Law & Order: MCU

[Shield]

The morning after Zombie vs. Cyborg

Colerain's Hardware on 54th and Martin Luther King had become a convention of flashing lights and yellow caution tape by the time Officers Duquesne and Wilde arrived in an unmarked black Dodge Charger. Duke flashed the lightbar concealed under the edge of the windshield so they weren't shunted away with the rest of the traffic and pulled alongside another cruiser.

Duquesne let out a low whistle as he stepped out onto the asphalt. "Would you look at that. Nobody called this in last night? This neighborhood must be more jaded than I thought."

The hardware store couldn't have looked much worse if someone had dropped a bomb on it. The plate glass window in the front had imploded, spreading shards all over the floor inside, and there were more aisles overturned than not, with merchandise scattered and broken from wall to wall. Off to one side was a middle-aged man nervously smoking a cigarette and delivering a statement to a pair of detectives - must have been the owner, whose morning had just become much more interesting than he'd ever wanted.

Duke rested his hands in his pockets as his shoes started grinding over bits of glass. "Look at that, Chris. Already two detectives on the scene - wonder why they called us in?"

It was a question that hardly needed answering.

[Chris Wilde]

It was a morning of mixed blessings. First, I was hungover, and not the only-a-couple-o'-miles-o'er-the-limit-officer kind of hungover, this... was special: today, I was the twelve inch deluxe edition Superhungover Chris complete with a state-of-the-art self-pity feature and imminent vom action. But it wasn't my fault. The night before marked my official ceremony of innitiation into the Los Santos bureau and, courtesy of my fellow frat- police comrades, I endured a rigorous trial by fire that involved a secret handshake, a treacherous quantity of beer, and the company of a charmingly robust hooker called Mercedes. This rite of passage was the unavoidable fate to befall every new officer who walked through the station doors, at least that was the story as the pitcher was applied to my lips, so I carried myself with dignity and held my heavy head high, except when I was bitching at Duke about the speed bumps.

Officer Duquesne, as fate would have it, was the blessing in my mixed cocktail of ill-fortunes. That morning, there had been a briefing scheduled for the officers of the MCU, and then the call came in, requesting assistance at a crime scene which required a... unique perspective. In his wisdom, the captain sent Duke, him being the local boy, and Duke, in his questionable wisdom, requested my company. Thus was I spared the shame of sitting through one of Stern's motivational speeches half cut, pretending to be inspired with eyeballs rolling around in my head like loose change. The blessings of the almighty Duke were two-fold in that, him being not only the local boy but our designated driver, he chose the venue for our morning coffee: Rosie's on forty-sixth and West Mason would be forever engrained in my memory.

So, it was with my ebon-domed saviour and a cup of the most glorious inexpensive coffee in America that I crossed the shattered threshold of the hardware store and, with a degree of imbalance in my shuffling step, I considered his question, and kept at bay the remark about desk jockeys that was brewing on my tongue.

"It probably has something to do with the nine pints of blood on the floor and the disappointing absence of a body. Either that or they heard you were a cracking conversationalist, but I couldn't imagine where they'd have heard such a shameless rumour."

[Jo Holloway]

Jo adjusted her glasses, leaned over and snapped a dozen high-res shots of the blood pool on the battered concrete floor, and then turned her attention to the spray on the wall nearest. She was concentrating so hard she didn't even notice the arrivals of Det. Wilde or Det. Duquesne to the scene, the flash from her Nikon D3X casting the scene in sharp relief.

Some... shit... had gone down in this store. She narrowed her blue eyes, camera dangling from a strap around her neck as she carefully stepped through the debris on the floor. "We'll need to print everything..." Jo reached down and plucked a heavy screwdriver from the ground between a gloved finger and thumb, pulling an evidence bag from her back pocket with her other hand and placing the tool inside.

She didn't often get to spend time at crime scenes, but she did enjoy getting out into the field. There were other CSU technicians who preferred she stayed away. In fact, she was enjoying about a twenty foot bubble of personal space as she picked her way through the store. Probability manipulation was considered a nifty mutation until you actually had to spend time with someone who had it. So Jo usually spent her time in her lab, running tests and keeping her head down.

The Mutant Crimes Unit was new, and as a registered mutant she'd been lumped into it, though she wasn't even a police officer, just a lab rat that worked for the department. Still, it was an interesting experiment...

...what was this? Jo dropped a plastic marker and took another picture of what could have been a partial footprint, and then found herself looking up... up... up at the duct work on the ceiling.

And nearly running right into Det. Duquesne. "Oh! I'm sorry!" She pushed her glasses up on her nose, and took a step backward, nearly slipping into the blood behind her, but just managing to avoid it.

[Shield]

The scene inside the hardware store galloped past nightmarish and plunged headlong into the surreal. Of course there was blood everywhere on the way in - once the victim or the perp got blood on their hands, they left it on everything they touched, and all it took was a cut on the head to make a fistfight look like a murder scene. But the question that came to mind here wasn't how the hell did it get on the rafters but how much blood could a person possibly contain? It still pooled on the shop floor, pooled, and not merely glistened like the slime left behind on the concrete docks by a high tide. The vinyl floor had absorbed it to the point of saturation, and there would be a stain in the concrete pad below that nothing but a jackhammer could remove, and yet it was still a lake.

Duke and Chris had had to step carefully through the ruined aisles to avoid the smears and streaks the contained partial fingerprints, handprints, and footprints, each of them marked with a folded and numbered card. Duquesne hadn't even noticed Jo until they blundered right into each other, and he reached out to catch her before she tripped into the huge slick behind her.

