and onto the canvas. Slowly the palette stilled until the artiste could truly begin to revel in the joy of their art, the unbridled ecstasy of creation. With the utmost reverence, a new masterpiece was born in blood, as all great things should be.

“All I’m saying is you’re completely, one hundred percent wrong.”

Judy Hopps shot her partner a mean side-eye as she turned their police cruiser onto Palm Street. Nick Wilde was in rare form this morning and had dialed up the playful antagonism to an eight… maybe a nine. It was all she could do to keep her paws on the wheel and not sock him in the arm.

“And I’m saying you can’t possibly know if I’m wrong until you’ve tried one.” She slowed the cruiser to a stop just before the rest of the emergency vehicles. “We’ll get back to the many ways you’re wrong later. You get the kit from the back while I check in with the Sergeant.”

Nick fired finger guns off at her, then unbuckled and hopped out the window of the cruiser rather than open the door. Judy rolled her eyes as she exited the car in the normal fashion. It was just going to be one of those days.

The Palm Hotel and Casino in Sahara Square was a popular local and tourist attraction, as casinos go. The property that the casino owned wasn’t only relegated to the casino and hotel buildings themselves, but also the three acres surrounding it. This sprawling real estate held various fine dining restaurants, outlet shops, and chic outdoor areas that were meant to serve as picturesque places to sit and talk, take a selfie, or just pass a bit of time observing the pieces of art scattered here and there.

No one was enjoying the newest piece of “art” that one of the patrons had stumbled upon this morning. Tangled amongst the spirals of welded metal entitled Triumph, was the eviscerated and partially mummified form of a female caracal.

Judy and Nick approached the police tape that cordoned off the scene. They flashed their detectives’ badges to the uniformed officer who was stationed there to keep unauthorized mammals out. The rhino nodded and stood aside as they walked past. Nick lifted the tape up for his partner as she walked straight under it without pause, eyes down and examining her notepad. He shook his head good-naturedly, and followed right behind. 

Nick glanced back at the patrol mammal. “Can you tell us where the on-site commander is?”

The rhino hesitated for a moment, then responded without looking at Nick. “Sergeant Asstor should be with the technicians by the victim.” He pointed towards a collection of portable flood lamps.

Nick nodded and continued in the direction that the rhino indicated.

From the state of the body, it was clear that the victim had been killed elsewhere and moved. There was a distinct lack of blood; even the scent of blood was faint. What gore was there had been mixed with some sort of plastic resin that had been hardened and shaped in such a way as to simulate an outward bursting of red from her open chest cavity. The sculpture that the body was positioned around stretched above this bright red explosion. It gave the appearance that the metal spiral had burst up through her. Her face had been left mostly unmolested, frozen in an open-mouthed silent scream, eyes wide in an expression of terror. They were striking, her eyes, vividly colorful for a corpse. They might have been made of glass for how glossy and bright they were.

An African wild ass with Sergeant stripes turned as Nick shuffled across some of the gravel near the walkway. “Ah, the P-1 celebrity detectives have arrived.”  

Judy’s ears twitched at the slight condescension in his voice, but she seemed set on ignoring it… for now. “Good morning Sergeant,” she said evenly and started donning her latex gloves. “What can you tell us about the scene, beyond the obvious?” 

The jack snorted at the clear challenge in her tone. “Nothing beyond the obvious; at least not until the mammals from forensics come back with something like a time of death, or cause. No clothes or identification on the victim, so we don’t even know yet who she is.”

“Her name is Bridget Carcallie.” Everyone looked as Nick began taking his own pictures of the scene. “She was a ‘Ring Cat’ for ‘Big-Time Modeling Agency’. She worked the Iceberg Amphitheater for about ten years before she rolled her ankle in a Rhinoman-Tuskerson fight.” He pointed to the cat’s left ankle.

Judy had to rein in the secondhand smug that threatened to take over her face. The Sergeant’s long ears swung back and he lifted his head to glare along his snout at the pair.

“Well, looks like you already have the case in the feed-bag, then,” he said snidely. “What do you need the rest of us for?”

“Now, Sergeant, don’t put yourself down so harshly.” Judy smiled a sweet smile at him. “I’m sure an able-bodied ass like yourself wouldn’t mind running some social media and maybe vehicle registration on our victim for us, would you?”

Sergeant Asstor glared back and forth between the rabbit and fox detectives, though Nick was entirely focused on talking to the various technicians. Judy tilted her head as she looked at the sergeant expectantly. “Something else on your mind about this case, sir?”

He snorted. “I was just expecting more of a show.” He thrust his chin towards Nick. “Either way, the case and the site are yours.” He spun on his hoof and marched off. “Don’t expect your famous good luck to carry you through this one.”

Judy’s eyes followed after his retreating figure with an intensity that could put holes in steel before she turned and crouched down next to her partner at last to get to work. He chuckled softly as she joined him.

“I can’t believe you called the old work-horse an ass.”

“What? That’s what he is, isn’t it?” Judy shot him the most wide-eyed, innocent face and his laughter deepened. She didn’t join him in his levity, but huffed instead. “Just tired of that crap, is all. It’s been two years. We’re detectives now, positions that we earned, not lucked into. How long until we can stop proving ourselves?”

“It’s just not enough for some mammals. Lucky for us, their opinions are worth less than nothing. You heard Bogo this morning in the bullpen. ‘A case he wouldn’t put in any other paws but ours,’ right?”

Her ears perked. “You’re right.” She looked sidelong at him. “Don’t let it go to your head.” 

“Now do I look like the kind of guy that would…?” Judy gave him the most expressionless face possible. “Yeah, okay, don’t answer that.”

She turned to face Bridget’s corpse. “So, you knew her?”

“Only by reputation.” Nick tapped an otter tech on the shoulder, sending the mammal off. “She worked for one of Mr. Big’s more-or-less legitimate front companies.” He pointedly ignored the concerned look on Judy’s muzzle. “Big-Time handled a lot of low-level modeling work: looking pretty next to new automobiles, smiling in front of some art gallery or another, that sort of thing.” He sat back on his haunches and looked at his partner. “Bridget was a favorite as a card-cat for Prize-Fights, but she wanted something more... legitimate than swishing her tail in a bikini for the crowds.”

“Did she quit, then? And if she did, was it on… amicable terms?”

He scratched the underside of his chin. “I wasn’t kidding about her rolling her ankle. She couldn’t very well walk in circles inside a ring wearing an air-cast. I’d heard her contract was bought out right afterwards, but that was right around my infamous carpet deal, so I can’t really say how Mr. Big took it.” He frowned and looked up at Bridget’s glassy eyes. “It’s a few years too late for grudges, but you’ve seen how he is about those.”

Judy chewed her lip. “We’ll have to pursue it.”

He nodded. “He’s not gonna like getting grilled, but it’s better than having someone like the good Sergeant trying to make points with the Commissioner's office.”

“Agreed.” Judy rose to her feet and walked a complete circle around the sculpture until she was back where she started. “It seems a bit… flashy for a mob hit, you have to admit.”

“True, but Big has a stake in the Palms, and this,” he gestured to the scene, “has exactly the right level of flashy for a mob message.”

He stood up. “You’re the senior partner,” Judy rolled her eyes, “but I don’t know that we can get anything out of this that the techs couldn’t without us in their way. Shall we head back and fill the Boss in on what we have?”

“What we think we have, junior detective.” She put her notebook away as Nick packed up their evidence kit. He hesitated, gave the technicians one last look, then followed behind Judy back to their cruiser.

Judy waited in the driver's seat until Nick was buckled in. “Alright, spill.” He looked at her oddly. “I’ve seen the ‘biting my tongue’ face on you enough by now. What piece of your mind were you just dying to give them?”

His ears perked up. “What? Oh, the Sergeant? Nothing that I haven’t said a thousand times at this point. I’m not wasting any more breath on the whole ‘surprise! I’m not actually a dimwit at my job’ spiel.”

Judy put the car in gear and pulled out into the road. “Okay… good, I guess? But there’s still something rolling around in there.”

Nick gave one last look at the crime scene. “As strange as that scene was…” He shuddered. “...and boy, strange hardly does it justice… I can’t help but feel like I’ve seen that image somewhere before.”

Jiro kept his camera tracking the famous duo of Wilde and Hopps as they left the scene. 

Put the bunny and fox on this case, did they? he thought as they left his line of sight. This is going to be a scorching hot story before long, that’s for sure.

The racoon-dog lamented not having a parabolic mic; he’d have loved to know what was said to send the equine sergeant off in such a huff. Ultimately, he wasn’t there to record conversations. He was there to take the first pictures of the crime scene, before the police sanitized it for the public. 

And what a scene it was. It was so sensational all on its own Jiro doubted that the graphic designers would need to photoshop barely any of it. It was front page worthy just as it was. The editor-in-chief was going to be ecstatic. 

Thank heaven for solid anonymous tips. They were hit or miss, but when they hit, OH BOY, did it sail clear out of the park. He didn’t know how his contact knew where this was going to happen, and to be frank he didn’t care. Some rich, snobby mammal bit the proverbial big one, and he got the chance to show the world just how common the ‘high and mighty’ were.

He snapped a few more, but it was clear that his window of opportunity for any more stellar shots like the ones he’d snagged earlier was quickly closing. Foot traffic was increasing, more and more pedestrians getting in the way, and then the cordon around the scene was shielded from prying eyes further with a forensic tent.

With one last satisfied look at the better of the photographs, Jiro shut the tablet down and started packing up the telephoto camera. He was ever thankful that digital photography had come as far as it had; he could carry an entire field camera and development studio in his backpack. That was especially important as he generally wasn’t welcome by the subjects of his work.

He casually stepped out from the small service alley he’d set up in and strolled in the opposite direction, back toward his car he parked among the many other vehicles in the casino parking garage. Not out of place there, in a building that never closed with mammals that were up and active at literally every hour of the day and night.

Jiro slung his bag carefully into the passenger seat of his car, started the ignition, and drove out of the lot and onto the main drag. The sun wasn’t even at its peak yet for the day, but he’d already put in better than a day’s work. If he hurried, he might even be able to make the submission deadline for tomorrow’s edition. He’d get one hell of a bonus for that. 

Nick and Judy split as soon as they entered the precinct house: he coordinated with the Criminalistics department, and she went to Bogo’s office. It had begun as smoothing things over due to Nick’s and Bogo’s often clashing personalities, but after more than a year on the beat and then as a Detective, there was no denying Nick's professionalism when it came to the job any more than denying Judy’s competence and skill. Now, it was simply tradition: Nick schmoozed and networked with the technical departments to get their cases (and those of fellow officers when the need arose) fast-tracked, while Judy provided the cadre with a familiar and photogenic face.

Judy entered at Bogo’s usual gruff acknowledgement. “What do you and Wilde know so far?”

She stood at parade rest. “Precinct 3 is on a fast track for an Equal Opportunity lawsuit, sir.”

Bogo gave her a level stare for a few seconds. “What do you and Wilde know so far that I don’t?” He pointed to the large chair across from him.

Judy hopped up, putting the two much closer to eye level. “Nick’s tentatively ID’d the victim as Bridget Carcallie, a former employee of one of Mr. Big’s, ah—businesses.” She flicked an ear at the Chief’s pained expression. “We’re waiting on Forensics and the Coroner to confirm the identity, but there seems to be a lot of overlap. We wanted to warn you before anyone had to be sent to the Big Estate.”

The cape buffalo huffed. “I’ll take what I can when it comes to that family. You know you can’t pursue that angle personally, correct?” He quirked a grin at Judy’s almost mockingly scandalized look. This was also more tradition between them; she knew full well her relation to the Big family precluded her directly investigating them, and he fully trusted her and Nick not to cross that line. “Once you have confirmation of the vic’s ID, you and Wilde will run down her timeline. I’ll have Higgins and the Organized Crime Taskforce look directly at the Big Cartel.”

“Yes, sir. We’ll get right on it once we have more from Forensics.”

He nodded in satisfaction, then leaned forward. “Now, your impressions of the scene itself?”

Judy stopped for a few seconds, then seemed to sag. “One of my sisters got into the art scene about eight years ago, specifically the ‘Grotesque Surrealism’ movement. It reminded me of that, sir.”

Bogo gave a harsh snort through flared nostrils at the description and shook his head. “The last thing this city needs is for murderers to start getting creative. Give this case top priority; feel free to delegate any administrative tasks off your plate. Anyone has a problem with that, they know where I am.”

Judy hopped back down and shot the Chief a salute before heading out. She’d long since learned when Bogo needed formal protocol to be followed, and when he just needed his officers to get to it. She arrived at her cubicle just in time to see a black and red tail slip inside. 

“Made the rounds even more quickly than usual, didn’t you, Slick?” she said as she sat in her chair and twirled it about to face him. 

He glanced over at his partner with the relaxed but sad face he always wore around any case involving a death. “Not much to do until the Techs and Coroners get done with Bridget. We do have that much, though.” He tapped a few keys on his computer. “Turns out her tumble in the ring was worse than anyone let on, and she ended up with a plate screwed into the bone to keep it stable while it healed. It had a serial number, simple to cross reference.”

Judy nodded solemnly. “Does she have family in the city, or a point-of-contact on file?”

Another few taps on the keyboard brought up a legal document. “Her emergency contact is... well, that’s gonna be awkward.” 

Judy moved to look over his shoulder. “Who’s Jamal Shabal?”

He snorted. “Only the most notorious art critic in the city. His recommendations on a piece or a venue can make or break careers.”

Judy squinted. “Does he have any mob ties of his own?”

Nick leaned back in his office chair. “Not that I know of, but there’s always a chance he’s on someone’s payroll.”

Judy pushed away from Nick’s desk and grimaced. “Well, we have a coroner ID, and he is listed as her emergency contact.”

Nick nodded reluctantly. “Let me get changed into my duty uniform. I really hate giving these notifications. He’d be difficult to interview under the best circumstances, but after this...”

He let his sentence trail off and made an especially sour face. Judy nodded and picked up her notepad once more. “Always the possibility he already knows?”

“An art critic trying his paw at some art of his own?” Nick bristled at the thought.

“Most likely to be killed by someone you know, right?”

He snorted an almost Bogo-esque snort and shook his head. “Let’s get our facts before we build any more theories. He’s a suspect by proximity, not evidence.”

Judy refrained from rolling her eyes. “I know that, but we also need to come at this impartially, not get caught up in any tear-jerking sob stories like—”

“Like a father whose son just wants to be an elephant?” Nick walked beside her as they headed towards the locker rooms.

“Exactly.” She gave a curt nod. “He could be a very sneaky, if articulate, fella. We both know how falling for that sort can go.” She gave him a hip bump before heading in the females’ locker.

Nick gave a fading grin as he pushed open the males’ room door. “Yeah, or a sheep that just wants the city to be safer for the little guys.”

Chapter Text

Jamal Shabal’s home was nestled within an acre of well-kept, neatly landscaped property. It was set well away from the street he lived on, as were most of the houses in the Delta Rio neighborhood of Sahara Square. The driveway was long, but happily it was not itself gated like the community was, so they didn’t have to grapple with announcing their presence before even getting to the house itself. Which, when they arrived, seemed a fortunate happenstance. From inside, there came a shriek of grief and rage, followed by glass shattering and furniture crashing to the floor. Nick and Judy both left the cruiser at a crouch and drew their side arms as they stalked up to the entrance in perfect sync. No words were spoken between them as they moved; this was a dance that they’d shared enough times that their movements were hard-wired into them.

The sound of their approach was covered by the distressed caterwauling from inside the home. They stacked beside the door. At a tap from his partner, Nick hammered his fist on it. “Mr. Shabal? Police!”

The activity from inside halted. After a short pause, a ragged voice called out, “Go away!”  

“We just want to talk, sir,” Judy called from Nick’s side. 

There was another pause, then Judy’s ears perked up at the sound of someone padding heavily towards the door. There was a click, and the aperture swung inward slightly. Nick holstered his weapon and cautiously entered, trusting in Judy’s faster reflexes to ward off any danger. They took in the scene: one vase lay in pieces in a puddle of Tiger Lilies and water, while something that could have been an Ottoman was shredded and strewn about the room.

The hunched and distraught figure of Jamal Shabal stood just off to one side of the door. He was a middle-aged caracal with honey toned eyes and broad set shoulders wearing a trendy Mandarin-collared Hoggo-Boss shirt and expensive Owlex watch. He wasn’t much taller than Nick, but the subtle outlines beneath his sleeves alluded to a strength that he would prefer not to grapple with.

“Please watch your step just there,” Jamal said as he closed the door behind Judy and pointed at the broken glass from a picture frame by the wall. “I… am not having a good morning.” He then picked up a whisk broom and dust pan and began listlessly cleaning the detritus.

Judy and Nick exchanged glances as they carefully sidestepped around the debris. Judy, not about to assume anything of what he knew or didn’t, said warily, “Receive some bad news recently, Mr. Shabal?”

He glanced back at her with a weary and impatient expression. “Don’t take me for some naive simpleton. I know why you’re here.”

“Do you?” Judy asked, and her paw hovered again over her sidearm. “And what do you think we’re here for, sir?” 

“About what happened to…” His voice cracked, and he paused with a hard gulp before he finished. “What happened to Bridget.” He picked up a tablet from the coffee table and contemptuously tossed it at their feet. On the screen was a picture of Bridget’s corpse and a headline that read, ‘But is it Art?’, under the title The Sun-Bearer.

Both officers stared at the image in alarm, as they could be seen in the foreground. Judy rallied first. “Yes, sir. On behalf of the ZPD, we wish to extend to you our sincerest condolences in this trying time.”

“Thank you.” He picked up an overturned chair and placed it back up by a long table before he set himself down. He indicated the disarray. “Apologies for the state of my home. I’m afraid I’m not handling this… well.”

“That’s quite alright, sir.” Judy said. “This isn’t the sort of thing mammals typically handle well.”

“No, I suppose not.” Jamal scrubbed his paws over his face and brought them to rest folded on the table. “If there is anything I can do to help find whoever did this,” he left the statement hanging as he gritted his teeth.

Judy and Nick exchanged a subtle look, and she took out her notepad as she moved out of his line of sight and let Nick come around in front.

“Well, now that you say that,” Nick began as he sat in the chair directly opposite Jamal, mirroring his posture, “we do have a number of questions regarding Ms. Carcallie’s whereabouts during the last 24 hours. Who she contacted or interacted with, any planned outings or last-minute changes to them, any unusual communications she may have received, especially any threatening letters or such.”

Jamal turned his eyes down to search the table. “It was a regular Thursday, as far as I know. We keep Fridays available to spend time together from our typical schedules. Thursdays were set aside for ‘Me’ time. A mental reset, so we didn’t bring work-related stress with us when we wanted to be… to be…”

“Intimate?” Judy suggested.

“Yes… as you say.” He shifted, his paws gripping together tightly. “She has a group of friends she regularly goes out with. I have their contact information.”

Nick nodded as he scribbled notes. “And for your ‘Me-time’?” He made a point of looking Jamal in the eyes as he asked. Years of experience had taught him how defensive mammals got at the question, ‘Where were you when…?’ It seemed to help if the mammal he asked could see his eyes and read his intent.

Jamal’s muzzle twisted up in anger at the question, but he quickly gathered his frayed composure and grabbed something out of his pocket. “I was at the Canine’s Film Festival. Bridget can’t stand Indie...” Jamal’s whole frame shuddered for a moment as his voice broke, looking at the receipt in his paw, “couldn’t stand Indie films. I’d tease her about it all the time.”   

“We understand that this is difficult, sir, and thank you for your cooperation,” Judy said, coming around from her position next to Nick to give him a sincere expression. “If you could provide that list of contacts for us when you feel you’re able to, we would appreciate it. And if you don’t mind, there’s just one last question I wanted to ask.”

“And that is?”

“That online article.” Judy pointed at the cracked tablet that was now blank on the floor. “How did you come across it? You don’t seem the type to regularly peruse the sleaze journalism of The Sun-Bearer.”

He snorted in contempt. “I don’t subscribe, but I do have my Tweeter and Muzzlebook accounts linked to about a dozen such rags so I’m updated to any articles with mine or Bridget’s names, or anything we’re associated with. When you're in a position of public visibility it’s a good idea to know when public opinion is shifting, and who’s shifting it.”

“Bridget was identified in the article?”

“No,” he scratched at the table. “The headline; it’s my catchphrase. I almost always use it somewhere in my reviews… it’s expected now and… and they used it... for the headline…”

The caracal’s tenuous composure collapsed and he put his head down in his arms on the table, drawing shaky and shallow breaths in through soft sobs. Nick nodded at Judy and stood. He put a calling card on the table in front of Jamal, and placed a paw on his shoulder.

“I have to advise you to please stay in the city while this all resolves,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically somber. “And if you think of anything else, don’t hesitate to call us.”

Jamal nodded into his arms and Nick gave his shoulder a commiserative pat. Then he and Judy picked their way carefully back to the entrance. They left the broken-hearted mammal to mourn and closed the door quietly behind them.

“I can be fooled by other mammals’ acting on occasion, but that felt, smelt, and sounded like genuine grief back there.” Nick tucked his notebook away as they walked to the cruiser.

Judy nodded as she climbed into the driver’s seat. “We’ll mark him as ‘low probability’ on our suspect list. The tabloid angle though?”

Nick started typing on the Mobile Data Terminal. “Let’s see, The Sun-Bearer, owned by ‘News Zootopia, LLC’; nothing sticking out as far as antagonism, but they carried a piece on him and Bridget from four years ago and he filed a ‘Cease-and-Desist’ while threatening an ‘anti-defamation suit’.” 

“Hmm.” Judy put the car into gear and started to maneuver back down the long driveway. “Any indication in the article of who took that photograph?”

“No, but I bet Abby down in Digital Forensics could figure out where they were when they took it. With the number of cameras that are situated around that casino, we’d be able to get a look at the photographer before we go nosing into the newspaper that published it.”

Judy nodded, and pulled into traffic. Nick reached for the radio to patch a call in through dispatch when his cell phone rang first. He picked it up.

“Y’ello.” He listened for a moment and then switched the call to speaker and held it between him and Judy. “Hey there, Doc, I got you on speaker.”

<Good morning, Detectives,> came the lightly accented voice of Dr. Furiakin. <I hope your morning has been less interesting than mine has with this body you two brought me.>

Judy’s ears popped up. “Something else came up during your examination, Doctor?”

<I’d say so, yes.> There was some static on the other end. <I hadn’t gotten a chance to begin the internal examination when Detective Wilde came by this morning, but I have now and I wanted to advise you both immediately of a very concerning initial finding.>

Judy and Nick shared a concerned look. “Which is?”

<The paperwork that accompanied this body bag specified that the number of deceased mammals was one, but in fact… there are two.>

Judy pulled over and hit the normal emergency blinkers. “An explanation, please.” There was a slight waver in her voice. “Was Ms. Carcallie—?”

<No, my dear, she wasn’t pregnant.> Judy slumped against the steering wheel in relief. <The deceased feline’s stomach organ had been obviously tampered with. Sliced into, specifically, and an additional body was within it. A small rodent… I will tentatively say a field mouse, but the body has been extensively deteriorated by the chemical composition of the stomach, so additional tests would be needed. It was posed strangely, like the feline’s was. The position was kept fairly intact with that same resin the caracal was coated in. A small blade was glued between both paws.>

Nick set the phone down on the center console. “Just to make sure I understand this right: a mouse was surgically implanted in her stomach, with a weapon in its paws?”

<Based on what I can tentatively observe. There would have been damage—well, a different kind of damage—to the esophagus if he or she had been consumed while wielding a blade defensively.>

Judy looked at her partner in concern. “I don’t know whether to consider that better or worse.”

There was a moment of hesitation from Nick. “Objectively, it’s better.” He looked her in the eyes as she balked. “More data-points will help us narrow things down. If Bridget had eaten the mouse, we’d have a whole slew of suspects and new reasons.”

Dr. Furiakin hummed his agreement. <As grotesque as it sounds, Nicholas is right. With an additional victim so carefully prepared, we can be certain these two unfortunates were the victims of the same depraved individual… or group.>

Judy heaved a breath and leaned back in her seat. “Right. It’s still the same crime, rather than two potentially unrelated crimes. We can look for the correlation between the two and hopefully narrow down how they were selected.”

Nick set a paw on her shoulder. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but we’re going to make the world a better place...”

Judy reached up to squeeze his paw. “By finding this animal and getting them off the streets.”

<I will compile as much as I can for you both today on Ms. Carcallie. This surprise victim will require additional tests that will take more time to complete, but you will have those results and hopefully a name to work with as soon as possible. I will alert you immediately as I know more.>

Nick nodded at Judy. “Alright, Doc. We’ve got some other leads to run down, so we’ll keep out of your fur for the rest of the morning.” He hung up and glanced over. “Well, that was a gross little addition to this case. Care to see what the good mammals at The Sun-Bearer have to say about their oh-so-conveniently timed photographs of our crime scene?”

“Well, it’s the closest thing we’ve got to motive so far.” She pulled into traffic. “Let’s touch base with Abby first for some more ammo, then head out and see what they have to say.” 

Nick reached out for the radio to call in their movements to Clawhauser. “In that case, swing by Buy-n-Large for me? I need to grab a Jumbo-Slurp before we head back to the station.”

Judy scrunched her nose. “Please don’t.”

He smiled. “Sorry Carrots, but it’s a small price to pay for express service.” He leaned over and gave a faux scared expression. “And have you ever seen Abby off the stuff? I have. Trust me: you don’t want to.”

Judy heaved an aggravated groan.

Judy’s ears were all but pinned against her back as she and Nick descended into ‘The Pit’. It wasn’t the dark confines that bothered her, as those were similar to a rabbit warren. It wasn’t the smell of caustic soaps and sterilizing agents, though they were mildly irritating. It was the driving rhythm she felt more than heard. It set her on edge and made her want to bolt as each thudding beat landed. Next to her was Nick, holding a Wolf-sized plastic jug of carbonated sugar-water slurry and ice. Judy could feel her heart race just a little faster standing near it, much less drinking any of it. 

They rounded a corner and came into the Digital Forensics Lab. Nick delicately took the straw in his claws, and squeaked it in the lid. “Oh no, I seem to have an extra large, extra cold, extra blue slushie that I cannot possibly finish. Curse my folly. Whoever will help me with this conundrum I have created for myself?”

A computer chair swung around to reveal a rabbit dressed in a riotous mass of fluorescent colors and floral print beneath her white lab coat. The doe surged forward with a manic grin. “NickyNickyNickyNicky!”

Abigail Scutto, a bayou rabbit born and raised in the Canal District of Zootopia, did not have the kind of appearance that one would expect of a Police Technician. Dark fur was etched with intricate white liquid nitrogen fur tattoos, designs that varied from quotes to celestial bodies to skulls. Offsetting her bright and vivid clothes were black, knee high military style platform boots with all manner of buckles and straps on them. Though also a rabbit and maybe only as tall as Judy normally, these raised her height to almost as tall as Nick.

“Ah ah ah ah!” Nick lifted the drink up slightly as Abby threw her arms wide. “No hugs while I have the drink in paw. I don’t relish wearing this stuff again.”

The exuberant rabbit hopped up and snatched the liquid confection instead. “Knowell’s two doors down; he could give you a ‘County Intake’ shower.” She took a deep slurp of the unnaturally colored drink and smacked her lips. “You’d be clean again in less than a minute.”

Judy winced inwardly. It wasn’t so much that she disliked Abby; on the contrary, the doe was brilliant and delivered exceptional results at a speed that rivaled colleagues twice her age. Judy respected her ability, and her consistent work ethic. No, it was more an inability to quite see how she could put up with being so weighed down by so much extra… stuff. To relinquish the ability to feel the ground beneath her feet in lieu of fully enclosed boots was bad enough, but what she’d done to her ears had Judy baffled. Piercings lined both of her now drooping ears; a half-healed hole at the base of them from a gauge that had gone horribly wrong ruined the muscle there and left Abby unable to raise or swivel her ears anymore. It made Judy shudder to think about. How could any rabbit get along without full use of such a fundamental facet of rabbit-kind?

Abby swung a now slightly blued smile at her and said, “Mornin’ Juuuuuuuuuudy.”

“Good morning, Abbs,” Judy managed to reply over the music, ears popping up and then immediately flattening back again. “Think you could dial it back to a nine or so?” She glanced at the speakers on the desk.

“Heh, of course!”

Abby bounded in perfect precision up to the top of her oversized speakers, flicked the dial just so, and landed without losing a drop of her drink. Blessed pseudo quiet drove the previous cacophony away. Judy gave a relieved sigh.

“Much appreciated.”

“No problem. So,” she settled into her seat, looking at the fellow lapine, “you braved ‘The Pit’, and Nick brought a bribe drink. What is it you two need fast-tracked?”

“We just got scooped by The Sun-Bearer on the case we were assigned not three hours ago,” Nick said, tapping away at his phone screen for a few seconds. An old timey ‘You’ve Got Mail!’ alert chimed from the computer station just behind Abby, and she spun about at the sound. “That’s a copy of the photo that’s up on their site right now.”

“The timing couldn’t be worse,” Judy added as Abby opened the image and blew it up on the enormous monitor. “We need to triangulate this and figure out where it was taken from so we can cross reference it against the casino traffic cameras and ID the photographer.”

Abby gave a faux pout. “Awww, is that all? Barely any fun, boo.” She pulled up a map of the gardens surrounding the casino, then glanced at the photo again at normal size. “Huh, that looks like Triumph.”

Nick frowned slightly. “Yeah, they tangled her up in it like—”

“Not the metal junk.” The swamp rabbit opened a search window and started typing. “Triumph is a surrealist oil on canvas by John Thimbul. You can almost make out the inner warrior escaping from the confines of species conformity here.” Her search finished and a picture came up. The similarities were striking.

Judy was aghast and her eyes darted from Abby to the screen to Nick as she asked, “How does someone even paint something like that?!”

