Summary:

Viktor Zsasz is hired to inflict public pain upon Commissioner Jim Gordon in the most brutal way possible — with his daughter, Barbara. Dr. Strange deals with the aftermath.

DISCLAIMER: This work of fiction contains material that may be found disturbing, controversial, or morally offensive. The author does not endorse any actions depicted in their work. All characters, events, situations, and lines are fiction and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events is purely coincidental. PLEASE READ THE TAGS!!!

Notes: Update (July 2025) After becoming concerned that too many photorealistic images in a NSFW fic may have violated AO3’s policies, I removed my original version on the website and replaced it with an image-free version is still archived here. I have since learned photorealistic images cannot show nudity on their policy but did reupload some other images as teasers to the original story. Since this story was partially inspired by these images from other works, I am choosing to re-ulpload the full version here but removed all images with violence and nudity from the AO3 version.

DISCLAIMER: This work of fiction contains material that may be found disturbing, controversial, or morally offensive. The author does not endorse any actions depicted in their work. All characters, events, situations, and lines are fiction and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or events is purely coincidental.

Author’s Note: This story is not meant to occur in any specific version of the Batman canon. Viktor Zsasz’s personality borrows a bit from different cinematic versions (such as working for Falcone like he does in Batman Begins/Nolanverse but also having his more open sadism like in the comics). Barbara Gordon in this story is learning to be Batgirl and is Batman’s mentee and she more or less knows Bruce’s identity. She is around 19 circa Batgirl: Year One, but this story is not in that canon.

Part 1: Sending A Message

Barbara did not take it personally that both of her parents were too busy to be home by dinner on the last full day of her spring break from Gotham University. Her mother was  out of town, in D.C., for an important hearing.  Her younger brother had gone off to an out-of-state match with his lacrosse team two days before. Her father, meanwhile, was in the midst of a case she could not know about. So, Barbara was content to stay home that evening to work on a large research paper that was due at the end of the break.

Barbara had never seen her father so stressed over a case since the Harvey Dent fiasco that had ended with the District Attorney of Gotham pointing a gun at her 10 year old brother’s head — an event Barbara only missed because she happened to be sleeping over at her best friend’s house that night. That near miss — and the understanding that she not only almost lost her family, but could have done so in the same way that had scarred Bruce Wayne (her mentor, Batman) for life — had forever changed her in ways that, ultimately, turned her into the woman prepared to don the “Batgirl” suit years before she had known of that possibility. Though, she was not entirely comfortable with the “girl” moniker. She was 19, after all.

Her father had already called her to apologize and say he would not be home before midnight, probably later. Barbara understood. Being Commissioner Jim Gordon’s daughter entailed that constant secrets were as much a part of her life as her father’s smile and mustache, the smell of his first six of ten cups of coffee every morning, and a sense of looming danger as familiar to her as the furniture in the living room positioned in the same way her entire life. What bugged Barbara far more was the lack of communication from Bruce. It was not clear to her if he knew what was going on and was purposefully icing “Batgirl” out of a mission due to being overprotective again, or if Batman, too, was kept in the dark. The idea of writing her spring break paper on criminal psychology while her father was locked in on a mysterious mission that Batgirl could potentially help him solve (unbeknownst to her father, of course) drove her crazy. She had to content herself with faith that eventually Bruce or Dad would tell her or let slip what was going on — what or who they were so fixated upon. 

Sighing, she decided to make herself a bowl of popcorn for dinner. Why not? No one was stopping her. She popped the popcorn bag into the microwave, and as she listened to it pop, the idea of curling up in the living room with her laptop in silence sounded more and more appealing. She really did appreciate being back home for the first time in a wild semester.

Yet, something was not quite right in the silence. Her recently acquired, but developing, senses as Batgirl set anxiety simmering under the surface of the empty home’s apparent tranquility. Somehow, she knew this was not an anxiety to dismiss. Someone was in their house. She knew it.

But she missed the footsteps only yards behind her on the muted floor until it was too late to react. But even if Barbara had seen Viktor Zsasz appear through the Gordons’ bolted back door before he shot her with a tranquilizer, she would have been unable to overpower him without her Batsuit. 

