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“Okay, explain to me what I’m looking at.” Sampson had papers spread across the small table in front of him.
“You know, if you’d just use a tablet,” Chase said, waving his own tablet in the air for emphasis. Two pairs of eyes darted over at his sudden movement. Chase surreptitiously looked around the cabin of the plane where the giant man and a seriously fit woman were lounging. “And do we seriously need this much manpower?” He added under his breath.
The same two pairs of eyes flashed from their animals and back. Chase shudder in his seat across from Sampson.
“Did you forget shifters have excellent hearing?” Sampson asked. He was still looking at the papers in front of him. “Emma, Daryl, stop messing around. Chase, stop complaining and explain.”
“Yeah, right. Okay, so this,” Chase tapped on the image of a dead woman, “is Sandra Nguyen.” In the picture, the woman was in her dorm room. Her head was resting on her crossed arms, and she was drooling over an open textbook. “22 years old. 4th year, straight a, bio-chem student. Set to graduate summa cum laude and all. Family immigrated to Canada from the Philippines when she was 7. Had the pick of schools up north, but her long-distance love lived in Iowa. So, when she got a scholarship she took it.”
“The lover?” Sampson looked up.
“Ex-girlfriend, Iris Singh,” Chase said, showing Sampson a picture of a girl with light brown skin, amber eyes, and long black hair. “Turns out internet love ain’t always meant to last,” Chase smirked, but the expression faded quickly as they returned to the image of Sandra in her dorm room.
“Looks like she just fell asleep.”
“Exactly. That's why when her roommate came in, she didn't report anything for over an hour. The girl didn't think anything was wrong until she shook Sandra to wake her up, apparently to see if she’d already showered. One of those roommate schedule things? I guess they had it all worked out.” Chase shrugged, having never been to college himself. “That's when she realized Sandra wasn't asleep.”
“Right. I'm assuming we've taken her statement. She's being held?”
“Yeah, they've got her, but we can’t keep her. It’s a dorm. Lots of students were in and out, and we don't have the mortician's report back yet, so we can't get a timeline. Until then…”
“Okay, so a young girl is dead, what makes them think foul play? Do we have a cause of death?”
“Tox screens haven’t come through yet, and again, waiting on the mortician, but so far we can rule out obvious physical injury.”
“No bumps, no scrapes, no bruises,” Sampson nodded, studying the image of the girl a little longer before turning to the other images of the crime scene. “No signs of foul play so far. Just a young girl gone too soon, that makes this a tragedy, what makes it a murder?” Sampson looked up at Chase. “What makes it a serial? And why one so important they’d call in the head of the Supernatural Investigative Division?”
“This is where things get really interesting.” Chase zoomed into an image on the tablet in front of him before turning it around to show his captain. He tapped his finger twice on the part of the back of Sandra’s neck. The image enlarged.
“What is that?” Sampson asked, leaning closer to get a better look.
“That, Sir, is our killer's calling card,” Chase said. They both looked at the tiny imprint of angel wings on the back of the girl’s neck.
“Tattoo?”
“Temporary. And not the first found on a corpse, or a victim.” Chase said.
“Corpse, or victim?” Sampson asked.
“I’m getting there, Boss.” Chase pulled up another folder on the tablet and began flipping through the photos. They started out crisp and clear, but the image quality declined marginally the farther back they went. There were 9 in total, each showing a body, each with a distinct image of angel wings, though the wings differed slightly in the latter images.
“Copycat?” Sampson asked. Indicating the latter tattoos.
“It’s possible,” Chase said. “The first one here is from roughly eleven years ago. The murders are all over the country, and only seem to happen once every year and a half or so, all in big cities, all appeared to be cardiac arrest. All with no signs of struggle, except for the second.” Chase flipped back to the second to last image, what would have been the second body found. The picture depicted a scruffy, middle-aged Caucasian man sitting on an old couch in a messy living room. His head was lolling back, his mouth open, one hand was on his chest the other was holding a half-spilled beer bottle. On his exposed throat, amongst other tattoos, were angel wings.
Chase moved to another photo of the same scruffy man on an exam table. A circular bruise had formed directly over his solar plexus.
Sampson raised an eyebrow. “And he's the only one with any sign of external damage?”
“Any damage close enough to their death to make it relevant.” Chase nodded. Sampson sighed.
“Okay, we’ve got a serial on our hands. That still doesn’t explain why they’ve called us in. This has no traces of supernatural crime. I hate to say it, but based on the timeline of deaths, this doesn't look like it's a high priority.”
“No, but the girl, Sandra, is Canadian, and her daddy is a phoenix-blood on the Global Mythic Council.”
“Damn,” Sampson said.
The Global Mythic Council, or GMC, was a branch of the Global Supernatural Governance Board that functioned as global supernatural oversight, much like a mythical United Nations
“Yeah. That's probably the only reason they got the feds involved in the first place. The kid was mundane, but he didn't even want the girl going to school in the States in the first place.
“The guy made a huge fuss about whether or not the body was even his daughters, because she’d never get a tattoo, and she was a diligent student and respected her body and other such nonsense. Anyways, everyone ignored it until the roommate said the same thing.”
“About the tattoo?” The voice came from the only other occupant in the jet’s cabin. Jessamine was the SID’s lead witch, and for all she was abrasive, she was sharp.
“Yeah,” Chase confirmed. “Said she didn’t have the tattoo when she left that morning. Then someone did some digging, looked up ‘Angel Wings’ in the database, found these.” Chase flipped through some of the most recent pictures of the serial victims. “I decided to go further back, riffle through the mundane database, dug into some cold cases. Found the rest.”
“So, they need this resolved. And now. Before it becomes a serious international issue.” Sampson couldn't stop his upper lip from raising slightly. “And they called us in because of her dad. Not because this was a supe crime.” They had called him in because of politics, taking him away from potentially serious supernatural cases, from taking care of his people, because of politics. And they called him in, specifically, because somebody really high up and they needed to look really good.
The plane jostled then, forcing Sampson to tamp down on his animals as the crackly voice of the captain came loud over the speaker.
“We will be arriving in the next 10 minutes. I request you put on your seat belts as we prepare for landing.” Her voice cut off.
Sampson looked around at the shifters he had in his protection detail. They were less adept at keeping their animals in check, and he sent out a soothing rumble to calm them as the plane began its descent. The entire entourage looked over gratefully. Well, the entire entourage except for the mage. No, detective Jessamine Forrester just looked bored as she scrolled through her phone, absentmindedly buckling herself in.
Sampson shook his head.
“Emma, when we land, take our luggage to wherever Marcelle has us set up, then take the day,” Sampson said. Emma was a nocturnal shifter, and she’d need the rest. “The rest of you, Jess, look alive. We will be heading to the scene directly.” A chorus of groans echoed around the cabin, and Jessamine gave Sampson a pointed look, causing his lips to twitch in amusement.
Then he took his own advice, packing away the folder, downing the now cold coffee in his cup cupholder and preparing himself for miles, and miles of red tape.
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