Okay; I thought that in celebration of the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which is scheduled for June, I would write a crossover fanfic for this one. I will be crossing Harry Potter with CSI. If you enjoy, good for you! You have a crappy taste in fanfics! If not, then hopefully you have a better taste in fanfics that the people that like this one.


"Sorry I'm so late, Nick," said Dr. Langston as he crossed under the police tape that had been put up.

"No prob," replied Nick, snapping a photo with a digital longlens. "What happened to get you here late, anyway?"

"Cars blocking the driveway. I had to take a cab to get here."

"Tell you what… when you get off shift today, I'll give ya a ride home." Nick looked up at Dr. Langston, smiling wide, then let his camera rest against his chest. He pulled out a notepad and finished jotting down his observations. "I just finished with photos of the body, but if you like you could go photograph the rest of the scene."

"I've got the markers in my kit," said Ray, opening the case and pulling on a pair of gloves, then grabbing his numbered yellow evidence markers. He stopped when Nick passed a light over the face of the victim.

"Looks like a cat got to his face before he died."

Ray shook his head. "Those wounds are too deep to be a cat's clawmarks. And even if they were shallow enough, they're not in fours or fives."

Nick looked up. "You know many five-fingered cats?"

"Several." He looked out at the area that had been marked off. "You keep our poor friend here company, and I'll see about the rest of the scene." Nick acknowledged him. As Ray swept the scene with his keen eye, he repressed the emotions that threatened to eat at him at the sight of the dead man.

Ray paid attention to the ground in front of him, taking small steps and always sweeping the ground slowly and carefully with his eyes. He didn't see much; a spot of blood that was too old to have been the victims. The man had only been dead a few hours at the most, and that did not leave enough time for blood to have begun to turn a light bluish-green color on concrete. Even so, Ray placed a marker on the dime-sized spot of blood and took a step back to photograph it, then take a few photographs with which he could report exactly where he had found the spot.

As he stood, Ray saw a shaft of wood lying three or for yards in front of him. Even from where he crouched on the concrete of the parking lot, Ray speculated the length of the dowel was between twelve and fifteen inches. He slowly stepped toward it and examined it with his head tilted. He marveled at the shape of it; one end, slightly thicker than the rest and about four or five inches, appeared to be a handle. Down the length of the rest of the shaft, he noted a concentric curly-Q pattern, not unlike a well-formed curly fry. When he closed in on it, he placed another marker, this one labeled with a large black "2," which was one higher in sequence than the one he had found the blood.

He stood and stepped back two paces, then snapped a couple of photos and correlated the discovery of the dowel to its location. When he was done, he stood and moved around to the marker, but even after three more passes of the entire scene, he found nothing of interest.

"Whatcha find, Ray?" said Nick, who met him at the end of the taped-off area closest to the victim.

"Nothing definitive. A spot of weeks-old blood and a wooden dowel of some sort." He pointed over to the second marker.

"Of all the odd things to find at a crime scene, you find a stick?" said Nick incredulously.

"This stick appeared to serve a fairly decorative purpose, but I can't be certain of what that might be until we actually get it back to the lab." Ray handed the camera back to Nick. "What about you? Did you find anything?"

"I'm waiting for David to get here. Should be… ah, right on time, like always!"

David coasted to a stop twenty yards away, shutting off the van and jumping out. "I've got the kit," he said, running up and ducking under the tape Nick lifted out of his way. "Okay…" He set down the case and immediately pulled out a pair of latex gloves. "So we've got a male, possibly mid-to-late twenties." He clucked his tongue and shook his head as he noticed the man's face. "What made those gashes on his face?"

"That's one of our concerns right now," said Ray, standing back and looking out across the scene again. "But it's not our number one priority. That would be to find out how he died, who killed him, and to catch the killer." He gazed sternly at David, who nodded and pulled out a thermometer. He inserted the instrument where the man's liver was and waited for it to calibrate.

"I wouldn't say there's any obvious COD, but we'll have to get him back to the morgue to be sure."

"Obviously," said Ray, pacing the perimeter and looking again for anything he might have missed.

He was interrupted when David made the usual sound that indicated his thermometer was finished in its work. "Liver temp's 97. Based on the temperature and assuming that he wasn't killed elsewhere and dumped, I'd say he died between three and seven hours ago."

"Isn't this neighborhood usually one of the ones in Vegas where no parking lot is ever closed?"

"There are off days and off seasons," reminded Ray, looking out at the road beyond, where few cars had passed since he had arrived. "Besides, even if someone had found him, there's no guarantee they were the ones who called police. It could've been somebody they told, or someone who passed here afterward."

"Yeah, but who would go and not report a body?"

"I heard," chimed in Dave as he took a look at the different marks on the victim, "that one time in the sixties, this woman and her family just stopped showing up in society. For forty years, their house went untouched; nobody ever went out to get mail or groceries, nobody came to visit… the neighbors somehow didn't seem to notice, or they didn't find it unusual. Eventually the authorities opened the door and found the residents. All of them had been dead of natural causes since at least the sixties."

"And your point is…?" said Nick.

Ray had the answer lined up. "Sometimes people don't see something as suspicious, and they don't bother to report it."

Back at the lab, Ray pulled on a fresh pair of latex gloves and turned on his digital voice recorder. "CSI Ray Langston, June first, 2011. In the case of an unidentified Caucasian male in his mid or late twenties, have his only personal effects; one small drawstring bag of unknown content, and a scroll of some sort of paper or parchment." He paused to breathe and purge his mind of all but relevant thought, the way he always did when he was reviewing evidence.

"Will be first tackling the content of the drawstring bag. Appears to be leather or similar material, ruddy brown in color. The string looks like a similar substance, though slightly darker in color. Overall weight of the bag is five hundred grams exactly." Ray pulled on the lip of the bag and slowly drew it open. "Contents of the bag appear to be a number of coins of like design. All are gold, silver and bronze in color." He put his hand in the bag and withdrew a gold-colored coin. "On one of the gold-colored coins, there are what appear to be bitemarks. Unable to determine substance at this time." He turned the coin over in his hand and studied it thoroughly.

"The coin appears to have been minted with Roman numerals on either face." He peered closely at the letters minted on the face of the coin. "Letters appear across the top of the coin. Spelling: G - R - I - N - G - O - T - T - S."

For more than half an hour, Ray studied the bag full of gold, silver and bronze coins. When he finished, he turned to the parchment. "The paper appears to be fairly new. No sign of wear-ant-tear. It's tied with a red ribbon." He grabbed the scroll gently and took a pair of scissors from beside the scroll. As carefully as his hands would allow, he cut the ribbon in three or four snips of the blades and set it gently down on the table. "The scroll doesn't appear to have been rolled very tightly. Appears to be merely decorative."

Ray pulled the scroll open and allowed his eyes to read the contents carefully.

"The contents read: 'By the decree of the Minister for Magic, Kingsley Shacklebolt, the creation of the Muggle-Wizard Intercooperative Department is hereby established forthwith to ensure the continued existence of Wizardkind, and to establish government relations between wizards and Muggles.'" Ray furrowed his brow.

If he ever managed to help solve this case, it was definitely going to be an odd one. He just hoped it didn't turn into a perpetual cosplay.