Viktor Zsasz was a name Barbara knew quite well, though she was less familiar with the fugitive’s face than she was with the hundreds of scars that covered his body. One scar on his skin for each person he killed. Though Batman had been grilling her on the various members of the “rouge gallery,” as Mr. Alfred flippantly called them in his smooth British accent, it could be hard to keep straight who was working for whom at any moment.

With Viktor Zsasz, however, it was unclear that even he knew.

Zsasz was not chaotic the way the Joker was. He was, according to Bruce, more calculating, more of a chess player than a magician. He preferred to stalk his prey meticulously rather than indulge in the Joker’s theatrics.  Though Zsasz was allegedly not as precise or analytical as Dr. Crane, the Scarecrow, Batman once told Barbara that he thought Zsasz’s “simple” straightforwardness actually spared him from falling into one of Scarecrow’s greatest weaknesses: a tendency to overthink a situation unproductively due to his infatuation with his own intelligence. Meanwhile, Zsasz’s calm decisiveness enabled him to accomplish his “missions” more effectively. As such, he had worked with everyone from the Falcone crime family to his former advocate Crane to corrupt Gotham police to even The Joker himself. And Barbara well knew The Joker was not known for his cooperation skills. She wondered how he had kept that sidekick of his, Harley Quinn, around for so many years.

Of course, it was understood by even the Gotham underworld, according to Bruce’s sources, that everyone knew Zsasz had no loyalty to anyone. Zsasz himself was upfront about that fact. But the man was apparently good enough at “taking care” of problems that even the Falcone crime family, which functioned on a dated sense of loyalty, were not above hiring him to “make an offer no one could refuse,” or using their power and corruption to spring him from federal prison as needed.

Nonetheless, like The Joker, Viktor Zsasz had a fondness for knives and personal attacks against the people he killed. He killed for hire, for survival, or even for (the authorities suspected) his perverse sense of fun. Unlike most hired killers, who tried to leave as little evidence in a scene as possible, Zsasz had a habit of playing with the bodies after he killed them — positioning them in odd ways, inflicting postmortem injuries. He was apparently under the impression he “freed” the people that he killed. Each scar that marred his body was a talisman of victory. 

Barbara remembered her father noting that there are evil people in the world who commit evil because they do not care, then there are evil people who commit atrocities believing they were doing the right thing. Jim found the later kind scarier, “because we are all at risk of falling into it.” Not falling into it was the way Barbara lived her life, with or without the Batgirl mask 

But Barbara did fall to the kitchen floor, limp. She barely got a glimpse of her attacker’s broad, scarred face before her vision distorted,  and the last thing she felt before the world spinned to black were strong, stout arms catching her petite body before she fell to the tiled ground. Then there was the silence.

***

Viktor Zsasz could carry the girl in his arms almost effortlessly. She was only 5’1 and could not be more than 100 pounds. He hefted her limp body easily over his shoulder and retreated to the living room and plopped her clumsily on the couch. He allowed himself the pleasure of fondling her for a moment, sitting on the couch beside her. He peeled the clothing from her body, leaving her completely nude, before turning to his most pressing task.

Zsasz had brought with him a long rope, about 20 feet. It was not difficult to tie a firm knot in the hinge of the hallway bathroom door, the ledge closest to the living room and kitchen. When he was done, a good ten feet off rope drooped loose in the hinge; but, he knew that a decent amount of pressure on the other side would pull the rope easily taunt. Then, he tied a noose on the other side and tested it until it rose to Viktor’s shoulder. He only needed several inches. The girl was shorter than he had anticipated.

Within minutes, he had located the kitchen stool that this young woman no doubt needed to reach the higher shelves in her family’s own kitchen. Stripped of her clothes, her bare and already pale body now exposed to the air, Barbara Gordon stirred weakly just as Viktor had managed to carry her from the couch to the corner and wrap the noose around her pretty young neck.

The commissioner’s daughter immediately began to struggle. At first, her movements were feeble, her eyes foggy and mind clearly disoriented. Then, by the time he had her hoisted in the air, her bare feet still set on the kitchen stool while her hands clawed uselessly at Viktor, pulling the rope well out of her reach, she seemed to have regained full consciousness — enough, at least, to know exactly what was going on. 

