P. Stormcrow

“Hey. We have a new case.” Jackson bounced on balls of his feet as he stood next to her desk, a file in hand. The man vibrated with excitement and didn’t bother to hide it, either. Nearby, two other agents giggled as they walked by.

He may have the nickname of the Hound because of his ability to sniff out magic, but in this moment, he reminded Finn of an oversized puppy, ready to play. Despite the headache from the eyestrain of reading all morning—and that was the story she was sticking to—she couldn’t help but grin. “All right. Let’s see it.” She extended a hand out.

Jackson passed the folder to her before stepping back to watch her reaction.

She opened it and shut it close as fast as she could, suppressing a shudder at the photos on top of the file. “Nope.”

Her partner slowed, then stopped bouncing. “What do you mean, nope?”

“Just nope.” Finn’s mouth twisted in a disgusted grimace while she tried to hide how her breathing had grown shallow.

“Oh, come on. An actual serial killer. And this one from Criminal. We can’t not take it.” He paused and bent closer, narrowing his eyes as he studied her. 

“What?” she snapped, shrugging as she pushed the folder across the desk toward him. Even touching it made her skin crawled and she wished she had never taken a peek.

“Are you… scared?” 

Her heart skipped a beat. “Pfft. No.” She snorted and rose, pushing her chair back with a screech. Now was a great time to return some of the other case files she had just finished reading. She reached for the stack that was building up one corner of her desk and busied with straightening them. 

“Oh my God, you are!”

Finn walked straight past him and ignored the jab. She didn’t have to dignify that with an answer, but before she could go far, he placed a warm hand on her shoulder. 

A long whoosh of air left her lips.

“Talk to me, partner.” Jackson gentled his voice and when she turned to face him, she found the humor that was there earlier had fled. Instead, his eyes had darkened with concern.

Damn those baby blues.

“Jackson, that’s like every horror movie out there.” She jabbed her forefinger towards the file still on her desk as if it was a cursed object. “I mean, aren’t you at least a little creeped out?”

He scratched his cheek and glanced in the direction she pointed. “Okay. But not every one of them. Maybe half,” he muttered under his breath.

“That was a ventriloquist dummy.” She fixed him with a deadpan stare.

“It’s just the killer’s call sign.” Jackson grabbed the file, opened it, and flipped through the pages. “Besides, there’re others too. Here!” He held up one of the loose leaves. “See?” 

She could feel the blood draining from her own face. 

He peered over the piece of paper. “Okay porcelain doll.” Without waiting for her reply, he returned the sheet to the pile, rummaged again and brought another up, grinning with altogether too much hope.

“Dude, that’s a fucking Furby!” She didn’t bother hiding the shudder that coursed through her and wrapped her arms around herself. “Criminal says call sign. I say obvious possession. Why else would they pass the case to us?”

Jackson beamed with pride.

Fuck. Why did it feel like she had walked right into a trap?

Because I did. A month ago, she would have scoffed at the idea of a ghost. Now that had become her default assumption. She groaned, took a step closer, and snatched the folder away from him.

“Fine. I will take a look, but no promises. And you owe me.” She almost said a bottle of tequila, but paused and considered again. “You owe me coffee.”

Jackson chuckled. “Deal. I’ll go make it now.”

“Wait, how long do I have?”

“Meeting’s at eleven over at their HQ.”

As memories of that glass coffin of a building surfaced in her mind, she glanced at the mechanical watch on her wrist, something she had grown unreasonably fond of the last few weeks. Accounting for traffic, she only had an hour to process the case. With one more sigh, she returned the other files to her desk and eased back into her chair with the damn folder.

***

By the time they pulled up to the main campus, Finn wished she had another sweater on her to ward off the chill seeping in her bones. She remained quiet as she trailed after Ms. Callaghan and Jackson, wheeling from all the information gathered over the years. None of it was pleasant.

There were fewer people in the room that she expected. From the corner of her eye, she spied their director joining another suited man up front, but Jackson led her away before she could ask. Probably the local head of Criminal.

“Hey.”

She turned to find Agent Newman greeting them. At least there was a familiar face.

“All right, listen up.” He waited until he had the command of everyone in the room. It didn’t take long. “You’ve all read the Intel. This is one with history, but the recent case gives us more to go on. We have better tech now. We know —” he glanced at Callaghan — “more. So we build the profile from ground up. Pursue every theory. Leave no rock unturned. If we follow the pattern, then it means the household killer will strike again within forty-eight hours. Newman, you’ll take lead with The Strangers to support. Daniels, Chan, Shannons, you’re on backup.” When nobody moved, he clapped once more, the sound ringing even louder than before. “Let’s get to it people.”

Beside them, a younger agent snickered, but Newman kept a straight face, if a little weary. “Come on. We have an office set up this time at least.”

She still hadn’t uttered a word as they strolled through facilities that she would have envied if she hadn’t gone through the tube system incident. But as they walked farther and farther, she grew more concerned until Newman led them to something resembling a broom closet, away from everyone else.

But it wasn’t the smallness of the office that made it feel almost claustrophobic. It was the sheer amount of stuff. Several whiteboards on wheels lined up next to each other along the walls, while cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other in another corner. A single folding table dominated the rest of the space, littered with paper. There was not enough room for chairs, but Finn spied stools tucked beneath and had to wonder where Newman had commandeered them from.

Jackson closed the door behind them.

“So how much have you guys been brief?” Newman asked, jumping right into business.

“Just whatever’s in the files you sent us,” her partner answered.

But the contents on the board were distracting Finn from their conversations. It didn’t add up in her head. “Okay, I have to ask. Every murder’s been different. Even the call sign is not consistent. So how do we know it’s one guy?”

Jackson and Newman exchanged uneasy glances, but it was her partner who let out a long sigh. “We don’t.”

“The media named our killer or killers. Someone noticed that these seeming-accidents would cluster every few years around the same few weeks. It got written up as some kind of urban legend and that was when we started investigating,” Newman explained.

She paced the tiny space, pausing to stare at each victim’s photo.

“Always an older person. They might own toys for when their grandkids visit, but there’s no reason at their time of death for any of it to be close to them,” Jackson pointed out.

A shiver ran down Finn’s spine. She had been avoiding looking at the pictures of the accompanying call sign beneath the victims’ headshots.

“And not all do them have grandchildren either,” Newman added.

“I’m not the only one that finds this creepy as fuck, right?” she asked.

“Oh. It’s creepy all right,” the older agent confirmed. “I’ve been in law enforcement for twenty years now and few haunt me the way this case does.” Newman paled and swallowed hard. “No pun intended.” He rubbed his face with his palm. “To be honest, I was reluctant to call you guys.”

Finn opened her mouth to protest. “I know we’re—” 

Newman held his hand up to interrupt her. Not that she knew what she would say to defend her department.

“No, it’s not that. I just didn’t want to admit that there’s something straight out of some horror shit going on here.”

Well. There was that. Hadn’t she said the same thing to Jackson earlier?

“Fair enough,” she muttered and turned toward the board with the latest vic. Poor old woman. “Okay, so what now?”

“I’ve requested all evidence we have to be sent over to your forensics so your guys can do… whatever it is they do,” Newman mumbled. “Meanwhile—”

“We’ll have to visit the crime scene again and see if I can pick up any trail of the other kind,” Jackson finished for him.

Great. Just great.