MEANWHILE....
The reporter* was still talking to his friendly informant at the morgue of the hospital where Lionel Ulysses was treated and killed by an as yet unidentified assailant. The reporter was shocked to learn that if he wasn't murdered, Ulysses would have died in less than two years of AIDS from dirty needle drug use, but there was something he wanted to know more than anything else.
"Did the toxicology reports or other tests turn up anything else interesting?" wondered the reporter.
"What do you mean?" asked the morgue attendant in return.
"Come on. You saw the story on the news. The police vest cam footage. Did the man have a tail or not? Was he even human?"
"I didn't see anything saying otherwise, but let me look again," offered the morgue attendant, as he walked back over to a desk, sorted through the collection of paperwork on it, and came back to the reporter with one specific file.
Flipping though the pages, the reporter waited anxiously until his friend reached the end of the last page, when the morgue attendant said, "No. Nothing to indicate Lionel Ulysses was anything other than an unfortunate soul dying of a disease he probably didn't even know he had yet, since there were no indications of any treatment drugs in his system, not even back when he was just HIV+," before handing the reporter the file to look over himself.
"Hmmm..." said the reporter, looking over the pages too. "Yeah. I'm no doctor, but I can follow enough of this to see Ulysses was pretty much screwed between all the illegal drugs he took and their consequences. But what about signs of a tail, real or costumed?"
"You have the file in your hands, but it doesn't leave this room," the morgue attendant reminded him. "There was no biological indication of a tail on the deceased's body, but the police took all Ulysses' things when they started investigating his death, so I don't know how things turned out on that end."
"Okay. I understand. Thanks for your help," said the reporter, as he handed his friend back the file and five twenty dollar bills.
"Any time buddy. Anytime," replied the morgue attendant, while quickly pocketing the cash.
Hmm... thought the reporter, as he headed to the elevator. The police vest cam footage showed something odd happened during the capture of Ulysses and his so called "Rat Pack" gang. Yet even if it is a fake, there's been no further evidence of that alleged tail since. If the police have it, why not just resolve the matter once and for all right now, instead of trying to ignore the question outright?
Then the reporter shook his head to clear it as the elevator arrived. Well, I still have the murder story to investigate. Hopefully something will turn up once I talk to hospital security, he thought, pushing the button for upstairs.
ELSEWHERE...
"He's determined," the passenger noted to the driver of the car they shared, sitting in the hospital parking lot near the reporter's vehicle.
"Commendable, under different circumstances, for we need to discover who killed Lionel Ulysses too, but not good if this reporter actually finds out something he shouldn't," pointed out the driver. "At least we should be thankful that Ulysses' heavy drug use either masked or outright destroyed any physical evidence that he was a wererat," to which the passenger simply nodded in agreement.
The occupants had listened to the reporter's conversation with the morgue attendant via the bug they had left in the morgue office.
"We don't have any other listening devices in the hospital, do we?" asked the passenger.
"Unfortunately, no," conceded the driver. "Thankfully we already had an operative inside hospital security before the Ulysses matter arose, so the reporter's own actions will determine what happens next," referring to the fact that if the reporter did discover any evidence that Lionel Ulysses was a were, the world would soon be short one journalist.
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*And even if someone else decides to actually give him a name, remember that just calling him "the reporter" is the closest we can come to honoring a classic 1970s TV show.—tmw.