Though she had been trained as Batgirl, she could not overpower him without her suit, especially with her air being restricted. Yet Viktor could give her credit for this: the girl did not go down without a fight. Defiant anger flashed with fear in her eyes as she glared at him defiantly, struggling to free herself without losing balance on the stool, barely under her tippy toes. Already, she was held upright by the chord, her hands clawing desperately at the tight chord already constricting her throat. 

Ignoring her, Viktor pulled out the camera phone he had been given by his boss to capture the final moments of Commissioner Gordon’s daughter’s life. Soon, that video would be broadcast on the internet and around the city so that everyone in Gotham could hear the frantic cries of what happened to the loved ones of those who crossed his boss too publicly. 

Viktor kicked the stool out from under her legs

Barbara’s eyes, frozen wide open in mixed horror, rage, and humiliating pleasure (Viktor was sure), bulged almost comically while her mouth gaped in vain. The uncontrolled movements of her violently kicking legs, her hands clawing at her throat in a useless flurry of panic, and her thrashing body set her slender frame swaying in the air….all captured by the merciless gaze of Viktor’s eyes and his camera lens. Her curling and uncurling toes dangled mere inches from the floor that would have saved her. Her cute little pick tongue was  flopping and bulging in a desperate plea for oxygen while her delicate hands still clasped in vain at the rope digging into the soft, pale skin of her straining and enticing neck.  

Viktor tied down the rope and crossed his arms, watching the girl wriggle with clinical, detached interest. Wondering vaguely if she could still feel touch, but not caring either way, he found himself imagining lightly toying with one of her small, pert breasts, but could not do so while he carefully  filmed her demise. Her legs continued to scramble frantically for a grip that would not come, as each thrash further forced the air from her straining lungs. The sight of her kicking bare feet made his cock twitch in anticipation. 

Within what felt like a long set of minutes, the hanged girl’s gargling softened to a raspy, weak gasp. Her spasms subsided to twitching. The dying young woman’s popping eyes were wide with what Viktor knew from experience was the final haze of terror that swept over the dying when they knew there was no hope, but had not yet lost full consciousness. A single streak of drool trickled down her childish jaw from swollen, blue lips that were already dark against the backdrop of her ruddy face, now fully  in the throes of dying.

 Eventually, her legs stopped kicking feebly and her arms fell from clawing at her throat to swaying useless at her sides. After a long, and (to Viktor) boring fight, every muscle in the hanging body fell slack and still. Viktor saw a few muscles in her thigh twitch after he could no longer hear the rasp of her breathing. Then, as he waited, another twitch never came. The body hung limp and perfectly still. The only sound in the living room was the distant buzz of cars and people of the city of Gotham living their lives outside the window, blissfully unaware of the life that had been snuffed out in this room. 

Meanwhile, the dead body of Barbara Gordon Jr. swayed peacefully in the noose like a tree branch in a gentle wind. 

Viktor was not too gentle when he let the body down, delighting when it hit the floor with a thump. He checked the video on the phone to make sure he had recorded it correctly. While his orders were to transmit the video to his boss immediately…he figured there was room for improvisation.  

It occurred to him with all the time before her father would return home from his stupid mission trying to track Viktor down  — according to the mole his boss had in the Gotham police department — that it might be a good idea to scour the house for any information against the commissioner, any files that would put him in good grace with one of the many people he worked with. Besides, he was dehydrated and hungry. That popcorn in the kitchen smelled really good. 

So he left the young woman’s corpse to cool in the eerie silence, lying supine on the hardwood floors with its dead, hollow gaze transfixed on the ceiling of her childhood home.

***

After over an hour later — maybe two — Viktor was enjoying the power of not being in a rush. He felt he had gleaned anything he could glean, filming anything of note or taking pictures of classified documents in addition to stealing several. The body remained sprawled exactly where he left it, allowing Viktor Zsasz  a moment to admire his handywork. Still lying with her head tilted at a slightly unnatural angle, coupled with an angry red ligature mark directly under her chin, there would be no doubt to Gordon exactly what befell his daughter the moment he walked into the room. Viktor delighted in that. 