“I know, right?” Abby said in a voice that sounded almost reverent. “It’s so expressive, has so much passion to it, the composition, the lines, how it draws your focus right here even with so much else going on around it, it’s just… guh, it’s incredible. I wish I could paint something like that.”

Judy’s jaw could have hit the floor, but she took a second to recompose herself before she spoke again. When she did, it was with the barely contained, overly neutral voice of one laboring to speak her mind in a less explosive way than she was feeling inside. “Paintings are supposed to be pleasant to look at. Things you hang on the wall of the kitchen and look at on rainy days when the sun isn’t out. Decor that’s nice and comfortable.”

Abby wrinkled her nose. “Ick, comfortable art is so lifeless. What’s the point? If it doesn’t make you feel something, it’s not doing its job.”

Nick chuckled at Judy’s distress. “Come on, Hopps… haven’t you ever seen a Salvadore Dholey before?” 

She shot him an annoyed glare. “I have, and I don’t know why they exist, to be honest. Why would someone create something so grotesque to lay eyes on that it kicks you in the gut?”

“Same reason there’s Stomp-Metal and poems about dead kits,” Nick absently commented. “They’re upset and need to express it somehow. It’s still healthier than the route I took. This Thimbul guy didn’t join a gang or try to commit suicide by mobster. Can’t say it’s my cuppa-tea, but to each their own.” He glanced at his partner. “That’s what Zootopia’s supposed to be, right: anyone can be anything? This guy just decided to be morbid is all.” 

Judy huffed and crossed her arms. “Well, it would appear that Mr. Morbid’s little work of art inspired a killer. Says something about that kind of expression, doesn’t it?”

Abby’s fur puffed and ears twitched, though they remained flopped to either side of her head as always. “Uhh, no. See, it’s not the responsibility of the creator to censor the outpouring of his soul just because someone might get offended, or triggered, or take it the wrong way, or do something dangerous with it.”

Judy threw her paw out toward the picture on the screen. “Even if it results in the ultimate kind of wrongdoing?”

“Hey, not that this isn’t a completely valid discussion and all,” Nick interjected while stepping between the two does with his paws out, “but first, we don’t know that this was motivated by the artist’s work, and second, we are here for a reason other than debating the merits or lack thereof for different art styles. Right? Can I get the most out of my bribe drink? Please?” He weathered the dual glares.

Abby narrowed her eyes, took another long sip of her slushie through the straw while still keeping her gaze aimed in Judy’s direction, and then donned a mild, tolerant smile. 

“Back to business, then,” she said, and turned back to her monitor with the same equally energetic movements that she had before the little disagreement began. She set her Jumbo-Slurp down and started typing away. “Palm Street and all the avenues around the casino are overloaded with traffic cameras and CCTV cameras for the high-end retail shops and banks. Whoever took this picture was probably caught on more than one… but if the traffic camera got ‘em, then you won’t need a warrant for the footage. We should be able to get a copy right from the database here.”

“Fingers crossed,” Judy said evenly, now also reining in the big bunny emotions to get her mind back on task.

Nick leaned on the desk. “Go Team Not-Misleading-Camera-Footage! And why’s this part so fuzzy?” He pointed at the edges of the picture.

“That’s out of the—” Abby trailed off. “It’s out of the point of focus!” She started frantically typing. Nick and Judy both leaned in, attracted by her sudden excitement. “There’s no meta-data left in the picture, but the image is very sharp so we’re dealing with a higher-end camera. Professional grade, not just a good smartphone camera. They’re really sharp on the subject of focus, but it leaves the background and foreground out of focus.” 

She enlarged and enhanced a blurry blob in the foreground. A very specific dark shade of blue splotched all over with a fluorescent, glow-in-the-dark variety of colors. “And this here... it’s a structure, but there’s some kind of ad right here.”

Judy stuck her tongue out. “It looks like one of those Blue Ham Group rave dance event things. Loud music, drums covered in neon paint, black lights… blech. One of my sisters did that for a bachelorette party. Came home looking like a stained-glass window.”

Abby chuckled. “Sounds like my kind of doe. Let’s see... Triumph was here facing west, and there’s a Ticket Mousters kiosk on the corner of Wilmott and Brandt.”

Nick whistled. “That’s one heck of a camera. Whoever it was took that shot a good quarter mile from our scene.” He got a thoughtful look. “Brandt Avenue ends in a T-intersection with Grazer Blvd.”

Abby pulled up a map of the neighborhood, and lined up the camera line. She leaned back with a smirk as the line led into a narrow alleyway. 

“Aaaaaand if we pull up the traffic cameras facing north and south at around… what time was it this morning you two were on the scene?”

“Might have been nine, nine fifteenish that we were done and walking back to the cruiser,” Judy said, standing now on tiptoes and body tense with excitement.

Abby brought up the Zootopia Traffic Network feed for Sahara Square from that morning and clicked to the traffic camera situated in that area. It took a little trial and error to pinpoint the timeframe that they were looking for, but even before the first police cruisers arrived at the scene—even before Judy and Nick received the urgent assignment from Chief Bogo the moment they stepped into the Bullpen for roll call—another mammal discreetly dropped out of the early morning sidewalk traffic and stooped in the alley by the dumpsters. They watched with anticipation as he began to unpack… camera equipment. 

Judy bristled up. “That sleazy little creep knew!” She pushed away from the desk and stormed in a circle. “He knew a murder had happened and failed to report it! He even profited—”

“Simmer down there, Fluff.” Nick held a paw in front of his partner. “He was there ahead of time, but we can’t prove that he knew the nature of the crime.” He glanced pensively at the grainy CCTV still. “Even if that is super convenient timing.” He looked back at Judy. “We’ve got a lot on our plate on this one. Let Asstor and the Third run this angle.”

Judy gave her patented ‘I’m-not-sharing-you-can’t-make-me’ look before letting it fizzle on her face. She gave another sour glance at the screen and nodded. “Not a bad plan. Then we can focus on The Sun-Bearer and any possible mob connections. Chief did say to delegate where we needed to; it’ll be a good use of that ‘get out of tedium’ card.”

Nick put on his most pedantic look. “And it allows us to look like the better mammals to the higher-ups. Hustling lesson of the day: never pass up on an opportunity to earn political points. They’re worth your weight in gold.”

Judy laughed. “Wow, that much, huh? Maybe I can trade them in for a studio apartment on Hill Street.” She turned to Abby. “Could we get some hard copies of those pictures with the timestamps? And as close to that guy’s face as you can get. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll be on their payroll. Any fur patterns we can vaguely match might give us an edge when we question the Editor-in-Chief there.”

Abby smirked and pointed to the printer, which was already laden with a number of glossy printouts. “Done and done.” She slurped her slushie again smugly. “Go on, say it.”

Judy rolled her eyes, but still smiled as she collected the pages. “You’re the best, Abbs.”

“I am, aren’t I?” She grinned wide up at Nick. “Bribe spent. Have fun storming The Sun-Bearer! Tell me all about it after, in excruciating detail. Especially the part where Judy makes someone cry. Those are my favorite.”

The Sun-Bearer’s office was located in Hyenahurst, and was almost as facile as the content it produced. The building had a professional face out front, crisp lettering over the door, clean windows, with neat and simple landscaping. The interior, though, was a different matter entirely. The smell of cigarette smoke clinging to the lobby almost sent Nick lurching back outside. Meanwhile, Judy cringed at the heavily water-stained walls that promised mildew and worse behind the faux-wood paneling that looked to be at least as old as her partner.

There weren’t many employees in the office when they arrived, and those that were seemed to take a similar level of care in their professional appearance as their place of employment, most taking the ‘casual’ part of ‘business casual’ much further than one would expect.

A stodgy old warthog nursing a stub of a cigar came out to the front desk at the receptionist’s announcement that the ZPD was on premises. In stark contrast to his employees, he wore a blazer and tie, as well as a pleasant expression on his face. The receptionist introduced him as Victor Yehlathi, the periodical’s Editor-in-Chief.

He gave them a warm greeting and shook their paws firmly. “Good morning, detectives. You’ll forgive my delay, I hope… busy busy busy, the news never takes a break, does it?”

He flashed a disarming smile that almost put Nick off balance, then immediately turned and motioned them to follow without waiting for their reply. No grass grew under his feet, from what they could see. Even when they were in his office and seated, he remained standing and in constant motion, whether fiddling with his stogie, his tie, or whipping his tail.

“I can already guess why you’re here, and we have both a constitutional right and moral obligation to print—or post as the case may be—the news.” He pulled out a layout of the front page for the upcoming printed edition. There in vibrant color, were the mortal remains of Bridget Carcallie, as well as Nick and Judy. “It’s not often we get to scoop the major papers, and I do have to keep the future of this paper and my employees in mind. News is a cut-throat business.” He came to a sudden halt in front of Judy. “You of all mammals know that.”

Judy bristled and wrinkled her nose with annoyance, though she managed to keep the venom out of her words. “While we are here in regards to the article in question, we’re more interested in the photographer.” She set out the stills Abby had given them. “Specifically, how he managed to be in position to take these photographs a full ten minutes before emergency services were dispatched.”

Nick cleared his throat out of reflex in the stale office air. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, what does it say about a struggling periodical who has a photographer ready to go at a murder scene before the police get there, and then fails in their civic duty to notify us?”

Victor nearly swallowed the stump of his cigar. “Now wait up one second! Are you accusing this paper of manufacturing this... this atrocity?!”

Judy sat up primly. “We’re not making accusations, Mr. Yehlathi. We’re investigating. And currently, one of the most promising leads is the photographer who took these photos for you. A photographer who seemed to know when and where a murder victim was being displayed before anyone else… except, of course, the killer.”

Nick steepled his paws and leaned forward. “We need to find out how they knew where and when to take that shot.” He tapped the CCTV still. “If he’s got a ‘source’, then it would be in everyone’s best interests to cooperate and help us track down the mammal or mammals responsible.”

The warthog began pacing again, and was starting to sweat. It added a distressing new layer to the office’s peculiar piquant. “I... I want to help; really I do.” He withered slightly under the twin glares. “He’s not an employee! He’s a freelance photographer. He takes pictures then sells them to whoever pays him the most up front. Some of our best articles were thanks to him selling me a timely candid shot.” He settled next to his office chair and leaned heavily on it. “This paper is still afloat because of that Vanessa Cudgens scandal picture from last year.” 

“Well,” Judy said evenly, and collected the prints together. “If you paid him, then you should have his name and address on record as part of your expenditures for tax reporting purposes. You can give us that information willingly, or we can come back with a warrant for it.” She leveled a molten hot glare at Victor. “I would strongly recommend not making us come back with a warrant for it.”

Victor froze under the intensity of her stare; not a single hair on his body moved. Beside her, her fox partner’s expression had settled into the smuggest of smiles and he tilted his head ever so slightly as if to wordlessly say, Care to try her?

He heaved a deep sigh and finally sat in his chair. He put his phone receiver to his ear, and tapped away at the number pad. 

“Stacey,” he said, reaching for a piece of paper and pen as he tucked the phone against his shoulder, “would you give me the contact information for that freelance-photographer who contacted us this morning? Jee-heero… something?” He scrawled the pen quickly over the paper, nodding as he did so. “Right, Jiro, that’s the one. Good. That’s all, thank you.”

Victor hung up and reached over his desk with the paper between his hooves. Nick rose to accept it from him. Judy followed suit and said, “The ZPD appreciates your cooperation, Mr. Yehlathi.”

“I’m sure it does,” he replied thickly, accepting their abbreviated paw shakes. He nodded pointedly to his office door. Nick and Judy were more than happy to take their leave.

Nick took an exaggerated gasp of breath as soon as they stepped outside. “I have never been so happy to breathe taxi exhaust. I’d suggest demolishing that place, but then the city would be on the hook to clean it up.”

“We have another mess to clean up because of this place, anyhow.” Judy turned in the direction of their cruiser with stiff steps. “Now let’s see if this Jiro guy is willing to shed a little light on how they knew about the scene.” She glanced down at the sheet, then stopped and groaned.

Nick turned as she thrust the sheet at him. He snatched it up and glared at it. “What the... all they gave us was an email address and wire-transfer account number?! Mam, I hate dealing with the banks.” He managed to not perforate the contact sheet with his claws.

Judy heaved a sigh. “Whelp,” she gave Nick a wry smile, “don’t suppose you have a fast-track method to working with financial institutions up your sleeve too, do you Slick?”

“Nope.” He popped the ‘p’ as he leaned against the cruiser. “Aside from convincing Lemmings to buy snacks from me, I have as little to do with banks as possible.” He heaved a sigh himself and headed around to the passenger side. “Even I have limits to how much speciest BS I’ll put up with, and boy does it come out of the woodwork when you try to apply for a personal line of credit.”

“Then we sic Financial Forensics on them. We still have the email address. We can get that to Cyber Crime and see if they can work their dark magic on it.” Judy hopped up and started the cruiser.

“Tallying up our progress, we’ve got a dead body—”

“Two dead bodies.”

“Right, two dead bodies, a dead end, and more questions than answers. More than enough running about for the morning.” Nick smirked. “What do ya say we grab some grub before we check on the good Sergeant’s progress in that back alley?”

Judy hummed. “Sounds like a better plan than heading straight back to the station. I’ll call it in. You go ahead and pick, but keep in mind it’s my turn to buy. That means no Mexicat.”

He made an exaggerated crestfallen face at her as Judy pulled them into traffic, though she didn’t notice it. She kept her focus on observing the traffic ahead. She was already working through the mental gymnastics to arrange the small bits of information gleaned from their disappointing morning’s work. 

The disappointment Judy and Nick experienced on the first morning of their assignment persisted for the next three days of detective work. As they had suspected, Sergeant Asstor wasn’t able to find anything substantive in the alley. More disappointing was the lack of leads on Jiro. The financials on the mammal led to an LLC with a single prepaid card account, while the address listed was a condemned apartment building.

Nick shook his head in frustration. “Gotta paw it to Jiro, this is a slick setup: single mammal LLC, all payments go wirelessly through this one account so every expense is a tax-deductible business expense and he doesn’t even have any real income, so no personal taxes.”

“Is that professional envy I hear?” Judy popped her back with a smirk over her shoulder at him.

Nick snorted. “Only for that one detail. This is the work of a paranoid mind; there are easier ways to dodge taxes,” he held up a digit to forestall comment, “and the only reason you twigged onto me was you needed leverage. I could have run any of a dozen schemes that would have had me and Finnick living in a penthouse. But that would have put me on the IRS’s radar.” He yawned wide and rubbed his eyes.

Judy caught the yawn and clipped hers short just as her phone began to ring. She reached over and picked up the receiver.

“ZPD, Detective Hopps.” She listened for a few seconds and her eyes brightened. “We’ll be right down.”

Nick perked his ears in inquiry as she hung up the phone and rose from her chair. “That was Dr. Furiakin. He’s got more information on the second body. Let’s see what he can tell us, and maybe we’ll have another angle to work.”

They locked their work stations and headed down to the medical examiner’s office. “Good morning Ducky!” Judy smiled at the sable medical examiner.

“Yes, good morning, you two.” He waved at them from his elevated desk, keying the several monitors to display the form of an autopsied rodent. “We’ve managed to extract our second victim, and my findings are up here.” He gestured to the nearest monitor showing statistics, rather than gruesome imagery.  

Nick squinted at the screen. “Daniel Fields? You got an ID already?”

Dr. Furiakin nodded. “He was in our system.”

“I see it,” Judy pointed to a note on the bottom of the document. “Possession charge three years ago.”

“Indeed, and it seems from his blood work he never did break the habit.” Illya brought up the chart on the mouse’s blood work. “Between the levels in his blood, liver, and kidneys, he was in quite the altered state when he died.” 

Judy’s ears flagged. “I suppose it’s for the best. If he was that high, maybe he didn’t suffer.”

Nick sucked in a breath, pointing at one of the doctor’s notes. “If he was high on ‘Zootopia Ice’, then he felt it all and then some.” He shivered as Judy looked on in horror. “College student or laborer pick-me-up, but I’ve seen mammals shrieking and pulling out their own fur while high from a light breeze. It’s nasty stuff, Fluff.”

Judy gritted her teeth. “Well, what exactly was the cause of death, if he wasn’t… you know…” She gestured vaguely, no desire to put into words the end of her thought. “Was it the drugs?”

“A severed spinal cord.” The sable pointed to the back of his own neck. “A clean cut to the base of the neck killed him instantly. The murder weapon may very well have been the blade that was positioned between his paws, although it would be difficult to prove that.”

“Any type of prints on it besides his? Nose, paw pads… anything?”

“Sadly, the implement was cleaned and clear-coated before it was lacquered into Mr. Fields’ paws.” Illya turned to the two officers, his expression sober. “I’m afraid you’ll have to do this the hard way this time.”

“It’s a double homicide, Ducky,” Judy said. She and Nick put on their determined faces while looking at the photos. “There isn’t any way but hard.” 

Judy and Nick took their leave of the doctor with a copy of the results to add to their casefile. Next steps at this point were clear: run down the new victim’s background and contacts, then cross reference those with their prior victims’ for connections. More and more pieces of the puzzle now in their paws, it was time to start sorting and laying down the frame to begin filling in the picture.

The plain white panel van blocked the view to the Tundratown Ice Park entrance, though that wasn’t really a problem at such an early hour. What was slightly more invasive to the serene setting was the sound of a motorized winch, and the sound of something heavy scraping the truck bed. The few mammals who were still up were either departing the various late-night clubs and bars, or those with nowhere else to go. Still, the Ice Park was home to a sizable outdoor sculpture park, and trucks of that type were a common enough sight to not attract more than passing attention. An hour later, the truck was gone. 

A lone Siberian tiger staggered towards the park entrance, intent on cutting through on his way home from a later night than usual. It was a well-trodden path, and one he knew well. He could have walked the route blindfolded, or blind drunk as was the case. He never noticed the new fixture suspended from the park’s gate. Slamming head-first into the solid mass of ice was the final blow to his senses, and he collapsed on the spot. 

The serenity of the neighborhood was shattered that morning. As the first light of dawn broke an arctic hare couple happened to stumble upon his still form. They called the police to report the unfortunate soul, only to look up in horror at what had laid him low and scream.

Chapter Text

Judy and Nick stared grim-faced up at the latest whopper of a puzzle-piece that had been dumped onto their investigation. If they were forlorn when they left the station, they were desolated now. They had been dispatched to a jumbled report of one or more victims, though one of the two turned out to be a drunk tiger suffering hypothermia. He had been rushed to Doctor Ages Memorial Hospital for treatment. The second, however, was not nearly so benign, nor as easily resolved. This was the second homicide in a week, one where the victim was prominently and brazenly displayed.

At first glance it appeared to be the body of a small, male caribou, although even those details were sketchy at best considering the condition that the body was now in. The upper half of the body was naked, the arms and hooves threaded through with barbed wire as though it had been stitched all up and down. The hooves were positioned on either side of the bull’s face, which had its jaw wrenched open at a horrifying angle until it looked like it would nearly fall off. The tongue was cut clean off from within this voiceless scream.

The body itself was suspended by the modest rack of antlers on his head from the top arch of the gate entrance. The same type of barbed wire had been looped around the tines like lights on a holiday tree and then wrapped around the post to allow the body to hang straight down from it. A varnish of red and orange colors gave the reaching points the appearance of flames. The bottom half of the body had charred flesh inscribed with designs… possibly words, it was difficult to tell through the ice. The body was dipped up to the waist in layer upon layer of ice polished to the clarity of glass.

Once again, the cordon was up even before they’d arrived and the technicians were scurrying about at three times their normal speed, photographing and marking every crack and cranny around the displayed body. Given its location and the fact that literally half of it was frozen solid, it was a mad dash to keep the deceased as preserved as possible for the medical examiner to extract the most information he could from his remains.

If their prior victim had been ‘interesting,’ Judy had no idea what Ducky might say about this latest one.

“So, any tell-tale identifiers on this one, Slick?” she asked him, still staring up at the body that was slowly being lowered from the cross post.

“I wish.” He snorted, then sneezed. “Only thing tell-tale here is that he was—” Nick paused to find the right word. “—burned, or maybe smoked, over locust wood.”  

Judy looked around at some of the few chimneys. “Like around here?”

He gave another snort. “Nah, mammals in T-Town use coal or wood-pellet furnaces, or nothing at all. No in-between.”

Judy scribbled a note as a sharp twang signaled that their victim was coming down. Behind them a refrigerated box truck beeped as it backed up to just a few feet away for ease of loading, though lifting the body proved difficult even for the largest mammals given its posturing and the additional weight that the many layers of ice added. For a few minutes they jockeyed around before resorting to wheeling out a dolly to use. For those few minutes Judy and Nick circled the body like one would a statue in a museum, eyes roving over the intricacies not so much in awe as in rapt concentration. What could this mammal tell them about the monster or monsters that did this to him?

“These scribbles don’t look random,” Judy said as she peered through the glassy ice to the charred flesh beneath. She gestured for one of the techs to bring a camera over, while her pen was in rapid motion. Her eyes flitted up and down as she jotted the designs down on her notepad. She wrinkled her nose and brought out her cellphone. “Or maybe they’re letters?”

“It would be so nice if Zootopia’s crazies would learn to just post mean messages on the Ewe-Tube comments section like normal basement trolls.”

“What would Bogo need us for then?” Judy asked with as much glibness as she could muster. The frozen body was at last strapped to a large dolly and one of the polar bear officers began to wheel it into the truck. She sighed. “That is something he’ll start asking if we don’t make some real strides on Bridget’s case, though.”

Nick chuffed a laugh. “I’m pretty sure the Union would have his horns if the words ‘48 hours’ slipped his lips.” He turned to their cruiser. “We should just focus on doing our job right, City Hall metrics be damned.”

“Well, maybe I want more progress, then.” Judy’s nose wrinkled in disgust and she snapped her notebook closed. “Took two days for us to unravel a city-wide conspiracy. It feels like we should be doing better, faster… for them.”

Her eyes tracked to the back of the truck and the closing doors that now hid their latest charge from view. Judy looked down at the scribbled writing on her notepad and tapped her pen to her chin in contemplation. She folded the notepad pages over the pen in one paw and drew her cell phone from her pocket with the other.

“Would you mind driving us back?” she asked Nick. 

“Ahh, conceding to my superior driving ability?” he asked as they turned simultaneously in the direction of their patrol car. “It’s okay, you can say it. You were bound to see the light eventually.”

Judy rolled her eyes, even as they remained trained on her cellphone. “Hardly, dumb fox. I just want to use the time we’re sitting in traffic to look up a couple of things. This… looks familiar, somehow.”

“Suuuuuure, Carrots.” He gave her a thumbs up with his typical smug smile. “You’ll accept it one day. It’s only a matter of time.”

There was a second eye roll as Judy opened the passenger side door and hopped in. Nick maneuvered out of the Ice Park and onto the slick roads and morning commuter traffic of Tundratown. The ice flow routes helped to keep it a little lighter than downtown, but rush-hour was rush-hour was rush-hour no matter where you were in the city. It would be a while before they were back at the precinct.

They were cruising down the Inter-District 5 when Judy received a push-notice ping. She tapped her phone, then her ears shot up. “Gog Dammit!”

Nick swerved at her exclamation and managed to get over to the highway shoulder. 

“What!?” He stopped the car and put up the flashers. “What is it?”

“That slimy little voyeuristic intestinal parasite Jiro did it again!” Judy thrust her phone over to her partner. There on the screen was another picture; this one from only an hour ago, as it showed Nick and Judy’s arrival on the crime scene.

“Ohhhhh… fuzz.”

“Yeah.” She drew it back and hammered away the screen with her fingers. “Cyber’s already diving into his social media, but just the absolute gall of this guy, I could just… grah!”

She made a few additional aggravated noises before focusing all of her attention on another incoming ping. The remainder of the ride back to the station was spent in mutually agreed silence, Judy glaring down at her smartphone and tapping away furiously at the screen. Nick was almost afraid to say anything to her at all. Her normal agitated state was, dare he say it, adorable; but once she was in this particular frame of mind it was generally best to wait her out. He took advantage of her distraction to take a somewhat circuitous route back to the station.

By 45 minutes, Judy had calmed down enough to notice they weren’t back yet. He caught the side-eye she shot him and quickly turned down a side street. They were back at the precinct five minutes later.

Not that the detour helped in the end. They didn’t even have a chance to pass by the front desk before the Chief’s bellow rang down into the atrium. “HOPPS! WILDE!”

They both cringed, and steeled themselves inwardly for the inevitable reaming that was coming. As they approached Clawhauser’s station, they saw and heard a caribou cow berating him.

“... and that’s another thing!” she wailed in fury at the patient cheetah as she yanked another tissue from the box he was holding out to her. “H-h-how is it we had to f-find out from Muzzlebook of all things!” She blew her nose loudly with shoulders shuddering and tears streaming. “D-d-do you know what that d-did to our calves? To see Preston like… to…”

And she broke down in sobbing and more wailing over the counter, having finally made the transition from anger to grief.

“I know, Mrs. Peary… it’ll be okay…” Clawhauser came around the desk and made the appropriate soothing shushing noises as Nick and Judy paused. He let the grieving caribou bury her face in his chest as he gave them a subtle head shake and rolled his eyes up to the mezzanine where the Chief was waiting.

Nick put a paw on Judy’s back and urged her onward. “Let Benji handle it. We need to focus and find these creeps,” he whispered just loud enough for her to hear.

She nodded and continued past with stiff steps as every inch of her railed against that action, to turn and let that poor mammal know that they would stop at nothing to find whoever had done this to her and her family. That she herself would personally ensure that the proverbial book was thrown at them. That if she had anything at all to say about it, they would see the fullest extent of justice that was possible under the law.

They arrived at the Chief’s office and didn’t even have the chance to knock when they heard a rather ominous “Enter.” 

They hadn’t even started to salute when Bogo looked up from his desk. “Shut. The. Door.” He steepled his hooves once the sound of the distraught mammal at the visitor’s kiosk was muffled.

“I’m not angry with you two. Yet.” The hard emphasis made Judy gulp. “Now, that may change depending on why you’re nearly half an hour late arriving back from the crime scene.”

“To be fair, sir, Officer Hopps was making excellent use of the rush-hour gridlock to communicate with Cyber regarding the incident,” Nick replied smoothly, and Judy’s ears perked.

“I thought for sure you would have gotten informed of the update as we were in transit, Chief,” she added, piggybacking off of his deflection.

The bull snorted and tapped his keyboard. “I did get that update, though I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that I prefer my officers update me in person, not through an email chain.” He nodded towards the other chair in his office and spun his monitor around. “Based on the findings of the last photo taken by our shutterbug, Cyber was able to determine where he took his most recent photo from, and managed to find him on the CCTV network.” He stared at the two in front of him. The cameras showed him arriving five minutes before the call to Tundratown’s 911 center.

“He knew where to be, and knew to be there before the crime was called in. I want to know how.” Another tap on his keyboard brought up a city map. “The Sun-Bearer has already informed us they refused to buy his latest photos, so apparently he became impatient and posted them himself. Cyber tracked him to an internet cafe, and they insist he’s still there.” 

He spun his monitor back around. “Bring. Him. In.”

Nick and Judy snapped sharp salutes and were off like a shot.

Jiro sipped his Kombucha with mixed irritation and smug satisfaction. He watched the stats climb and comments fly in over his latest photographic wonder. The instant gratification was not nearly as satisfying as a paycheck, of course, but at least that blasted rag would feel the sting of missing out on all this publicity. The warmth of spite would peter out eventually, but for now it certainly went well with his drink.

“This seat taken?”

A snarl was just starting to wrinkle his nose as he looked up over his laptop at whoever it was that voice belonged to. He was met with the stony-eyed glares of Zootopia’s two most famous officers.

And their badges, of course.

He schooled his features from years of practice and gestured to the open seats. “Not at all.” These two weren’t the first cops to try and strong-arm him, though they were certainly the least threatening. Seriously, you’re no snarling tiger or trumpeting elephant. 

The fox flashed a sales-mammal smile. “Thanks a bunch, Bug. You don’t mind if I call you Bug, do you?” Jiro’s left eye twitched slightly. “You know, on account of you being such a shutterbug.” 

At that, the rabbit began laying out prints of his work; specifically, the last two ‘art’ pieces. “We’d be very interested in knowing how it is you knew about these two events before we did, Jiro.” She all but spat his name.

Jiro sneered at the two, having neither the time nor patience to put up with their ham-fisted ‘tough-cop’ act; he had places to go and photos to sell. “I haven’t done anything wrong, so you can take your Jack-Rabbit-Boot thuggery and—”

Judy’s ears vibrated in barely contained rage. “Two mammals were mutilated, displayed like nightmarish scarecrows for all the city to see, and you knew ahead of time.” 

“They were already dead; what was my phone call going to do for them, anyway?” He scoffed and picked up his drink. “Let some other good Samaritan take care of that. I take care of me.”

“And now we’re going to take care of you, as well.” Nick’s smile was anything but friendly as he put a paw over the drink’s mouth. “18 ASC Section 4 states that Misprision of a Felony Crime is, itself, a Felony. You were set up to take pictures of not one, but two such crimes, before the police arrived, even before the 911 calls were made. You knew about both scenes before anyone else and failed to report those crimes.” 

The growing murmur from the chic internet cafe suddenly hushed as Judy stood behind Jiro and pulled his arms behind him. “You are under arrest for Misprision of a Felony Crime.”

“Two counts, to be precise,” Nick cheerily chimed in around the tell-tale clicking of the cuffs.

Judy continued as if her partner hadn’t spoken. “You have the right to remain silent...”

Nick and Judy led Jiro and his lawyer to the interview room. The raccoon-dog was brought up short when Chief Bogo and the City DA were standing at the door. 

“Thank you, officers. I’ll take it from here,” the Chief said with a significant look at the two detectives. “If you would, CSI Scutto has requested you down in Cyber-forensics. Come see me after.” They nodded and stepped away without any delay. “Now Mr. Jiro, Mr. Merah, if you would step this way, please.”  

