- Mayor Klass demands that Captain Gordon recover his daughter and capture Batman within five days - or else be fired and blacklisted for life. With no other options, Gordon reluctantly allows Cort and the rest of his taskforce to pursue Batman with maximum firepower.
- Batman finds his psyche fraying, his nightmares of his parents' murder growing sharper and sharper. He learns of Catherine's kidnapping from a passerby's radio. Immediately suspecting Strange is trying to frame him, Batman invades Strange's penthouse and demands answers, only to trigger a trap full of hallucinogenic dust.
- As Batman reels from the hallucinations, Strange attacks with a baseball bat, and eventually forces Batman off the penthouse balcony. As he falls, Batman desperately cries out for his mother and father, inadvertently correcting the one flaw in Strange's psychoanalysis: his motivation stems not from some recent crime, but one from his childhood.
- The concussed Batman helplessly scrambles through Gotham, barely evading the police vision of his parents' killer completely overwhelms him.
- Meanwhile, Captain Gordon finds Cort similarly exhausted; though unaware of Cort's activities as the Night-Scourge, Gordon investigates, and the files Cort has been secretly passing to Strange, chief among them a dossier of all family murders within the past twenty years.
- With these files, Strange has already deduced Batman's secret identity.
- On returning to Wayne Manor, the exhausted Batman is horrified to find Alfred unconscious, and every room occupied by mannequins of Thomas and Martha Wayne. Through tape-recorded messages, these mannequins relentlessly blame their "son" for their deaths, driving Batman into a complete breakdown - and a panicked flight into the depths of the Batcave.