By the time Viktor returned to the body, the skin had already taken on an alluring ashen hue. The dead young woman’s lips were parted, the tip of a violet tongue forced between her teeth. Her arms were outstretched as if she had fallen pointing in opposite directions, or if she had collapsed while making snow angles in mid-flap of her “wings.” Her nipples were still hardened, though rigor had yet to settle in the rest of her limp body. Beads of sweat still glistened on her pale skin and shapely legs, pooling on her small breasts. He could already see the foreshadowing of rigor in the curve of her thin fingers. Yet he knew her cunt would just as lax and unresisting as he had known and wanted it to be when he finally slipped his throbbing penis inside of it to fuck the dead girl’s body. 

Viktor no longer regretted that the Joker had forbidden him to use their favorite weapon — a knife. The girl had to be recognizable beyond doubt in the video uploaded, in these days of DeepFakes and falsifiable “news.” Such a decision had allowed Viktor to not only draw out the dying girl’s final moments, but to leave behind a body so pristine sprawled before him. 

There were perks to his job, and he was going to take them. The sight and feel of her exposed corpse was high among them. Hot with anticipation, he gazed into her glassy eyes as he pushed into the slit of her moist still lubricated cunt, making no effort to spare her unfeeling tissue the roughness of his penetration.  The way the angle of the body’s hips and lower back pressed flat against the hardwood floors would have been uncomfortable to maintain for a partner who could feel. But Viktor had all the time in the world to manipulate and mold his fucktoy’s position as he pleased.

Viktor felt his pleasure rise with each careful, ginger thrust into her soft curves, her hips slapping slowly against his in the silence of the room. He longed to draw out this moment and memorize it forever, though soon enough his ragged breathing grew into more desperate pants alongside the soft slaps of her flesh on impact, as he rubbed against her unfeeling clit. 

 Viktor placed his arms on either side of her to better steady himself as he straddled the corpse — it was not as if he needed to give care to pulseless, unfeeling breasts.  The dead girl’s pale body lay pilant under his weight. Yielding completely to his touch, the body rocked in time with each motion of Viktor’s thrusts, small chest jiggling on beat. Her shoulder-length red hair fanned around her pallid face,  gently catching the fading afternoon light. Her tongue was still protruding through her bloodless thin lips, swollen but pale, and the sight of it sticking out more with every rock of his hips aroused Viktor even more. 

The feeling of her young, still-warm cunt clenched around his penis as he plowed into a body as hard as wanted without resistance….This was the best physical sensation (outside a few stabbings) that he had felt in a very long time. Rarely did he have the opportunity to defile his marks so completely. Something about the  forced wide-eyed look of dead bodies turned Viktor on immediately. The feeling of a freshly deceased corpse clenched around his cock was unparalleled; there was nothing like the dull glow of a dead skin radiant in pallor during that sweet spot of time where the body was both beautifully lifeless and fuckably limp. 

Then, his rough thrusts began to pick up speed. His scarred, calloused hands clenched her slim hips, defining a pale slender waist, with a grip as hard as the noose had been around her neck in order to better position himself between her still-soft thighs. His rough thrusts grew harder and more desperate as his grunts turned into low, deep groans. All the while, Barbara Gordon’s limp body shook with each thrust, small breasts wobbling, as he pounded the dead girl. The give within her young, slack muscles was incredibly erotic — more so than either welcome or resistance in the girl’s body would have been in life. As he continued to ram into her, her face bobbed along with an unseeing gaze, utterly unresponsive to every clap of their flesh. 

Really, my girl, don’t take it personally, he thought. Viktor killed many people out of both anger or necessity, to say nothing of desire. Still, while Gordon was certainly an enemy — all police were — Viktor did not personally hate the man the way he hated Batman. He certainly did not hate his daughter. No, my dear, it was just a job I had to do. You would have understood one day if you had not gotten there now — and perhaps I did you a favor, little dove, sparing you from that. Now, you will be young and innocent forever. But right now, you are mine for these hours and in my memories of this moment that I expect to turn over in my mind for a very, very long time, you lovely pathetic little thing. 

Grunting as he finally came, Viktor enjoyed the splatter of cum across hairless, still limp thighs, letting his gaze linger lingered on the bloodless cheek. He imagined himself cumming again across that unblinking gaze in a few hours once the body was completely hard. The spilled streams of his cum glistened in the living room light across her virgin tits. Let the Commissioner find his baby girl crusted with dry semen and spit, legs spread wide and clearly violated before or after death for hours before he arrived — too late — to find her defiled body stiff. 