Jiro and Merah hadn’t even sat down when DA Brunnea went straight for the throat. “Three years in Federal prison plus $250,000 for each charge of Misprision.” She didn’t bat an eye as Jiro and his lawyer immediately started trying to talk over her. “You can’t expect the city to levy anything less than the full weight of the charges filed. Unless you want us to also file charges of Conspiracy in what is now three mamicides, you’ll start cooperating now.”

Chief Bogo began laying out both Jiro’s photos, as well as the time-stamped Jam-Cam still of Jiro getting set up. “We have you at these places, preparing to take photographs of staged crime scenes before city emergency responders were notified. This indicates foreknowledge. Either you did this and came back for a very specific light scheme for these photos, or the mammals responsible gave you a place and time to be. Which is it?”

Mr. Merah cleared his throat and laid a paw on his client’s shoulder, his striped tail flashing in agitation. Somehow, the red panda’s fur seemed even more flushed. “Madam DA, Chief, my client is more than willing to cooperate in exchange for an immunity—”

“I do not have time for jokes, so just don’t,” the dour hyena said, locking eyes with Mr. Merah. 

The red panda fluffed then calmed. “I’m not joking, Madam, but I have to think you might be. The only evidence against Mr. Jiro for Conspiracy is his presence in the general region of these crimes.”

Bogo snorted a jet-like blast from his nose. “Your client had foreknowledge of both events, and showed distinct sociopathy in both cases by not only failing to notify the authorities, but by profiting off of them as well.”

DA Brunnea shifted her humorless gaze back onto the raccoon-dog. “I can easily sell the sociopathic escalation angle to a jury, especially for a mammal disowned and banished from his own family and homeland.” Jiro flinched and looked away. The hyena delicately licked her lips, then looked at the lawyer. “Your client will be charged with two counts of Misprision instead of three counts of Conspiracy to Commit Murder and Obstruction of Justice. I’m willing to offer him six years with the chance of parole as opposed to back-to-back life sentences.”

Mr. Merah held up his paws and looked at his client to keep him silent. “My client will cop to both counts of Misprision and assist the police and the DA’s office for a reduction in sentence: fines of $100,000. That seems quite reasonable, given the—” 

Both mammals gaped as the DA abruptly stood up. “I see you have no desire to treat this seriously, so I guess that we’re done here.” She headed to the door. “You should both prepare yourselves. I intend to file murder charges before the end of the day.”

“Wait!” Mr. Merah tried to restrain his client as he desperately reached out for the DA. She stopped and looked over her shoulder expectantly. He slumped his shoulders. “I’ll talk.” 

“I wish we could have stayed to watch Chief pin that Bug to the wall,” Nick said as he and Judy entered the elevator to descend down to The Pit. “Maybe he’ll let us rent the recording to, ahh… review with a bag of popcorn.”

Judy shivered. “No thanks. I’d feel cleaner after front row at a Gallagher show than I do after five minutes with that creep.”

Nick snickered. “I think the interview room will need a good cleaning after Bogo and the DA are through with him.”

The elevator dinged and released them into the dimly lit and suspiciously quiet sub-basement level. They began the short walk to Abby’s lab. “Well, with any luck maybe they can wring another lead out of him so we can actually—”

“UGH!”

Nick and Judy turned the corner just in time to see Abby slam her fists down on the desk and push her chair away in disgust. “The nerve of some mammals!”

It didn’t seem that they would need to bribe or otherwise cajole the doe (today sporting a thick chain necklace, rosy pink shirt and tulle skirt set, dark leggings, and her big black stomping boots threaded with ribbon the same shade as her shirt) into fast tracking their case; the photos from the forensic team of that morning’s victim were already pulled up on her computer monitor.

“Hey Abbs.” The doe spun around at Nick’s voice, her earrings chiming as she did so. “I see you got the news.” He nodded at the picture.

Abby stared for a moment then snorted. “Me and the rest of the internet. This,” she spun back around and gestured at the screen, “is just... just—”

“Grotesque.” Judy’s eyes were locked on the face of the deceased deer.

“More than that; it’s a complete mockery!” Abby huffed. “Phoenix Rising is about being reborn from the ashes of your old life, not... Gorn!” 

Judy scoffed. “Personally, I can’t imagine the original could be much better if it inspired this.”

Abby froze and her ears spasmed. “Really? You think that is a reflection of the artist's intent?”

Nick had a sinking feeling as he saw Judy cross her arms and stare defiantly at the screen. “What, you don’t? I mean between the sheer vulgar violence that you recognized right off and the demonic scribbling carved into this poor mammal—” 

“Excuse me, that is a language.” Both Abby’s ears and nose were twitching with righteous fervor. “Old Volish, to be exact. It has a rich history and has almost been completely wiped out by Common.” She spun in her chair and jabbed an accusing paw at Judy. “Thimbul’s pieces always contain some Old Volish in them to keep the language alive; to keep his heritage alive! It’s no one’s place to decide whether it’s ‘appropriate’ or not.”

“Whoa whoa, wait, time out here!” Nick crossed his paws in front of him as the two rabbits turned their still incendiary glares his way. He pointed at the blown up picture on the screen with the writing that they were hotly debating. “You mean that actually says something?”

“Of course it does,” Abby huffed.

Nick gestured at the screen more. “And what does it say?”

Abby gave a rough and grating exhale, obviously displeased to have her debate interrupted. Still, she turned to type a few especially hard keystrokes on her keyboard. “As with any translation, the Common meaning doesn’t precisely capture all the nuance of the original language; however, most native speakers agree to the following meaning of the verse here:

“Bear witness:

Choose not to be the candle, 

Consumed by the Flame to guide others.

Alight from within, from the brilliance

Of your own destruction

And be reborn.”

Judy stared for a moment, split between her personal views, how they clearly clashed with those of a coworker, and the poignancy of the prose. “If it’s such a positive message, then why all the macabre?”

“Because Volish mammals had it real rough.” Nick rested a paw on her shoulder. “Remember they were everyone's prey. Back in the day, you were either Big ruthless, or you were dead.”

The grey rabbit looked sideways at her partner. “Ruthless? I can see it in Mr. Big, but come on. Lemming Brothers is a financial powerhouse and they don’t—”

“You honestly think they came into that kind of wealth and power without getting their paws bloody?” Abby was still typing. “Half of my job is taken up by tracing hush money coming out of LB.” 

“Hmm…” Judy put a thoughtful finger to her chin, her foot tapping the floor. Her ears shot up suddenly as she turned her eyes again in Abby’s direction. Nick was sure that the tangent had run out and they were about to start back up again when Judy asked, “Did you say that this guy’s paintings always have some of this, ahh… what was it called again?”

“Volish,” Abby offered with just a hint of leftover peevishness.

“Right, Volish.” She spread her arms out. “Where was it in the last piece, then?”

“The sword blade.” A few mouse clicks and Abby switched to the photos of the previous murder. “Thimbul’s first couple of paintings only had the title hidden in Old Volish somewhere. Phoenix Rising was the first one where he injected a full message within the picture.” She quirked a smile. “There was a bit of a row over accusations it was a forgery because of that.”

She zoomed in on the picture of the mouse and the blade gripped between his paws. After exceptional magnification and enhancement, they could just make out scratches in the blade’s edge, in the same kind of strange alphabet that they saw gouged into the lower half of the body from that morning.

Judy pulled out a notebook and scribbled. “We can check with Ducky on whether they still have the blade or if it’s been sent to evidence.”

“Sure seems like someone is using these paintings as a Paint-by-Number for murder,” Nick commented over Judy’s shoulder. “And I honestly don’t see the Big family being any of those someones, even to send a particularly potent message. Too flashy, too messy, too conspicuous. He’d never pose these things on properties that he owns, either.”

“Never pass pellets where you lay your head,” Judy murmured as she closed her notebook up again. “Definitely not his style, I agree. Given the insane detail in these replicas, it really does seem more that someone with intimate knowledge of this artist and his work is bringing them off the canvas and onto the streets… but why?”

A smirk pulled at Nick’s muzzle. “Well, maybe let’s start by asking the mammal himself. I happen to remember his work is being hosted in a gallery in Vol Gardens.”

Abby looked at him skeptically. “You ‘happen to remember’?”

His smirk fell. “Yeah, okay. It got a mention in an article by noted art critic Jamal Shabal.” He looked uneasily at the picture on the screen. “It wasn’t the nicest of writeups.”

“I’d call that a possible link between him and one of the victims.” Judy turned and started toward the door. “Let’s bring this to the Chief and see if he got anything out of Jiro.”

She was already out the door before a belated, “Thanks, Abbs!” slipped through the crack as it closed. Nick plastered an apologetic smile over his grimace and patted Abby on the shoulder.

“Great work as usual, darlin’,” he said, and also turned to follow after his partner. When she huffed, he added, “And don’t take this all personally. This case isn’t exactly painting anyone in the best light.”

Judy jammed her finger into the button holding the elevator doors open for the second time as Nick finally emerged to saunter toward her. At last they had their first major clue about this case, and he was moseying down the hall like he wasn’t in a hurry to bring this to Bogo.

She huffed as he stepped in. “About time, Mr. ‘100-yard Saunter’.”

An equally hard jab at the button to close the doors up and begin their blessed ascent up from The Pit. They were moments from the first floor when Nick flipped up the Emergency panel and slammed the red ‘all stop’ switch. The elevator ground to a halt and went to emergency lighting only as he squared his shoulders and crossed his arms. Judy glared up in his general direction as her eyes adjusted to the reduced light.

“Hey, what’s the big idea?” she demanded and tried to reach past him to start the elevator back up again, but he parried her attempt with a backpaw.

“I was about to ask you the same thing. I know you don’t like Thimbul’s art, but attacking it is uncalled for; much less getting into an argument with a coworker for liking it.” 

Judy reeled back and her ears sank. “I didn’t… it’s not about liking it. It’s like… as if it’s more important than the fact that someone died.”

“Not more important. Also important. To her.” He closed his eyes and sighed. He leaned against the wall and spoke aside. “Look, I get that you’re frustrated this second case popped up. I get that the lack of progress is disheartening. I get all that. But when we catch these guys—when, Carrots—we’re still going to need to work with Abby. Do you really think it’s a good idea to be burning your bridges behind you as you speed off toward the next lead?”

Judy turned her head and stared at the door. “She wouldn’t be the first mammal at the Precinct I don’t work well with. Besides—” She faced Nick again. “—just because she likes his art for whatever reason isn’t reason enough to give him a free pass. 

“If a radio jockey jokes about going into a club and hurting mammals because they have money, and somebody does it, then they’re responsible for what they say.” She looked down at the floor. “If someone tells the media that ‘predators might be reverting to their savage ways’, that it’s biological, then that mammal is responsible for what others do in her name.” 

She looked back up into his eyes. “I’m not going to suggest anything absurd like charging him, but if this Thimbul character is making art that someone else is using as inspiration for murder, then he does hold some of the blame.”

“Seriously? Drawing parallels between a psychotic murderer and a fresh from the academy officer caught up in the political machinations of Lionheart and Bellwether isn’t doing you any favors.”

Judy crossed her arms and stood firm. She’d be a hypocrite not to consider herself culpable for the part she once played in someone else’s game; there was plenty of room on this hook for company. Nick’s face softened, an expression of concern and understanding that morphed into one of contemplation before...

“When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide

Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride

Till I get to the bottom and I see you again!”

Judy was taken aback when he started to sing. “Uh, Nick?”

“Do you know what song that is?” 

She frowned and nodded her head. “It’s ‘Helter Skelter’ by the Beagles.”

Nick smiled. “Middle of the road for them as far as popularity goes, though it arguably did invent heavy metal. Do you know which mammal was also impressed by it, even inspired by it?” 

She closed her eyes and nodded again. “Charles Mooson.”

“Got it in one, Fluff. For years after the ‘Mooson Family Murders’, people were claiming the Beagles were responsible for a crazy person twisting their art and using it to justify murder.”

Judy huffed. “That’s different.”

“Is it?” 

“The Beagles weren’t peddling offensive imagery you can’t show in polite company out to the public. You can turn off a song. You can’t unsee these things.”

“It isn’t up to the artist to censor their art for the people who experience it. That responsibility lies solely on the public. We are only responsible for our own actions. Condemning Thimbul for another’s crimes isn’t Law, it isn’t Justice, and it certainly isn’t ‘making the world a better place’.” Nick extended his paws towards her. “If we begin telling people they can’t express themselves because it might offend someone else, no matter how objectionable we may find that expression, it starts a precedent for the repression of all expression. That is illegal.”

The irritation fizzled on Judy’s face as Nick arched his eyebrows in playful challenge. She gave a resigned laugh. “God, you can be so obnoxious sometimes.”

“Yes, how dare I combat big bunny emotions with annoying logic?” Nick’s expression softened back to his typical self-satisfied smile. “Lock me up and throw away the key.” 

“I’m tempted to.” She reached again for the emergency switch and this time Nick let her. The lights shined back to full brightness and the elevator gears began turning again to ferry them up to the main floor of the station. 

They moved through the halls of the ZPD with a purposeful stride to their desks to assemble together the narrative that would support the direction that they wanted to take their investigation. The Chief wasn’t one to accept lip service; anything that they could provide to back up their reasoning was always better to give right up front rather than fighting uphill against Bogo’s arguments later.

“Two murders happen within two weeks of each other, both with specific details linking them to artwork created by an artist who also happens to have his art on display locally,” Judy began summarizing as they entered their shared workspace and gathered their files together. “The first victim is the significant other of an art critic who also happened to make unkind remarks regarding said works.”

Nick unlocked his computer and opened up the casefile database. “We might check with the records of those two locations; see if there was ever a request to have Thimbul’s work displayed there. This seems too elaborate for the staged scenes to have been chosen at random.”

Judy quirked her ears. “An attack on the locations themselves? Seems kind of passive-aggressive to me. The bad press/notoriety is likely to draw more of a crowd than snubbing the artist would.” She shrugged. “We’ll put it on the punch-list.”

Nick subconsciously rubbed his shoulder. “I really wish you’d call it something else.”

Judy smirked and snapped her file closed. “You done whining over there so we can get to the Chief’s office?” She rolled her eyes at his particularly melodramatic follow-up whine, followed by the sound of Nick’s office chair being pushed back.

Documentation in paw, the two headed up to the Fourth Floor Mezzanine and Chief Bogo’s office. They opened the door at the Chief’s bellowing invitation, and were unpleasantly surprised to find that they weren’t the only ones in attendance for this impromptu meeting.

Sergeant Asstor gave the detectives a sideways stink-eye as they came alongside him and stood at attention in the middle of Bogo’s office. 

“Good, I don’t have to call for you two. I hate having to repeat myself. At ease.” All three mammals relaxed and refocused on the Chief.  “This afternoon’s interview with the freelance photographer who snapped those unauthorized crime scene photos didn’t net me nearly as much information as I was hoping for. What we do know now is that he received phone calls from someone telling him about the scenes approximately one day before each event, and another one hour before he arrived on scene to tell him the location. Cybercrime is backtracing the number, but I’m not optimistic it will lead to a name. The one quote I took from him was his contact’s assurance that he had ‘a lot of work coming to him.’” Bogo took his glasses off and let them drop on his desk. “This morning’s photo-op wasn’t going to be the last.”  

Though the unspoken worry had been hanging in the air since the call had come in about the second murder, having it confirmed so concretely gave all of them pause.

The African ass rolled his shoulders and stood just a little straighter, “There is a demonstrable link between both locations, the first victim, and the Big Cartel. I am confident that it’s no coincidence.”

“And what about the second victim?” Judy asked, earning a glare from the Sergeant.

“We haven’t vetted Preston Peary’s background fully yet, but I’m certain there’ll be a connection there.”

Nick tsked and shook his head, diverting Asstor’s ire towards him. “Everyone in Tundratown has some kind of link to the Bigs, so that’s just playing ‘Six Degrees of Separation’. No, we meant Daniel Fields, the mouse who was entombed inside Ms. Carcallie. What’s the link to him?”

Asstor’s ears flagged in obvious uncertainty briefly before again shooting back up in annoyance. He swung his eyes down to the copy of the casefile notes in his hooves, scanning intensely until his face broke into a long and wide smile.

“He was hopped up on enough drugs to down Officer Trunkaby. I’d venture that his dealer was one of the cartel’s middle-mammals in Little Rodentia.”

“Fitting the evidence to your theory rather than the other way around?” Judy clicked her tongue. “Major Friedkin would be so disappointed.”

“Enough.” Judy shrank slightly and focused her attention back forward at Chief Bogo, who was looking less than amused at the snark being shuttled back and forth between the three mammals in front of him. “To give such biting commentary surely means you two have an alternative theory to pitch. Let’s hear it.”

Judy glanced at Nick, who nodded. She took a deep breath. “We will acknowledge the apparent ties to the Big Cartel present in these crimes, though they don’t seem to be the strongest link between the murders that we’ve determined.”

Nick continued. “The common thread is how the victims are displayed.” He set out the crime scene photos as well as copies of the Thimbul works. “In both cases, the victims have been displayed as near exact replicas of paintings by John Thimbul, a Zootopian artist. The first victim, Ms. Carcallie, was affianced to Jamal Shabal, a notable art critic who posted a less than flattering piece on Thimbul’s work.”

Judy picked up from there. “As Sergeant Asstor pointed out,” she nodded to the scowling mammal beside them, “we’ve only just received an official ID on our third victim, and we are still waiting on information on Mr. Fields. Still, the choice of staging locations, two prominent public art displays, along with the particular demographic details of the victims themselves, leads us to believe the killer is very familiar with Mr. Thimbul’s work; enough so we believe there may be a direct connection between the artist and killer.” 

Nick finished confidently, “We’re looking to move forward with investigating this local artist and his artwork. Given that this mammal or mammals are looking to carry out more killings, it seems likely any future ones would follow the pattern we’ve confirmed.”

Sergeant Asstor scoffed while looking at the two diminutive officers. His mini-outburst was met by a much louder burst of air. He turned to find the Chief staring levelly at him while drumming his hooves on his desk. Bogo maintained his subtle glare until Asstor dipped his head down. He turned his head to take all three in. “Both theories have merit, but they both have holes too.” 

Nick and Judy knew there were flaws with their theory; they were also accustomed to Bogo’s seeming inability to be pleased, so they simply nodded. Asstor was not so accustomed, and bristled but wisely remained quiet.

“Since both plans are equally plausible, I feel they should both be pursued. Sergeant Asstor,” the equid snapped to attention, “You’ll work the Big angle. Coordinate with major Crimes and Gangland so you know what you’re getting into and don’t trip up any of their operations.” The African ass snapped a salute. He spared time for one last sneer at Nick and Judy before departing.

Once the door was shut, Bogo focused on his two smallest officers. “Obviously, you two will focus on this art angle.” He heaved a heavy sigh as his eyes wandered to the photos that Nick had set on his desk earlier. “Given all the hallmarks of mob warfare, I wouldn’t be surprised if Asstor’s direction pans out in the end. And I would almost prefer it, to be honest.”

The Chief gathered the pictures together in a stack, leveled it against his desktop, and offered them back to Nick.

“With all due respect, sir,” Judy said evenly as her partner stepped back, “we would be remiss to ignore certain other hallmarks present, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Completely. And I have no doubt that you’ll pursue this angle with the same diligence that you always do; however—” He gave a sad kind of smile. “—in this particular case I would prefer that the outcome is that we are dealing with monsters that we already know rather than the alternative.”

The two officers saluted, gathered their files, and headed out. They had a killer to find, before anyone else suffered for their art.

Chapter Text

The Maus Haus Gallery was a fairly inconspicuous building, all things considered. It sat on the corner of a not terribly busy avenue and a zero traffic side street, opposite a vacant business front. It had the typical bold, stark, looping font sign over its doors, an open glass front with tantalizing art displays to attempt to draw interest to the works showcased within. Though Vol Gardens was home mostly to small sized mammals, the structure of the gallery itself was accommodating, if not catered, toward medium and larger sized mammals as well. Even megafauna like elephants and giraffes could sneak a peek at the works within through the many skylights in the ceiling of the open-concept studio.

Dolly Grainger was the curator. A giant rat of ironclad convictions and the fashion sense of Ms. Frizzle, she managed the studio the same way she managed her finances: down to the very last iota. From converting the once failed bank building to a studio all the way through advertising and soliciting creators for the loan of their works, she maneuvered herself and her resources like she was conducting a symphony orchestra, every note and rest accounted for. For all her hard work over the years, she had only seen meager success… that is, until now.

She drove around the studio on her electric scissor-lift cart; stopping periodically to flick a duster at an errant smudge, or to ask one of the various patrons if they had any questions. This was the busiest the studio had been in several months, and she was milking it for all it was worth. Notoriety from the two killings had summoned gawkers from all over the city, whose curiosity eventually compelled them to enter. She grinned at the press of mammals; there really was no such thing as bad publicity. 

“Ms. Grainger, do you think I could meet him, please?” Dolly turned to address the college-aged coyote that had just started rambling at her. Given her carefully ripped shirt and distressed jeans, she was probably an art student. “It’s just so incredible how evocative his work is and I have so many questions, I would just… it would make my whole semester!”

Dolly hesitated as she looked back at the hors d'oeuvres table; every time she’d sent a mammal over to see John Thimbul, that mammal had left immediately after. She was certain at least three of them would have gladly bought something. She turned back to the wide-eyed canid. “I’m afraid not. He’s—” She racked her brain for a split second. “—in the middle of his methodology. He pulls inspiration from his environment, and if we disturb him now...” She left her statement hanging while looking knowingly at the young mammal.

“Oh! Oh gosh, I wouldn’t want to interrupt him; I’ll just—”

Dolly rolled next to her and rested a paw on her shoulder. “That’s quite all right. Enjoy the gallery, and let me know if anything catches your interest.”

“Thank you, I couldn’t afford anything here. I was just hoping—”

“Oh, nonsense!” Dolly squeaked happily. “Just let me know and we can work out a deferred payment plan.” She had to fight to hide the predatory grin as the young student gushed her thanks and wandered deeper into the gallery. Impulse buyers were some of the best revenue streams, especially if they went the financing route. Banks and collection agencies made sure she was paid.

She caught a glimpse of two moderately well-dressed mammals making their way towards her; a solidly built rabbit doe only slightly taller than herself, and a lean but very healthy fox todd. The rabbit was openly disturbed by the imagery surrounding her. Not surprising, since most of that species had no stomach for strong imagery. The fox on the other paw was looking around the studio with a calculating eye. He wasn’t necessarily casing the gallery, but he was certainly not here for the art.

Dolly parked her cart by the nearest wall and leapt down quickly. She wove with practiced finesse through the crowd of mammals to intercept them.

“Can I help you two?” Her tone was devoid of the sales-silk she used on most mammals; these two she wanted out as soon as possible.

The fox grinned a Cheshire smile at her, clearly hearing her intent. “Certainly. I’m Wilde, and this is Hopps. We’d like to meet with Mr. Thimbul. If you could point him out for us that would be great.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Thimbul is indisposed at the moment. You can call back and I will see if I can schedule a meeting.” 

The duo surreptitiously pulled something from their back pockets and hung them from their breast pockets: a pair of gold shields with a star in the middle of each.

The rabbit leveled a flat stare at Dolly. “We insist.”

The rat had to school her features to hide her excitement; the notoriety of the murders was one thing, but having the ZPD come down would stay in the news cycle for weeks. “I see. Follow me then.”

Dolly turned with a casual wave of her paw. Judy and Nick followed close at her heels as she wove her way back through the throng of guests. Judy scanned the crowd of gallery patrons as it gave her something to focus on other than the violent images that dominated the canvases. A lot of the attending mammals reminded her of going to Fun-Houses and Carnival Side-Show attractions at the various county fairs as a kit. So many of them seemed to be here simply for the shock value. The few who were apparently there for the art were nearly as disturbing, waxing poetic about contrasts and themes while waving UV pen-lights at a picture of an eviscerated elephant. The now familiar lettering of Old Volish lit up beneath the beams, and the mammals crowed with delight to see its fluorescent glow for themselves.

John Thimbul had assumed the posture of a wallflower by the drink and appetizers table, arms crossed and shoulders hunched while his eyes darted around at the milling mammals. If not for the larger-than-life publicity photos dotting the gallery, Judy would have assumed he was part of the staff. The giant rat wore a well-used painter’s smock over regular business casual clothes as well as an almost pained expression on his face. Judy assumed that someone who utilized such dramatic images in his art would be just eating up all this attention; much to her surprise, he more seemed to be internally crawling in his own skin. Not an attention hog so much as a cornered animal, desperate for a chance at escape.

Nick and Judy were about to introduce themselves when Dolly piped up first. “John, these two police officers would like to speak to you.” Her words cut through the murmur of the crowd like a knife, and suddenly all attention was on the four of them.

Judy watched as John Thimbul shrank even further into himself from the sudden attention. “Mr. Thimbul?” She smiled at his nod out of reflex. “I’m Detective Hopps, and this is Detective Wilde. We’d like to speak to you if you have somewhere private we could go.”

“There’s an office above the studio. You can use that.” Dolly set off at a brisk march. She was halfway to the stairs when she realized John hadn’t moved. 

She turned to see him pensively scan the gallery before setting his drink down. “If it’s all the same to you two, maybe we could talk at the station instead?”

There wasn’t a ‘please’ at the end of his sentence, but they both heard it as though it had been spoken through a loudspeaker. They nodded and gestured for John to come between them when Dolly zipped in front of him.

“John, dear, what are you doing?” she asked directly into his ear in a saccharine sweet voice. She gave him a forced but patient smile as she caught his eyes. “You can’t leave your own showing. They won’t stay if you go now. Mammals want to see the genius creator, you see?”

“Yes, I do see,” he whispered back sotto voce. “I see gawkers at a train wreck; scavengers picking at my art’s infamy, rather than learning the meaning behind it. I’m not interested in catering to mammals like that.” He looked to the two detectives again. “Whenever you’re ready.”

They again began moving toward the door when a collared peccary shoved a trotter in between them all to get at the snack table by the wall. His odor and six-inch mohawk styled fur would have been reason enough to give him a wide berth if they’d had any warning at all he was in the mood for refreshments. He gave a gruff snort and “One side” as he barreled through. Both Nick and Judy gave the typical heated glares, though they chose not to engage with the impolite mammal. John gave a contemptuous sniff, but also said nothing. He passed behind the pig to continue following Judy and Nick to the door just as the peccary abruptly hip-checked him and sent John sprawling across the floor.

“Oh sorry! I didn't see you down there!” he said with a laugh and took a sip of his freshly poured drink.

Nick helped the artist back to his feet while Dolly stormed over to the mohawked mammal. “I’m not surprised; the only thing you’ve looked at since stepping in my gallery is the buffet table.” She raked the peccary with her eyes. “Not that you’re in any dire need of a meal.”

The miniature porcine snorted and glanced around at the murmurs and chuckles being directed his way. “Only marginally good thing about this so-called art event is the drink recipe. Has a lot more punch to it than this hack ever will.”

Judy stepped in front of him, ears ramrod straight and posture subtly shifting gears for a fight. “If your main reason for attending this showing was the food, sir, it appears you’re quite full of it. I suggest you seek dessert elsewhere. Now.”

The pig gave her a surly grunt as he rolled his shoulders back, and Judy felt the presence of her partner draw up behind her. “Crude behavior isn’t a crime, but verbal assault of a police officer is. Choose your next words very carefully.”

The peccary finally clued into the mood of the room. He gave a derisive snort, spun on his trotters, and left.

Dolly sneered after the swine. “Odious little parasite.” She huffed and turned to John and the two Detectives. “Well, now that that is out of the way shall we head up?”

John looked pensively around the gallery; every mammal was looking at him and the Detectives. “I meant it earlier. I’d rather head to the station; I’ll be able to focus better.”

Dolly blinked and twitched her nose before plastering a sweet but clearly forced smile onto her face. “Whatever you think is best for you and your work I will support.”

“Thanks for understanding.” He followed behind Judy and Nick with a little wave back at her. “I’ll try and make it back before you close up for the night.”

“See that you do.” Dolly nodded imperiously, then spun around and began working the crowd once more, though her gaze lingered on his withdrawing figure.

Maybe it would be fine, after all. She wouldn’t have to divide her attention now. Unfettered by any possible reservations, she could turn her methods of persuasion up a level or two. These mammals would learn the depth of his true genius, and she was just the one to teach them.

John Thimbul remained silent as they made their way to the car. Judy still had difficulty reconciling the shocking imagery of the works in the gallery with this, dare she say, mousishly meek mammal.

The moment he was seated though, he drew out a small paper pad and pencil and immediately began sketching. Judy glanced at her partner who simply shrugged, then climbed in the car. Judy slowly pulled the cruiser out from the undersized parking spot and maneuvered carefully out of the narrow street onto the main avenue heading back to Precinct One.

There was silence in the car for a little while save for the short messages coming through now and again over the radio. She adjusted the rearview mirror slightly to glance back at the painter in the backseat now feverishly scribbling at his sketchbook.

The image she glimpsed in the mirror was in its rawest form, but she could still clearly make out the head of a porcine creature. What caught her attention most was an eruption from the beast’s mouth. 

-HONK-Skreeeeech-

“WATCH IT, HOPPS!”

Judy wrenched her eyes away from the shocking image taking form in the back of the cruiser, and back onto the road ahead. Her heart was racing as she pulled into a streetside parking spot; whether it was from the near accident, or the violent picture Mr. Thimbul was creating, she wasn’t sure.

“Good idea; I’ll drive.” Nick unbuckled and moved around the front of the car.

Judy looked over her shoulder at John Thimbul, and saw he was almost completely undisturbed by the near accident. She was again startled by a rap on the window. She looked out to find Nick staring at her meaningfully. She unbuckled and reluctantly scooted across the dash to the shotgun position as Nick opened the door to take the wheel.

John must have finally noticed the lack of movement, because he glanced up from his forming nightmare and asked, “Are we there already?”

“No, sir. Just needed to adjust our route to avoid an accident.” Judy scowled at the jab as Nick pulled out into traffic once more. “It’ll be a few minutes more yet.”

