Chapter 1: House Call
The spreadsheet was called GROCERIES.xlsx, because you were not an idiot.
It lived on an encrypted thumb drive taped to the underside of your kitchen drawer, behind the takeout menus, and it had four tabs. The first was dates. The second was injuries, coded in your own shorthand: L clavicle, healing fx, est 6–8 days; R zygoma, hairline, est 3–4 days; L glenohumeral, chronic instability, prior dislocations x many. The third tab was news headlines, cross-referenced: ARKHAM BREAKOUT, CLOCKTOWER COLLAPSE, BATMAN SEEN FALLING FROM GOTHAM CATHEDRAL. The fourth tab had one cell filled in, and you'd typed it at four in the morning eighteen months ago with your hands shaking, and you had never once typed anything else on that page.
It said: Bruce Wayne.
You were thinking about the spreadsheet at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night, standing in your kitchen in sweatpants eating cereal out of the box, because you'd just come off three nights in a row and your body didn't know what time it was. You were thinking about how you really should delete it. You'd been thinking that for eighteen months.
Then somebody knocked on your door.
Not the building super's knock, which was a fist. Not your neighbor's, which was the shave-and-a-haircut. Three measured, unhurried raps, like the person on the other side had all the time in the world.
You checked the peephole.
You stepped back from the door. You put the cereal box down very carefully on the counter. You checked the peephole again, because there was a chance you'd had a stroke.
Bruce Wayne was standing in the fourth-floor hallway of your building in Midtown, under the flickering light the landlord had been promising to fix since March, wearing a black tuxedo with the bow tie undone and hanging loose. He was holding a bottle of red wine by the neck. He was smiling at your peephole like he could see you through it.
Which, you thought, with a cold drop in your stomach, he possibly could.
You opened the door on the chain.
"Doctor," said Bruce Wayne warmly. "I'm so sorry about the hour. I was at a thing for the hospital foundation, you know how those go, three hours of rubber chicken and then a man from the Rotary wants to tell you about his boat. And I thought, you know who I've never properly thanked? The brilliant woman who read my X-rays after that dreadful polo business. So." He held up the bottle. "Château Margaux. Ninety-six. I hope you're not a white wine person. I'd be devastated."
You looked at the wine. You looked at him. Up close he was bigger than he looked on magazine covers, which you'd known clinically, because you'd seen his films. You knew the exact length of his femurs. You'd measured the joint space in his left shoulder with a digital caliper.
You'd never stood two feet from him while he smiled at you. The smile was very good. It was a professional product. It went all the way up to his eyes and stopped exactly there, like a tide line.
"Mr. Wayne," you said. "How did you get my address?"
"Oh, I'm hopeless with that sort of thing, I'm sure someone at the foundation..."
"My address isn't on file with the hospital. I use a PO box."
The smile didn't move.
"And I've never told anyone at Gotham General my first name," you went on. Your heart was hammering so hard you could feel it in your teeth. "Everyone there calls me Doctor. Even the parking guy."
For a long moment Bruce Wayne just looked at you through the gap in the door.
"May I come in?" he asked, in exactly the same light, pleasant voice. But something under it had gone very quiet.
You thought about saying no. You thought about the phone on the counter, the police, the twelve or so people you could call. Then you thought about who would answer if you called the police in this city, and who'd show up on your fire escape, and you laughed, short and slightly hysterical, and slid the chain off the door.
He looked wrong in your apartment. Too big and too expensive, like a racehorse in a studio. He stood in the middle of your living room with his hands in his pockets, taking in everything. The secondhand couch. The reading lamp. The framed print of a chest X-ray from 1896 over the bookshelf, which your mother had given you when you graduated and which every date you'd ever brought home found creepy. The bookshelves themselves, full of radiology texts and mystery novels and, God help you, the thumb-worn paperback biography of Thomas Wayne that you'd bought at a used bookstore after the fourth tab.
His eyes landed on it. Stayed a second. Moved on.
"Nice place," he said.
"It's eight hundred square feet."
"That's what I said. Nice." He set the wine on your kitchen counter, next to the cereal box. He looked at the cereal box. "Is this dinner?"
"I'm a doctor. I eat what doesn't require chewing."
"Alfred would have opinions." He said it without thinking, lightly, and then something flickered across his face, as if he'd made a small mistake. "My butler. He has opinions about everyone's dinner."
"I know who Alfred is," you said.
The room got very still.
You'd been a radiologist for nine years. You were very good at looking at a picture and seeing what was under it. And you watched it happen now, in real time, in your kitchen: the playboy came off Bruce Wayne like a coat sliding off a hanger. The easy slouch went first. Then the half-smile. His shoulders came back and squared, and his weight shifted onto the balls of his feet, and his face settled into something hard and patient and extremely awake, and when he looked at you again it was like being looked at by a different man.
"How long," he said. It wasn't the magazine voice. It was low and level and had gravel at the bottom of it.
You'd heard that voice before. On a grainy news clip from the night of the Arkham breakout. Growling something at a camera crew from the top of a police car.
