Reading Time:
8 Minutes
Blaise's voice ascended into Banshee territory. "He's dead. Dead, I say!"
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“What the actual FUCK!” Blaise’s voice went high and screechy as she slammed her fist on the table, shaking the ornate tea set. “Fucking marry me? Seriously? … as he nutted.”
“He did take it back right after though…” Draco murmured from behind his cup.
That didn’t help. Blaise’s voice ascended into Banshee territory. “He’s dead. Dead, I say!”
“Talk about post-nut clarity.” Millicent chortled from the peanut gallery, her shoulders trembling as she bit savagely into a cup cake.
Draco glared hotly at her. She grinned back devilishly, icing on her lips, as Blaise continued to rant, now in rapid Italian. He didn’t take Milli’s smile at face value. She was probably planning just how to help Blaise hide Neville’s body without leaving trace.
He really didn’t want his lover shoved through the veil fragment Lady Zabini kept… somewhere… for shits and giggles.
“Show me!” Blaise tugged at his sleeve.
“No.” he denied immediately, “I made a promise, remember? No Penseives, no Legilimency nor Occlumency. You’d just use it for your sex research.”
Blaise feigned afront. “I would not.”
He gave her a flat stare. “You totally would.”
“Who’s going to tell your mum?” Millicent hummed.
She was so not above throwing gasoline on a dying fire. The slag. Draco cursed in his head. He’d almost derailed Blaise’s rant. Shit.
“No one is telling anyone anything.” He ordered, face serious. “Neville will propose properly and no one will have to die horribly. I love my man and don’t want to be stuck marrying a corpse, even a reanimated one. Nor do I want to spend my life fucking an Inferi.”
“She wouldn’t.” Blaise pouted, shaking her head.
He rolled his eyes. “You and I both know, firsthand, exactly what Lady Zabini is capable of when she gets going.”
“True.” Milli nodded sagely.
Draco sat forward and looked at them both with a frown. “Swear to secrecy. Both of you. And you too, Mufty.” He turned to the house elf who was trying to look like an innocent piece of furniture in the corner.
He frowned at her obvious reluctance. “For me. Please.”
The elf wrung her little hands for a bit before giving an exaggerated sigh. “As you wish, Master Draco.”
“Thank you, Dearest.” he smiled, relaxing. “Thank you all for this.”
Blaise huffed and slumped in her chair. “I get to needle him with it though.”
“Fine.” the blond pinched the bridge of his nose. “But keep it light until after he’s done dealing with the old crone. She’s had him jumping through hoops since we got back and he’s just about at the end of his rope with all the Lordship bullshit. He’s handling it for now so don’t add any more stress for him, okay?”
Blaise crossed her arms with a huff. “Fine. What’s in it for me though?”
“My undying love?” he shrugged.
“First of all, I already have that. Which is the reason for not telling my mother…” She shrugged and picked over the colourful cakes. “I am going to need serious bribery to not needle Longbottom mercilessly before he offs the old bat.”
“He’s not going too…” he stopped talking. A little parricide was perfectly acceptable in pureblood society, especially when it came to legacy and inheritance disputes; and he wouldn’t waste time explaining to Blaise why Neville wouldn’t see any kind of avicide on his grandmother as a possibility.
“Whatever. What do you want?” He gave a heavy sigh before pointing a finger at her. “And don’t forget. Keep it within reason.”
“Of course, of course… We’ll be gentle with your little lionheart.” She grinned wickedly, rubbing her hands together and he was reminded vividly of Lady Viviana vetting another potential husband. A shiver ran down his spine. He could hear his bank account weeping already.
Blaise bounced in her chair. “I’m sure we can work something out, Darling.”
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“I think I’ve found another murder committed by our unsub.” CFA Blessing Taiwo placed a slim file folder on the table and sat, setting her coffee cup next to it.
Vernon reached across to pull the brown folder closer. He deftly undid the red string holding it closed and began to flip through the papers, skimming each one before passing it to Draco.
The dark skinned CFA ran a hand over her bald head before pulling off her scarf and draping it over the back of her chair. Her usually warm brown eyes were solemn as she watched them read.
“Two years ago, a Caucasian male, aged sixty two, was found stuffed in a trunk in an abandoned mansion. The property was registered to Octavius Blackthorn, who’d been reported missing almost a year before that.”