“Oh, good.” 

He immediately went back to scribbling. Now that she didn’t have to divide her attention, Judy twisted herself around to more directly regard the art-rat.

“That must be difficult,” she said evenly, trying to avoid the now visible rack of ribs that had come into creation on the pad though her eyes gravitated toward it with morbid curiosity each time she pulled them away. “Drawing in a moving vehicle.”

“Rough sketches are just that; I can be as crude as I want, as long as I record the idea while it’s still sharp in my mind.” He made several violent strokes on the paper. “The idea always evolves during the creation process, but this way I have a tactile connection to the moment when inspiration struck.”

“Do you ever take a break from all this… ah… I’ll say creation?”

“I don’t choose when inspiration strikes. Have to take advantage when it does, or risk missing the opportunity.”

Nick gave Judy a sideways glance and cleared his throat loudly. “Well, you’ll need to take at least a little break; we’re about a block from the station.”

Judy was relieved when John looked up at that, then closed the little sketch book and put it away. It stayed closed and unseen even as they all walked into the front doors of the station, but the image contained within lingered behind her eyes. Even witnessing its coming into being wasn’t one she wanted stuck now in her mind alongside the bodies that seemed inspired by others that had come before it.

Benjamin Clawhauser’s jovial smile, of course, helped in dissipating at least some of the sour mood as they approached the desk. “Hey you two! I don’t see any cuffs on your friend, so I’m guessing you don’t need me to contact booking?”

Nick could still sense his partners unease, and swaggered over to Ben’s kiosk. “Yup. Our friend here is a subject matter expert, and we need to interview him. You just let us know if one of the Size-class-2 rooms is available. Hopps,” he turned towards her with a lazy smile, “you want to head to Cyber and see if you can get the feed from the database piped up for us?”

Judy veered away, glad for an excuse to have a few moments away from the creator of those grotesque pictures. “Sounds good. And I’m going to just grab a few waters for us while we talk. Didn’t get one of those drinks at the gallery, did we?”

Nick saluted. “Alright then. See you in there.”

“Room 4B, Hopps!” Clawhauser called after her.

“Got it!”

She paid Cyber an abbreviated visit with the room and requested case file number to feed up to the system therein. A few grumbles from the techs about the short notice and that task was complete. Judy swung back toward the offices and breakroom for the bottles of water. She was surprised upon entering to find a face that she didn’t usually see in this particular context.

“Oh… hey, Abbs.”

Abby spared her a brief, neutral glance from the soda machine as she jabbed at her selection particularly hard. “Hopps.”

Judy’s ears sank as the conversation she had with Nick earlier bubbled up in her mind. She didn’t think the discussion with her rabbit coworker had been that contentious, though she did have a hard time reading Abby, what with her ears never moving an inch. Not to mention her bad habit of laser focusing on casework rather than social nuances. It wouldn’t serve her, her partner, or the case they were embroiled in to go antagonizing Abby now. Maybe she could rustle up some kind of olive branch… that is, if Abby would entertain letting her offer one.

Judy moved up to the vending machine behind the swamp rabbit just as her drink of choice fell into the bin. She grabbed it up, popped the tab, and started chugging.

“Did you, uhh… miss your morning cuppa? Or something?” Judy asked carefully as she stepped up to make her own selection.

Abby’s ears twitched, making the many rings jangle in a not at all cheery way. “I was distracted and let the ice melt. It’s just nasty when it gets like that.”

“Right. Of course.” Judy scuffed her foot on the floor and then craned her neck. She took a breath and said, “Alright, listen… not that it’s any substitute for a bribe drink or anything but if you’re interested, that artist guy John Whatshisface is here for an interview, so…”

“Whaaaat?” Abby spun around with eyes enormous and a grin that would have put every Beagles groupie to shame. She grasped Judy around her shoulders. “John Thimbul is here? Today? Now?”

Judy cringed. “...yes?”

“Squeeeeeee!”

Abby spun on her heels and zipped out of the breakroom at breakneck speed. Judy stood blinking for a few seconds at the reaction, then braced herself as the whirlwind returned and screeched to a halt back in front of her.

“Which room?”

“4B. But don’t…!” Abby gave another excited squeak and bolted out again before Judy could finish.

She sighed and smoothed her ears back. Seemed like this was just going to be one of those days that was never going to end. Her transaction with the vending machine complete, she followed in her coworker’s wake, half expecting that there would be scorch marks on the tile.

Judy arrived at the interview room to hear Abby excitedly chattering with Mr. Thimbul.

“...has to be Wistful! The offset framing of the mourners versus the mammal in the open coffin really forces you to focus on the whole picture, rather than any one element.”

Abby hardly took a breath as she spoke, launching from one topic to another. The rat artist meanwhile had a rather stunned expression at the attention he was receiving. “Yes, well... I had an instructor at NorthWestern who insisted that a piece’s focus should always be a single point, but all the pieces he used to demonstrate that were so bland. When I really got into formal study in painting, most of the most outstanding and memorable pieces in art history have an offset focus: The Scream by Edvard Muncher and Starry Night by Van Goffer for example.” 

Judy noticed that the more he talked about the nuances of art, the more animated and mammal he became. She could almost imagine some of her own family talking just as excitedly about an upcoming Tractor Pull or the latest Mouse-Car drivers.

Nick caught her eye from his spot at the far side of the table where he was sitting. He leaned back in his chair and clasped his paws behind his head as his smile deepened.

Well, this backfired spectacularly, Judy thought as she set the water bottles on the table and went over to join him.

“Your doing, I assume?” he said to her as he nodded at the two mammals still passionately conversing at the other end of the table.

Judy huffed and crossed her arms. “Just wanted to try and smooth things over. Serves me right for trying to be nice.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. If you want to place some kind of value on this, I’d say it has the same weight as a month’s worth of my sugar-slush bribes. Working relationship restored, and I’m willing to bet Abby would gladly walk on coals for you if you asked.”

“I suppose the mammal of a million favors would know something about that.” Judy pursed her lips as her ears flagged slightly. “All the good will in the world won’t save us from the Chief if we can’t get started. Think maybe you could… you know… hurry this along? A little?”

Nick theatrically rolled his eyes and stood up. “Oh sure, make me be the bad guy.” He walked over to the two now quite excited mammals. “I really hate to break this up, but we can’t monopolize the interview room. If you two could exchange digits, I’m certain there are venues much more conducive to discussing art than an 8x8 sound-board box.”

John looked around. “I don’t know. No distractions, no interruptions, just you and your muse. I could get a lot of work done if I had a studio built like this.”

Abby’s earrings jingled as she huffed a sigh. “As much as I know it will just inflate his ego, Nick’s right.” She stood up and handed a business card to John. “I’d love to pick your brain about composition and palette sometime. And if you’re serious about a studio like this, I can point you toward the contractors who build these rooms for the city.”

He swiftly pulled his phone out and entered the numbers at the bottom of the card, then sent a quick text. Abby squeaked and binkied slightly when her cell phone buzzed. Judy tried not to flinch at the jangling noise coming off her coworker’s ears. “Oh, this is great!” She put her phone away and beamed at John. “I promise to only use this great power for good.” She looked over at Judy and mouthed, Thank you!

Judy gave a strained smile back as Abby left. 

She turned and regarded the rat. As in the studio, he didn’t strike her as the ‘creator of nightmare-fuel’; just another introverted rodent. But then again, a wide-eyed ewe once tried to tear Zootopia apart via species warfare. Nothing was ever exactly as it appeared.

Nick settled into one of the available seats and waited for Judy to take the other. For all people were snide or derisive about him due to his nonchalance around his friends in the force, he took his duties to the mammals of the city very seriously. As such, she could always count on him to be nothing but professional when they had a mammal sitting across from them.

“I imagine you’re up on the latest news coming out of the art community, Mr. Thimbul,” Nick said, and dragged the console over to himself. “Considering it has to do with you and your paintings.”

“The recent hordes that have descended on the gallery have made mention aplenty, yes.” John wrinkled his nose and twisted his fingers within clasped paws. “I haven’t sought out whatever fabricated stories they’ve been referencing. It all sounds very far-fetched, from what I’ve heard.”

“The saying normally goes, ‘art imitates life’.” Judy began pulling crime scene photos up on the mounted wall monitor. “In this case, death is imitating art. Your art.”

John’s eyes slowly widened as his gaze fell upon the photos in front of him. His mouth parted and nose twitched, lips forming words that were nonetheless not given any voice.

Judy watched, and again her expectations were dashed as instead of callous disinterest, John Thimbul reacted with growing horror.

“What... what the hell is this?!” His head began jerking around as his tail lashed behind him.

“Mr. Thimbul, I need you to calm down.” Judy used her best parental tone.

“No! What is this?! This isn’t my work! This isn’t—” Judy winced as his voice became higher and higher until all she could hear was a near continuous high-pitched squeaking.

Nick was out of his seat and moved Thimbul’s whole chair into one of the room’s corners. He thrust one of the water bottles into the rat’s paw and said firmly, “Drink, breathe, drink again.”

In the absence of the intense stimuli, John followed the instructions exactly. His breathing began to even out, and he stopped squeaking. Nick stood back and allowed the rat to regain his calm. Once John was more relaxed, Nick returned to his seat. He noticed Judy’s questioning look. “My last employer had a lot of rodent clientele. I had to learn the signs and best practices for dealing with panic attacks. In this case, the corner is safe; nothing can get to him from behind so all he has to worry about is what’s in front of him.”

Judy nodded, honestly a little shaken by how visceral Thimbul’s reaction to the photos was. She needed to reassess her view of Thimbul if she wanted any results moving forward. Considering his usual choice of subject matter, it didn’t seem likely that viewing the case photos would elicit such a reaction. She decided to stick with words from here on out instead.

“There have to date been three murders. The first two, Bridget Carcaille and Daniel Fields, were murdered and displayed together in a manner reminiscent of your piece, Triumph, actually placed upon a metal sculpture of the same name at an open-air exhibit outside the Palms.” John chattered his teeth in agitation. “The third victim, Preston Peary, was displayed similar to your Phoenix Rising painting from the gates of another open-air exhibit; this time in Tundratown.”

John was quiet for a moment. “I know, or know of, Peary. He does landscapes, portraits, still lifes. Nothing special, but nothing bad. Got a break when Bellwether commissioned him to do that gaudy thing she had hung in the City Hall foyer.” He huffed and looked at the floor. “Now he’s the next Johannes Vermeercat… just ask him.”   

Nick grimaced. “Difficult thing for anyone to do now.”

“Right… of course, sorry…” John looked abashed for a moment and gave a huff of aggravation. “It was… frustrating. I lost two bids to him for private commissions; corporate ‘Big-Mammal’ gifts, the kind of stuff the rich like to splurge on so they can show off how cultured they are.”

Judy jotted down a few notes of her own. “Anything else you can think of?”

John’s paw squeezed the water bottle and made it crackle in his grip. “Did you also say Daniel Fields?”

She nodded. “I did.”

“Danny’s dead?”

Nick and Judy exchanged a significant look.

“Did you know him personally?” Nick’s voice was soft but firm.

John’s eyes didn’t track anything in particular. “He’s... he was a part of the cleaning crew Dolly hires. They come in twice a month to give the gallery a top-to-bottom cleaning. We’d talk about my art, his recovery, being raised in traditional Volish families.” His voice seemed almost distant. “You know how sometimes they say that someone has an old soul? That was Danny. Wise, and kind, and… and…”

“...a friend?” Nick suggested carefully.

“I don’t have friends.” John swallowed hard, nose twitching. The water bottle raised to his lips again for a few more gulps before he let it back down again. “But… he was close.”

Judy nodded and said, “I’m sorry for your loss, sir.”

“Why him? He never did anything to anyone!” John pushed back in his seat, taking comfort in the corner. “Why did this happen to him? How?” 

Judy rose to this all too familiar challenge. “The answer to the last question is the only one we have, and I would spare you those details. The first two are the ones we need answers to, and it is our hope that you can help us in that regard.” She switched the image on the monitor to show Daniel’s employment photo. “Help us understand how he fits into these pictures, your pictures, and we will hopefully be one step closer to finding out who killed all of them.”

John blinked at her, his eyes dropping to study the floor intensely. “I don’t… I’m not sure how…” His nose twitched as he put a paw to his head, attempting to wrangle the disorganized thoughts within. “His job was everything to him. He wasn’t slapdash with anything, ever. It was a singular point of pride for him and… and hope even. Like the deeper he cleaned the things around him that it was also cleaning up his past, scrubbing away his own mistakes somehow.”

Nick scribbled a few notes. “When was the last time you saw Mr. Fields, either professionally or outside of work?”

He fidgeted, again crackling the nearly empty water bottle as his face screwed up in concentration. “I think it might have been… it was a Wednesday, they always came on Wednesdays late. Or is it early… after midnight, anyway. I stay up painting, I don’t ever look at the clock, but… I think that’s when they come. Dolly would know better, she keeps records of everything…”

Judy breathed a sigh of relief at something to go on other than a distraught artist. “We’ll follow up with her, sir.” She shut off the monitor and stood up, joined by Nick. “Thank you for your time. You may not realize it, but sometimes the smallest details can lead to the biggest breaks in a case.”

John nodded dully, and stood from the chair on unsteady legs. He set the water bottle back on the table and picked up the sketchbook he’d left there. His paw hesitated, hovering over his latest sketch for a second as his eyes traced over the rough lines. He looked like he might be sick at any moment.

“Could we offer you a lift back to the gallery?” Nick asked.

“I think I’d prefer to walk, although…” He fidgeted the sketchbook in his paws and then looked at them both in turn. “This seems like very little in the way of help. Is there something else I can do? To… I don’t know, watch for?”

Judy mustered a reassuring smile. “Just keep an eye and an ear out for anyone who seems... unusually interested in your art.”

John sighed. “That describes more mammals than you know.”

Nick gave a smirk. “It’s your art, and your fans. You’ll know the difference.” 

They escorted Thimbul out of the precinct. He turned and gave them a tired smile, then headed out into the quickly deepening twilight of the city.

The pair silently headed to their shared cubicle to begin preparing their notes and reports. 

“Well, I’d say that netted us some good information, wouldn’t you?” Nick asked as he slumped into his chair and pulled his tie out. He waited for a response from his partner, though it was not forthcoming. “Fluff?”

“Mmhmm.” Judy made a humming sound in tepid agreement, her eyes still roving over her notepad.

Nick smirked and assumed his best TV personality voice. He put an imaginary microphone to his face and said, “John Thimbul, the mammal, the mystery, the artist! Tell the mammals at home your first impressions, little lady. And don’t hold back any juicy details.”

He stuck the invisible microphone in her face now as she finally looked up to give him a dirty look. “You want my impression of the mammal who’s somehow inspired three murders? Fine.” She spun her seat around to face him and swatted his paw away. “He’s not what I envisioned for someone who creates such grotesque art, okay? He all but defined mousish, even though his work positively screams in your muzzle. He,” she paused as she ran out of steam, “he remembered the cleaning mammal who came to his place of work. I don’t know the mammals who clean up around here, and we’re supposed to notice details. What does that say about us?”

Nick sighed and lowered his paw. “It doesn’t say anything about us, Judy. We aren’t bad mammals for not knowing the cleaning crew’s life stories any more than John is because someone is perverting his art.”

Judy’s ears flagged as she slumped in her chair. “I suppose. It would just… be easier, though.”

“What would?” Nick had a sneaking suspicion, but he knew this was something Judy needed to articulate in order to confront it.

“If he was a jerk. Easier to dislike both the mammal and the stuff he makes. You know?”

“Yeah, I get that. But I know something that will be made easier by his lack of jerkiness.”

Judy cracked a tiny smile. “What’s that?”

“Nailing the monsters that are terrorizing him. Much easier doing that for the non-jerk mammals, right?”

That got a real smile from the rabbit. “Right! We just need to—”

Brrrreeeeeeep! Brrrreeeeeeep! Brrrreeeeeeep!

They both started when their desk phone rang. The two stared at it for a second and then rock-paper-scissored for the pick-up. Rock beat scissors and Nick picked up the phone after the tiniest of groans.

“ZPD Precinct One, this is Detective Wilde.”

<Officer Wilde?> The voice at the other end of the phone was familiar, despite the thick emotional tone that was weighing it down. <It’s Jamal Shabal. You asked me to call you if any new facts came up.>

“Just a moment Mr. Shabal, I’m putting you on speaker for my partner.” He ensured the speaker was on and they both had their notepads out and recorders on. “Alright, sir, go ahead.”

<Allow me first to apologize for the tardiness of this call, but I didn’t learn about this until earlier today. I,> there was the sound of a ragged breath, <I haven’t been as diligent in checking my phone messages, since the one person I want to hear from isn’t calling ever again.>   

“Completely understandable, Mr. Shabal,” Judy said, pen tapping lightly against her notepad with just a hint of impatience. “There’s no need to apologize. What new information do you want to tell us now?”

There was a sniffle from the other end of the line. <-ahem- Right. This morning at 2:15 am, someone left a very cryptic message using a voice-altering program on my phone, mentioning ‘A new up and comer whose art is to die for!’, and that I, ‘need to get in on the ground floor of this one right away!’ I’m no stranger to receiving calls from the occasional drunken nut, but this was… eerie. Those were almost some of the exact phrases I used facetiously in my write-up on John Thimbul.>

Judy absently scribbled as she listened. “You said they used a voice altering program. Are you certain?”

Jamal snorted a laugh. <Yes, unless the robot warlord Mega-Trunk is making art recommendations now. Everyone needs to eat, I suppose.>

“Which phone did they leave the message?” Nick asked. “Was it your cell? A landline?”

<It was my work number. I have an office at the ‘Gnu-Yorker’, but my job specifically requires me to be on the move so I have a code to remote access the voicemail logs. I notified the office to save the logs, so you should be able to swing by to pick them up.>

“We’ll do that,” Judy said, and flipped to a new page. “Is there a particular contact we should talk to for this request?”

Jamal rattled off the names and phone numbers for two administrative assistants and their normal office hours. Given the lateness of the hour, Judy and Nick wouldn’t make it to the Gnu-Yorker before they closed the building for the night. The voicemail recording would just have to wait until the morning.

“Thank you for alerting us, Mr. Shabal,” Judy said as she tossed her notepad onto her desk. “We’ll notify you of any updates as soon as we learn more.”

<I appreciate it.> There was a pause, and an audible gulp from the other end. <Am… am I safe? The way this guy talked, and with what happened to Bridget—>

“You’re completely in the right to be concerned for your safety, Mr. Shabal. We are also.” Judy made a motion at Nick and he jumped back to his computer as she continued. “What we’ll do is post an unmarked police car outside your home for the next week. To ensure you aren’t being targeted for some sort of violence while this case resolves. Would that be an acceptable arrangement?”

Jamal heaved a sigh. <Thank you. This has been harrowing, to say the least.>

Nick gave Judy a thumbs up and she said, “We certainly understand, sir. Lock your doors and get some rest. The unmarked vehicle will be parked outside your home in the street within the hour. Let us know if you receive any additional strange messages.”

<I will. Thank you, detectives.>

“Stay safe, sir,” Nick said as he rolled back to Judy’s desk and the phone. “We’ll be in touch.”

Judy hung up the call and consulted her notes. “I wish we could listen to that voicemail tonight.”

“Same,” Nick agreed, and tapped a claw on her notepad. “But I think he gave us the most important bit to think about already.”

Judy nodded. “Another reference to Mr. Thimbul and his paintings.”

Nick nodded back. “Whoever this guy is, he’s clearly obsessed with our new artist friend.”

Judy turned her chair and drew up the case files on her computer screen. “Three murders, staged to resemble, almost to the letter, Mr. Thimbul’s paintings. They’re displayed in locations meant to showcase art, and the victims…”

“One a mouse who cleaned the gallery his paintings are being shown in, another a rival artist he lost work to, and the last…”

“...the significant other of the art critic who publicly criticized his paintings.” Judy stood from her chair so abruptly it tipped for a second before landing back on the floor. She started to pace. “The mammal gives an unpopular opinion and it gets his girlfriend killed. Is this Zootopia or Moosecow? If mammals start living in fear of expressing themselves, then what has happened to the city?”

Nick quirked an eyebrow. “The same thing that would have happened if a rat is denied the right to express himself through painting. It’s just two sides of the same coin, really.”

“Except someone is trying to rig it so Mr. Thimbul’s side of the coin lands face up more often.” Judy stopped pacing and looked back at her computer. “But who? It’s clearly not something he approves of, so it’s unlikely it’s anyone he’d associate closely with.”

“Which would be a lot simpler to narrow the field down if it were, let’s be honest. Did you see how flustered he got with Abby? How many mammals does the guy actually associate closely with?”

“Yeah, really.” Judy leaned against her desk and chewed her lip. “Even those aren’t safe either. Mr. Fields never hurt him, and this lunatic killed him too. Why?”

Nick yawned. “All things to pick up with tomorrow. Maybe we’ll be able to glean some more to work with from that voicemail and get a few answers instead of more questions.”

In contrast to their visit to the offices of The Sun-Bearer, The Gnu-Yorker building was everything that Nick and Judy expected a reputable business office would be. Its staff even more so, as they were greeted by a legal representative for the magazine who handed the recordings over with only an official certification. They actually spent more time in the chain store picking up Abby’s morning offering than at the offices.

The warped recording played over Abby’s speakers between loud slurps of the slushie. As Jamal had said, the voice distortion was significant, making a few words almost unintelligible. A written copy was transcribed and printed for them to add to the casefile.

“Good morning Mr. Shabal,” an overly saturated digital voice spoke while garbled noise in the background buzzed annoyingly. “I understand you are the ‘Mammal with the pulse of the Zootopian art scene’. Well I’ve got a scoop on a new up-and-comer whose work is to die for! You’ll certainly want to get in on the ground floor of this one.”

-click-

“Hoo boy, this is going to be a hot mess to sift through,” Abby groaned as she handed the paper copies over to Nick and Judy.

Judy smiled. “It’s okay; we know this isn’t one of those procedural shows where there’s a 15 second montage of random technology and the finished clue pops out like toast.” 

“I wish.” Abby sighed. “It’ll be a couple of days at best.”

Nick gave her a reassuring pat on her shoulder. “Do your best. Can’t conjure magic every time.”

She smirked. “I’ll give you both a ring if I manage to pull myself out of a hat.”

Judy tensed subtly at the reminder of the treatment rabbits were often subjected to during the height of the Vaudeville performance era. It was jarring to her, to hear it referenced so casually.

“Give us a ring either way,” she said, and turned back toward the door before her face gave her away. She’d managed what amounted to a small miracle getting back on Abby’s good side the other day; no reason to let a verbal gaff undo that now. “Come on, Nick… let’s get back to it.”

Nick nodded to Abby, then followed his partner out into the hall. She was beating a dignified, but hasty retreat. As he caught up, he played the conversation in Abby’s office over in his head to see what might have soured her so suddenly.  He figured it out by the time he came up beside her.

“Judy.” She tensed at his use of her proper name. “I’m sorry about that. You’d think a fox would be more sensitive to that deep of a cultural scar. Abby using it was no excuse for me not to call her on it the moment it was said.”

“Not like it’s something I’ve personally experienced,” Judy mumbled.

“Well no one’s ever hacked my tail off to use as a fashion accessory; doesn’t mean I like being reminded of Lucrecia van Pelt every time someone calls me ‘Pelt’.” He glanced down at his partner and then at his watch. “Shift’s nearly done. Wanna swing by McGruff’s and wax poetic about the ‘Good-ol-Days’?”  

Judy gave a grateful half smile. “It’s like you read my mind.”

Moonlight cascaded down over the open construction site below. The gridwork of the steel I-beams above served as a useful guide. Very useful indeed, for such auspicious work.

Every few feet, with a look overhead to gauge that the angle was just right, a mammal paused and drove a stainless steel spike into the hard, packed earth with a pneumatic hammer. On to the next, same sequence of motions. The work tonight was tedious, but necessary. So very, very necessary.

Once the final stake had been driven in, the mammal hefted up the hammer and returned to the large panel van parked at the entrance to the building site. There was no foot traffic this close to the site at this time of the night to worry about. Even if there was, who would question a truck at a construction site?

Bundle by painstaking bundle, the mammal unloaded a number of cylindrical, plastic wrapped items. Each bundle had been prepared, meticulously marked so that setting them atop the newly driven spikes would take as little time as possible. It was sad, really, that this part had to be so rushed, that they could barely take any time at all to appreciate the marvelous work in all its magnificent glory.

At least the preparation had taken long enough to give some bit of satisfaction. Wonderful hours, those were. And they were about to come to fruition.

The mammal went around the circle with the bundle trailing behind on a handcart. As they came to a spike, the plastic was torn away and the cylinder set over the spike. At the next, the same thing. And again. And again.

The methodical pattern gave them time to muse over their work, the delight that grew exponentially with each new piece. It was inconceivable that the excitement they had during the first piece could ever be eclipsed, and yet, here they were in a cloud of what could only be described as euphoria. 

They only wished there had been a better medium to share their work; Jiro may have been a social parasite, but his command of the camera was nearly as powerful as true art. He also ensured everyone could revel in the Artiste’s pieces. With his arrest, they’d had to sever any and all tenuous ties to the tabloid photographer. For now, they had to rely on Jamal and the ZPD to bring the audience, and hope someone saw and could appreciate their work. 

In what seemed like a blink, the work was finished. The mammal stood back only just a moment, taking in the marvel so lovingly displayed around them. The last item was set at the place that they stood: a cylindrical mirror.

They took care to sweep themselves backward out of the site, dusting over pawprints in the dirt, all the way back to the truck. With one last look in the side view mirror, they turned the key in the ignition, rolled inconspicuously out into the light traffic, and was gone.

Chapter Text

Judy didn’t even get the chance to get to the bullpen the next morning. Chief Bogo called her on her cell phone before she’d even made it out the door for her commute into the precinct. He instructed her to wait for Wolford to shuttle her directly to this morning’s crime scene. No sooner did she step outside than she was greeted by Wolford’s patrol cruiser and her only nominally conscious partner sitting in the back. She settled in without a word as her wolf colleague shuttled them off to whatever fresh hell was in store for them.

They were ferried to a Downtown community just South of the Rainforest district. Between the boarded-up shops and several buildings in various states of demolition or construction, Judy felt like she was driving through a warzone.

“Ah, ‘urban renewal’ and ‘gentrification’.” Judy had long since learned to detect the bite of cynicism in Nick’s voice. “Add a little ‘Gerbil-Mandering’ and you have a perfect trifecta of displaced low-income mammals.”

Judy allowed her partner to vent. “Do we have the address of the crime-scene?” It was a largely rhetorical question, but getting Wolford to start talking would keep Nick distracted from his growing diatribe on the failures of modern urban planning.

The wolf glanced back at Judy, a glint of chagrin in his eye. “It’s Hill Street Blues.”

Judy glanced over at Nick, suspecting a story was involved. “It’s everything I just said. The Blue-Water Condominiums on Hill Street West were built back in the Twenties as housing for dock managers. Time moved on, but management of the building kept the place solvent through long-term tenants and their policy of maintaining rent controlled pricing.”

Wolford turned up the street and picked up the story. “Right up until a new batch of housing regulations were passed by the District Aldermam. Stupid, unnecessary regulations specifically meant to break the bank for rent-controlled housing in the District. The Blues had to shut down and everyone was left homeless.”

“Then, swoosh!” Nick pantomimed a bird with his paws. “In came the developers to knock it down and put in some swanky new club or somesuch.”

Judy sighed in frustration. “That can’t be legal.”

“Oh it’s perfectly legal.” Wolford pulled up into a spot near a line of city emergency responder vehicles. “Amoral, unethical and cruel, but legal. The tenant’s association has been fighting in the courts with a battery of Class-Action suits. They managed to get the regs repealed, and the Aldermam who passed them is under investigation for taking kickbacks from the developers; but by then, The Blues had already been partly demo-ed.” 

Nick and Judy thanked their colleague for the ride and bid him goodbye as they steeled themselves for whatever they were about to walk into. This time they had to shoulder their way through a veritable swarm of reporters of varying species as they made their way from the street to the cordoned area where their newest puzzle piece was on display for them.

Or rather, puzzle pieces. Unlike the prior mock-ups that they’d borne witness to thus far in this case, this particular mammal’s remains were not unified in a singular sculpture. Rather, they’d been scattered in what could only very loosely be called a pattern around the construction area. Hunks of whoever this mammal once was had been snipped and pulled and rounded and tucked into very specific shapes made of bone and flesh and fur, then stuck atop steel stakes that had been driven into the ground. Eventually, they found one that might give some indication of the victim’s species: the head of a bear was set just off center from a shining metal cylinder perched on its end. The jaw had been wrenched until it was almost dislocated from the rest of the skull, and unlike the other sculptures, its eyes were completely missing. It stared sightless while the rest of its body hovered around it. As with the other scenes, there was a notable lack of blood; each piece of the meat puzzle shined with the same lacquered substance that kept the processes of decay at bay.

“How many days since the last one?” Nick wondered aloud as they donned gloves and began following the careful path around the spikes. “Six?”

“Five,” Judy corrected him, and paused at a particularly misshapen piece of what she could only assume was once a part of a limb. “The killer is escalating.”

Nick gave a grim nod and broke away from her. Judy held her place amongst the suspended gore around her and let her eyes do the walking instead. It felt like her stomach had dropped out of her, and she immediately regretted her decision not to grab that granola bar on her way out the door. Then again, it was questionable if she could have kept it down, given what she was witnessing.

“I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Judy turned her head to find Sergeant Asstor standing nearby, marveling in a disgusted kind of bewilderment at the bits and pieces of mammal situated all about. He gave a hard snort as his ears lay back. If he had any additional thoughts to add to his statement, he didn’t seem willing to share them unprompted.

“Good,” Nick gave a diffident huff as he stood next to his partner. “I’d hate to think what it would say about us or the city if any of us were used to this.”