"Eighteen months," you said. You were amazed your voice worked. "You came in with what you said was a skiing accident in February. Right zygoma fracture, three days healed, minimum. You said it happened that morning. The ski resorts in Aspen weren't even open that weekend; they'd had an ice storm. I checked."
He said nothing.
"And the date lined up," you went on, "with the night someone took down the Penguin's whole smuggling ring on the Sprang River. The news said Batman took a hit to the face from a grappling hook. So I went back. I pulled your older films. The polo fall. The car accident on the Robert Kane Bridge. All of them a few days older than your story. All of them right after something on the news." You swallowed. "And the left shoulder. You've dislocated it so many times there's barely any labrum left. There's a video from the docks two years ago where Batman's arm is hanging wrong, and he puts it back himself against a wall. I watched it about two hundred times. It's the same shoulder."
"You accessed my records nineteen times," Bruce said. "Over eighteen months."
You flinched. "How do you..."
"The hospital flags repeat access to VIP charts. The flag goes to compliance." A pause. "I read compliance."
"Of course you do."
"You didn't tell anyone."
"No."
"Not a colleague. Not a reporter. Not a friend over drinks."
"No."
"Why not?"
You'd asked yourself that a hundred times. In the reading room at four in the morning with his films glowing on the monitor in front of you, the long bones and the ribs and the healed places like knots in a tree. You'd looked at the ghost of the clavicle fracture you'd never told anyone about and thought: somebody has to put that back together every time. And somebody has to walk into a gala the next night and smile like nothing hurts.
"Because I'm a doctor," you said. "And you're a patient. Your scans are protected health information. If I tell anyone what's in them, I lose my license." You lifted your chin. "Also, you'd be dead within a month, and I'd have done it. I didn't take the oath to do that."
Something moved in his face. Very small. Like a hairline fracture showing up on a second view.
"So that's why you're here," you said. "To make sure I'll keep quiet."
"Yes."
"How were you planning to do that?"
He looked at you for a long moment, and you understood suddenly, viscerally, that he'd had a plan. Several plans. That he'd come up the stairs with every one of them loaded, and that some of them involved money, and some of them involved leverage, and none of them had accounted for you saying the word oath in your kitchen in sweatpants.
"I was going to assess," Bruce said finally. "And then decide."
"And?"
"I'm still assessing."
You crossed your arms. "Then here are my terms."
His eyebrows went up, very slightly. You were fairly sure nobody had given Batman terms in a while.
"I keep your secret," you said. "I delete the spreadsheet tonight. You never have to see me again if you don't want to." You took a breath. "But you get that shoulder looked at. Properly. Not by your butler with a field kit on the kitchen table. It needs surgery, Bruce. You're going to lose it one of these nights on a rooftop and you'll fall forty stories because your arm won't hold your weight."
He stared at you. Then, slowly, something you hadn't seen yet came over his face. It wasn't the playboy's smile. It was smaller and rougher and real, like it hadn't been used in a while.
"You called me Bruce."
"That's your name."
"Most people say Mr. Wayne." He took a step toward you. You didn't step back. "Or they say the other thing, in that whisper. Like I'm a ghost story."
"You're not a ghost story. You're a forty-year-old man with a bad shoulder who eats nothing but protein bars, judging by your bone density."
He took another step. Now he was close enough that you had to tilt your head back to see his face. He smelled like expensive cologne and, under it, faintly, something sharp and chemical, like gun oil or Kevlar.
"And if I want to see you again?" he asked quietly.
Your mouth went dry.
He was standing very still, looking down at you, and his eyes weren't steel-blue at all this close. They were darker, with a ring of gray, and they were on your mouth.
"Then I'll need to examine that shoulder," you managed. "In a clinical setting."
"Of course." His voice had dropped another half-step. "Clinical."
Neither of you moved. You could feel the heat of him across the six inches between you, and you were suddenly, violently aware that you were wearing an old Gotham U sweatshirt with a hole in the cuff, and that he'd come here to threaten you, and that you wanted to put your hands on his chest anyway, just to see if his heart was going as fast as yours.
He stepped back first.
It cost him something. You saw it. He picked up the wine bottle and set it down again a few inches to the left, unnecessarily, like he needed to do something with his hands.
"Delete the spreadsheet," he said. "Tonight. I'll know if you don't."
"I don't doubt it."
He went to the door. He paused with his hand on the knob, his back to you, and for a moment he was so still you thought he'd changed his mind.
"One more thing," Bruce said, without turning around. "You weren't the only one."
"Only one what?"
"Pulling my files." He looked back at you over his shoulder, and his face was the hard one again, all edges in the flickering hall light. "Somebody else at Gotham General has accessed my records forty-one times in the last six weeks. Somebody with better clearance than yours."
"Who?"
He didn't answer. He just opened the door, and stepped out, and was gone, so quietly that you didn't hear him on the stairs.
You stood in your kitchen for a long time. Then you went to your laptop and logged into the hospital system, and pulled up the access log on Bruce Wayne's chart, the one you weren't supposed to be able to see.
There was your name. Nineteen times.
And above it, over and over, in neat rows going back six weeks, every single entry timestamped between two and four in the morning, there was another one.
Dr. Thomas Elliot, Chief of Neurosurgery.