The following morning they visited Roy again, and not once did Diana's fear of them lift. Iris was no longer offended by it; she mostly found it funny and proof of the fear she could invoke in civilians when she wanted to, which naturally could prove useful for cordoning off any emotional stress their hatred caused.
"You said you got the search warrant?" said Iris.
"Correct." Roy showed it to them. "Your Timeline proved rather difficult to argue for, given it could be constituted as its own fishing expedition, but I suspect the judge believes you would search the house even if you were not granted one. The warrant limits your Timeline as far back as the day of the most recent murder."
"What if we need more?"
"Call me and we will discuss it. I will note, however, that you are likely to reach a point beyond which the hand of civilian justice cannot grasp. To go beyond that may require your usual Urasaria methods." He shook his head. "We will discuss it if it proves necessary. You've done much to help Thomas, however much the media and police have tried to ratchet back your efforts."
"Hopefully we can stay within those limits a bit longer." frowned Iris.
"Hopefully so. Were you able to verify the eyewitness's testimony about Thomas?"
"He pissed on the wall of that seafood restaurant, not the river."
Roy sighed. "Don't mention that in the trial. If questioned, say you could not verify it, no matter what the prosecution says."
"Why? Doesn't it prove Thomas's confession false? He said he urinated into the river, but he didn't."
"That is what his confession states, yes, most likely because he had heard the police openly suppose it enough that it became reality to his mind. The rest of your evidence will have already disassembled his confession; I see no need to hand the prosecution even one verifiable fragment, however little truth is contained in its essence." he said. "They would seize upon it. They will say: 'What I have learned in twenty years of prosecuting dangerous criminals is that coincidences do not exist', and my defense against such would have to be 'of course coincidences exist, and they occur every day'. The former is righteous and the latter right -- thus the jury would rather believe the former."
"Understood."
"Was that all we needed to discuss?"
Olivia looked to Iris, letting her decide whether to mention this.
Iris did. "I found evidence that Thomas assaulted a man. He didn't maim him, but you know the strength disparity between host and civilian."
Roy nodded. "Would the prosecution know of this?"
"I won't tell them. We just thought you should know."
"The man is tried for murder, not assault. He'll certainly be convicted of hosting a Revenant illegally, but I can do my best to ensure he's given only ten years and not the chair. You seem perplexed, Kronos."
"I just expected to have to argue with you about it. I agree that he doesn't need to be punished more than that."
He shook his head. "Ten years in prison is deterrent enough. Without a Revenant and the ferocity of youth, the young man will age out of crime as most prisoners do. Had he, like many other young men, committed his crime on a university campus, he would have been warned by campus police, not imprisoned. Why should he not be extended the privilege of that leniency?"
Iris nodded, and she felt a vague sense of defensiveness come over her. She realized that though Roy did not know her past well, if he did, then he would likely know more about her than she did herself. Whatever it was, she wished she had known him in her teenage years; she might've been able to avoid them then.
She pitied Thomas more now; while she thought him a stupidly unlucky son of a bitch, she could not condemn him; she could not draw up a line by gender between herself and Thomas, to say that her violence was explainable by mental illness and his was explainable by criminality; that one should be helped and the other punished. She had not really discussed this with Olivia, but she had felt that she too understood Iris's way of thinking, and for a moment she was anxious that by defending Thomas she had only disrobed her soul to deeper shame and the pity of others for what it suggested about herself in defending him.
But she had spoken to both of them and they had seen value in her. She tried to remember that she had told Olivia of a few of her wild and cruel acts, and yet Olivia had not looked at her with hatred and shame; she had been able to understand that that Iris was not a bad person, only that she came from a bad place, and for an unpitiable instant she felt that will to match another's praise for her again, just as she had with Natasha.
She felt well as they drove out to the suspect's home late that night, and entered the home at their approved time.
Tentatively, Iris decayed all walls and then reverted them; he was not here. She found the bedroom, crouched down, then checked the outlet closest to his bed. She scanned and saw electricity had flowed through it nightly into his phone charger. "Timelining here." She laid down and focused, then began skimming through the previous midnights. His phone flickered into existence, and as she checked it, she was relieved it was an iPhone. The location was turned off, but it would not matter. "Give me a few minutes."
