Death Cannot Kill What Never Dies – Chapter One – quicksylver28

Reading Time:
11 Minutes

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Glossary:

CFA – Chief Forensic Analyst

SFA – Senior Forensic Analyst

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Yasmin leaned her curly head through the glass office door “Looks like we’ve got another one, boss.”

Draco looked up from the notes he was making on his computer, the files from his quarterly reports and evaluations strewn neatly across his desk. “Same unsub?”

“We think so. Same MO. Same impossible crime scene. I heard this one’s pretty gruesome though.”

He frowned. “More gruesome than decapitation?”

She gave an exaggerated shudder before leaning against the door frame. “Please don’t remind me of that. Those photos of the scene were awful. Makes me glad my job keeps me in the office.”

She made a soft noise of distress. “Apparently, this victim’s been cut in half.”

“Bisected?” Draco’s hands faltered in the tidying of his files and he blinked up at his assistant in shock. “Seriously? Fuck.”

“Tell me about it.” Yasmin’s brow wrinkled as she folded her arms over her ash pink satin blouse. “Dispatch just gave me the heads up. It’s a circus out there.”

The blond nodded sharply and began sorting papers into secure desk drawers. He already had his usual crime scene kit prepped and ready to go and, soon enough, he was shrugging on his coat, grabbing the silver case and nodding to his assistant as he made for the elevator.

Watts joined him at the lift, his own kit in hand.

SFA Desmond Watts was a black man, late-thirties with stocky build, a close shaved head and trimmed beard with gold rimmed glasses. Easy to smile with a dry sense of humour, he’d been with Draco the longest in the lab; from the blond’s first day to the day he’d been promoted to Chief. The senior analyst was practical, reliable, skilled and highly intelligent and Draco fielded poaching attempts almost every day from other labs around the country and beyond.

“This one makes five?” Watts’ voice was deep and came from his barrel chest.

Draco exhaled slowly, already checking his phone for details from dispatch. “So it seems.”

The other man shook his head. “Every time I think London can’t get any more crazy… ”

“Indeed.”

The address was in Lambeth North so they would have to take the evidence truck cross the river. Thank Merlin, it wasn’t rush hour. The site lead was Sargeant Collins, the same officer from his stay at the hospital. He nodded to himself in approval. She was a skilled officer with a level head and firm grasp of procedure. She’d make sure that the scene was preserved enough for them to collect proper evidence.

What evidence they would be able to find anyway.

There hadn’t been any worthwhile evidence at the last scene nor the three suspected ones before that. No fingerprints. No DNA. No trace of anything. No indication that anyone other than the victim had even been present.

Most of it was still a guess at this point. Circumstantial connections that worked more as hunches and extrapolations than fact. The cases hadn’t looked connected on the surface. They hadn’t really followed an sort of set pattern. The only common thread was that the victim was found behind locked doors, alone, with no evidence of any others’ presence than their own.

The deaths seemed… impossible. And that is what linked them all.

The first… according to the cases they’d found amongst the cold files and archives … had been a drowning. A security guard had been found in the middle of an empty warehouse, lungs full of water. He’d been on his nightly rounds and hadn’t checked in with his shift mate. His clothes and skin had been dry, his eyes opened and blood shot, water dribbling from his mouth.

The second had been a bullet to the heart. This one had been a middle aged bank manager found in the bank’s vault. The heavy doors had been closed for spot inventory and there’d been heavy guards outside. When he had failed to respond to their hails, another branch manager had been called in from PTO with the proper authorization and found the body.

There had been no bullet in the wound despite it not being a through and through but the all too familiar damage bullets caused to human flesh had been clear. With no marks to indicate that anyone had dug it out, they’d searched the body for fragments and had even done an a CT scan, finding nothing. He’d made a note that the bullet may have been made from ice and had melted into the body but the timing and access didn’t make any sense in that situation either.

In fact, they were still stumped on the issue…  even after all this time.

The third had been the infamous beheading that still gave Yasmin the chills. This one had been a college student. A young girl just starting her freshman year at King’s College. By all accounts a happy and excited young woman from the country side hoping for a new life in the capital. She’d been discovered, decapitated, in her single dorm by her traumatized RA after she’d missed two days of classes.

The scene had been as gruesome as the photos had indicted and the discovery had been a big deal in the news for a long while. The panic of such a brutal killing at a major college had all but ground the city centre to a halt. Scotland Yard had been under immense pressure from all sides and had worked tirelessly to try to solve it ever since.

CFA Charles Vernon from Lab One had been lead on that one so Draco’s department had stepped in as support, taking over other, smaller cases to ease the pressure. Still, the case had been a wake-up call to the London police force that someone very dangerous and highly intelligent was hunting within the confines of the city.

They’d really established the pattern with the fourth killing, the first scene Draco had witnessed firsthand. A young man. Delivery driver. Found in his tiny basement apartment,  broken and bruised from a fall of great height.  His crushed body had been pancaked to the grungy floor of his ten by ten by ten room. No sign of forced entry. Locked from the inside.

Another seemingly impossible crime. Another weight already on the Yard’s back.

Vernon had called him in as a consult, along with the head of Lab Two, CFA Blessing Taiwo and the three of them had stood in the cramped room in gloves and cloth booties, looking down at a young man’s crushed and crooked body. He’d lain on his back, half his face crushed to the dingy carpet soaked dark with dried blood. His mouth was open as if he’d been screaming and his remaining intact eye was wide with fear.

