Jesse walked into his living room from his bedroom, he was fully dressed for work. He picked up his car keys and turned to find where he dropped his phone went he heard it ring. It buzzed as it rang and he followed the buzz to the kitchen. He picked it up, expecting a message from the precinct.
It wa a homicide call
Body of a female.
Young, found nearly an hour ago.
When Jesse heard the address, his gut twisted.
Something had to be connected.
Somehow, the storm had only just begun.
The alley that housed the crime scene looked like a wound on the city's face. The wet brick walls were bathed with police floodlights as it turned every morning shadow into something ominous, even the sign "Black Indsutries" looked ominous at this point. Jesse walked up to the body, the collar of his coat turned up against the rain. The coroner was still conducting mild examinations on the body, there was a notebook in the hand of the deceased.
"Hey Locke, cause of death?" Jesse asked.
The coroner crouched beside the body. "Single stab wound to the chest, she was stabbed in the back, literally. From the looks of it, it was done by a professional. Too clean for a crime of passion. She was stabbed right here"
The notebook in the woman's hand caught Jesse's eye again. The pages were waterlogged, ink slowly being washed away. He knelt, sowly and carefully, pried the notebook gently from her hand. He stood and flipped the smudged, almost invisible writings until he came across a few visible words. It read;
"Kruger. Black Industries(recently sold). Shipment. Possible fire arms"
That was all he could read from the page.
Nothing about this could've been a coincidence. Murdered in front of this same warehouse, the recurring names. Jesse turned to an officer and demanded, "Who is she?"
"Rachel Moore," an officer replied. "Freelance reporter and new blogger. Did quite a number of crime pieces and it looks like she dug a little too deep."
The name sort of rang a bell, Rachel Moore. Jesse remembered her byline, he'd come across her blog a couple of times. She wrote articles about police corruption, muggings in the city, feared gangs and some of her articles helped bring some criminals to justice. She was relentless, no surprise that she was murdered but this was deeper than that.
Later at the precinct, Jesse pinned her photos on the board, Pike's photo was still on another board in the room. There was going to be a briefing in a few minutes. Pike and Rachel's murder wasn't very distant, they were both sniffing around something that had to do with the warehouse and someone named Kruger.
Jesse presented the theory in briefing and there was total silence. Some detectives seemed to support the theory and a few other thought it to be far fetched.
Jesse insisted that the deaths were not random. Pike was kidnapped because of what he knew and Rachel was murdered because of what she had discovered and was about to publish. It was the same trail.
Captain Briggs focused on the board, his arms folded. "That is a very smooth theory White but you know that's all it is. If you feel that's how things played out, you will have to find evidence that will lead you somewhere plausible because i won't let you run head blind into something that looks too deep to be real....."
"Sir, evidence will be gotten but this is......". Captain Briggs lifted a finger and paused him.
"I understand that your instinct is pushing you but you need to be careful, i won't lose any officer due to carelessness. Solve the murder and get over this."
Jesse sighed with slight frustration and Captain Briggs continued, "If it leads you nowhere, we close the case file and move on Jesse, we won't pour resources on a cold case".
An officer came in, "Excuse me, Detective White" Jesse turned to him. "The victim's mother is here"
The interview with the victim's mother led nowhere. Her apartment had been tossed, someone was obvioulsy looking for something. Rachel's laptop was gone and her neighbours said they didn't see anyone enter her apartment since she left it.
It was hard to even build a timeline of her whereabouts, her phone wasn't found on her, just the notebook. If the killer was trying to clean up the trail of what she knew, why did he leave the notebook behind, he could have easily snatched it from her. The notebook was the only thing on her when she was found, no purse, no phone, not even an ID. The officers simply knew who she was. Hours later and still nothing had turned up, her neighbours saw nothing and no DNA was left at either the crime scene or her apartment.
Then when Jesse contacted a friend of hers, she confirmed that Rachel was working on a story though she wouldn't talk about what it was. When asked if she noticed any odd person hanging around Rachel lately, she attested to seeing a man leaving Rachel's apartment about a week ago. Jesse decided to follow that up, he re-interviewed the neighbours and the ones that were home recalled there was a heated argument coming from her apartment that day. Racehl's friend sat with a sketch artist and they got a sketch of what the man looked like. When the sketch wan ran through the database, the result was unbelieveable.