The Sergeant snorted again and focused his attention on one of the many mammals putting out evidence markers rather than at any of the pieces of evidence that they were marking. “The gangs have gotten out of sorts before, in the past. Sent their own brand of grisly messages… I remember someone waking up with the head of their prized racing basilisk in their bed. But never… never anything like this.”

Nick’s ears flicked slightly. “Was that when Tawney’s Crew tried muscling in around Hyenahurst?”

Asstor snorted and cast a slightly distrustful side eye at the todd, then continued. “Naw; Tawney talked up shit like that, but she never had the ruthlessness for that kind of message. This was the ‘El-Gatto’ feud.”

Nick shivered slightly. “I’d heard about that through the grape-vine. ‘Course, I’d just made one of the stupidest decisions of my nearly very short life and was avoiding the shady side of the city.”

Judy wanted to get Nick refocused when she felt his tail thump against hers. The meaning was suddenly clear: Nick would field Asstor so Judy could work in peace. She chirred her teeth and flicked her ears at her partner before heading into the scene proper.

Judy stepped carefully around the outskirts of the scene. There were assorted footprints in the dirt, but those all belonged to the officers and the forensics teams. One of the initial pieces of data that they had provided to her and Nick on their way over was how the dusty ground had been meticulously swept—almost like it was a Buddhist sand garden. There were no prints when the foremam arrived and then left to call the authorities. The only prints that were present when the initial wave of officers arrived were his.

But there was a different type of track at the entrance to the site that had been marked: tire tracks. Given that there were no vehicles present in the site at the moment aside from those with belt treads, these very probably belonged to the killer’s vehicle. She gauged the width of the tracks—significant time spent on parking duty shifts allowed her a pretty good eye for at least vehicle sizes. She could ascertain that the vehicle wouldn’t belong to a mammal classified as megafauna—elephant, rhino, giraffe. The treads would have been much deeper and much wider if it had been. And there was an imperfection in the tread that didn’t seem to come from the terrain… a jagged patch that repeated in the right track over and over...

“Nick, can you come over here?” Judy glanced at her partner, who had broken away from his handling of Asstor and now seemed particularly distracted by the reflective post. “Something up?”

He licked his fangs in thought. “Maybe.” He began weaving back out of the macabre scene. “Or maybe down. You got something over there?”

She pointed at a spot on the ground as she dug out a marker flag from her back pocket. “Weird tire pattern, like maybe the at-home patch jobs you see on farm equipment sometimes.”

Nick nodded thoughtfully. “We’ll have a cast made. At least we’ll be able to narrow down the vehicle by wheel-base and tire size.”

“That’s what I was thinking. Bet Flash could hook us up with a breakdown of vehicle types that would match.” She glanced around to find Sergeant Asstor not far away and bearing down on one of the CSIs. “How did that all turn out, then?”

“Sergeant Hardhead seems willing to entertain the possibility that this is not, in fact, related to the Big Cartel or gang activity now.” Judy gave a faux gasp and Nick held up his paw. “I know, it’s an honest-to-God miracle. If he hasn’t already called it in to Bogo, then he’s going to very soon. We’ll see more of him, but at least our resources won’t be split chasing down half-baked theories.”

Judy shrugged and looked at the Sergeant. “It’s not that far-fetched, and he did make some compelling arguments about the first case. Dead wrong, of course, but still...”

“Yeah, still.” Nick sighed. “Is it wrong that I hate that we were right?”

Judy looked absently at the macabre scene. “Is it wrong to wish we were dealing with a cool, calculating mob boss who can be reasoned with instead of a serial murderer who is now actively taunting the mammals they’ve hurt with their artistic obsession? No, no it isn’t.”

The duo traded sad grins, then Nick stepped away from the spot he had been standing on. “C’mon over here and get low. Tell me what you see.”

Judy headed over to Nick and squatted down. She shifted around several times with a look of concentration on her muzzle. Her ears suddenly shot up in alarm. “I need a CSI with a camera right here, right now!”

There was a mad scramble from the gathered officers and onlookers.

Sergeant Asstor’s braying voice cut through the dull roar of dozens of whispering mammals. “Make a hole, make a hole; get outta here you freaking magpies before I drag you in for Obstruction!”

He all but headbutted a nearby coyote to the side to illustrate his resolve. The other mammals took the hint and pulled aside and away from the spikes.

The criminalistics team came up to the peculiar sight of Detective Judith Hopps, decorated veteran police officer, chin on the ground and butt in the air like a kit ready to pounce.

As absurd as the scene was, Detective Nicholas Wilde’s dead serious mien quashed any humor. His ear flicked to a meerkat with a small Mega-Pixel digital camera. “Audrey, get down where Judy is and start recording.”

She nodded and complied immediately, zipping forward between the spikes straight to Judy’s position. Hopps moved aside as soon as the tech was next to her. “Lay down where I am. Get your head about level with where a field mouse’s would be.”

Audrey did as asked, looked at the central pillar and gasped in shock. She rallied and began taking pictures even as she started barking orders to her team. “Frank, I need panoramics of the whole scene. Mark this spot, then have Derek get the Borescope rig and start taking low angles from,” she pulled a small collapsible ruler from her pocket and measured her own eye-line, “between two and a half to three and a half inches.”

On the screen of her camera was a disturbing image: each of the individual ‘pieces’ gave the impression of an indistinct supplicant, while the complete image of a bear glared hatefully at the throng through eyeless sockets.

When Nick and Judy returned back to the station, they wasted no time even dropping their things down at their workstation, but instead blazed a trail straight to The Pit with a periwinkle blue sugary mega gulp cup still frosty on the outside.

But Abby didn’t greet them or the nectar they offered her with any sort of enthusiasm. When they came in, she was languishing at her workstation, the background music actually in the background at the dullest of roars.

“No, I can’t in good conscience accept that,” she moaned, not even picking her head up from the desk as she flopped her head to one side to look at them. “I have nothing. Zip, nada, zilch. I searched every site, every blog and catalogue on modern art, and this one isn’t there.” 

She rolled her head so she was looking at the complete composite image. “It’s got all John’s hallmarks, but I can’t find any record of a Thimbul piece like this one.” She scrunched her muzzle in concentration. “Maybe it’s an earlier piece? Or a copycat; we’re due one of those about now.”

Nick shivered slightly. “Let’s not borrow any more trouble than we need to, okay?”

Judy looked at Abby and said simply, “Couldn’t you just call John and ask him?”

The doe’s eyes widened to cartoonish proportions and she all but leapt up from her seat.

“Oh my gosh how dumb am I, of course I can duh, but wait can I do that even, what if he’s working on his next painting and I interrupt it, I would actually die…”

Judy thrust the straw of the syrup slurry into Abby’s mouth and waited. The frantic doe soon calmed and began nursing the sugary concoction. “Better?”

Abby nodded and took the frosted cup into her own paws. “Better. I just got so—” She gesticulated with her free paw.

“Fixated?” Nick offered with a smirk.

Abby gave a derisive slurp. “Flustered, at not knowing this piece.” She set the cup aside and turned down the music as she dialed out on the office phone.

It rang twice and then picked up to a sharp, definitely not male voice. “This is John Thimbul’s phone, Dolly Grainger speaking.”

Abby’s face fell. Nick stepped up to the speaker phone. “Ms. Grainger, this is Detective Wilde, Detective Hopps and Criminalist Scutto. We have a, ah... piece... which matches your client’s style, but we can’t find a record of it. Would John be available to consult on this?”

“I’m afraid not,” the tiny tinny voice came back. “He’s in, well, a bit of a funk with everything that’s happened. I suppose you could come by the studio; at the least I could take a look and see if I remember it. I am his current exclusive distributor.” There was a mild tinge of smug self-importance in her tone.

Judy stepped up before her partner took the unconscious bait. “That would be great Ms. Grainger. We should be there in about an hour.” They hung up the phone and she flipped her notepad up. “This is good timing. Even if she doesn’t know the piece either, we can pick her brain about Daniel Fields and maybe get a list of recent visitors to the gallery to see if there are any trends that stand out between the dates of the killings.” 

She flipped her notebook closed again and turned on her heels to head out of The Pit. Nick patted Abby on the shoulder. “Don’t despair, Abbs. There will be other opportunities.”

Abby watched them leave and turned back to the piece of art that had eluded her, the glare of the void in the subject’s eyes reflecting a small bit of her inner turmoil. She swept the slurpee cup from the desk into the trashcan at the end of the desk with expert precision, and returned to her chair to get back to work.

Nice as it would be, this case wasn’t going to solve itself, after all.

Nick and Judy arrived at the Maus Haus Gallery an hour later to the minute. When they walked in, the gallery was quiet, nowhere near the level of activity that there had been when they had visited the day before.

“No no no, viewings by appointment only today!” They turned automatically in the direction of the admonition that came at them from a room over as Dolly barreled through the doorway with a hurried gait to the front of the gallery. She slowed, an expression of surprise on her face as she glanced down at her wrist watch. “Oh, detectives, excuse me. I thought you were a walk-in. I didn’t realize what time it was.”

“That’s quite all right, Ms. Grainger,” Judy said. She and Nick followed after Dolly as she waved them deeper into the gallery and away from the door. “I would think that you’d welcome any patrons, wouldn’t you?”

“Normally, yes, I would,” she agreed with a tinge of irritation edging her words, “but after the incident yesterday, I decided to limit visitors today only to serious prospective buyers I’d scheduled an appointment with.”

Nick glanced down at Judy for a moment. “Have there been any additional developments to prompt this sudden bout of circumspection?”

“The caliber of most patrons of late has been… lacking, to say the least.” She sighed. “And it’s been adversely affecting my client’s production, as well. It’s a delicate balancing act, separating the connoisseurs from those simply feeding on suffering.” Dolly looked over the gallery. “John’s art has always attracted a, ah... particular following. It’s my job to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were. This has become increasingly difficult.” She gave a grim chuckle. “The only upside is the increased foot traffic means more impulse buyers.” 

“We can appreciate the frustrating position you’re in,” Judy said graciously, and exchanged an even look with Nick. “We certainly don’t want to take up too much of your time this afternoon. We were hoping you might be able to offer some additional insight into the very clientele you’re describing: outliers, someone who may have taken their interest in Mr. Thimbul to… an extreme.”

They watched as Dolly shifted in thought before huffing. “None more than usual. As I said, John’s work attracts a particular kind of connoisseur. The only new outliers are simply the Storm Crows.” She glanced at the two officers to see their slightly puzzled expressions. “People who flock to calamity to be close to something momentous, rather than doing or being momentous.”

Judy sighed while Nick nodded. Both were more than familiar with the sorts of ghouls that liked to lurk at the edges of crime scenes.

“Well, if no one stands out in demeanor, what about frequency?” Nick asked. “Anyone that’s been hanging around more often or for longer that you’ve noticed?”

“Or do you maybe keep a record we might be able to review?” Judy added hopefully.

Dolly perked up a little. “Well, I do have a guest log that I recommend people sign with contact details so I can forward information on special events: like the Meet-&-Greet you came into last time.” She walked them towards a stepped series of touch-pad tablets near the door. “If you are looking for someone who’s more interested in John’s work than might be healthy, they might be on that list.” 

Judy pulled a flash drive from her pocket and waited for Dolly to indicate the appropriate port, then retrieved the ‘Guest List’ for the last two months.

While Judy was wrangling the files, Nick was sweeping his eyes over the gallery space. “I hope I’m not out of line here, but everything seems just the tiniest bit dirtier than earlier.”

Judy tensed slightly. Nick was being openly baiting and more than a little harsh, but she knew that was calculated. They’d both used the tactic in the past to get mammals in a different headspace; Nick had a knack for infuriating mammals into flubbing a rehearsed alibi or story, while she could get them to remember things they had forgotten or overlooked.

Rather than take offense, Dolly huffed and looked around. “The company I usually hire to clean recently had one of their workers leave, or so I’m told. Their quality has certainly suffered of late. I’ll give them another month, but if this is what I can expect from now on I’ll need to find another cleaning contract.” 

Nick’s ears flicked. “What was it about that particular crew that got you to hire them initially?”

Dolly planted her fists on her hips and frowned. “They had a mouse on their payroll who could get into all the really tight spaces. Well, when he wasn’t slacking off and wasting John’s time. Fancied himself an amateur artist because he took some ‘Art Appreciation’ courses while in prison.” She gave a disdainful snort, then frowned. “When he left, that was when their quality dropped off.”

Judy pocketed the drive and came up to the other two. “How long ago was that?”

Dolly put a finger to her chin and mused to herself a moment. “When was the last deep cleaning… not this week’s, not last week’s…” She shrugged. “Maybe three weeks ago? I can check my records if you need.”

Nick nodded in thanks. “We’d appreciate it.”

She gestured for them to follow, and headed toward one of the wings where a stepped desk was set up for sales and interviews. Her desk was pristine, organized, with even the Post-it note pads lined up in little lines next to her keyboard. She opened a file cabinet and began looking through her records while mumbling to herself.

“Ah-ha! Here we are.” Dolly pulled a receipt with a QR code on the bottom and placed it under a magnifying glass built into the table. “Twenty-two days ago. You can tell the mouse was here because of the additional hours.” She frowned ever so slightly. “I guess it was time well spent, considering the recent drop in quality.”

Nick looked around while Judy read the receipt. “Have there been any other issues with the crew? Have they ever damaged anything, or is it just the drop in cleanliness?”

“They were professional enough,” Dolly allowed. “Careful around the pieces, never forgot the restrooms. While the mouse was diligent when he did his work, I wonder if him flaking on his job was a foregone conclusion after all.”

Nick could see Judy’s tail flash in mild agitation, though she hid it from her ears and face as she looked up at Dolly. “How so?”

She gave a put-upon sigh. “One of the selling points for using that company is they are a genuine ‘work-rehabilitation’ program.” She clicked on the tablet at her paws and a cell-phone sized screen displayed the company logo. “They have a deal with the Department of Corrections to hire mammals right out of prison; help build a resume so they can rejoin society as productive members. It’s good PR for my studio. I’d overheard him talking with John about his stint in jail for possession charges a couple of times.” Her tiny shoulders sagged. “I guess he never kicked the habit.”

Nick smiled beneficently. “Well, while a relapse would be a tragedy as well as a crime, it didn’t seem to affect his abilities. I mean, it wasn’t like he trashed one of the paintings.”

“Indeed, no. Whatever his, ah… extracurricular activities may have been, he was always very respectful of John and his work. I appreciated that about him. There have been plenty of others who have foregone such courtesy… right up to the point of destruction.”

Judy sat up in her seat. “Are you referencing the belligerent peccary from the other day? Or did one of your patrons vandalize a painting?”

Dolly waved the question off, though she looked downright angry. “No on both accounts. However much it may annoy me, once a patron buys a piece it’s theirs to do with as they see fit,” her teeth ground hard enough Nick thought they might crack, “including feeding it to a shredder and claiming that as art. The nerve!”

Judy put a perfectly-timed paw to her mouth. “You’re kidding! How awful.”

“Devastating. John was a wreck for days; it was like he watched his own child die. He wouldn’t even allow me to sell prints of the piece afterwards. And imagine how I felt! I sold it to that, that… degenerate attention seeking honey-sucker! Were I to do it all over again, I’d have told him exactly where to stick his money rather than entertain his bid on Corpus. Any of the other offers would have given it a proper home, I’m sure. I regret that sale to this day.”

“Do you remember the buyer’s name?” Nick asked. “Or how long ago this was?”

“It was three years ago, right after we opened the doors of our first studio on Hill Street. Nathanial Bainbearidge was a so-called performance artist.” Dolly spat the words out. “He bought the work through a brokerage, which should have been the first hawk-shadow for me; but I was desperate for a sale and for the exposure. He was the only offer that came close to what I thought the piece was worth… monetarily, anyway.” She seemed to deflate, all the hot anger petering out as she spoke, and she added softly at the end, “No amount of money can pay back its loss now.”

Judy waited a moment before pressing on. “You said John wouldn’t let you sell prints. Does that mean there are surviving prints?”

“Of course!” Dolly perked right up and headed to a series of vertical doors built into the studio wall. “I always ensure there is at least one print of each piece; more for insurance purposes than anything else. Accidents do happen, but occasionally you get some loathsome miscreant who tries to swindle the companies by forging a work, then damaging that for the payout.”

Nick’s lip turned up in a faint grin while Dolly opened one of the doors. “That sounds like a hell of a racket.”

“Oh, it is,” Dolly exclaimed as she pulled a tall shelf out. “Art is quite the investment, if you get in on an up-&-comer before they really hit their stride. Insurance is common, as is forgery and fraud since you can get the pieces assessed value for replacement. That could be a few thousand dollars, to tens of millions. Aha!” She grasped the corner of one print and pulled it out. “Here we are: Corpus!” 

The small glossy reproduction of the painting was startling, though it didn’t quite capture the detailed brushwork or the hidden Old Volish that would have been present in the original. Reflective shards surrounded the imposing figure of a bear in the middle. Bloodied pieces of himself were showcased within the intricate mirror images, almost trapped within the reflections. The eyes were no more than empty sockets, streams of red flowing from either side of his anguished face.

“Very, ah… striking piece,” Judy said evenly, and turned the print over. “I don’t suppose you might remember where he painted the Volish words into the painting?”

“Oh, it was ever so clever. The title was painted criss-crossed over the subject in the middle, and the reflections held bits of the letters in reverse as they would show in a mirror. Very difficult to achieve in oil paint, accurate reflections. It was his way of giving a nod to the fracturing of the language itself.” She gave a sigh. “Simply brilliant.”

Nick glanced at Judy over Dolly with a raised eyebrow, though his voice remained even when he asked, “Since you mentioned you have this for records and insurance purposes, I’m assuming that we need to sign something if we wanted to take it back to the precinct with us?”

As accommodating as Dolly had been up until this point, that cooperation seemed to have reached its limit with that request. She reached out and slipped the print back from Judy’s paws. “I’m afraid not. This is the only copy remaining after that hack destroyed the original and broke John’s heart. If you give me a day, I can make a high-resolution digital copy and send that to you, but not this print.”

Judy forced a gracious smile. “We’d certainly appreciate it. It would also be a help if we could schedule a follow up interview with Mr. Thimbul. Maybe for tomorrow afternoon?”

“I’ll see what I can do about that, though at this time I’m reluctant to commit to anything. He’s still trying to recover from the shock of the last one, after all.” At this she turned and gave the clock on the wall a glance. “It’s been a pleasure speaking with you both, but I’m afraid I do have an appointment to prepare for. Was there anything else I can help you with at the moment?”

Nick gave his signature side smirk to Dolly. “Thanks, but no. We’ve got everything we could expect, and as you said you have your own work cut out for you.”

She returned a professional smile and nodded toward the front. “Please let me know if anything else comes to mind.”

“We’ll do that,” Judy said. “Many thanks again.”

She and Nick offered their paws to Dolly to shake in turn and headed back to the door to leave. Returning back through the gallery of still-life horrors, Judy couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief once they had left the dark subjects behind and were back outside in the bright afternoon sunlight.

Nick clicked his tongue as they got to the cruiser. “Not as productive as I would have liked, but not as bad as it could have been.”

Judy gave a full body shiver as she sat down. “Speak for yourself. I’m going to be seeing some of those out of the corner of my eyes for a week.” She looked at Nick with a pleading expression. “Could you swing by Hobby-World on our way back to the station?”

He cocked his head. “What for?”

“So I can purge all that nightmare fuel out of my skull: folksy paintings on tin, needlework and crochet, quilts.”

Nick smirked. “Glitter?”

“No!” She stuck her tongue out in disgust. “No, that’s something I think everyone agrees on. Glitter adds nothing to art except to make sure pieces of it stay everywhere, all the time, forever.”

He laughed. “Okay, Carrots. A little brain bleach for you, and then let’s see what Abby can dig up now that we know which painting this latest murder scene resembles.”

Judy buckled her seatbelt and chewed her lip in thought. “The painting was a bear, and the victim was a bear.” She flipped her notebook pages back and forth a few times. “How much do you want to bet ‘Bainbearidge’ is an Ursine name?”

“No bet… ‘honey-sucker’ is most certainly an Ursine slur.”

Judy nodded the reluctant nod of someone who was right and didn’t like it. 

Abby blinked owlishly at the two detectives after their explanation, then wordlessly spun her chair fast enough to set her earrings jangling. Her claws on the keyboard sounded like an over-caffeinated woodpecker as she started searching news articles until...

“EEEEEeeeeeee!!!!” 

Judy pressed her ears to her head in a feeble attempt to mitigate the shrill squee that her coworker was making, to little avail. Even Nick’s ears flagged and he rubbed one gingerly.

“Inside voice, Abbs, inside voice.”

“Are you kidding me?!” Abby’s grin nearly reached ear to ear. “This is the Holy Grail of art pieces! I mean, Bainbearidge is notorious for being super picky about which pieces he works with, and his choosing a John Thimbul original put him on the map!”

Judy looked slightly askance at the jubilant doe in front of her. “You seem awfully ‘okay’ with the wanton destruction of a piece by your art hero.”

Abby’s glee dampened. “I would rather the painting still exist, sure, but that’s the point Bainbearidge makes in his performances: beautiful things are beautiful because they don’t last forever.”

“So he hastens the process along?”

“Oh, forget it.” Abby threw up her paws and turned back to her computer. “His choice of expression is doused in shock value, sure, but it’s just as valid as any other art or craft or skill a mammal would use to express themselves.”

Nick cleared his throat to try and shake the does out of their argument. “Well rather than guessing about it, how about we contact him? Abby, could you bring up any press photos or contact pages?”

Abby tossed her ear over her shoulder and tapped away at her keyboard again. “He should have multiple social media profiles online. Yeah, here… Tweeter, Muzzlebook, Zoo-tube…”

She clicked on one of the accounts at random and up popped a well-designed profile page filled with thumbnails of past videos. She scrolled past them to a Profile link, and a new page opened up to a short blurb about Nathaniel Bainbearage as well as a stoic portrait. Judy felt her heart plummet to her feet, her mind involuntarily gouging out the bright hazel eyes into the gaping red voids she’d seen in the mirrored reflection at the crime scene.

“Really glad I didn’t take that bet,” Nick murmured, and pinched the bridge of his muzzle between his fingers.

Judy drew a tired sigh. “Abby, could you see if Nathaniel had any family we’d need to contact? Nick and I need to head down to see if Ducky can confirm this.”

Abby gave a single nod. “I’ll send whatever I find to your phone as soon as I have it.”

“Great.” Judy turned crisply, though her gait dragged as she headed for the door.

Nick gave Abby a pat on her shoulder and an abbreviated, “Thanks, Abbs,” before he followed in her wake. His steps were equally heavy, weighed down with the fact that they still seemed no closer to finding the monster responsible for these murders dressed up in the trappings of “art” and the knowledge that unless they had an honest to God break in this case, they’d probably see another before the week was out.

The sable leaned heavily on his cane as he looked at the two detectives. “There’s been a tremendous amount of damage done to this poor fellow, and not merely in transforming him into this mammalian jigsaw puzzle,” he absently waved a paw at the gruesome collection behind him. “The preservatives and chemicals that allowed him to be mutilated in this manner have denatured a great deal of the tissue.”

Judy looked at her cellphone notes. “His records show he’s a registered bone marrow donor. Could we use that?”

“Yes, but not quickly. Institutions like the Hayo Clinic won’t want to release that kind of information without a very good reason.” He held up a paw to forestall Judy’s building ‘Diatribe of Justice’. “I have the contacts and the licensure to secure a confirmation. Just let our Chief know I’ll need to send a Same-Day-Priority package. The Hayo will let us know if we have a match.”

“We’re due to give him an in-person update anyway,” Nick said with a nod. “May as well add that to the list of things to notify him of concerning this debacle. At least it’s some kind of potential progress.”

There was a sharp rap on the table and the two detectives noted the stern, but rapidly softening mien on the Coroner’s muzzle. “I want to let you two in on something about this case you may not have realized yet.” 

Nick and Judy looked at one another then stood at Parade Rest. Ducky snorted. “I have worked in this field my entire adult life, and longer if you count my years working with my father at the Mortuary. Do you know how many other serial murder cases I have heard of in this city in that time?” He waited just long enough for the two to open their maws to speak, then rapped his cane on the table again. “One. In thirty-two years, this is the second serial murderer in our city. We don’t have the experience, expertise or dedicated mammal power for this sort of crime. You two are literally doing the impossible with a shoestring and sheer bloody-minded obstinance.”

He then tapped each of them on the snout. “So don’t get trapped in your own heads about a ‘lack of progress’. Crimes like this are always hideously difficult to solve, and some manage to go decades without being solved despite the best and brightest being piled on them.” He leaned back and smiled at them. “You are doing all that can be asked of you, and everyone at this precinct knows that.”

Judy’s wilted ears popped up. She straightened herself up even more. “We’re not letting this take a decade to solve. Whoever this monster is, we’re going to bring them to justice now. They don’t get to do this to our city and get away with it for years.” She turned and stormed off, adding under her breath, “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

She was out the door before either Nick or Ducky could call her back. Her partner sighed and shot the doctor a rueful smile.

“It was a valiant try, Ducky.”

Ducky frowned and tapped his cane sharply against the floor. “I’ll take getting through to one of you. I leave the rest in your capable paws, Detective Wilde.”

Nick gave the sable an abbreviated salute and turned to head out after his partner. Ducky watched him go and shook his head, regarding with grim determination the task before him. Before all of them. Whatever other tiny details he might glean from the body he would unearth before the day’s end. Let the bones give up whatever secrets they might still be hiding. When monsters like this were involved, there was no such thing as an insignificant detail. Every bit of information was valuable. Might mean the difference between a break in the case, or seeing it turn cold.

Judy wasn’t the only one itching to see this mammal find himself behind bars.

Chapter Text

Bogo looked over at his two smallest detectives with weary eyes. “I can tell by your stances that you haven’t had a case-breaking discovery. What do you have that I can throw to the media vultures?”

Neither Nick nor Judy was happy or surprised by the stress in the Chief’s voice. Judy spoke first. “Sir, we may have discerned a pattern in the killer’s victims, but we need Ducky to get some information from the Hayo Clinic to verify our current victim’s identity.”

Nick continued when the Chief glanced his way. “Doctor Furiakin will be sending a priority shipping request that will help explain some, but we believe all of the victims have in some way in the past slighted local artist John Thimbul.” Nick paused and became contemplative. “It’s also possible that each piece is directly related to the mammal killed and displayed; at least that’s the case with our current vic. I’ll have to see if Abby can look into that.” 

Judy glanced curiously at Nick. “Something you think we missed?”

Nick cracked his knuckles nervously. “More like overlooked; Bainbearidge did his whole Performance Art schtick on Corpse—”

“Corpus,” Judy corrected.

“Right, Corpus. And then he, we believe, gets ‘displayed’ in an identical manner to the painting. I’m wondering if the other two are the same? Did Shabal only diss John’s work, or was it specifically Triumph that he poo-pooed to the art snobs? Did John just lose out on an art contract to Perry, or was it for Phoenix Rising itself?”

Judy’s eyes began getting wider with renewed excitement. “If we can get a list of incidents relating to specific paintings and mammals, we might be able to predict possible targets!”

Nick smiled, but rested a paw on her shoulder. “It’s possible, but it could also be me chasing my own tail. No pinning hopes on this; it’s just a hunch.”

“I’ll take a possible trend emerging as a sign of forward progress,” Bogo said with a muted snort. “I’ll approve that request from the good doctor as soon as I get it. Work this angle and see if the link holds under more scrutiny. If you think you can start to get a profile of possible future victims worked up, I consider that the next best break to actually cuffing this so-called Artiste.” Nick and Judy gave him an inquiring look and he sighed. “It was only a matter of time before the media gave this guy a moniker. That’s what they’re calling him.”

Nick and Judy both grimaced. Bogo picked up one of many folders gracing his desk and waved them off the chair.

“I’d appreciate it if this press conference was the only one of these I have to give,” he said as he levered himself out of his seat. “I don’t need to tell either of you how ravenous the media can get for details, especially gruesome ones. Get me leads so I can let them chew on those and give us some room to work.”

Both Nick and Judy sagged slightly at the implied pressure, but saluted and left to continue their investigation. Nick waved at Judy as he headed to the elevator. “I’m going to see if I can get Abby onboard, if you want to touch base with Dolly or John.”

“Will do,” Judy waved at Nick and headed to their office. 

She was tempted to veer at the last minute away from the hall that led to the cubicles and back in the direction of the atrium, following in Bogo’s wake to the imminent news frenzy he was about to placate. The thought of the row of microphones and the throng of reporters made her stomach churn and she rejected that thought immediately. Secondhand stress wouldn’t do her any good right now, but maybe a little food might.

Judy cut a swift turn at the stairwell and headed to the break room. She hoped there were some herbal flavored gnaw-sticks left in the vending machine. The patrol wolves went through the salted and fish-flavored ones so fast they sometimes went after the ones she had requested be ordered.

When she came in, she felt an odd kind of tension in the room; like a buzzing she could almost hear, but only at the edge of her senses. She made her way past Francine and Bob Trumpet, who simply sat and stared at one another over their coffees. She lucked out at the vending machine, and also got a bag of spicy Plantain chips for when Nick came back up.

She had just turned around when McHorn barged into the breakroom. “Will you two knock it off already? If you’re going to talk, do it so the rest of us can hear; not so low it stirs coffee on the third floor!”

Francine turned a lazy eye on her partner. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, though her tone was anything but apologetic, “was our private conversation interrupting you?”

Judy wanted to make a quick exit from the impending office drama, but Frank had planted himself in the doorway. 

“As a matter of fact, yes.” His tone was outright challenging. “Your rumbling is making every printer in the precinct jitter. I have a field report that looks like ASCII art now!” He brandished a relatively small stack of pages at the two elephants.

Bob Trumpet lived up to his name as he snatched the ream. “You were using the Zebrox on the third floor again, weren’t you?” Bob waved the papers dismissively. “That thing jitters when Hopps chews loudly, and we have a mindless media herd milling around in the lobby. Don’t go blaming your poor planning on our biology.”