The victim was a muggle. They all had been. No magic whatsoever. Which made the fact that the body had been covered in traces of magic even all the more strange. He hadn’t been sure. His mage sight was weak at best and he didn’t have the knowledge, skills or training to hone it. He could just see the aura of certain things, people’s emotions, that kind of thing.

And he’d seen that aura… that magic… faint and fading… around the corpse.

He’d made a note of it in his private files. There had not been enough of anything substantial to tell anyone about. Even as a hunch. The idea that the serial killer that had the city almost up in arms could be tied to the magical world in some way… lest they be a wizard or witch themselves… would turn everything on its head. There was no way that he was going to putt that theory forth without at least something solid backing it up.

He was a Slytherin. He knew that when in doubt, keep his lips shut and wait.

What he discovered at this murder scene would nail down the theory that had been swimming in his head. One way or the other. They made good time to the scene, a squaddie waving them passed the growing crowd and bright yellow caution tape. Collins met them at the front doors of the nice looking building and led them personally up through bright hallways to the fifth floor apartment.

Thankfully, she’d been strict about preservation of the scene so two squaddies were stationed at the entrance of the last stretch, giving the forensic team a good ten feet of hallway to work in. she’d also provided foot and finger print records for the officers who’d been present as well as the ambulance crew who’d been summoned by the terrified maid who’d found the victim.

As he’d said before. Efficient. Intelligent. Reliable. Collins was good people.

Vernon was standing right outside the apartment. He was thin and wiry, in his fifties with ice blue eyes, a full head of salt and pepper hair and a permanent frown on his thin lips.

“Martha Kensington-Hartwell, 44, sole occupant. Last seen by a neighbour entering her apartment around ten last night.” his voice was hoarse, no doubt from long, sleepless nights. “Found by the part time maid an hour ago. She’d in the bedroom.”

He led them further into the apartment. It was nice and bright, warm colours and soft surfaces. Draco glanced around the room, taking in the general area before narrowing in on the details.

“Where’s her cat?” he gestured at the box of litter in the corner.

“What cat?” Vernon spun at the sound, eyes tracking to the same corner. “Shit.”

“I’m on it, sir.” Collins chipped in immediately and spun on her heel to wave at a fellow officer. She grabbed a picture frame with the victim smiling with said cat on her way and ducked around a corner out of sight.

They continued on to the bedroom. Vernon’s SFA, Abigail Swanson, was stepping around the body carefully, recording the blood spatter patterns. She greeted them softly as they entered before going back to her work.

The victim lay, sprawled on the bed. Her white cotton nightie sodden with blood and rucked up around her armpits. She was bisected at the waist, with her arms and legs twisted. Her hands seemed to have been clawing at the cut, her nails leaving scrapes and scratches on her torso.

“The cuts are too ragged for knife work.” Vernon rasped, both his hands in his pockets. “…and the blood shows that she bled out from the wounds.”

“Jesus.” Watts murmured as he took a careful step closer. “She clawed at the cut. Blood under the broken nails match scrapes on the torso. She was alive while it was happening. Jesus Christ.” He crossed himself.

“At least it wasn’t long ways.” A low Scottish lilt said into the silence.

They all stopped to stare at Abigail.

“Jeez, Abs.” even Vernon blinked dumbly at her. “Gruesome, much?”

The forty something year old woman shrugged. “Saw that once. First year on the job back in Glascow. Freak incident. Glass factory. Worst thing I’ve ever seen, I think.”

“Worse than this?”

She stood from her squat, “At least this one’s neat. Those anatomy books don’t prepare you to see a man sliced open down the middle like a hot dog bun.”

“Jesus.” Watts said again, looking a little green around the gills, his imagination most likely getting the better of him.

Draco didn’t blame him. He looked at the blood and guts spilling out on the bed and swallowed heavily. Hn. Neat. Right.

Shaking his head, he took a breath and let his mage sight bleed through, painting the room in waves of light. Nothing around the room seemed out of the ordinary. Little pin pricks of light where the victim’s beloved items lay, waves vibrating from a thrown scarf or a childhood plush.

The bed though… the bed glowed. Yellow from fear, murky greens from pain, black from death. The whole thing looked swallowed in miasma. The kill was fresh. The death was fresh and it hung heavy in the air around the body, clinging to it like wet cobwebs.

Draco quickly shook the sight away, to creeped out to keep looking at it. He carefully set his kit and opened it, taking out a custom camera he’d had specially made by a warlock in India. It looked like a polaroid camera and the pictures came out looking normal most times. But this machine had a special function that only Draco could trigger.

He pointed it at the bed and took a photo, the whining of the camera loud in the quiet room. He could feel the others looking at him as he held the picture in hand, waiting for it to develop but he paid them no mind. He already had a myriad of explanations for the tool.

Seconds ticked by and he took several more from every angle, leaning in close to the victim’s face and hands as well as the gaping wound cutting her in two. By the time he was done , the first of the photos had cured, revealing an image that sank his heart into his stomach. An image that only other magicals could see.

The same miasma hung in the picture, almost like the filters that Blaise liked to use for her selfies. That confirmed it. The magic was real. It still clung to the dead body, fading slowly as each minutes ticked by.

The cause of death was magical.

The killer was magical.

Fuck.

That wasn’t good.

He was  definitely going to have to tell Milli about this.

Chief Superintendent Davies too. The man was going to have kittens. Draco was sure.

He tucked the photo into his pocket and muttered under his breath. “Merlin’s Balls.”

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