Taiwo took a sip from her cup then continued, her full lips pursed as she absently spun her cup on the table. “The body was found when the bank finally foreclosed on it for non-payment of property tax. They’d sent inspectors in before the public auction and the pair of them found the trunk in an attic crawl space.”
Vernon’s frown grew deeper. “What makes you think it’s the same unsub?”
The dark skinned woman pulled a photo from the stack of papers and tapped on it with a neatly manicured nail. It showed a dark and cramped attic space with an ornate trunk in the centre. The thing was dusty and worn but the brown leather and faded gold filigree could still be seen in sharp relief in the harsh light of the camera flash.
There was no lock in sight, either broken or intact, which was sort of odd with what Draco knew of these kinds of trunks, but there was a yellow evidence tag and a foot rule on the ground next to it.
In any other circumstance, it would have been just another dusty old trunk in another dusty old crawl space in a dusty old house… but this… there was something wrong with what he was seeing. Draco’s brow furrowed at the image.
He tilted his head. “Is that trunk even big enough for a grown man?”
Taiwo just hummed. “Not voluntarily.”
Another photo showed the trunk opened and even Vernon made a face. “Good God Above.”
The body had been strangely preserved, though the clothes had half rotted. The skin was grey and wrinkled but not as near desiccated as a body dead for a year should have been. And that wasn’t even the weirdest thing about the body. It had been… folded… into the too small trunk, its arms, legs and even its head; were all twisted to fit into the small space.
The face wasn’t visible from the open trunk but another photo of the body on an autopsy table showed an expression frozen in utter anguish. They’d had to break the limbs to straighten them out, revealing a short and somewhat pudgy figure with a drunkard’s pooch, wisps of fly away white hair crowning a balding bulbous head. The corpse’s once blue eyes were cloudy white and the crooked teeth yellow and rotting.
Draco narrowed his gaze at the photos spread across the table, something niggling at the back of his mind. He blinked, something slotting into place. His clothes. The corpse’s clothes… they weren’t muggle. They were wizarding clothes. No robes… they wouldn’t have fit in the trunk anyway… but he recognized the embroidery and trim from an old Gladrags Fall Collection ensemble design more than a decade old.
He remembered hearing his father sneer under his breath when Crabbe Senior had strutted around the Ministry looking like a clown in the same ridiculous ensemble. His mind raced, sharp eyes steadily reading through the rest of the case file as Taiwo and Vernon spoke softly.
The victim… maybe the first victim of the Impossible Unsub… had been a wizard.
Morgana’s frigid titties.
He checked the name, Octavius Zebulon Blackthorn; mind racing as he ran through the Official Pureblood Registry in his head from memory; and flipped through the victim’s details. No school or work records. Normal for wixen from a muggle purview. Not much information except as property owner. The house hadn’t been unplottable like #12 Grimauld Place. That’s how the muggle bank got their hands on it and not the goblins.
Hardly anything personal except for an empty Metro Card, a Sainsbury Loyalty Card, a stack of liquor receipts and an expired subscription to a body mag.
“Simple tastes.” he sneered softly to himself.
The trunk had not been locked but the attic had been. Again from inside. So had the house. Just like all the others. All the finger prints found had been the victim’s and the DNA as well. What they could find after a year of dust and grime. Still, it seemed eerily like the others. Just as impossible.
Blackthorn certainly didn’t stuff himself into the trunk. It was a promising lead.
He left the meeting with a lot on his mind. He had to inform both Millicent and Davies of this new development. If Davies was mad enough to have kittens at the potential butting in by the DLME already, then he was going to have dull grown cats at the news that one of the victims was a full blooded wizard. A pure blood one at that.
Blackthorn hadn’t been high on the Registry rankings but the family name was still there and that changed pretty much everything. He shoved his hands into his pockets as he walked from the conference room at Lab one back to Lab Three, his thoughts a storm as he ran through several potential scenarios.
The case was shaping up to be a clusterfuck of epic proportions and he was probably going to be smack dab in the middle of it. He just hoped that Milli would be the one sent as liaison. Muggle Affairs really would be the first choice in this situation. He really didn’t want to get stuck with some fool Auror with more balls than brains. They would probably send someone skilled in magic and familiar with the muggle world.
As he ran through all the Aurors he knew about through Milli and the Rasputin grapevine, there was only one name that kept popping up. He made a face and cursed to himself.
“They’re going to send fucking Scar Head, aren’t they?”
His shoulders slumped in defeat as he made soft sound of utter disgust.
“Bloody fecking hell.”
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Nice update!