There was a brief standoff between the two as they stared each other down. McHorn eventually snatched the paperwork back with a harsh snort before turning on his heels and leaving the way he came. The door had just closed behind him when Judy felt the tense buzzing begin again.

Judy wrestled with herself back and forth for a moment. She gripped her snacks tighter, squared her shoulders, and made a beeline toward the big table where the two pachyderms were seated.

“Francine?” The elephants paused in their rumbling and looked down. “Sorry to, ah… interrupt you, but is everything okay? You aren’t usually that harsh with Frank.”

She smiled and gave a short trumpet. “Oh Bunny, you just haven’t done a ride-along with me and Frank. We generally keep it civil in the precinct, but he’s surprisingly thin-skinned for a Rhino.”

Bob sipped his coffee and chuckled. “They’re just not social animals, and Frank is making it a point to get on our collective last nerve today.”

“Is this really about the printer?” Judy knew it had to be something else, but ‘process of elimination’ was second nature to her.

Francine sighed. “No, not really. He gets frustrated when he can’t understand what I’m saying, as though I’d be saying something about him I wouldn’t say right to his face.  It’s been a sticking point for years. It’s a matter of principle now.”

“Oh.” Judy’s ears flagged. “Sorry, then. That’s out of line.”

Bob shrugged. “Truth is, it’s impossible to share the silly song my daughter was singing to me this morning in Common, and I just had to share it with someone.”

Francine laughed. “Everyone should be thankful I’m taking one for the team. Your singing is awful.”

Bob swung his trunk up and puffed at her square between her eyes. She gave him a good-natured flinch and laugh. Judy felt the tension ease and there were no further rumblings around the two elephants. She smiled and turned just as her ears picked up very different rumblings from the mounted television nearby. She glanced up to see live coverage of the press conference going on not twenty yards from her.

“At this time, we are pursuing a number of leads regarding these heinous crimes. The mammals of Zootopia may rest assured our total effort is being brought to bear to identify, locate and apprehend the perpetrator or perpetrators responsible.”

Several reporters pressed forward with microphones thrust out like accusing fingers. Judy could see the war in the chief’s eyes as he debated just telling them, ‘No questions’. In the end, though, he gave a resigned snort, pointed to an impala, and nodded.

“Henry Pyceros, ZNN,” the reporter said, readying his pen against the notepad in his hooves. “Is there any common thread linking the victims of these murders?”

“My detectives are following a few possible connections,” Bogo said tactfully.

The reporter followed up the non-answer quickly with, “Could you elaborate on those possible connections?”

“We are not prepared to commit to any one possibility at this time. More information will be provided as we gather additional evidence.”

Bogo cast his gaze away from the impala and a snow leopardess managed to catch his eye. He pointed to her and nodded. “Jennifer Tailisker, Evening Gazelle. Do you have any suspects at this time?”

Judy could tell by the flick of the Chief’s ears that he felt he’d already answered that question, but she knew equally well that there was no escaping the media when they had your scent.

“There have been very few mammals of interest in this case currently, and no arrests have been made at this time.” Bogo gathered his papers between his hooves. “That will be all the information I can provide at this time. The ZPD will keep the city updated as we learn more in this developing case. No further questions.”

The throng of reporters began firing additional questions over each other in an attempt to be heard before his inevitable dismissal. Photographs snapped and the Chief expertly ignored the limelight that followed after him, his tail flicking behind him as though swatting away the irritating questions bugging him as he took his leave.

Judy turned away from the television, a pang of secondhand press conference uneasiness sweeping through for the briefest of moments. She cast a wan smile at the two pachyderms and said, “That’s probably my cue to get back to it. I’ll leave you to your impromptu singalong.”

Francine gave her a look of faux betrayal as Bob smirked. Judy could just make out the dull rumble resume as the door closed behind her. She headed to the rear of the building where the fire escape stairs were. They weren’t the most convenient method to get to her’s and Nick’s office, but it would keep her out of the media’s sights. She continued to mull the situation as she trudged.

What do we really know beyond the identities of the victims? We think John has nothing to do with all this, but all of the pieces he makes are so… dark. That has to come from somewhere... 

She shook her head hard. NO! I’ve looked in his eyes, and there was genuine grief and regret. Those weren’t the eyes of a killer. 

But neither were Bellwether’s, and she had me, Nick, and the Chief duped. Can I trust my gut on this one?

By the time she was back to the cubicle, she was even more confused than when she’d left the Chief’s office. She sat staring at the phone trying to formulate what she’d ask of either John or Dolly without coming off as accusatory; after all, mammals were presumed innocent until proven guilty. 

But someone is always guilty, whether the law knows it or not.

She pinched her eyes and shook her head fast enough for her ears to slap. “Get it together, Hopps,” she whispered to herself, “you can do your duty without compromise. Just make the call, get the facts, and follow where the evidence leads.” 

She felt slightly renewed, even if it was just likely vertigo, and picked up her desk phone.

Dolly’s studio number rang six times before going to voicemail. She left a generic message, then tried John’s personal number. He picked up on the second ring.

<Hello? This is John.>

“Good afternoon, Mr. Thimbul.” The carefully neutral, citizen-facing tone of voice took on a cool edge, though it wasn’t one that Judy intended. “This is Officer Judy Hopps with the ZPD. We spoke recently at Precinct One.”

<Oh. This is about…> he trailed off. Judy heard a shaky breath over the line. <I heard Chief Bogo’s address on the radio while I was painting a little bit ago. What can I do to help?>

Not paint grotesque pictures that inspire psychopaths, for a start, Judy’s teeth chirred slightly as she got herself under control. “We think we may have identified a pattern in the killings. We need to cross reference each piece that has been... replicated, with any incidents relating to the victims used as a medium. If we can discern a trend, we might be able to anticipate possible future occurrences.”

There was a pause. <What kinds of incidents?>

“Anything you can think of.” Judy readied her pen on her notebook, another tense breath coming into her ear. “Or maybe something you’re already thinking of?”

<I... honestly I can’t understand any of it!>

Judy’s foot thumped in empty air. “Nothing? Really? Not Jamal Shabal’s scathing review about your art, or Bainbearidge destroying one of your earliest works? You don’t consider those noteworthy at all?”

<Jamal? What, the art critic from the Gnu Yorker? He’s paid to criticize art and push certain styles; he was never going to give my work a positive review, so why should I care what he writes?> John’s voice had a note of strength and fire Judy hadn’t heard from the rat before.

Judy hummed nonchalantly. “Tearing up a piece with words is a far cry from actually tearing one up, I suppose.”

There was an additional defensiveness added to the painter’s words. <I held no malice toward Bainbearidge. We sat down after he did his piece but before my interview in ArtAnimalia. I asked why he chose my painting to destroy and not some corporate carbon copy. He told me that he picked mine because it was art, and not just some Preston Peary Lobby painting. It was irreplaceable, and the whole point of his performance pieces is the fragility of the NOW. There won’t ever be another piece like Corpus, and he was trying to show that to the world, to me! His talk changed me. Up until then I’d been trying to replicate whatever it was that got Night-Hawk its publicity, and Corpus was made out of frustration. It was unique, and that was what made it good. I stopped trying to chase patterns and trends and just made art! Not just something popular, but something that matters.>

Judy let her pen come to a gliding halt, breath hitching just slightly. There was no denying John’s skill with a paintbrush, and he used it to create what was, to her eyes, gross obscenities. She certainly would have preferred to see it used to create a landscape or a bowl of fruit… but that wasn’t what motivated him. Would he put so much passion into something that didn’t speak to him as loudly as this? 

Almost as if he knew what she was thinking, John said, <I know it isn’t for everyone, what I paint. And I know a lot of mammals were just attracted to it for the shock value even before the murders; but for every fifty Jamals, there’s one Bainbearidge and that makes it worthwhile!> John was actively panting after his rant.

Judy stared at her notepad without any real focus on the words there. She asked, “So... there was no enmity, no resentment?”

She heard John give a bitter laugh. <Nicodemouse, no! He inspired me. I spent a month really re-evaluating the direction I was taking my art, and shifted entirely to Stark Impressionism. It doesn’t sell outside particular collectors, but they appreciate it more, and for the same reason Bainbearidge did. That’s why I wasn’t torn up when I lost out on the Appleton Towers contract piece to Preston. He enjoys still lifes and landscapes and the sort of things corporations love and Barksy messes with.>

“But you still entered into the bid?”

<Of course! It was a fifteen-thousand-dollar contract! I’d be stupid not to.>

Judy whistled. “That’s a pretty penny. I imagine bidding for contracts like that can get a bit… well, for lack of a better word, cutthroat.”

<I guess it can, at times; but while Appleton Towers may not have picked up Phoenix Rising, it was still sold for twelve thousand to a collector.>

She leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling. Staggering amounts of money for pieces of canvas with graphic depictions of gore on them. The most universal of motivations. But also personal connections to each piece, though not for John himself. Jamal’s connection to Triumph was clear to see, and now she had confirmation that Preston Peary was a direct competitor associated with the creation of Phoenix Rising, as well as Bainbearidge’s connection to Corpus. It was a strong causal link, but was it the right one? She needed to refine her theory, to eliminate any extra variables so she could see the crime through the minutia. 

The details... details like Daniel Fields.

“Well, I have to say that this has been very illuminating information. I only have a couple more questions, if you have time?”

<Sure, I guess. What else did you want to know?>

Judy steeled herself for the one question regarding the one mammal she knew John had a real emotional connection to. “During Daniel Fields’ work at the studio, were there ever any incidents he mentioned regarding Triumph?”

There was a hitch on the other end of the line. <Incidents? Like what?>

“Anything out of the ordinary. Good or bad.”

There was a prolonged pause, long enough that Judy almost asked if he was still there. She bit off that inquiry as John finally spoke again. <I’m sorry. I can’t… I’m trying, but I…> Another hitch. <Danny loved that painting. He left it for last every time he came just so he could linger over it. Whenever I went to find him, that’s always where he was.>

Judy’s muzzle scrunched up. Danny didn’t match the profile she’d been building: no perceived disrespect, no vandalism or competition; just an avid lover of an art piece that spoke to him, that he was never going to be able to afford. And with only three incidents to work with, there wasn’t enough contrary evidence to discount his being targeted. 

Though the last thing she or anyone else needed was for there to be a larger sample pool to work from.

“Thank you, John. I realize that wasn’t easy for you.”

<I’m all right. Really. It’s just…> His voice trailed into a long pause. His voice took on a wistful quality when he finally spoke again. <I miss talking to him, you know? It was… he was…> He sighed. <It felt like he really heard me. I could tell him anything about these paintings and it didn’t matter what it was, he would hear it all.>

“Sounds nice. It’s important to feel heard.” Judy tapped her pen on the desk. “What kinds of things did you talk about, then? Inspiration, or faux pas, or things like that?”

<Yeah, things like that. Like—> There was a bit of jostling on the other end for a moment, the sound of air rushing past the speaker. <—like when I accidentally tore a hole in Oroboarus because the director of the Metropolitan Modern Arts College, Mr. Peterswine, called while I was working on it. Or when I had to scrap an early draft of Unhinged because the paint dried while I was being glad-pawed by some investor Dolly had brought in; Tanuki Ishida I think. Or…>

Judy’s pen started scribbling furiously notes from John’s recollections, each one running into the next, painting to painting, like she was listening to a guided tour of the gallery through his voice. There were some that were benign enough tales, funny even—more than once his grim sense of humor made her laugh—but more often his words took on a somber quality that tugged at the heartstrings. He was a mammal that had experienced true loss—both parents dead of pneumonia just before he graduated high-school, years of poverty before his first break. A passion that was fed by deep-seated anxieties and a loneliness carefully crafted with his own two paws. All this poured out onto canvas to sate his desire to be meaningful to mammals he had such a hard time connecting with. To bring meaning to a world that so often seemed to be without.

It had been more than a few minutes’ worth of rambling before John abruptly stopped himself mid-sentence. <I’m sorry I went off like that, I… wow, what a waste of your time…>

“Not at all,” Judy assured him lightly, and when she heard a deprecating kind of scoff from him she added, “John, really. I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. This has all been very enlightening, and helpful.”

<I hope it has. Truly. I want to help.>

Judy’s ears twitched. “I know you do. And I realize it might be asking a lot of a creative mammal like yourself, but I have to request that you… maybe limit your creativity. For the time being. Whatever the killer is inspired by, none of us want additional inspiration or variables.”

<Oh.> A pause. <Right, of course. Makes sense to limit extenuating factors. Perfect sense.>

Judy grimaced. “I know this is your passion and livelihood, but—”

<No, I get it. Really, I do. It’s just…> He breathed a harsh breath. <I don’t know what else to do with myself. Is that weird? Like, I don’t…> Another breath, steeped in exasperation. <There’s so much in me. I always felt I should do something constructive with it all, make something instead of… I don’t know, tearing something apart. I feel that way, sometimes, and grabbing a brush is less expensive than fixing a hole in the wall. What else can I do if I’m not painting?>

Judy smiled, though she knew John couldn’t see it. “It isn’t weird. You’re...” She paused a moment, “you’re driven by your passion. I know exactly how that feels.” She smirked slightly. “My partner Nick usually has to nag me into taking leave. If not for him I swear I’d probably lose all my time off.”

There was a forced chuckle. <Time off? What’s that?>

“You set your own schedule, don’t you? I’d say you’re more than entitled to take a little time away from working, given the circumstances.”

<I suppose I should. It’s been…> He paused, a long pause. <I can’t remember how long, actually.>

“Well, that’s a good indication it’s time for a break. Do you maybe have anyone you can visit with and talk to, at least until all this blows over? Maybe you could take some time to just go enjoy the city a little. Take Dolly out to scout the competition a bit?”

Judy heard John suck a breath through his teeth. <Ours isn’t really a... cordial relationship. It’s more of a professional one. I rent the studio. She manages the business side of marketing the pieces I create, finds prospective clients and such, gets a small cut. If it isn’t profiting the gallery, she doesn’t really have time for it.>

“Well, not all of your time needs to be devoted to production, does it? I mean… pot calling the kettle black here, of course, but even I know that Nick’s right when he shoves a leave request in my face. A little jaunt out at a few galleries or museums for a day seems a good use of your time to me.” Judy smirked to herself a little mischievously. “I don’t know if you’re in the mood for company, but there’s a certain rabbit who would probably enjoy talking over the latest art-crazes with you if you’re up for it.”

There was a long pause. <You really didn’t strike me as the type, I’ll be honest.>

Judy barked a laugh; couldn’t believe she had a laugh in her, but there it was. “No, not me! Abby! Abby Scutto, you met her when you came in last week? Exchanged cell phone numbers? Ringing a bell?”

<OH!> Tense laughter on the other end now also. <Right, of course. That… makes much more sense.>

The laughter ended as abruptly as it began, Judy launching back into her more professional phone voice as she said, “Just a thought. And thanks again for your time. Remember to keep your eyes open, and stay safe. If you think of anything, or something seems amiss, please call me or Officer Wilde.”

<I will. Thank you. Have a good day.>

Judy returned the well wishes and hung up the phone just as Nick rounded the corner of their shared cubicle. “Well, Abby’s putting together an allegory, or building an alligator, or whatever it is young whipper-snappers do with computers besides surf for porn and funny bird videos. After that it’s either going to Data-Mine, or play Mine-Craft; one of the two. Any luck on your end?” 

Judy grinned at his Old-Dog antics. While he would never win any gaming awards or hack any computer systems, he was still competent enough to not need to bother IT with minor issues or operator induced messes.

“John confirmed almost all of the connections we suspected except Danny Fields. He also mentioned a few mammals that... influenced his creativity in several recent pieces. It’s a possibility that one of them could be the next victim, but with only four victims and three murder scenes I don’t feel comfortable pinning the tail on this Donkey quite yet.”

Nick raised an eyebrow. “Making jokes and taking jabs at fellow officers? You got your fire back.” He smiled and nodded. “Good, ‘cause barring a miracle finding from Criminalistics or the Morgue, that theory is about our only lead right now.” 

Briiiiiiiing! Briiiiiiiing! Briiiiiiiing!

As if on cue, Nick’s desk phone began to ring in earnest. He reached over and plucked it off the receiver. “ZPD, Officer Wilde.” He listened and then dropped the phone back in its cradle while simultaneously hitting the speaker button. “Go ahead, Ducky, I’ve got you on speaker.”

<Good afternoon, Officer Hopps. I trust I find you in better spirits than last we spoke.>

Judy’s ears flagged. “Incrementally, yes.”

<Good. I hope I can improve that further with the latest lab results I just received back.>

Nick quirked his ears as he glanced at Judy. “Well, don’t keep us in suspense Doc.”

The ermine coughed slightly. <Quite. We’ve managed to separate Mister Fields from Miss Carcallie, as well as the implement he was bound to. There were no traces of blood or other mammal tissue, but there were traces of ochre, amber, turpentine and linseed oil sealed under the clearcoat.>

Judy looked at Nick curiously. “That’s an odd combination to find on a scalpel.”

<Indeed it is, which is why I bring it up. Forensics is currently working on a chemical profile to see if we can deduce what this blade was used for. There was one other detail, specifically about Mister Fields. While there are indications that his death was caused by an overdose, there is no indication of recent chronic use.>

Nick frowned as he pulled out Danny Fields’ file. “His record shows an arrest for possession in conjunction with an assault, as well as a prison medical report on his rehab treatment. Did he fall off the wagon?”

<It would need to be someone who knew his preferred poison. His kidneys and liver both show near complete recovery, while there are no traces of metabolized drugs in the follicles of his fur. Our friend has been clean for at least three months, if not more. This particular substance is more psychologically addictive than biologically. He is unlikely to have experienced anything stronger than mild cravings one might experience for a favorite sweet.>

Judy began typing on her computer while looking at the list in her hand. Nick chuckled at the phone. “Thanks Ducky. We’ll look into leads that might connect with Danny.”

<Very good. If you’ll excuse me, I must return to my duties.> The line went dead as Nick and Judy began cross referencing Danny Fields’ known associates with John Thimbul’s list of names.

John Thimbul was panting; his paw shook as he hung up his phone. The circuitous path he’d taken through the gallery had ended in front of Triumph, and his chest ached as he looked up at it, eyes wandering unconsciously to the right-hand corner where Danny would sit on his break. Where they would talk in Old Volish about more than just work and painting. So much more…

The siren song of the canvas called to him and he heeded it without a second thought, making a beeline past Triumph, past Homecoming and Epiphany and Out of Order to the back wall, through the still open door of the studio in the back and the unfinished piece he’d started when the phone rang.

It would be about that time now to start scraping the edges where the colors met, let the razor edge add an element of sharp contrast between them. Where where where did that knife get to? John rummaged through the half-rolled tubes and still wet brushes on the ledge of the easel… and stopped. His painting sat barely half-finished and he ached to pour all his anxiety and heartache out over it. But the officer’s words rose over the tumult, a simple request to leave the brushes and the paints aside until they could figure out what was happening with them. Until they could find who’d erased Daniel Fields from the world’s canvas.

He could let his paintbrush rest until Danny was laid to rest himself.

John wiped his paws with the paint rag and dug his phone out of his pocket again when the sound of light pattering footsteps rose to his ears.

“John, dear, I have some spectacular news for you,” Dolly said as she entered through the studio doors all smiles, brandishing a few catalogues in her paws. “Schminke Moussini is interested in hosting a public session with you to showcase their line of oil paints. Ticket sales are estimated to be over four thousand dollars, at least. I know it's the brand you prefer, and if you could give a demonstration for an hour or two…”

She trailed off as she came to a halt just beside his work station, eyes following his pacing as he stared at his phone between his paws, fingers endlessly scrolling over the screen. This wasn’t right. John had the soul of an artist; he was supposed to be caught in the tormented throws of creation while wrestling his muse, not surfing his phone!

“Joooohhhn,” she singsonged his name as she trailed behind his pacing. “Did you hear me?”

“What?” He turned and looked up, as though just realizing she was there. “Yes, Dolly, fine. Just… not today. And… you know what? Not tomorrow, either. Or this week. I’m taking a break.”

Dolly stared a moment and then barked out a tense laugh. “Very funny, John.”

His face may as well have been made of marble. “I’m not joking.”

Her forced smile stuck, though her eye twitched. “What do you mean you’re not joking? Where did this come from?”

“It’s what needs to happen right now. I need this. The police think it will help them narrow down possible victims and I want to help them, so that’s what I’m going to do.”

Her eye twitched again, and she redoubled her smile. “But, John… four thousand dollars in ticket sales. Come now, let’s not be rash.” She shook her head at him and smoothed back her ears before indicating the catalogues she was holding. “Now about the public session—”

“Tell them I appreciate the interest, but no thank you.” John stabbed his finger at the screen of his phone and cast one last look at his unfinished, slowly drying painting. He started toward the door. “I’ll be back later.”

“You… but, you…” Dolly sputtered, taking a few feeble steps after him and then back toward the canvas, and again. “But the… it’s not finished, John…!”

“And?” John glanced at the unfinished work, then back at his phone. “It’s not the first incomplete piece in my catalogue.” He sighed and looked absently around the room. “Maybe Detective Hopps is right; I really do need a break from all this.” He looked back at his phone and began typing a message. “The idea will keep fine, and I can come back to it with a fresh perspective.”  

Dolly heard the distinctive chime of an incoming text on John’s phone. His smile and flashing fingers were the last thing she expected. She needed to get this under control! “Be reasonable, John; I’ve already made the arrangements for the event, and a dozen tickets have already been sold. You have an obligation—”

John cast her a terse but sad glance. “An obligation you made without consulting me first to see if I was available or willing. I’m not, and I’m not.” He pocketed his phone and headed over to his coat rack. “If you’ll excuse me, there’s a rabbit I have made arrangements with waiting to meet me. I’ll see you on Thursday.”

He lifted his jacket off the rack and started to put his arm through the sleeve as he walked purposely through the studio door, and then out of the gallery entrance. The front door chimed merrily, a sound at odds with the tense atmosphere hanging in the air.

John grimaced to himself as he finished donning his jacket; every step away from his studio was a step toward something that he found himself genuinely looking forward to. He felt a bit awful inside for what he said to Dolly, but she should have known better. It would be fine. She was just as good at negotiating her way out of events as she was negotiating her way into them. She would come out on the other side cranky but ready for the next event, just like always.

Chapter Text

It felt like the first honest break they’d had since this case began, and the simultaneous sigh of relief that Nick and Judy shared after they hung up their phones for the last time made that beyond apparent.

“I spoke directly with all of mine,” Judy reported, spinning her chair around to face Nick as he did the same.

“Same.” He tossed the notepad down on his desk, then knocked on it. “I don’t want to jinx it—”

“Then don’t.” Judy also knocked vigorously on her desk. “They all live within spitting distance of regular patrol routes. We can easily divert them to extend their circuits to do spot checks of the residences, and daily follow ups. If they keep to their homes for the time being, we might even get lucky and catch this monster in the act. He’s been bold from the start. Maybe that boldness will make him trip up now that we’ve got our radar trained on who he might be after.”

Nick huffed and leaned back in his chair. “It’d be a nice ‘smoking gun’, but I’d be happier if more of our evidence was ‘painting’ a clearer picture of who they are. We’ve got so much diverse information, but no context: particulate from somewhere in the Marshlands, a utility truck, and ultra-high-end paints. The cleaning service Dolly uses has access to all of that, but Asstor and his mammals cleared all of their trucks: none of the tires have the patch you noticed, and all have wear on the tires. Everyone else on our list with means is either a victim or a target.”

He scratched the fur between his ears while growling. He was interrupted by a ping on his and Judy’s computers. They opened their emails to see the message from Abby Scutto.

"Tracedetectionbackonthebladeopenattachmentokaygottagocoffeewithafriendkthnxbai”

Judy chuckled at the jumbled message. “How can she possibly write as incoherently as she talks?”

Nick blinked and rubbed his eyes. “Was that even Common? Did the spacebar take a hiatus on her, or did it just throw in the towel?”

She shook her head and opened the attachment that had been alluded to somewhere in the middle of the mishmashed email. A standard form template popped up on the screen, autofilled with a list of chemical symbols and percentages, as well as a summary synopsis at the end to summarize the findings.

“Chemical composition consistent with oil-based paint and ochre pigment.” There were notes indicating the traces had been embedded in the factory logo on the blade.

“Well, can’t say that’s helpful at all,” Judy said dismally. “More paint. Big surprise.”

“Wait, though.” Nick turned and rummaged through one of the many folders on his desk, and then turned back with a packet of pages stapled together. He flipped a few of the pages back and forward. “The initial macro analysis for all three bodies had no paint on any of the props. The only paint used was mixed into that clear resin lacquer for Mr. Peary. The rest of the time the Artiste used only blood as the medium of choice. Other effects were made with deformation and physical duress to the bodies… gouging, disfiguring, dismembering…”

“Okay, okay, I got it.” Judy grimaced, but almost immediately her expression cleared into one of excitement. “This is a mistake. Question is, what can we glean from this mistake?”

“Well,” Nick got out of his chair and began pacing their small work area, “the report indicates the paint is isolated to the blade, so it was likely on it before. That means it was in an area with those paints, possibly used with them.” He picked up a picture of the implement. “It’s kind of a strange blade: more like a spatula really.”

Judy brought up a digital copy of the report. “Forensics calls it a ‘Palette Knife’. It’s...” she trailed off slightly, “it’s used in artistic painting.”

Nick frowned slightly. “Bring up a studio image of Triumph.” Judy did, and they both looked at the central figure. “That just looks like a generic knife like you’d get at a hardware store. Kind of an odd divergence.”

Judy’s ears flagged back and forth from attentive to worried. “Unless the Artiste used what they had on paw, rather than running off for supplies for the sake of accuracy.” 

Nick combed his paws roughly through his fur at the back of his neck. “Artists abound on our list of possible victims, but on our list of possible suspects…”

“That’s a bit more limited.” Judy gritted her teeth. Had she had the proverbial wool pulled over her eyes again? She sucked in a breath and let it out slowly. “It’s circumstantial at best.”

“Well, it could be simple enough to rule John out.” He sat back down and picked up the desk phone. “You have the number for the studio handy, right?”

“Again, let me extend my sincerest apolo—”

-CLICK-

“–gies.” 

Dolly looked at her phone after the abrupt end of her twelfth and final cancelation call that night, her twelfth refund that night. It was frustrating sometimes, being so small; she couldn’t even really indulge in throwing her phone across the room, since the Blu-Fang device was too durable to really break. 

No, Dolly; focus. They aren’t to blame for this. She is! Dolly’s incisors creaked as she grit her jaw at the thought of Judy Hopps while she absently paced John’s work-space. He had nearly been in the perfect mindset! Just one little stress nudge and he’d have fallen into one of his creative fueges. Days of painting, maybe even weeks. Three, maybe even four new works. Now… now he’d gone and abandoned his latest. A half-finished painting may as well not even exist at all.

-grrr- “Now, instead of creating the next Great Work, he’s off gallivanting with that Art-hating, artist-destroying Country-Bumpkin cop!”

She very much wanted to destroy something at that moment, but the current best tool for that task, John’s scraping knife, had already been elevated to a higher purpose. The only other option in house was flammable, and she’d never risk John’s work like that. 

She glanced over at his now stillborn piece. Even in its unfinished state, she could feel the pathos; the crushing sense of everything closing in and looming over. It was a sentiment that was lost on the larger mammals; however, it all but shouted at rodents. For a moment, she almost saw Judy Hopps experiencing that same crushing sense.

A smile teased at her tiny muzzle. “Yes, yes! That would be the perfect catalyst: eliminate the meddler and put John back on track!” Dolly froze in place for a moment while looking around her studio. “But which one? Her eyes kept drifting back to the unfinished piece, her mind filling in the blanks on the canvas, sharpening the lines, darkening the color palette...

And at its focus, one terrified rabbit, overwhelmed by an uncaring world.

Briiiiiing! Briiiiiing! Briiiiiing! 

It was after hours and Dolly was under no obligation to answer that, especially not in the middle of what was turning into a maelstrom of creative reverie, but she hurried out to the front desk anyway just to see who was calling. Her heart sped up a little in excitement as the Caller ID displayed Zootopia Policy Dept across the screen.

How delightfully serendipitous, was the thought that flitted across her mind as she donned a charming smile and picked up the receiver.

“Maus Haus Gallery, this is Dolly Grainger, how may I help you?” Her voice was pure saccharine.

<Miss Grainger, this is Detective Nicholas Wilde.> 

Dolly felt her mood flag slightly, but she kept her ears and her tone high. But history has taught the city: where one is, the other is sure to be close by.

“Good afternoon, Detective. What can I do for you today?”

<We’ve had a break in the case, and wanted to come by to confirm some details.> 

For a brief instant a lightning bolt of panic shot through her, and her mouth turned dry. A break? What kind of break? She’d been exceedingly careful, meticulous in her execution. What kind of break could they possibly have?

Her heart slowed and she licked her lips. A false one, of course. If they suspected her even slightly then why would he even admit that to her, give her an inclination to run or to hide? No, no… this was fine. This was better than fine. This was the perfect opportunity for something magnificent.

“I’d be happy to afford you any assistance I can, of course.”

<Would you be available for myself and Detective Hopps to swing by the studio later today?>

Now her smile was uncontainable. “Absolutely. Anything for the ZPD. My evening is wide open. What time might I expect you?”

<How about in one hour?> The vulpine’s voice held an edge of excitement.

And you should be excited! You are about to become something truly wondrous.

He couldn’t see her curtsy but she was compelled to do so anyway. “I have you penciled in! I look forward to your arrival.”

The detective offered an abbreviated farewell and Dolly quickly hung up the receiver. Her fingers itched, and she wrapped her arms around herself to contain the anticipation that threatened to burst from her chest. So much to do, so much to do to be ready. An hour wasn’t very long at all, and yet an eternity to wait for this, what was surely the rough sketch of her most stunning work, possibly even her own personal masterpiece.

She got started immediately.

Chapter Text

Judy’s teeth chirred nervously as she drove back to the Maus Haus. Nick sat beside her, his thumbs clicking against this phone’s screen.

