She'd kept her gloves on the whole time, so fingerprints weren't a concern. As for the bodies — four dead gangsters in New York City, with the NYPD's legendary backlog, wasn't the kind of case that landed on anyone's priority list quickly. No one was rushing to match gunshot residue to a college-aged girl.
Back at the apartment, she turned down Maki's offer to scrub her back again, stepped under the showerhead, and let the water wash away the residue of her first kills.
I wasn't looking for trouble. Trouble found me. That was the nature of this city.
After she dried off and changed, she opened her laptop and started working through the address the tattooed man had given her.
The location was deliberately dark — a blind spot in the camera grid. She mapped the surrounding blocks and found almost no obvious activity signatures. No unusual delivery patterns, no foot traffic anomalies.
Madame Gao was one of the five fingers of the Hand. An elder expelled from K'un-Lun. She looked like a stiff breeze could put her in the hospital, and she'd been alive since the Ming Dynasty — four hundred years of accumulated knowledge, four hundred years of honing her qi. She could shatter boulders from a distance. In combat, her qi-enhanced speed, strength, and reflexes put her in a category well above what physical training alone could achieve.
Daisy did not want to fight her. Unfortunately, they had now seen each other's faces, and Gao's entire strike team had disappeared without a trace. The old woman didn't need courtroom evidence — she worked from outcomes.
First mover wins. Even if she couldn't eliminate Gao outright, she could make New York too expensive to operate in.
She spent the next several days watching from a distance through binoculars. The location was meticulously maintained — but operations at that scale always left some trace.
What she was looking at, eventually, was clearly a production facility for a controlled substance. The exterior footprint was deceptively small: one narrow door, two armed men standing watch with submachine guns, locked down tight. But the building's roofline sat about 1 meter (roughly 3.3 feet) higher than the surrounding residential structures — the kind of height differential that implied significant underground space. Daisy estimated the subterranean level could comfortably hold a hundred people.
Every night around midnight, the door opened and a blind man would emerge, carrying a satchel, tapping his cane along the sidewalk as he made his way to the delivery point. This was Madame Gao's distribution operation in New York.
They gouged out his eyes. The thought settled in Daisy's stomach like something cold and heavy. They were using blind couriers — people who couldn't identify locations, couldn't give useful testimony, couldn't be easily prosecuted if caught. And they'd made them blind on purpose.
That woman needs to be stopped.
She didn't move. Charging in alone was the Punisher's style, not hers. She'd been a civilian in her past life and she had no particular ambition to play lone hero in this one.
She needed law enforcement.
The NYPD was saturated with corruption — she probably knew more dirty cops than any individual officer would admit to — but the department wasn't entirely rotten. A few decent people still existed.
She skipped the hacking approach and went old-fashioned, working through the public directory on the precinct's website.
George Stacy — NYPD Captain, Gwen Stacy's father. In principle, a useful contact. In practice, completely inaccessible. A man at that level moved in circles Daisy couldn't reach through normal channels.
The other honest cop she could recall clearly — someone the neighborhood called "Big Daddy" — had already left the force.
She kept scanning. Eventually her attention settled on Brett Mahoney — a patrol officer out of Hell's Kitchen. One of the few people in the precinct with a genuinely clean record. He was Daredevil's contact in the department, a man who'd committed to protecting his neighborhood and actually meant it.
She'd seen him around. Hard not to, growing up in Hell's Kitchen.
She adjusted her internal frequency slightly — a subtle nudge toward warmth and openness, the kind of presence that made people feel instinctively comfortable — and walked over.
"Hey, Officer."
She let a trace of anxious relief cross her face, the kind that appeared naturally when someone stumbled onto unexpected safety.
The tall officer looked at her, took a beat to place the face. "I know you. What's going on?"
Daisy glanced around with practiced caution, then dropped her voice. "I found a production facility. They're using disabled people as workers — it's large-scale..."
His first instinct was to shut it down. This wasn't the kind of situation a civilian girl should be anywhere near, and the claim was extraordinary. But the ambient warmth Daisy was projecting through her frequency kept him from cutting her off, and he listened.
By the time she finished, Brett Mahoney had a forehead full of sweat and a complicated expression. Whether it was true or not, this wasn't something a patrol officer had the authority to act on alone.
"I'm just a beat cop," he said, with uncomfortable honesty. "If your information is solid, you'd need to report it through official channels. I can walk you to the precinct—"
Right, because that would work beautifully. File a report, and within the hour someone would have tipped off Gao's people. She felt a brief flash of sympathy for his optimism.
She couldn't exactly explain to a police officer that his department was riddled with people on the payroll.
"You need proof before any of this goes anywhere, right?" she said instead. "Come with me tonight. I don't have a weapon on me and I'm not trained to fight — I just want someone who can actually do something if we see what I think we're going to see."
He thought about it. Unverified tip goes up the chain, gets ignored or buried — bad outcome either way. But if he physically witnessed something and reported that, his position was completely different. Solid ground no matter what happened next.
Every honest cop still wants the promotion, Daisy thought. Nobody wants to walk a beat forever.
He nodded. "Alright."
Well past midnight, Daisy and the officer were crouched inside an empty room on an upper floor, 200 meters (about 660 feet) from Madame Gao's facility.
"That's the place you mentioned?" Mahoney kept his voice low. "It doesn't look that big."
Daisy smiled — the quiet kind that comes with knowing something the other person doesn't. "Look at the roofline. It's a full meter (about 3.3 feet) taller than every residential building around it. Doesn't that seem off? I cross-referenced the electrical draw and water consumption data for this block. There's a significant underground space beneath it — conservatively, it could hold over a hundred people."
As they watched, the narrow door opened. A slight figure emerged — a blind man, feeling his way forward with a white cane, a heavy bag slung across his shoulder, moving in careful increments through the dark.
Mahoney knew blind people. He'd spent years in Daredevil's territory. He could read the specific quality of movement, the way the body navigated without light input.
"That's your courier?" he asked. "Why are they using—"
"Blind couriers don't get searched," Daisy said quietly. "If they're caught, the sentencing is lighter. And these men..." She paused. "They didn't come into the world this way."
Mahoney went very still.
Two armed guards. A door designed to be invisible. A blind man carrying unknown cargo into the night. No legitimate business needed any of that.
Daisy sketched a quick diagram of the block. "He'll turn at the second intersection up ahead and get into a vehicle. Where it takes him, I don't know yet."
She'd kept the details tight — but every piece pointed to the same conclusion. This was a major operation, with manufacturing, distribution, and a management chain extending well beyond a single location.
Mahoney looked at her steadily. Daisy met his eyes with an expression of complete civic responsibility.
"If it's what you're describing," he said slowly, "this is too big for the district to handle. It goes way above my level."
"You're worried about leaks," Daisy said.
He nodded once, not denying it. Every cop in his precinct knew who was clean and who wasn't. No one said it out loud, but everyone knew.