The dead blue eyes still gazed into oblivion when Hugo took out his phone to upload the video to YouTube and other sites of note. It was finally time to upload, once he left the scene. No doubt the video would not go long unnoticed, bringing the good Commissioner home. 

Viktor indulged one last glance at the girl’s dead body, gorgeously pallid and sickly in the natural afternoon light streaming through the Gordon family’s living room windows. He took a few final photos for his own amusement, before leaving it on the floor to cool, and for her father to soon find.  

To be continued…

Part 2: In the Morgue

It was decided on the scene that, in addition to the formal autopsy, Dr. Hugo Strange (chemical expert and part-time consultant at Arkham Hospital) would also evaluate the body for criminal evidence. 

Though most agreed that the girl’s cause of death seemed to be simple strangulation, they could not rule out the possibility of toxins — a potential indication towards Commissioner Gordon’s daughter’s killer. Dr. Strange was an expert in chemical warfare and toxin design. Hugo’s expertise was needed to deduce if the young woman’s cause of death had included the use of the chemical weapons commonly employed by several of Commissioner Gordon’s most known enemies.

 Several suspects had emerged. Hugo’s former colleague at Arkham Hospital, that egotistical hack Crane, now known by the moniker “Scarecrow.” This new fellow who was called “The Riddler.” And, of course, the infamous “Joker” himself.  What interested Hugo was less the murderer’s identity itself, but whether or not her death was the work of one of the enemies who brewed weapons within Hugo’s specialty — particularly, what such a possibility would entail for his research. 

Barbara Gordon’s murder was all over the news. It could hardly not be. How often is the death of the daughter of the most prominent law enforcement official in Gotham caught on camera and broadcast online? The video had already been scrubbed from YouTube, though Hugo knew without doubt that the patrons of certain sites on the Dark Web had already captured the video for their own viewing pleasure. Hugo knew this because he had once been familiar with such sites, where one could browse photographs of corpses in all manner of states; from lying in a coffin in repose to disfigured on a crime scene floor. On some sites, one could even filter by state of decay. Hugo knew this due to his own past history discovering these archives on the web.  At this point in his life, however, he had little interest in the Dark Web online. He had contact with the real thing. 

Hugo Strange had always been fascinated by bodies. The process of postmortem decay….how the flesh maintained the stories of their owners’ deaths with them after they lost all power to speak. He was a teenager when he knew he was drawn to crime scene photos in ways irreducible to intellectual curiosity, sensing that his mind processed images of murders in an unusual way, devoid of the more common-place disgust. The doctor had already read the young woman’s file. He was not perturbed by the obvious prescense of semen in the vaginal canal and torn tissue that he expected to find – tissue torn but without severe brusing, an indication of postmortem rape, as corpses do not bruise. The handiwork of one of her father’s many enemies, no doubt. Yet Hugo, again, had more pressing concerns. 

It was not often he was alone with a body so fresh and non-disfigured as that of the commissioner’s daughter. Hugo rubbed his hands together in anticipation, eager to take a look upon the body that had lain in wait for him for several hours. Carefully, he removed the sheet that covered her body to reveal her torso and face. He regretted that he had not been present to remove the body bag as well. Watching the black plastic peel away to reveal the body cocooned within was one of his favorite parts of the preparation rituals, and he practiced it with the tender care of foreplay.

The corpse awaited him in the examination room was striking in its silhouette of its petite body, traceable beneath an opaque white sheet. Hugo pulled back the sheet and was met with Barbara Gordon’s head and shoulders. Laid upon the gurney so still and undeniably dead. 

The dead girl’s eyes were half-open, a sliver of blue irises gleaming dully in the green morgue light. Her face still retained traces of baby fat that the young woman had not lived to outgrow. But the roundness and softness in her girlish cheeks did nothing to lessen her remarkable beauty — though, no doubt, more lovely to Hugo in their sunken state than they would have been alive. A row of small, perfect teeth was visible between her slightly parted lips — lips once plump and pink, now chapped and bloodless within an equally lifeless face. Though the body had been reportedly found nude, someone — probably in a shocked state of grief — had haphazardly reclothed the girl in a peach-colored cotton sundress (without remembering to include a bra) with spaghetti straps slipping off her bare shoulders. 