"No, no, it's okay, Jo," he said. "Wasn't watching where I was going. Hey, you probably don't know Chris. Chris, this is Josephine Holloway, MCU's resident forensic spook. Jo, this is Detective Chris Wilde, our new British import. So what can you tell us?"

[Jo Holloway]

"Hi," she gave a little awkward wave to Det. Wilde, and then gestured about her a bit. "Well, its a mess. Two intruders, entered through the plate glass window," Jo pointed the way the two detectives had come with a gloved finger. "There's enough blood to indicate both sustained injuries."

She turned a bit, regarding the massive pool of blood on the ground. "One was killed. Bled out right here. I think...think we have a third set of boot prints though. Someone came in and removed the body after the fact."

Jo adjusted her glasses a bit. "Well, obviously, as there is no body." She chuckled a bit, but then quickly continued as it was also obvious no one else was laughing. "Uh, primary weapon seemed to be a sword or bladed object of some kind. I'll have to run some spatter tests back at the lab but here -" she indicated the wall where the majority of the blood spray was, "-this is classic for a violent slice through a body. And the back counter, well, its chopped up, and there's also a metal pipe that's been sliced to bits.

"This sword, if that's what it was, was really sharp." She looked up at Det. Duquesne. "And from the foot prints it looks like the one that died was female." Her eyes tracked down to the detectives' feet, and she pointed at their bare shoes. "You forgot your booties." Jo waggled her own properly covered foot.

[Chris Wilde]

"Mornin'. How's it go-"

Josephine, or Jo as Duke had called her, was already regurgitating the length and breadth of the situation so I quickly retracted my hand and, in what was undoubtedly an all-too-cliché playground trick, ran it casually through my hair. She was really into her work, I noted, adopting my game face, and nodded along with practiced interest. I pictured her hunched double over a coffee table plastered in horror scene photogrophy, nursing a takeout carton or a microwave dinner, wasting away into the small hours of the morning. There were blood stains and fingerprints everywhere, she was in her element, and in the barely-contained excitement in her voice, it showed.

These were the skills you were taught in the academy and beyond, the tools with which one equipped one's self in order to become a standout detective, and thus far, I feared my only real standout quality was my ability to walk through walls. And therein lies our dilemma. The phenomenon of mutation, and consequently mutant crimes, pretty much tosses the rule book out the window, and the MCU is now tasked with the responsibility of cracking cases that defy the very laws of nature. So much blood. So few bodies. Our case began with a huge, double-helix-shaped question mark, and, of course, the first thing on the mind of little miss blood-and-guts was the absence of our booties.

"Never fear, at the station, Duke and I are renowned for our twinkle toes," I offered a cursory smile, and raised my gaze to follow the chaos into the rafters, "And speaking of which, our samurai and Lady Bleedalot weren't exactly dancing in here; you can't create this kind of carnage without announcing it to the neighbourhood. Have any witnesses came forward following the disturbance?"

[Jo Holloway]

"Well, not that I know of." She nodded her head toward where the other uniforms were clustered. "They called in MCU after reviewing the security tapes - tapes still, can you believe that? I thought everyone's gone digital, but this store's tech is a bit dinosaur. The quality is pretty bad - no its awful," Jo grimaced, "and it doesn't cover even most of the store, but there was enough there to flag it as a possible mutant crime.

"I still have to do the DNA testing on the blood to find out for sure." Her eyes darted around the scene, making a list in her head of all the things she had to do once she got back to the lab. "Uh, I heard something about canvassing the area for homeless who might have seen anything. No one's come forward yet, and since this is all commercial there aren't any residents to complain about the noise."

[Stern]

Captain Michael Stern of the Mutant Crimes Unit appeared at the edge of the crime scene tape in his usual fashion: suddenly and without warning, save for a brilliant flash of light.

"Hope I didn't mess up your pictures, Jo. Thanks again, for agreeing to help with all this."

Stern ducked under the tape and looked at Shield and Ghost. Duke and Chris were fantastic. The captain felt that he was more than lucky to have officers of the finest quality working under him.

"You know, I wouldn't call generating several more pints of blood than usual for a human being a mutant power. Hell of a way to go testing your limits." After a long time working on mutant crimes, added in to his time spent 'away,' Captain Stern had developed a rather dark and dry sense of humor.

"Gang war?"

[Jo Holloway]

"Well," inserted Jo, before she could stop herself, "Its not the amount of blood, persay, that just indicates someone must have bled out and died, its the video. Tape. Uh..." she looked down at her camera and fiddled with a setting or two.

"I'll just get back to cataloging."

[Shield]

"Well..." Duke traced the streaks of blood on the pillars, the shelves, even the rafters. "Hard to say until we have some idea who the victim was. From the looks of things in here, she must have put up a hell of a fight.

"Then there's the sword. I've known Yakuza gangs to use swords for executions, but not for fighting. Anyone packing a medieval weapon is trying to make a statement. What do you have on these footprints leading away from the scene?"

He pointed at the rough trail of what looked like sneaker prints going from the pool of blood to the front door. They were heavy with blood, which meant they'd been laid down after the victim had bled out.

But before Jo could answer, one of the officers called from the street: "Captain, we've got an eyewitness out here."

[Kale]

A young man with mouse-brown hair and a gangly frame stood just outside the cordon of crime scene tape. He had nervous hands and busy eyes, and he clearly didn't want to spend any longer than necessary in the company of a bunch of cops.

[Stern]

"Well, an eyewitness! That's certainly lucky."

Stern strode out of the building and found the nervous man standing by the police tape surrounded by uniforms.

"Thanks, fellas, for letting me know. Hi there! I'm Captain Michael Stern, Mutant Crimes Unit. You say you saw what went on here?"