“Okay, message away,” he declared as he pocketed his work phone. He gave Judy’s shoulder a gentle pat. “I’m not saying don’t worry, but Abby’s gone through her fair share of bad dates. I don’t think she’d be so starstruck she’d put herself in a dangerous situation that might give him an opportunity to hurt her.”

Judy scoffed mildly. “Did any of her ‘bad dates’ ever turn out to be a serial killer?”

Nick hummed in thought. “Well, Norm was a special kind of something and I wouldn’t be surprised if his apartment was decorated in scavenged ball-point pens.” 

“Not helping, Nick.” Judy pumped the brake less than smoothly and the car lurched at a red light. She took a deep breath and relaxed the vice grip she didn’t realize she had on the steering wheel. “If something happens—”

“It won’t.”

“If something happens,” she repeated, firmer, “I don’t know how I’ll live with myself.”

Nick pressed his lips into a thin line and stared down at the still unanswered text. “Positive thoughts. We either rule him out or confirm his involvement. Once Abby texts back we’ll know what our next move is.”

“What if she doesn’t?”

His frown deepened. “We’ll still know what our next move is.”

The remainder of the drive to the studio was silent. They pulled up and were climbing out when Judy spotted something down the adjoining alley. 

“That’s a big truck for this neighborhood, isn’t it?” she said to Nick, and pointed at the wide grill she was staring daggers at.

Nick froze mid-step, body angled toward the door of the gallery and head craned to see what had caught Judy’s eye. His paw gripped the cell phone it was still holding.

“Sure could use that text back any time now, Abby…”

“Too coincidental not to check out.” Judy waved him toward the gallery and hovered her paw over her sidearm. “Divide and conquer. It’ll take less time. Meet back here when you’re done.”

Nick frowned for a moment, then nodded. Trusting Judy came second nature after their years on the force. “I’ll start the ball rolling with Dolly and see if she’s willing to let us into John’s studio without a warrant.”

Judy gave a thumbs up and put out her fist to him. “Turn the charm up to eleven.”

He bumped it. “Twelve.”

Nick watched Judy hurry down the alley and out of sight before turning his attention back to the gallery entrance. Relax Nick; it’s not like the killer is here right now. He took a centering breath before heading inside. As soon as he opened the door, his nose was assaulted by the scent of turpentine.

-cough- “Miss Grainger? Are you in here? Do you need assistance?” His ears tracked back and forth as he did his best to not breathe through his nose. He could taste the chemical scent; it made his throat burn.

“Oh, Detective!” Nick heaved a sigh of relief at Dolly’s cheery voice. She came into view wearing dish gloves with a dust mask perched on her head. “I’m so sorry, please excuse my appearance. I didn’t realize you would be here this soon.”

“Sorry to put upon you like this, but we are in something of a hurry,” he said and swallowed hard. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, yes, of course. I realize it smells awful right now. Again, my apologies. I was hoping to air this out before you came. Here, let me just…” She hurried away quickly to her desk area and reached behind it. When her paw came out again it had a small water bottle in it. Dolly hurried back to him, opening it as she did and thrust it into his paw. “You look absolutely parched. Some water will help.”

The caustic smell didn’t exactly wash down with the tentative sip he was compelled to take, but it did help soothe the burning in his throat. “Thank you, it does.”

“Oh, good.” She beamed up at him and motioned him to step further inside. She looked behind him and asked, “Where is your lovely partner this afternoon?”

“Detective Hopps will be here shortly, I hope.” He motioned toward the back of the gallery. “I won’t waste your time. May I have a quick look around Mr. Thimbul’s work area?”

“Oh, certainly!” She all but skipped past him and he followed in her enthusiastic wake. “As long as you don’t mind stepping around a bit of a mess.”

“Mess?”

She indicated the air generally. “Yes, that’s unfortunately what I was trying to clear up when you arrived. John left in a terrible rush earlier after he couldn’t find one of his painting tools. He knocked over a pot of paint-thinner on his way out.”

“One of...” Nick wobbled slightly, “...one of his tools?”

The biting scent in the air notwithstanding, some additional layer of wrongness was causing the fur on his neck to raise. Judy was close by, and Abby was still unaccounted for, so he gave his head a hard shake to focus on trying to pull as much detail as possible from the curator now staring up at him.

“You don’t look so good Detective. Why don’t you sit down?” Dolly smiled serenely and gestured to a chair. She continued as Nick fumbled into the seat. “Yes, he couldn’t find one of his palette knives as he was working on his latest piece. He was quite upset.”

-baBloop-

“A... a palette knife.” His eyes flickered uncertainly, as he tried to focus through the growing haze, now attempting to pull out his phone for the text he’d been waiting for as he justified what she’d just said. “It wouldn’t happen to be a Mont Marten steel canvas scraper, would it?”

“Yes. It would.”

The words came at him in a tone that turned his blood cold. He finally caught a clear glimpse of the return text from Abby, tunnel visioning as darkness creeped all around her words.

<I’m fine here. What’s wrong?>

He tried to send a warning text, to Abby, to Judy, to anyone, but his thumb simply slid aimlessly over the keypad before brushing the send key. “Funny. Our break was a Mont Marten steel canvas scraper platta… palalatte...” He paused to stretch his mouth and jaw to pronounce the word, shook his head hard again to wrest just a few more seconds of consciousness back. “I gotta know who your supplier is; this is top shelf stuff.” He gave an appreciative whistle before the phone clattered to the ground.

Judy kept her steps quick and light, drawing her sidearm only once she was out of view of the avenue. She came around the front grill slowly, using her small stature to crouch low between the vacant building opposite the gallery and the side of the truck. There was enough clearance she could easily duck under it if she wanted to. Looking up, she could see the side of the truck was blank, a stereotypical non-descript vehicle with no discernible distinguishable characteristics like business logos or images. 

She did decide to crouch underneath the chassis as she approached the rear, just to get a look at the insides of the back tires. Nothing out of the ordinary yet. She drew her sidearm as she inched slowly around between the mudflap and the back tire, swept it in front of her as she came around the back fully. No one there but her.

Judy kept her weapon out and aimed it up at the back of the truck. The roll up door was down and too high up for her to easily reach. She didn’t exactly have probable cause yet to search the vehicle even if she did, of course… until she glanced down at the back right rear tire tread. A jagged misshapen patch just slightly off center…

She grabbed up her radio as her heartbeat began to rev and ducked back behind the mudflap. “Dispatch, this is Detective Hopps requesting immediate assistance.”

<At your service, Detective,> came Clawhauser’s voice, slightly encumbered by what Judy imagined was his typical mid-afternoon snack of strawberry glazed with sprinkles. <What can I help you with?>

“I need a plate run ASAP. Registration owner and address.” She stared at the building beside her. “And also a property inquiry, owner of a vacant location.”

<Ready. Go ahead.>

Judy supplied the address first, and then peeked back around the mudflap to read off the plate number. Clawhauser gave a terse, <Stand by,> and the radio went silent.

Judy steadied her breath and cast a glance at the gallery. Was Nick making good progress? If they were quick enough would they still have a chance to find Abby and get this vehicle to impound for forensics? How long would she have to wait…?

<Detective, lot is listed as ‘in escrow’, but the vehicle has a commercial registration under Maus Haus Gallery.>

Judy tensed as her fears started to well up about her opinion of John. Then she paused and took a centering breath. Follow the evidence, don’t try to make it follow you, came the first piece of advice her detective Trainer had given her. “Is there a name as to who owns the title, or is it exclusively listed under the Gallery?” 

<The vehicle is registered under the business, but the individual owner of the vehicle per the title is listed as one Dolly C. Grainger.>

Her nose twitched. All the fur on her neck stood pin straight, it felt like she’d stuck her finger in an electrical outlet. All the blood rushing to her ears almost made her miss Clawhauser’s next words as she backed herself out of the truck undercarriage.

<Uni’s are about fifteen minutes out. How copy?>

“Send back up to the Maus Haus Gallery address now,” she said, zipping out from under the grill. “Possible 10-999!”

<I have units on their way to your location. ETA now ten minutes given current traffic conditions. Hold your position until they arrive.>

“10-4,” was what Judy said to Clawhauser, but Like hell I will was what she said to herself. She was already moving for the loading door at the rear of the Gallery, which was visible from the truck as the radio fell back to silence. She pressed herself against the wall, straining her ears to hear over her thunderous heartbeat. Firearm ready, she turned into the doorway of the loading dock and slipped inside.

The smell hit her first. Not two steps into the big back studio, it felt like she’d run into a wall of noxious fumes. She could only imagine how affected Nick must have been.

Dumb bunny, she railed at herself, sending your partner in here alone! She perked her ears for any hint of either a rodent or a fox as every detail and conversation from the case came rushing through her head: the intimate knowledge of the subject art, the various victims whom John had either been cordial or indifferent to, but who an outsider might have seen as a threat. So happy to help you, Detectives! Of course she was, only too happy to lead them both around by the nose! And now Nick…

Judy swallowed hard, both to try and ease the pain in her throat and keep her voice in check. She couldn’t find his scent in what she finally decided must be the smell of turpentine, and neither could she smell the gallery’s owner. She put her elbow to her nose in an effort to mitigate the assault on it.

-baBloop-

Judy’s ears snapped to the sound of Nick’s obnoxious text notification. Her head swiveled around until she saw a flash of black and red fur. Her focus zeroed in on that tiny little glimmer of hope and she bolted toward it. She holstered her weapon as she scampered over to him. His phone on the floor next to the chair he was slumped in was still lit from whatever notification it was sent. She strained all her senses, listening for breath, looking for the slightest twitch of movement from him, she had no attention to spare for anything else. She was nearly to him when…

WHAM!

Judy slid across the tile, a pitched squeak echoing around the open space as she hit the wall below one of the larger centerpiece paintings.

“Well, goodness me,” came a strained, yet cheery, voice. “I didn’t expect you for a while yet. Already finished corrupting my John, or did he catch wise and ditch you?”

The room swam. Staring up from the rocking floor, the image of Dolly perched on top of a motorized scissor-lift blurred and refocused in and out. She made some oblique movements with the controls and it dipped toward the floor at her command. She left her perch daintily, like she was descending a staircase on her way to a banquet, and hefted a thin wrench up behind her head as she loomed over Judy. The rabbit only had the wherewithal left to try and back away from her advance, but the wall behind her was in the way.

“Now now, don’t go anywhere. One shouldn’t run from an opportunity to be part of something magnificent, wouldn’t you agree?”

There was a dull flash of gray that cut across her vision as the wrench fell like a guillotine. That was the last thing Judy saw before the inky blackness flooded in.

Chapter Text

Coffee wasn’t one of Abby’s top five drinks of choice, but this Snarlbucks was thankfully willing to work with her on the additional fixins that it was at least palatable. Not nearly as good as a blue raspberry Jumbo-Slurp, of course, but the company more than made up for what her beverage was lacking.

“...but as much as I love Gerhart Richter’s use of contrasting colors, I don’t want to be considered ‘derivative’. I mean, every artist has a... a...” He waved a paw in the air as he tried to find the right word.

“A language,” Abby offered.

John jabbed a digit into the table. “Exactly!”

There was an ease to the conversation that the rat and rabbit had been having since they ordered their drinks, which she found refreshing. The pleasantries were mostly out of the way now, and they’d really started in depth discussion of the art scene, of creativity and creation in general, as well as how to balance life and work in a world that insisted on assigning dollar signs to every creative endeavor as an evaluation of its worth.

“I’m not trying to recreate someone else’s masterpiece; I’m trying to create my own.” He sagged slightly and looked into his miniscule cup. “But sometimes it feels like I’m trapped in my own derivative style; like I’m not allowed to evolve my own language out of fear of losing my own… niche? Is it strange to feel that way?”

Abby pointed her coffee stirrer at him. “I don’t think so. Everyone who’s ever been successful at something comes to a point that they’re afraid to give new things a go, because what if it’s not as good, right? But shouldn’t art—really, any kind of creative expression—be transformative? Even if it doesn't become part of your own personal expression, there’s a ton of merit in just experimenting, trying new things. I mean—!” She waved at him dramatically. “Not that I don’t love what you paint! The expressiveness, and the extreme color contrasts, and the themes just… ugh, they are gripping. But that’s not to say one day you won’t wake up and find a different vein to pull your creativity from, right? Everyone’s muse has gotta try new things. No one can eat cake every day and stay healthy.”

John huffed and took a drink from his cup. “Tell that to my investors. To hear Dolly tell it, we’d be in the poor house in a month if I didn’t use this brand of paint or that brand of palette knives...”

WoopWoop!

A notification from Abby’s cell phone on the table stopped the conversation dead and their eyes simultaneously wandered over to it. 

John pointed. “Do you need to get that?”

She huffed in annoyance and swiped it away without looking at it. “Ugh, absolutely not. I work the technical side of forensics: anything I work on that’s time-sensitive, is also precisely timed. I’m sure it’s nothing that can’t wait until I’m done having this little moment to relax with a new friend. Everything can’t be about work.”

John chuckled and raised his cup. “You should talk to Dolly. She nearly had a meltdown earlier because I set a piece aside and took the afternoon off.” He leaned back and looked out the window absently. “It’s for the best really; I couldn’t find the tool I needed to finish it anyway, and the paint would have dried too much by the time I got a replacement.”

“But there, see? What if you just changed it up just a little at the end there, just to see how it would turn out? I could tell you tons of times when I was just humming along something and just had a moment of ‘but why?’ or ‘well, why not?’ and John, lemme tell you, sometimes—” she grinned wide and proud at him— “it turned out absolutely awful.” She made an exaggerated face to replace her grin and John laughed at the silly expression. “And sometimes it turned out to be just what I needed to ask to get to the next level.”

He reined in the laughter and leaned over the table, head tilted in inquiry. “Well, now I have to hear about one of the times it went absolutely awful.”

She grinned again. “Oh, brace yourself, buddy… when Abigail Scutto fouls up,” she jangled her ears meaningfully, “she fouls up hard.”

John had picked up a toasted pine-nut and began absently chewing while Abby spoke when her phone went off again.

-Wow-wow-wow-wowow-wowow!-

He sniggered for a second. “So what does the fox say?”

Abby smirked as she picked her phone up. “You have to cut through all the snark to find out. Let’s see now… the fox saaaaaaays…”

Her next words stuck in her throat as she read it over to herself. She was ready to do her best Nick impression, but this wasn’t a text meant for anyone else but her.

<Abbs, if you’re with John Thimbul right now do NOT go anywhere with him. Stay in a public place, turn GPS on if it’s not. Text back that you’re okay.>

“Is everything alright?” Abby’s head snapped up with a jingle at John’s question. Her nose twitched slightly as she considered his placid mien and concerned look. The last message she had sent to Nick and Judy was about the implement pried from Daniel Fields’ corpse: a painter’s palette knife, with traces of high-quality oil paint.

She looked back down at her phone and fired off a quick message, <I’m fine here. What’s wrong?>, then set her phone on the table. “Unfortunately, it’s work related; an update on one of the cases I’m assigned to just came back. It’s nothing I can do anything about right now.”

She kept her voice even and pleasant, with just a hint of annoyance. If what Nick was warning her about John Thimbul was in fact true, what she could and would do right now was keep the artist (or was it Artiste?) pinned here until he could give her direction on what to do about it next. Keep chatting, distracted… not hurting anyone while she was here with him, so that’s where they’d stay.

John sagged in his chair slightly. “I take it our repast is finished then?”

“Oh no,” Abby put on her best ‘Annual Performance Review’ smile. “I’ve already clocked out for the day, and you have no idea how hard Mammal Resources would come down on me if I tried to sneak in any overtime. Besides, like I said: it’s nothing I can do anything about right now.”

His face brightened. “That’s a relief. It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to really relax like this and it’s been… well, I’m really enjoying it.”

-Wow-wow-wow-wowow-wowow!-

Abby grabbed for the phone again before the alert had even finished its obnoxious wail. “Sorry, just a sec…”

<Iuytdsdfgiolkjuy>

If she could have kept her ears up, they would have flopped in confusion at Nick’s text. He was a consummate prankster and punster, but never about the job, so she didn’t believe for a second that Nick was messing with her. Her fingers flew over the screen to shoot back at him, <What’s that mean? We’re @ Snarlbucks on Maple Cross and MLK Boulevard. Stay here? Are you coming?>

“Ugh!” Abby shook her head, the rings in her ears jingling cheerfully as she put the phone aside again. She motioned at the phone with exaggerated exasperation that she hoped would mask the nerves firing off in her brain. She flashed a saccharine smile at the rat sitting across from her. “I swear, sometimes I wonder how they ever got along without me.”

He attempted a return smile. “Sounds frustrating. Are you sure you—?”

“Yep! I’m completely committed to this. We’re not going anywhere.”

“Okay, well… then I have effectively braced myself so…” He clasped his paws on the table and sat at what appeared to be rapt attention. “Storytime with Abigail Scutto still on the table?”

Consciousness was regained in pieces. Judy attempted to blink and immediately regretted it. Everything swam, whatever information coming through her five senses now broken and distorted like they were being strained through a sieve. Her ears rang, her gut roiled, churning and eddying and red like the taste of blood in her mouth…

She gasped and turned to the side just in time to throw up what little she’d had to eat for lunch. Her head felt like it weighed as much as an elephant, but by degrees she managed to lift it ever so slightly. There was a crinkling noise that wormed its way into her ears and she cracked one eye open tentatively for a little more context.

There was a sliver of bright light at her feet to see by. Beneath and over top of her were a couple of tarps and painters drop clothes, splotched all over with varying colors of paint and now the new addition from her stomach. Neither of her paws or her feet would move without the other and upon forcing her eyes to focus she could see why: her paws were cuffed, and her feet tied together with nylon cord.

She risked more movement, reached down around her waist for her utility belt to find it wasn’t there. She edged the tarp up more, then put her ears into motion. There was still so much interference from the ringing and the drone of her racing heart, but her adversary didn’t seem to be around for the moment. How long that would last, she had no way of really knowing so she had to make the best of this opportunity while she had it.

Judy wriggled down toward the line of light, all the while shifting her wrists this way and that. Whoever had put these on—and at this point she had a pretty good idea who that was—didn’t know what she was doing. By the time the rabbit officer had reached the line of light, she had one paw free with the cuffs dangling from her other. That was enough mobility to work with for now.

She shielded her eyes as she turned and squirmed through the opening. Her head popped out from the little tarp cocoon she had been wrapped up in and she could see her broader surroundings better now. She was inside the truck that she’d been sneaking around earlier. The roll-up door was open and the bed was covered in these tarps and painter’s cloths. The edge of the bed was just in front of her, bright late afternoon sunshine beyond it.

Bits and pieces from earlier were starting to come back as her injured head incrementally began processing faster, and Judy looked around in the mess quickly, hoping to find Nick there with her. Nothing vaguely fox shaped could be found in the few seconds she felt she had to spare. She bit her lip and crawled her way to the edge of the truck bed. A cursory look around the alley confirmed it was still empty for the moment. If she was going to get out of this truck of her own volition, it was now or never.

Judy swung herself over the edge and half tumbled out onto the dusty ground. Though she did her best to cushion the fall, it still knocked the wind out of her for a few additional seconds. Two deep breaths later and she had rolled and shimmied herself under a dumpster beside the gallery wall.

Just half a heartbeat from being caught.

An ominous mechanical whirring noise broke through the confines of the building she was now hiding behind. The scissor lift from the studio made its reappearance, wheeling along steadily toward the truck that Judy had just managed to escape from. She barely dared to breathe lest she give away her position. Where she was hunkered down there was just enough of a gap between the dumpster and the ground to see by, and the scene outside alone was enough to stop her breath.

At the scissor lift controls was Dolly Grainger, and in a heap at her feet on the platform was a trussed up red fox.

Nick…

Judy’s mouth went desert dry as she watched Dolly raise the scissor lift up so the platform was in line with the edge of the truck bed. She locked it in that position and then bodily shoved her (she really hoped) unconscious partner from the lift to the truck bed. One roll, two, and Nick was amongst the tarps. Dolly hastily threw one over his prone form, and returned to the scissor lift. It rose up higher to the roof of the truck, where she grabbed a strap and then leapt off the platform. The momentum and weight from her fall brought the rolling door thundering closed. She locked the truck door latch, and then scrambled back up the crisscrossing structure to the controls to lower and wheel it back behind the gallery. No sooner had she parked it in the back than she leapt clear and scurried with haste and obvious excitement to the driver’s side of the truck. She scrambled inside, started the engine, and pulled immediately out into the street. Another second and the truck, the perp, and her partner were all completely gone from Judy’s sight.

The breaths now came in rapid succession, heavy from what she’d just witnessed and the knowledge of what was to come if she didn’t do something soon. No telling how long she was out for, but surely the squad car she called for would be here any minute. If they moved fast and utilized their resources effectively, surely they’d be able to catch up with Dolly before… before…

Her eyesight turned wavy as she wormed her way out from under the dumpster. She brought her head down between her knees as she sat, partially to make the world stop swaying and partially to get the nylon cord around her feet between her teeth. Nibble nibble nibble and it snapped in short order.

Now free to move normally, Judy walked on wobbly legs into the studio through the back door once again. The smell of turpentine had almost dissipated completely by now, though the remaining whiffs she caught here and there made her stomach turn all over again. She made for the now empty chair sitting out conspicuously by a half-finished painting. Around the chair legs was a tipped over water bottle and a pile of gear, both hers and Nick’s shields sitting atop like cherries on a cake. She rummaged through the mini mountain and found both her cell phone and his just as the sound of sirens rose up outside. Her backup was nearly there.

She opened to the home screens for both, hoping one of them would have a message back from Abby, relief flooding her chest to see that she’d responded to Nick twice and not very long ago. She wasn’t going to lose anyone else to this gruesome little art game these rats were playing at.

“ZPD! Open up!”

Sergeant Asstor’s voice boomed through the gallery beyond, and then there was the sound of glass shattering. The rumble of many footprints, and all at once he was towering over her.

“Detective, are you all right? What happened?” he asked and when she didn’t answer him, he hauled her up by her arm and set her in the chair. Deft hooves went to her paws to key open the remaining cuff and he tried to hold eye contact with her still wildly unfocused eyes. “Where’s Wilde?”

“Taken,” Judy managed to croak, and even just that word burned to eke out. She stared at Nick’s phone in her paws and finally brought herself to look at the Sergeant. “I’ll explain in a minute; head’s still spinning. Just call forensics down here now, and send a squad car around to Snarlbucks on Martin Luther Kingfisher Boulevard. There are two mammals there I need to have a little talk with.”

Abby flew under the police cordon and through the broken front door of the gallery. Normally, being in the same vicinity as so many of the works she had admired online would have had her in a stupor of awe. As it stood right now, though, she only had eyes for one mammal.

“Nicky Nicky Nick—!” She skidded to a halt at the back of the gallery where an opossum medic was examining Judy’s head. The area was conspicuously fox-free. “Where’s Nick?”

Judy waived off the medic. “Taken by the once gallery owner now turned lunatic serial killer. Dolly Grainger is the Artiste.”

“What?” John Thimbul was in the midst of being escorted up behind Abby when Judy dropped the affirmation, and gave the blankest of stares at her. “How is that even possible? She’s not… she can’t be…”

“She knocked out my partner and clubbed me like a molting goose.” Judy’s glare was molten as she swung it from the aghast Abby to stare down John. “Got your business partner bringing your business off the canvas? Painting the sidewalks with blood?”

“Me??” His blank stare turned to panic, though backing up only put him against the legs of the wolf officer that was standing behind him. “I’m not… I would never…”

“But you let her, then, is that it?”

“No!” He looked around the gallery frantically, though there was no escape route through the throng of officers collecting samples and laying out evidence markers around them. “She handled the promotions and the cash exchanges, the marketing! I produced. That’s all! That’s all I ever did. I told you that, didn’t I? Except when there were events I didn’t… I hardly ever even…”

He searched and searched and searched the faces around him, trying to find some little bit of commiseration that was simply not present.

His voice turned to pleading. “Please. I never wanted anyone to get hurt for my art. Please believe me.”

There was relative quiet for a few seconds before Abby put up her paw.

“For what it’s worth, I kinda do believe him.” Judy threw an expression of betrayal her way but Abby was undeterred. “I’m just saying. We talked for a long time. If I was supposed to be a target he could have spun me any old flattering garbage to try and go somewhere less public. After all, if I was going to be dead, what’s it matter? Tell me sweet little lies. But this lines up with that, which just leads me to believe it’s probably the truth.”

“I can’t believe that. Won’t.” Judy made the mistake of blinking and she could feel the red-hot resolve start to fizzle under the surface. “Because that… then that means that…”

She scrunched her face and threw her head back, taking deep breaths to quell the break that was forming. Because if John knew nothing, then she was at a dead end. If he wasn’t in league with his partner and all her sick little art pieces, then however was she going to find Nick before it was too late?

A gentle pressure wrapped around her chest, a calming sensation of paws stroking over her wilted ears kept the crack from widening any further. One more breath and she felt like she’d reined it in enough to return the embrace.

“We’re gonna find him, Judy.” Abby gave her a quick extra squeeze and held her by the shoulders. “Big ol’ case review, right here, right now. All the pieces, all of us together.”

“And me too.” John took a tentative half step forward, nose twitching a mile a minute but his back straight as a soldier’s. “If it’s true and Dolly…” He took a breath, looking for a second like he’d just taken a shot of sewerage. “I want to help stop her. Stop all this. Whatever I can do to help, I will. Just say the word.”

Judy narrowed her eyes. “What do you even know about Dolly? You’ve been business partners for how long and she starts going on a killing spree, it didn’t even send up red flags?”

“Objection,” Abby said with a huff, crossing her arms. “A master manipulator manipulates everyone, not just their victims. You know that as well as I do. Don’t badger the witness, Judy. Lead him. Start with the smoking gun. You were here for a reason, right?”

“Right, the knife,” she locked her eyes on John, “your knife, I’m sure. There weren’t any prints, but there was a brand name. Missing one from your studio?”

He nodded. “I only just noticed tonight I couldn’t find it.”

“It was embedded in the first murder scene,” Judy told him. “Daniel Fields had it glued between his paws.”

“There was almost no trace evidence on the Triumph recreation, but there was a ton in the ice sculpture of Preston Peary. The ice trapped so much it took weeks to get through it all, and the report was eighteen pages long.”

Judy rubbed her aching head. “I remember. It made my eyes glaze then, but there didn’t seem to be enough of any particular thing that would narrow it down to one specific area of the city over another.”

“Well, maybe now that we know who dun it, we can back trace off her habits.” Abby turned and yelled, “Someone bring me a mobile workstation!”

Judy winced and rubbed her head. “Ow ow ow, Abby, please, indoor voice.”

She looked chagrined and lowered her voice. “Oof, whoops, sorry. Adrenaline’s going, usually I’m in a heavy speed metal zone by now.”

A loud clopping was followed by a shadow passing over the small mammals as Sergeant Asstor walked up to them carrying a Mobile Data Terminal and a Base Station Radio, likely from his cruiser. “I already brought up the case files. Just tell me where you want me to put all this.” 

“Over here.” John walked past the Sergeant and motioned them to follow him into the back studio. He wheeled the enormous canvas and easel it was on away from the wall, unlocked one of the many adjustment gears, and pulled it down until it was completely horizontal. What was a canvas was now a table. He threw a splotched cloth over the defunct painting and gestured at their new workplace with a little air of ‘ta-da’ before resuming his more tentative stance.

“That’ll work,” Judy said as she stood from the chair. It took a moment to adjust her eyes from the unwanted swimming, but she was able to walk over beside Abby and the Sergeant without any assistance. He placed the gear on the impromptu table and stood back as Abby all but pounced on it and started cruising through their applications.

“Alright, here’s mine and Ducky’s report on the palette knife,” she frowned and moved the file aside. “We already know the significance of that. Moving back, Bainbearidge: let’s see, sealant used, placement of the... components, a tire casting.” She looked over to Judy with an inquiring eye.

Judy nodded. “The service truck registered to the studio under Dolly’s name has a tire patch on the left rear tire.” She looked over to the Sergeant. “It was parked in the empty lot next door. Bare dirt, so they should be able to get an impression to corroborate.”

Asstor nodded and headed over to his team before barking orders.

Abby nodded then turned back. “Okay, farther back we have Peary as Phoenix Rising. Same sealant as all the others, particulates trapped in successive layers of ice.” She frowned at the screen. “She dipped him like a candle.” Shaking her head, she moved on. “Significant third-degree burns, cause of death is ‘smoke inhalation’—”

“Locust,” Judy blurted out. Everyone looked at her oddly. “When we found Peary, Nick said it smelled like he’d been, ‘smoked over Locust wood’.” 

“Oooohhh, now that’s something we can work with,” Abby said, her fingers now flying over the keyboard. “That’s not really a common lumber source, and there are only a few small areas where you might be able to collect that kind of wood naturally. A teensy place at the edge of the Meadowlands, two spots in the Rainforest District, and—”

“—the Canal District.” John finished Abby’s sentence and their eyes turned to him. He pointed at the map on the screen. “Dolly hosted an event once a long time ago, way out in the dodgy North Swamp area.”

“My old stomping grounds,” Abby said with an almost nostalgic gleam in her eyes. “I lived there as a kid, before I moved up to Shady Place to be closer to work.”

Judy’s ears drooped. “That whole area is a ridiculously complicated system of thoroughfares. They can’t even keep traffic cameras operating there with the moisture and, well, lack of actual traffic. Not like airboats have license plates.”

John nodded. “We took a paddle ferry and then an airboat to get to the place. I… I don’t remember the address, damn it. But I do think I can sort of remember the way there, if I saw it again.”

Abby grinned an almost predatory grin and cracked her knuckles. “Then all we need is to find the right place to start. Let’s consult our eyes in the sky to tell us.”

“Detective, a word?”

Judy turned to find Sergeant Asstor beckoning to her from the gallery. She motioned for Abby and John to continue and went over to join him.