Viewing her profile up close, her face was oddly frozen in an expression of a corpse whose muscles have fallen lax, then hardened in that slack position with the beginning signs of rigor mortis; her final expression of pain and terror having long faded to blankness. In death, the freckles and blush that Hugo had seen in her file’s photographs had vanquished with her final breaths; the only mark of former life visible being the harsh ligature bruise around her lovely throat. After pausing for a moment to drink in the sight of her dead face, Strange removed the rest of the sheet from the girl’s body to reveal her entire supine form laid out on the gurney before him. 

At least six hours dead, her skin had since turned frigid, hard, and gray with rigor and livor mortis. Yet Hugo could tell by sight that her alabaster skin lacked traces of hair that usually “grew” in postmortem dehydration of the skin; her body was as smooth as the steel table upon which it lay sprawled. The young woman’s slender arms seemed set in an awkward position, as if they had been found outstretched, but now dropped limply at her side as useless in death as they had been in saving her from strangulation. Both of her legs seemed tilted at an unnatural angle, as if she had been found splayed and then her white legs manipulated post-rigor to a closed position. Her bare feet were the same pale shade as the rest of her gray, pale flesh — the evenness of her skin’s hue suggesting a lack of sun in life. Whoever had dressed her in the sundress had also provided cotton underwear to preserve her modesty; Hugo knew from the file the girl had been found completely nude. Hugo swallowed deeply as he took in the sight of her — the lifeless body before him a display of the finality of death, and the intoxication of that finality at the mercy of Hugo’s whims. 

Dr. Strange began the examination by cutting away the girl’s clothes, peeling off the cotton rags that remained of her underwear and sundress to bag them as evidence. Then, Hugo began massaging the rigor from the body, so as to better re-position it as needed to better examine it and collect evidence. He started with its delicate fingers, then its pulseless wrist, before moving to the larger joints of its elbows, knees, and shoulders. Soon, the main joints and core were more malleable, while the limbs kept their odd and angled stiffness. The gentleness of Hugo’s massage contrasted with the violence clearly inflicted on the poor girl, both before and after she died. 

Once the rigor was somewhat massaged from the body to the point it was more manageable to begin taking evidence, he started with a q-tip to swab the vaginal canal. Anus. Mouth. Every inch of the corpse’s skin was explored with both the radiation light and the finger-print collection kit, rolling the body to-and-fro to document every centimeter of skin. Hugo carefully examined under its fingernails for DNA, noting the absence of both her attacker’s skin or defensive wounds indicating struggle, suggesting whoever killed her did so from behind despite the angle of the ligature wound suggesting she had been hoisted up.

Hugo examined each of the girl’s eyes by raising each lid and shining a light into each unblinking, dilated eye. He noted the lingering redness in her vacant eyes, hinting at blood having pooled in eyes only to sink to the part of her body touching the ground in liver mortis. He took a note of those traces of bloodshot, as they suggested both that she had died with considerable trauma inflicted upon her neck, and that her body had been primarily positioned lying on her back following death. 

As Hugo documented the signs of asphyxiation, he began to feel increasingly disappointed at the lack of signifying clues for poisoning. Though he knew another autopsy might be requested by the family, it was evident to Hugo the girl’s cause of death was boring strangulation.  Whoever may have ordered or performed the girl’s death did so without using a recognizable toxin that could be traced back to the killer.  There was nothing of interest to him here. 

Nevertheless, Hugo had a job to do and, as a professional, he would do it meticulously. He shined the radiation light into her hair in search of traces of semen to catch on his coroner’s comb. Her bright red hair haloed her face, so bright against her gray skin it was as if her image had been an artificially colored technicolor photograph. The waves of copper were incredibly soft, he noted, and he wondered what they must have smelled like before taking on the vaguely formaldehyde-tinted stench of the morgue. 