The man was Warren Loft, a deceased police officer who died in active duty about two years ago, another stonewall, Jesse thought as he rubbed his forehead. How could a dead man be seen coming out of Rachel's apartment? Security footage of the apartment was requested for but the manager said footages were reviewed and cleared every two weeks and that week's footage had been cleared. Jesse refused to give up, he ran the sketch on facial recognition through out the city's surveillance cameras but nothing came up. "The man's dead White, this case is leading you nowhere. Take a break from it." This was Captain Briggs.
Deuce Black was seated on a work stool in his private lab/workshop. He had just finished re-reading Rachel Moore's last article and he sighed. She was digging for the truth, chasing down an arms dealership in the city. She published that the name of the operation was Kruger and it was bigger than anyone suspected. She obviously knew too much, if she knew the name of their operation, then it's obvious why they had her killed. She had been connecting the dots that everyone was too blind to see.
Now her name had been added to a list. A list of their victims. It has been four days since her body was found and the police has had nothing to say about her killer.
He looked around the workshop, most of the completed machines or devices were the ones he built with his wife years ago. Apart from them, blueprints littered the tables-schematics of drones, surveillance rigs, tasers,gears. These were his unfinished work, after the fire, he couldn't bring himself to finish working on them. It was his wife that drove him to build all these, then it was just a game, a plan to somehow be private investigators. Now they just lay there, gathering dust.
He closed his eyes, remembering the fire. He remembered running towards it, hearing their screams and unable to save them. It was a recovery mission for the fire fighters as the fire had burned too fast. He remembered the fire captain stating his suspicion of the fire not being an accident. He remembered almost everyone turning to him, his clothes were burnt in the fire. The accelerants were found in his trunk, he showed them that none of them had been used and he was not even at home when the fire started. It didn't matter to them.
He remembered the trial. The verdict that cleared him based on lack of substantial evidence but also left him condemned in a different court, the court of public opinion. The city believed him guilty and maybe he was--guilty of not being there for his family, guilty of staying silent for so long.
He looked around again and stood. "All that ends tonight" He muttered to himself. He walked across the room and took out the finished armour from it's display case. Though completed, the suit probably needed a few tweaks but it was enough, it could serve it's purpose.
Deuce put on the armour, the locks hissed shut. It's weight settled on his shoudler like old guilt. The suit had come to live, he tested the gadgets on his belt. Every single one of them ready to be used. The suit refined his look, in all black with a gold belt, gauntlet and boots, he looked menacing. He was going to serve justice in a new way, he knew vigilante's were not legal in Victoria city but he waved that off.
From the far corner, Jane peeked in without saying a word. Her eyes widened with fear, fear for what was coming next. Deuce saw her and approached, they were the only ones in the house that knew of this workshop.
He crouched down, resting a hand on her shoulder. "You are safe here, always. Right now, i have some things to take care of". Jane nodded and he slipped like a shadow out using a secret passage.
It was already late. So far, nothing useful had been discovered since her body was discovered days ago and the captain closed the case but Jesse couldn't let it go. He returned to the alley, alone this time. It was raining, that was all the sky knew how to do these days. A stray dog barked somewhere, an ambulance siren was heard. He scanned the ground looking for anything the CSU might have missed. Nothing.
He moved further and saw a dumpster, he just moved towards it and something caught his eye, not in the dumpster but behind it- tucked in the shadows of the dumpster was her phone and her ID, her name was boldly signed on the back of her phone. Someone had tried to discard this here, probably nothing to incriminate them on the deivce. Why not get rid of it properly?
He pocketed the ID and the phone. Someone didn't want Rachel's story told and that's why she was murdered. This could only mean that her story had significance.
Across town, Jesse was back in his dim apartment. He had already clustered his desk with files, trying to dig up what he couldn't in the past few days.
He leaned back on the couch, the only couch in the living room. Work was obviously his life, there was not even a picture of him or atleast a painting hanging on the wall. His walls were bare.
He reached for a bottle of whiskey, poured a glass and let it sit untouched. His eyes drifted outside, it was still raining. His journey as a detective had barely began and he was already frustrated.
"But why do i care more than the people who should?" He whispered into the emptiness, the only response he got was the low hum of a refrigerator in the kitchen.
Outside though, the city was alive-the rain, sirens, music from bars and somewhere in the distance, the faint sound of something new moving through the night.
A shadow. One ready to take back his city.
Something new had been born.