She walked into the other room and found his computer; she skimmed through the past states of his phone, finding the login credentials to his Apple account. "Be right back." She walked out of Timeline and allowed the phone to teleport back to where it was in the present, then walked back inside, leaned over his desk, clicked 'Lost Mode', confirmed through email that she had lost her iPhone, and the phone's location was revealed.
Olivia was fucking stunned. "YOU CAN DO THAT?!"
"Poor security disguised as user convenience." Iris shrugged. "We've got one minute before he realizes."
They rushed out to Iris's truck; with Kairos it accelerated, rapidly, until they were parked outside of a small, shitty motel. They still did not have his room number, but it would not matter; as Iris walked out and Olivia followed her, she hung out below the outside overhang of the second floor.
She called the phone's number, and as she readied to scan where a vague vibration would twitch in eternity -
- two hooks shot out of her phone's screen and ripped her eyes clear out of their sockets; she threw it down and blasted it with a geyser of lava as she gave out an agonized scream, and felt Olivia grabbing tightly at her, whispering to Iris quickly: "I- fuck, I already see him leaving -- are you okay-"
"-besides the bli-"
"-besides the blindness- Baal!"
Iris heard and felt a truck accelerating out of the lot, but decided not to interfere; she heard Baal rapidly chewing beside her and Olivia shoved her behind her back, and a glob of vomit fizzed into existence as she shouted: "Back!"
A gust of wind launched them back and Iris groaned as she hit the wall, Olivia landing in her lap and quickly standing off.
"Fuck, he's gone." muttered Olivia. "Iris, don't revert it."
"There's a reason I didn't when I could." Still blinded, Iris felt behind herself and repaired the bits of the wall she had broken. "Better he thinks that we can't track him."
"I got a good vomit into his gas tank. He's not going far."
She felt Olivia crouch down beside her and rub her shoulder. "Okay, besides the two missing eyes, are you okay? Did you take any worse damage?"
Iris felt nurtured, and she resented it. "It's fine." She stood up and tried to feel out, vaguely, until she felt Olivia grab her wrists.
"Let me guide you."
"I was reaching out for something to grab onto."
"Yeah, you were about to get two big handfuls, dummy."
"If I accidentally did, would you hold them against me?"
Olivia snickered. "Sometimes I wonder if her bacteria wasn't the only thing they transferred over."
"…reminds me of the time she came home with her right eye hanging out of its... well, I'll tell you later." muttered Iris. "Sorry, though."
She felt Olivia guide her into what, by the outline of her scans and the screaming of civilians, was the hotel lobby. She heard Olivia explain that they were students and did not need an ambulance, and the screams dimmed until normal operations resumed. Eventually she felt two Flickendecke patches stuffed into her eye sockets and give her sight anew. She was sitting across the room from the front desk; a few employees were watching her with horror.
"By the way, they know we're students now." Olivia glanced back, then whispered to Iris: "I didn't say we're doing a civilian case."
"Works by me." muttered Iris. She did not bother to get up as she asked: "So, what room was it and what's his name?"
"Jackie Horowitz. H-He was in room 237."
"Did he specifically request that room number?"
"No, it was just the first one available."
"You mind if I search it?"
"W-Wouldn't you do that anyway?"
Iris paused, then said: "I certainly would." She went off to his room; little left there. He had packed lightly and taken his phone & charger with him, though she Timelined anyway, and found nothing. He had noticed the phone and the message left about a minute before they arrived, and when she had called, fled quickly and hooked his light travel bag with him.
"Can't locate the phone again." she muttered. "Most likely destroyed it. Truck, maybe, but he'll likely abandon it if he saw his phone flash into existence. Mirrors on the truck... difficult to track a host on-foot."
"And with the hooks, he can go far. He was moving fast enough that only you could've kept up with him."
She grabbed the phone and checked its current state. It had been destroyed in the present, and his bag held no identifying information. If he were to have destroyed the truck and fled, she would need to track a host on-foot: always a difficult thing, although something she grew better at as the years rolled on. She thought, but again she was in her pattern of investigation; for now objects other than the phone or bag did not enter her mind. She wished occasionally she could empty her mind like the flushing of bowels, to no longer be caught in the bias of memory's preconception.