In what felt like too soon, he realized he had completed the exam. Whoever her killer was, he had left few traces of identification — though that lack of evidence was, itself, a key clue to her murderer. Hugo realized that he had finished the exam in a quarter of the time that he had requested. As he had been prepared for the possibility of more evidence, he had scheduled the examination time accordingly. Perhaps it may be a good idea, for professionalism, to linger a bit longer. Though he knew how valuable his information was — that the fact there was relatively little for him to find helped paint a more detailed profile — he knew he was barely respected, at best. Better take his time documenting evidence to maintain the image of an investigator who spared no detail in his exam.  He recorded his final notes, falsifying the time that the exam concluded. Then, he meticulously bagged and labeled each capsule of evidence and locked them in the appropriate drawers and boxes to deliver to the investigators. 

Dr. Hugo Strange’s part in the investigation was done. 

A second autopsy might be requested, of course. Yet, even so, Hugo knew no DNA would be extracted from an examination that would only reaffirm strangulation, not poison toxins, as the cause of death. The integrity of the DNA would already be compromised by that point. Even if DNA was gathered, and Strange’s was among the results, he knew that as long as removed the most damning evidence of his desire, any lingering traces of his DNA on the body could be explained by being the previous forensic examiner. 

Furthermore, because her body (Hugo reasoned) had already been brutalized after death before coming into Hugo’s care. Any additional postmortem “damage” could be excused by the body’s previous assault. There would be no reason to assume the body had been degraded yet again….

He turned back to look upon the dead body of Barbara Gordon laid out on the table. 

The girl lay splayed and still before his eyes, completely cold to the touch by now, and ashen in the stark morgue light. The longer his gaze soaked in the sight of the young woman’s corpse,  marveling at its stillness and visible chill, the more he registered what a rare opportunity was gifted to him: the chance to be alone with one of his works of art, for even an hour or two, without interruption. All throughout the examination, heat had pooled in his lower abdomen at the sight and touch of her icy skin…the sense  of taboo underlying his mundane professional life, just as titillating in its wrongness as the actual sight or feel of her breasts and cunt.  The fact he could easily be caught with the body simply aroused him more. 

Carefully, he cupped her icy cheek. Her head still lolled at a slight angle — the only sign of its cracked neck — its ligature bruise still red upon her graying throat. He turned her head to face him directly with a gentleness that was almost fatherly, brushing back the strand of copper hair that fell across her face.

The sight of that inanimate face went straight to his crouch. Unable to resist any longer, Hugo dropped down and started kissing her untouched breasts. He explored the Gordon girl’s breasts with his tongue, his unreciprocated kisses memorizing the feeling of every inch of her cooling skin. Her pink nipples had hardened with rigor over her firming, but supple breasts. Hugo kissed, squeezed, even bit those small and unresponsive breasts hungrily, allowing his tongue to lick those dead tits with abandon for as long as desired.  Though his own eyes were as closed as hers, the mental image of himself  licking and kissing her lifeless chest, juxtaposed with that startlingly, intoxicatingly blank expression on her face, aroused him just as much as the sight of her bare breasts themselves. 

After a deliciously slow, careful, but none-too-gentle time kissing Barbara’s chest, his mouth moved down the length of the small, thin corpse. Alternating between closed pecks and open-mouthed kisses, he moved both hands and lips across the delicate arch of her collarbone, the pulseless chest, her bird-like waist, and the underside of now-rigid arms. Then, throwing open her legs and kissing up thighs that had not lost their soft fat, he tentatively slipped his tongue directly into the folds of her pussy. The sensation of his tongue against her frigid, dry vaginal lips, his nose bumping against her shaved vulva, wracked through Hugo’s lustful body. Eventually, he pulled up, panting. He spat into his hand and inserted two slick fingers into the vagina, while his other hand explored Barbara’s parted lips, inserting into her mouth. 

Hugo took her lifeless hand into his own as he released his aching cock. Despite the rigor set into her hands, he easily manipulated her small fingers around his cock and began to run her cold palm rapidly alongside his length while caressing her spit-slicked cunt.

The feeling of her rigid fingers around his member released a strangled moan from his throat. As Hugo pumped his hips against her dead hand, the police commissioner’s daughter jiggled along complacently on the table with each jerk of her arm. 