“What is it, Sarge?”

He stared down his snout at her, forehead wrinkled with both aggravation and concern. “If Wilde is in the Canals we need to notify the 3rd.”

Her face twisted up. “No way! They’ll blow the whole thing and Nick will be a goner for sure.”

“I’ll remind you that they have the resources to navigate the swamps better than we do. And,” he added, pointing at her, “there’s no way I’m sending a concussed detective and a couple of civilians in against a wanton lunatic.”

“Abby’s on the force.”

“She has zero field experience.”

“And yet had a cool enough head to detain who we thought was the killer without giving herself away.” Judy thumped her foot and then turned her paws out, a gesture of almost pleading. “I can’t sit by and wait to see what happens to my partner, Sarge. Abby’s his friend, and she knows the area better than we do. John knows the building’s layout, and we… we won’t even confront her, okay? We’ll just get there and radio in for backup with the exact location. Finding Nick in time is the most important thing right now. We get him to safety, and keep tabs on her if she starts to leave. The rest we’ll leave for the 3rd.”

Sergeant Asstor glared the kind of glare that would have made Chief Bogo proud, but eventually it gave way to a resigned sigh. “Fine. First priority is securing Wilde, next ensuring the safety of the civilians. No theatrics, Hopps, got it?”

She gave the least ironic salute she was capable of. “Completely, sir.”

He shook his head and cast his eyes around at the crime scene still in process. “I’ll make sure this gets wrapped up nice and tight and alert the Chief. We’ll make sure every single count sticks.”

Nick felt like his whole mouth was full of sand. The lingering scent of turpentine still clung to his nostrils. There were other smells mingling with it now, such as oil, wet canvas, low tide and locust tree blossoms. This last one made him sneeze and that sent his head reeling anew. He attempted to bring a paw up to rub the ache only to find he couldn’t. Both were tied behind what was apparently a chair; legs were in a similar predicament. He cracked one of his eyes open and saw the last mammal he remembered seeing, though the venue had apparently changed.

She scurried back and forth across an enormous plastic tarp scattered with a variety of materials, from broken wood boards to repurposed corrugated metal to bits of broken colored glass. Overhead was a low chandelier draped in chains and rope that she dodged as she ran about meticulously arranging the pieces of refuse around an enormous wading pool; he could guess what that was for, though a quick look showed that it was empty. He was glad it appeared that wherever he was, his partner was not.

What looked like a fish tank was set off to one side of the pool, a flatburner beneath it heating some clear resin substance within. The gleeful rat hummed to herself as she moved about her work, almost as though she were dancing. Nick simply could not help himself.

“Well, hello Dolly.”

She started and spun around. “What? You’re awake already?”

Nick shrugged as best he could. “One of the very few benefits of a misspent Wilde youth is a greater than normal tolerance for, shall we say recreational substances. I meant what I said, that was some top shelf stuff. It must have cost you a pretty penny.”

Dolly regained her composure. “Merely a promise of an invite and introductions at the studio’s next major business event.”

She shrugged casually as if she hadn’t just admitted to acting as a go-between for a drug dealer. Of course, it paled in comparison to the list of other crimes she was also guilty of. Still, Nick was nothing if not thorough; Judy would have his tail if he didn’t get every speck of dirt on Dolly while she was feeling talkative.

“Quite the shrewd entrepreneur you are,” he said evenly. “Very resourceful.”

She actually beamed at the disingenuous praise. “Yes, well running a business I need to diversify and ensure I have repeat customers, and that sort of networking guarantees my studio events are a hit. You’ll even be the star attraction at the next one, once I’ve finished my Magnum Opus!”

“Front row seat. Lucky me.”

Dolly turned to face him again. “Yes, you are.”

Nick felt the first twinge of fear since waking up; not from any overt threat, since he knew she intended to kill him. Rather it was the completely guileless look and genuine smile on her face. Nick was looking into the eyes of madness so complete, that it couldn’t even recognize its own wrongness. He gave up the staring contest with the abyss and instead looked past her, taking in more of the decaying space. He noticed a vaguely familiar porcine profile lying forgotten in a corner, though the rude creature from Dolly’s gallery was now little more than a mutilated toy.

Dolly glanced to where Nick was trying not to stare. “Oh, never mind that,” she waved at the corpse dismissively. “I was trying something new; but while my muse was willing, the palette was inferior.”

Nick swallowed, but turned the charm in his smile up a notch. “Only the rarest and most exquisite of materials for a Magnum Opus, I imagine.”

She turned away with something that almost resembled a pout. “Not that your vulgar Fillystine partner would understand that, of course.”

Nick rallied his nerves to keep Dolly talking. “Now now, no need to disparage; just because her ‘Folk Chique’ style doesn’t appeal to you, that’s no reason to start casting stones.”

Her eyes turned steely. “A stoning would be an appropriate end for someone like her, trying to sully my John’s perfect artistic genius. She should have been grateful I chose to give her the chance to atone for that, and what does she do? Spits in my face.”

Nick had to snort at the image that came to mind. “I have to assume that’s some hyperbole; the worst thing I’ve ever heard her call someone was ‘a meanie’, and that was me. You’re nowhere near as obnoxious as I can get.”

“I am an absolute rutting delight,” she said with complete sincerity and turned to resume arranging the bits and pieces that comprised her current canvas, “and not just because I have party connections. I’m witty, and smart, and I can see business savvy at a glance. I can discern the magnificent from the mediocre. Do you know how frustrating it is to watch the lackluster achieve fame while a true prodigy wallows in obscurity?”

Dolly shoved a twisted piece of rebar just a little too hard against a precariously arranged pile of reclaimed wood and they toppled to the ground. She gave a furious squeak and leapt to recreate the arrangement all over again. Nick watched, waiting.

“Was that when you decided to go the extra mile, then?” The question caught her off guard and the little pile toppled again. “Elevate John’s paintings to the next level? Settle a few grudges at the same time?”

She scoffed. “None of them deserved to even breathe the same air as him. They debased his work, pushed him out, trampled on his vision. They were the perfect materials to bring his magnificence into the light.”

“But what about Daniel Fields? He was so good to John—”

“That worthless little junkie was poison to John!” Dolly rounded on Nick with fire in her eyes and a blade in her paw. “Just like your lop-eared trollop of a partner; they distract him from what matters!” The rage was washed away from her muzzle as a manic smile split her face. “The love of the art is the only thing that is true. And it’s for the love of the art that I had to kill him: the pain of loss is what drives the truly great artists like John.”

“I see.” Nick reset his internal character settings, tilted his head with a smile and softened his voice. “Well, I suppose it takes one to know one, doesn’t it?”

Dolly’s expression wavered with just the slightest hint of uncertainty, unsure if that was to be taken as an insult or a compliment. But Nick had no intention of further antagonizing the unhinged murderer while tied to a chair awaiting his own demise. Every minute he could delay was another minute Judy had to find this place. In that regard, flattery would hopefully net him the time he needed.

“What?” he said, and turned up the charm another notch. “I can’t commend an artist such as yourself for showcasing your own obvious talent?”

Dolly stared and then quirked just the tiniest of smiles. “So nice to find someone who recognizes the skill of the craft. It really is quite a challenge, you know. To recreate his paintings to even a fraction of their depth.”

“Boy howdy, do you deliver on that. Tell me, because we have just been stumped about it… just how did you manage to create the candle effect on Preston Peary?”

Her smile widened and she smoothed back her ears with self-satisfaction. “Oh, that was really quite clever, wasn’t it?”

“Striking. It must have taken hours.”

She waved her paw at him. “Not nearly so much as that, really. The trick to ice effects is constant, consistent water application…”

And then she was off talking through all the grisly and obscene methods she used to create the monstrosities she called art to him in excruciating detail. A few times she would stray from what she’d already done and wander to what she had planned for the piece he’d play a starring role in, how the resin would keep his blood bright and not to worry about his tail, it was so lovely, she’d ensure it was separately prepared, she’d gotten quite good at separating the musculature from the flesh...

Nick nodded and gave all the appropriate conversational cues as though he were listening to her enthusiastically recount a slew of her most treasured recipes. Gleaning as much as he could from the ramblings, letting her reverie distract her, doing his best to buy precious seconds more, and praying Judy was already on her way.

“ABBY, SLOW DOOOOWN!”

Judy wasn’t certain if the Swamp Rabbit heard her over the jangling of her multitude of ear piercings, much less the roar of the air-boat’s pusher fan as they slalomed through the bayou just south-west of the Rainforest District.

“Nothin-doin, Country Bun,” Abby’s voice was barely audible over the cacophony. “Lose any momentum in all these weeds and we’ll never pick back up again.”

“Turn there!” John’s voice rose above the tumult, backed with unwavering confidence. Abby negotiated the sharp shift to the right that he’d indicated with ease, though the airboat rocked enough to throw Judy off balance in her seat. It was a good thing she’d already thrown up previously, otherwise she had no doubt she’d have done so then and there.

“Are we getting close, John?” she asked him, trying to focus on what was to come after this hell-ride was over and the next challenge met them.

“Yes,” he pointed at a flash of white visible through the blur of green. “That’s the grove of locust trees on the island.” 

Judy nodded and called to Abby, “Cut the motor. We’ll coast the rest of the way in so we don’t alert Dolly.”

Abby gave a nod and immediately pulled the throttle down. The motor noise died instantly, leaving only the sound of the lapping wake the airboat made as they coasted toward the shore John had indicated. There was a short, wooden dock jutting out from the edge with another airboat tied alongside it. The dilapidated building was set back from the dock and barely visible through the hanging white flowers and crawling purple blossoming vines. Judy felt an involuntary shudder before she reminded herself the ‘Nighthowlers’ were a Perennial, not a vine.

The trio stayed silent in the thick stillness that followed, half afraid that any noise they made now would give away their approach. The sound of the airboat knocking against the dock bumpers rang in Judy’s ears, like they’d just announced their arrival over a bullhorn.

“I... I don’t remember it being this overgrown,” John whispered.

Abby gave a soft snort. “That’s kudzu for ya. Mom used to call it Devil’s Ivy, it smothers everything it touches. Judy?” The detective looked over at Abby. “I know your ears are probably still ringing, but can you hear anything?”

Judy fought down the urge to snap irritably and just listened for a moment. She heard lots of bugs buzzing, small birds, something splashing in the swamp, and ever so faintly, she could hear Nick’s voice coming from inside the dilapidated shack. “I hear Nick. Talking… normally. We’re not too late.” She motioned at the dock. “Come on; tie this cockamamie thing down while I call in our location, and let’s find a way in.”

A minute later, with the airboat secured, they padded their way up to the house. Judy was subconsciously cataloging the building code violations of the structure she was certain was only being held together by the vines that were devouring it. It was no wonder no one knew the horrors that these walls bore witness to. No neighbors for miles, couldn’t smell anything but the kudzu and the flowering locust trees. Secluded, isolated… once Dolly had her victims here there was no help to be found, and no way back to dry land except in pieces.

Judy’s stomach turned and her pace quickened. 

“We can’t just waltz in the main entrance,” she said, her words barely louder than a thought. “There must be another way in, either as part of the floor plan or as part of Mother Nature’s plan. John, can you remember if… John?”

She turned to where she expected to find him on her right side only to meet the eye of a Great Heron instead. Both she and Abby looked back down the overgrown path. The painter looked like he was rooted into the earth alongside the weeds, shaking like the leaves overhead, and staring at the destination now only a few meters away from them. “Just... just gimme a minute,” he murmured. 

“We don’t have a minute,” Judy hissed as she and Abby hurried back to him. “Come on, focus. Ways in, where are they?”

Silence.

“John.”

“We had a party here,” he mumbled as he stared blankly. “The caterer served Canapes on Garlic Toast Points. It was the first showing that had any real turnout. Dolly broke her back setting it up. It was… nice.”

Abby’s face softened while Judy’s screwed up in mounting panic. Her eyes darted back and forth between the stricken rat and the place she knew her partner was still alive, for now. She was about to bolt off on her own and leave them there consequences be damned when she felt her coworker’s paw come to rest on her shoulder. The other paw took a firm hold of John’s. He blinked out of the thousand-yard stare to glance down and then back up at her.

“I can’t imagine how you must be feeling,” she said softly. “She was a friend and confidant, someone who believed in you and the message you were trying to send with your art. Then she turns around and does something like this.”

Judy’s mind flashed back to the earliest days of her career, and to the one mammal who seemed to believe and support her.

“John,” the rat looked up at Judy, “I’m sorry. I realize you’re probably hurt and reeling right now. You trusted Dolly. She was a friend, and she betrayed that trust you put in her. I really do know that pain, and the only way I know how to deal with it is head on. I won’t make you go, but I need you to help me or I will lose my friend. Will you help us stop Dolly from twisting your artistic vision; from killing someone else in the name of your art?”

John took a shuddering breath, then pinched his eyes closed. His shoulders sagged as he let the breath go, and looked up at the two does with sadness, but also with determination. “There’s a chute near the back of the building that leads into the basement. I think it used to be for coal, but Dolly rigged it up for loading and unloading large art pieces. It’ll be on the west side of the building. There’s a Dumb-Waiter that leads into the main dining area; it’s the only room large enough for,” his voice squeaked as he fought for control, “for what she’s done.”

CRASH!

A sound of breaking glass accompanied the much louder and more frantic voice of Nick Wilde and the three exchanged silent nods to one another. They picked up their feet and surged forward as Judy started doling out instructions. “Okay, when we get in there, this is what we’re gonna do…”

Nick was hoping that the drone he thought he heard wasn’t just a particularly loud blood-sucking insect in his ear. It was a fleeting sound that had risen to the foreground during a brief lull in Dolly’s rambling, there and gone again within a breath. His ears swiveled hopefully, but there was nothing. He tuned back into the “I love Dolly” show as she started pulling loops of rope down from the chandelier overhead.

“Just out of, shall we say morbid curiosity,” Nick surreptitiously tested his restraints, “What exactly is the piece my debut is based on?”

“Based on?” Dolly froze for a moment, a jagged piece of mirror in her paw. “What exactly do you mean based on?”

Nick easily recognized the venomous tinge to the rat’s otherwise benign question. He knew that goading her was dangerous, but he also knew she was almost ready to start, and he needed to stall for time. If he could wind her up just right...

“Well, yeah; I mean, every single piece you’ve put together so far is just a three-dimensional reinterpretation of one of John’s earlier pieces.” He saw her tail lash once. “Aside from the medium, they’re all exact copies with no original elements. Which, understandable, of course, seeing how close to perfection they come, am I right? I’m just curious which piece I’m going to be made into.”

Briiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing!

The obnoxious ring of an old-fashioned egg timer chimed from across the plastic wading pool pit, and it turned Dolly’s attention immediately. She abandoned Nick’s inquiry and shot over to the enormous fishtank filled with the now crystal clear, molten resin. She ended the ringing alarm and stared at the gelatinous substance intently as a single bubble rose up from the bottom. The mirror piece she held was tossed aside, shattering on impact with the ground and she clapped her paws together.

“Well, no time left to paint you a picture, as it were,” she chuckled maniacally as she hurried over to a low-loader cart and wheeled it toward him. “Don’t worry, it’ll take a while to get to the vital bits, so you’ll get a guided tour of the process as we go.”

Well, time was clearly up; no reason for pretenses anymore. Dolly wheeled the cart around behind him, keeping well out of his reach. He tried snapping his teeth in warning, but she was in no way intimidated, completely confident she was in no danger of what little movement he could make in his current position.

“Oh, that’s the perfect face!” She fairly tittered in glee as she wedged the edge of the cart under the chair legs. The agonizingly slow roll toward the pit began. “See if you can hold that for the rest of the session; I can always fall back on making adjustments with nylon fishing line for small details, but nothing beats a genuine expression.”

Nick was on the verge of panicking when he heard a faint, but very familiar jangling sound. The edge of the pit was just ahead, the loops of rope hanging ominously all around. He fell back on the one thing he could trust himself to recite with this much adrenaline pumping through his veins.

“You want the Genuine Nick Wilde, Dolly? You got it. Dolly Grainger, you are under arrest on five counts of Murder in the First Degree, with Malice of Forethought, five counts of desecration of a corpse, six counts of kidnapping, and if I understood your rambling earlier, two counts of Assaulting a Police Officer.”

“Not to mention Illegal Transport of a Cadaver, and Drug Trafficking if Sergeant Asstor has anything to say about it,” an echoing voice filled the hall.

Both Dolly and Nick looked up to a ruined transom window to see the backlit silhouette of a lapine, fists planted firmly on her hips. Nick noted a number of odd details about the striking figure, but kept his peace for the sake of his partner’s plan, not to mention his own hide.

Dolly gave an impossibly loud screech in defiance. She abandoned the cart and ran around the pit toward it, shaking her fists. “Hopps! At least this will save me the trouble of tracking you down; you can join your partner as a part of my Magnum Opus!”

“Ha,” there was a slight delay between the word, and the movement of the mammal in the window. “Magnum Opus are original works, and you don’t have an ounce of originality in you.” 

The figure pointed at Dolly, while Nick felt the faintest tugging against his wrist restraints. He twisted his head as far as he could and from the corner of his eye met the eye of a clearly-on-the-razor-edge-of-losing-it John Thimbul.

“Shhhhh,” was all he could articulate while he continued to claw and gnaw at the bonds. Nick snapped his head back forward in an abundance of not wanting to screw this up, fists clenched and ready to add leverage when the opportune moment presented itself.

“You just ride the tail of better mammals while patting yourself on the back for your cleverness. Is that why you carved those mammals up? You don’t have a creative bone in your body, so you chop others up to see if you can find one?”

“What would you know about it?” Dolly sneered up at the window, and stomped her foot like a toddler having a tantrum. “You think I didn’t see your face, you turning up your nose at true artistic expression like you’re better? What have you ever made? What gives you the right to pass judgment on genius?”

“You’re half-right,” the doe shrugged. “I don’t like John’s style; it’s too morbid. Farm life can be hard enough without wallowing in nihilism. But then I didn’t live John’s life, and he didn’t live mine. As for genius, I hardly think you qualify. After all, you can’t even tell a fake from the original,” the doe leaned forward causing her heavily pierced ears to jingle and flop over her shoulders while winking, “when it’s right in front of you!” 

Dolly blinked. “What in the—oof!”

The rat was still unraveling her confusion at the rabbit who was clearly not Judy Hopps standing there when the actual Judy Hopps came and blindsided her. The tackle sent them both rolling clear over the side of the plastic wading pool pit. The end over end tumble ended abruptly as they slammed into the side, and Judy realized a bit late that jostling her still mildly concussed brain about was a mistake. Her vision started to swim slightly, and though she moved quick enough to get one cuff around Dolly’s wrist, she wasn’t fast enough to secure the other before the rat rolled and elbowed her in the jaw.

Judy saw the rat roll away and come up with a knife; not of the palette variety, but the fileting kind. “I had grand plans for you, you know. I gave you the chance to be part of a real legacy. You insulted me, my work. I can’t wait to dip my brush in your blood.”

Judy tried to stand up, but only managed to wobble and get her ears upright. It was enough as just before Dolly lunged, a black claw-tipped paw grabbed her ears and pulled her to safety. She squeaked in distress as Nick scooped her clear while Abby shoved the vat of resin over. The molten substance spilled out onto the floor between the cops and the raving rat. 

For how crazed Dolly was up to this point, staring across a hot lake of liquified resin at three adversaries tempered her confidence. This was her battleground, but being so outnumbered limited her ability to use it to her advantage. The only advantage she might still have left would be to escape.

She gripped the knife and turned on the balls of her feet, aiming directly for the dumbwaiter in the wall. She didn’t even take two steps toward it before it was blocked.

“Dolly, stop.”

She gawped while brandishing the blade at the mammal in front of her. “John! What are you doing here?!”

“Trying to understand what you’re doing here.” His voice was soft, almost resigned rather than stressed or angry or fearful. “My art was supposed to give form to the pain I felt, not visit that pain on others.” He walked towards her with purpose, if not confidence. “Bridget Caracaille was just a socialite who never hurt anyone; Preston Peary painted landscapes for a living; Bainbearidge inspired me to be true to myself. They were being themselves, just as I was being myself.”

She took a step back, and another, knife wavering. “They were nothing compared to you. Nothing! But they insulted and stood in the way of your success. I had to do something about that, John, don’t you see?”

“In my way?” he repeated, and his voice grew shrill. “Do you think me so incapable of handling a little criticism? A little competition? A little conversation? Danny was… he wasn’t even…” He clenched his paws and looked like he might just throw a punch, but they remained at his sides as he shouted at her, “He was my friend! You killed my friend, Dolly!”

She shook her head with an almost pitying smile. “But you don’t have friends, John. You have me. Right? You’ve always had me, and I’m all you need. I’m all you’ll ever need.”

“No!” John barked out, the pain in his voice startling Dolly and causing her to take a step back. “Everyone always needs people in their lives. If Nathanial hadn’t pulled me aside to explain why he chose Corpus, I’d have become Preston. Danny was… he grounded me when I felt things coming apart from all the marketing and events and appearances.”

“He was ruining your style!”

“He was helping me evolve my style!” Another step toward her, and she backed another step away. “Did that scare you? The possibility that I might outgrow it one day? That I might find new subject matter, new techniques and be better for me, but not better for you?”

“What’s better for me is better for you, John, you have to know that,” Dolly pleaded before scowling and pointing at the three ZPD officers. “It’s her, isn’t it? She’s poisoned you against me. But I can fix this; once I finish my piece, you’ll understand I was right, and she was wrong!” 

“If anything they’ve just opened my eyes and given me the opportunity to step out of the little box I’ve been stuck in so I have the chance to grow.” He shook his head. “I’ve heard you saying how you did all this for me and for my work, but that’s not true at all, is it? You didn’t do any of this for me, for art, for the enlightenment of the world, for anyone but yourself. You perverted my work for your own selfish wants.” 

A sudden blare of sirens and the sound of many heavy paws and hooves caused Dolly to start and stumble one more time, right into the hardening resin pool. One of her feet stuck in the resin and she braced herself with her paws. With the terrible angle she had fallen at, she had no leverage to free herself from the cooling resin. 

“It’s over, Dolly.” His shoulders slumped as Nick, Judy, and Abby came up behind him. Nick put a paw on his shoulder and Abby set a light paw against his arm in support. He took a deep breath. “It’s done, and we’re done. I wash my paws of you forever.”

Judy focused on Dolly just as a half-dozen 3rd Precinct officers came into the battered building. “Don’t worry too much about losing touch with the art world; I understand the Pen has Art Classes as a part of their rehabilitation program.”

“Considering you’ll be looking at back-to-back life sentences, you’ll have plenty of time to hone your own skills,” Nick added. “A little dedication and you’ll be teaching those classes within a decade or two.”

Judy gave her partner a mock glare. “You just couldn’t let me have the last word, could you?”

“Ah, come on, Hopps,” he said and ruffled her ears. “You know that’s not my style.”

Chapter Text

Judy eyed the venue warily. “If you quote Gazelle about ‘trying everything’, I’ll kick the snark out of you.”

Nick smirked but kept his peace as they entered the old Opera house. The marquee overhead advertised, “Differences United: Diversity Exposition and Auction”.

She kept silent for all of ten seconds. “Okay so yes, I did agree to try this and yes, you agreed to come along so I wouldn’t feel totally out of place, but that doesn’t mean you can lord it over me.”

The prolonged silence deepened and she itched to fill it. “I could just as well have said no and gone to see Rabert Plant, you know.”

Nick nodded sagely but remained quiet.

Judy growled. “Damnit Nick, say something!”

“You threatened to ‘kick the snark out of me’ if I did; well what else would be left of me then?” He passed his tickets to the door mammal as they entered the foyer where a small acapella ensemble used their natural animal vocalizations to give a haunting, but strangely compelling, background tune to the somber event.

Judy huffed. “A head-on with a commuter bus couldn’t knock all the snark out of you.” She saw Nick begin puffing up. “Though fitness quals are coming up, so I might just give it the old ‘College Try’ in the ring.”

The back-and-forth bicker banter continued in subdued tones as they moved further into the exhibit. Nick paused alongside several other canids, and several suidae and bears to admire an ‘olfactory sculpture’. Judy listened as the various mammals commented on the subtle differences in smell from different angles due to the several types of wood used in the sculpture. Nick waited patiently as Judy and several other leporidae, and an elephant couple stood inside a glass enclosure, just listening to their heartbeats reflected. They both paused and tried not to stare at the squirrel poetry slam that was too fast for either to understand.

All throughout the old performance hall were exhibits of species’ unique expressions through art. While most of the demonstrations were solemn, reflective affairs, there were a few less formal displays that mammals could participate in. Judy and Nick were passing one of these, a complicated set that allowed brave mammals to enter, cover themselves in watercolor paint of their choosing, and shake it off on a mounted canvas. The newly christened artists signed their work and left with the canvas as a souvenir of their foray into the art world.

This was where they finally managed to meet up with Abby and John.

Abby was in a pair of old work overalls that were splashed in a technicolor riot and tank-top, holding one such canvas. Beside her was John Thimbul in a simple blazer and slacks.

“Nicky! Judy! Check it out.” She held up her artwork for them to see, a mad splattering of fluorescents and pastels exactly matching the rainbow palette on her person. “A masterpiece, don’t you think? How much do you think this’ll be worth in twenty years?”

“If you really intend to keep that long term,” John said seriously, “you’ll want to hit it with a layer of UV protective clear-coat; otherwise, it’ll fade within five.”

“Well, I think I’ll do that, because this is going up in my living room.” Abby gave an obnoxious grin and motioned at the two detectives. “Gonna flex your artistic muscles in there too? It’s fun.”

Judy just shook her head while smiling. “Not really my speed. I prefer performance art, really.”

“Yes,” Nick sidled up beside her, “her dramatic scenes are to die for.” He happily weathered the toe kick to his shin without losing the smirk.

Judy gave an overly dramatic, long-suffering sigh before looking at John. “Mister Thimbul, it’s good to see you outside of a legal setting. How have you been holding up?”

John grimaced. “Getting by. I’ve sold off most of my original work, plus Dolly’s old studio and gallery so I’m not in any financial straits. I was having trouble finding my creative spark again for the longest while.” He perked up and smiled at the three ZPD officials. “But that was until last week. If you’ll all follow me?”

They all made their way to the Symphony Pit to find several works on display by several artists, all tagged for the charity auction. 

“I realized I was trying to recreate the same feeling as my old style, but I’m not that style anymore.” They wove through sculptures, paintings, blown glass work and pottery. “It still informs my style, but I can’t be tied to it. That’s what Dolly was trying to do, and I think it helped drive her a little more over the edge than she was already. My style is my life, and my life is my style. Both have to evolve with time.”

They came to stop in front of a piece that was clearly in John’s painting style, but not the same grotesque subject matter. There weren’t even any mammals in the painting at all. The focus of the piece instead was a scene they were all intimately familiar with by now: Dolly’s abattoir in the Canals. The sharp lines of the desiccated shack met the suffocating greens surrounding it, the locust trees overhead bright and blooming. The windows were painted dark with reds that might have been reflections of the overhead sunset, but for the subtle drips and black tendrils curling from the sills. A small plaque on the bottom of the frame read Fertile Ground, and a blacklight shined on it from overhead to allow all mammals to see the Volish message written in an almost oozing script below the foundation.

“Roots fed with blood will always bear bitter harvests, but from the darkest soil come the sweetest fruits,” Nick translated for Judy.

The piece was simultaneously haunting and beautiful, possessing peace and sinister promise in equal measures.

Judy stared for a moment, eyes drinking in every little detail. “It’s... it’s... what’s the minimum bid?”

Nick’s jaw dropped. “Are you serious?”

She waved her paw at him. “It’s for a good cause, isn’t it? Besides…” She looked it over again. “How can I not? It speaks to me.”

Nick gaped a second longer when John gave the opening bid. “This may be a good cause and all but--” his tail puffed up in alarm as Judy casually pulled out a checkbook and began writing. “No way Hopps; we’re on the same pay-scale and I know I couldn’t afford that!”

“Mom and Dad would consider it a worthwhile investment.” She swung her gaze to John’s hopeful face. “And so do I. An original work of art making the world a better place? Everybody wins!”

John took the check and placed it in a nearby lockbox. “Thank you, Officer Hopps.”

“Judy.”

He smiled. “Judy. You know, it’s hard to take the first step toward something unknown, even when it’s away from something that’s been awful for so long. You tend to stick with the monsters that you know rather than face the new, because what if it will be worse? Dolly reinforced that so often I really believed it. Thank you, all of you… for being the ones to prove her wrong.”

John sighed as he looked at the painting. “That, I think, was a part of Dolly’s problem; she was in the business for the money, not for art’s sake. Art is passion and pain and triumph and sorrow and everything we feel but can’t just describe until it bursts out in song, or dance, or onto the canvas.” He looked back at Judy. “You and I weren’t speaking the same language before; I didn’t know the words, and you weren’t ready to listen. But now...” He smiled and looked out over the milling crowds that, only a month earlier, would have sent him scurrying for the safety of his studio. “Now we’re all on the same page.”

“And speaking of pages,” Abby said with a nod up at the mezzanine above, “the demo for boaragami is about to start. Any interest or am I broadening my mind all on my own?”

“I’m game, since it’s about all I can possibly afford here,” Nick said. “Maybe I can get a little folded bunny for my desktop?”

Judy smirked. “It’ll get lonely without a friend, so I guess I’ll have to whip one up for it.”

“Ohhh, Hopps doing something with paper that isn’t crumpling it into an angry little ball and throwing it at Nick, or scrawling all over it?” Abby grinned wide. “This I’ve gotta see.”

Nick swept his paws out. “Even more culture awaits. Lead the way, Ms. Scutto.”

The technicolor bunny skipped ahead, earrings jingling cheerfully a melody all their own as she led the troop of mammals through the gallery of all the different expressions life could take. Friendships bolstered, new ones formed through appreciation of what each had to offer to the world, to the many mammals searching for something to give their own voices volume, or simply to see through eyes that were not their own.