Hugo could not say he had anything against Commissioner Gordon himself. In fact, he somewhat liked the guy as much as Hugo was capable of liking anybody, particularly police. Specifically, he could appreciate that the commissioner was not a micromanager; trusting his employees and associates to do their job. He certainly had nothing against the girl he never met. No, though her killer had made it personal, this act had nothing to do with the person who once owned this body, much less the people who loved her. It was all about the very fact that person existed no more and love had never mattered all that much to Hugo Strange.

Soon bored with the handjob, Hugo let her hand fall abruptly, dangling off the side of the table. Roughly grabbing her skull by its bright hair, he tilted her head back to better access that dry cool mouth with his cock. 

The feel of her motionless tongue against the head of his penis set his loins on fire. He fucked that mouth with with long, slow strokes, keeping a gentle hand on the back of her head to guide her head. He was not sure any living woman had felt as good to him as her dead face looked with its mouth bulging with his cock. But then again, he had never been interested in sex with the living enough to acquire enough experience to compare. 

As his orgasm grew closer, he took his free hand off her chest and leaned onto the gurney for support, focusing all his strength on not collapsing or brushing the underside of his penis against her teeth. He noticed her eyes had crept open, stubbornly, again — dark eyelashes stark against a drained cheek. The stillness of her eyelids frozen as if in mid-flutter simply added to the thrill of transgression. Hugo’s hand slipped from her hair to cradle her jaw, coaxing the mandible further open while his thumb stroked her cheek with a dispassionate tenderness. 

The rigor was setting in more quickly at this point. If he was going to go deeper into her body, it was best to do it now. Dr. Strange abandoned her mouth, gasping as he pulled out with all of his resolve. In one swift, rough movement, Hugo yanked her body by the ankles to the edge of the stainless steel table and let her legs drape off the edge to better position himself between her thighs while standing up. 

Greedily,  he hoisted her pale but fleshy legs around his waist and he sank a cock almost as rigid as her muscles into her spit-slicked vagina. Her muscles were both cool enough in the vulva and lips to send shivers through his entire body, yet still supple enough for his penis to enter. He neither knew nor cared how long he fucked her. Repositioning the body on the end of the table, he let the corpse’s legs plop down with a clang and manipulated its positions more firmly on the gurney, taking its limp head in both hands in an attempt to hold it straight. 

He felt like he could burst at any second at the mere glimpse of the body’s awkwardly nude position, draped from the table. Hugo’s imagination of the sight of her being strangled was enough to push him near the edge. Her hands and arms flapped at her side, dangling from the table edge, like the branches of willow trees in the wind while her feet followed course obediently on either side of his clothed hips. All the while, her face lay utterly passive, jerking under his weight to the rhythm of his thrusts.

When Hugo finally came with a gasp, he collapsed with his full weight on her chest. He planted a final kiss on her breasts, then her throat — directly above the fatal bruise encircling the dead girl’s windpipe. 

Dutifully, he wiped the body down. He stroked her cheek as if in gratitude, assuring her she “did a good job.” Hugo delighted in the irony of “thanking” a body that could not, and would not, “do” anything save what he wished to do to it. 

He noticed her eyes had opened further of their own accord. Hugo decided graciously to close them. He had taken adequate photographs of his project today — another perk of his job in the lab — that he could easily copy for his own archive. Already, he had a feeling that the memories of this afternoon would sustain him for a quite long time. 

Hugo planted a final kiss on her parted lips. He did not bother to return the sheet to its place over her corpse. Let the sight of those vacant, unprotesting eyes and the uncanny tilt of her fractured neck, frozen in rigor, great him upon his return. He would have to later sign out the body to the coroner for a follow up upon request. Until then, he left the body alone on the autopsy table, secure in the knowledge that he left no evidence of indulging his perversion. Before he left, he carefully positioned Barbara Gordon’s head upwards towards the ceiling and tenderly tucked her hair once more behind her head, the way he would later tuck her body back into a bag. 

 Before he left, Dr. Hugo Strange paused for one last glance. With his professional obligation behind him, he could continue to linger and take in his project, gazing with pride in his work upon her dead body. The young woman’s corpse — no longer Barbara Gordon, but something else entirely — lay lovelier than ever in death. Mesmerizingly lifeless, vacant, and as serene as the silence that now rang in the morgue. Both his desire’s blank canvas and masterpiece.