A Message By Murder
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A/N: This story is a sequel that follows on some time after the events of Cops and Wizards, which itself is a sequel to If You Don't Believe, It Might Still Find You. This will be the final installment of that series. As the series was started before Pottermore and even parts of this fic were written prior to a lot of its Word of God about international wizardry being posted, consider it to be automatically AU for any conflicts.
Chapter One: Harry Potter and the Unwelcome Recognition
Few wizards went in for the crazy, convoluted schemes some muggles came up with to murder each other. That was one of the most enduring truths Harry had learned from working with Detective Kate Beckett and the rest of her homicide team from the 12th Precinct. He wasn't quite sure why, still.
It wasn't that murders were exceptionally rare in the wizarding world, nor that wizards were innately more stupid or less creative than muggles. Even if plenty of wizarding murders were ridiculously easy to solve, since you just arrested the person standing over the body with a wand, the blabbermouth bragging about poisons to their neighbor, or found the latest evil megalomaniac trying to take over the world. It was clear enough those happened in the muggle world, too, from the stories the detectives told.
He suspected it might be because there was so much less cause to have to try and avoid detection in the wizarding world. Not only had muggles progressed so much further ahead in terms of techniques for investigating crimes, but the general public was at least generally aware of those advances. Even the dumbest muggle criminal had some basic knowledge of the existence of things like DNA and fingerprints and had an increased fear of being caught. Wizards, by contrast? Few of them ever bothered to learn much about anything that didn't directly concern them after they finished their basic course of schooling and took the NEWTs. They also didn't have things like TV and the Internet to put such information easily into everyone's hands as entertainment, either.
Unfortunately, the lack of savvy in the general population of wizarding criminals was still often reflected in the techniques of the auror's office. For the most part, their investigations were no more sophisticated than they had to be to handle the average day-to-day cases crossing their desks. Which meant that when some unusually clever wizard committed a crime and had the bright idea to cover it up in an unusual way, they were more likely to get away with it than a muggle counterpart would be. Fortunately, although the wizarding world as a whole tended to hate change and live centuries in the past, someone in the New York Auror's Office had seen this handicap for what it was. Which was how Harry's team had ended up working with the team of detectives in the first place.
Before they'd been forced together, the Auror department had already begun to pull in a few experts in muggle investigative science from a number of disciplines and specialties. Then a series of serial murders of wizards and witches living among muggles had brought the two homicide investigations together and lead to Beckett's team being read in on the existence of magic.
The first two cases they'd worked with Beckett's team had been the most awkward. There had been a lot of adjusting by both teams to understand and accommodate how the other half operated. There were tensions, but all of them genuinely wanting to catch the murders more than anything else had definitely helped smooth the way. Ultimately, the homicide team had clearly been a very solid addition to the muggle expert program, and they worked particularly well in conjunction with Harry's team. It had been an easy decision to keep in contact with them after those first cases. They were just so very good at coming up with new ideas and new ways of looking at things that could open up otherwise stalled investigations, even despite the considerable hurdle of knowing very little about magic.
It didn't hurt that the more they'd worked together, the better they had all gotten along on a personal level, either. Over the year following their initial meeting, Harry's team made it a habit to check in with their counterparts at the 12th on a regular basis. Sometimes they got together to work on cases, sometimes to only complain about cases they were working on separately, and every now and then, they gathered in the same place just to spend time and catch up on each others lives. Castle, for one, had bought an owl and sent messages on a pretty regular basis, which sometimes had letters from the others tucked inside.
The program overall was still fairly small and the number of muggles invited in kept purposefully limited. Despite that, already there had been a noticeable downswing in cases being left unresolved according to McAdams, the NYAO's senior liaison officer. Harry and his friends were some of the most open about embracing the unorthodox help, but they weren't the only ones taking advantage of the new resources from the muggle world. They also weren't the only ones that had favorite muggle counterparts. Although aurors tended to be more general purpose investigators than the muggle experts they were working with, fairly early in the program it became clear things ran more smoothly when the same muggles worked with the same aurors repeatedly. After joint cases had become a regular occurrence, the Head of the Auror Department had seen most of the muggles were far more comfortable working with wizards they had already gotten to know personally. Harry didn't really figure that Detective Beckett would be intimidated by anyone, but some of the other muggle experts he had met in passing seemed fairly nervous around unfamiliar wizards.
Ideally, all of their experts would be comfortable with any of the aurors, but there didn't seem much point in fighting it that things went faster and smoother when they paired experts and aurors who had previously worked together. Of course, as always with wizards, there were a couple of teams who refused to work with muggles on their cases at all, but Harry had actually been surprised at how few refused to come around. As to the rest, Harry knew Peterson's team had spent as much time with a pair of robbery detectives as his had with the group from the 12th. Winston Smith, who tended to work alone or with whoever needed an extra team member on a given case, was spending a great deal of time learning about profiling from a retired FBI agent. One of the other auror teams Harry's worked with fairly frequently on the largest cases was headed by a very competent witch named Millicent Marr. She and her partner had started up a working relationship with a medical examiner. As he had with most of the other experts in question, Harry had seen the man in passing a few times when they'd been working cases and Marr's team had brought him by the Auror's Office. Therefore when Harry's team was summoned to Lumos Avenue at an uncomfortably early morning hour before even false dawn was brightening the horizon because someone had found a body, it only took him a few seconds to recognize the face of the victim, Todd Summers.
It wasn't a pretty scene, even beyond the usual. The body had been partially torn apart by a blasting curse and then posed in a grotesquely splayed fashion. Its not-entirely-attached-limbs stretched out right in the middle of the grand staircase fronting the Ministry building where it faced onto the main magical street. The exaggerated way the body was prominently posed to make it as visible as possible was only underlined by the foot-tall writing across the steps above the corpse, scrawled in what appeared to be the victim's blood, "MUGGLE TRASH DOESN'T BELONG HERE".
His first visceral reaction, a product of both the recognition of the victim and the ugliness of the scene, was a wash of cold anger. After that Harry just felt vaguely sick. The war with Voldemort had already left him with too many memories of seeing familiar faces frozen in unpleasant deaths, but he had thought that a thing safely relegated to the past. Not that being an auror didn't involve some ugly scenes. Overall, though, being able to help bring killers to justice and the victims being strangers was enough to keep the cases they regularly handled from affecting him too much. It was a different thing when you knew the person, even in such a glancing way as he'd known this man.
It took him longer than he would have liked to be able to finally draw his eyes away from the grisly scene, and he swallowed hard, getting a grip on his thoughts and emotions, turning to the rest of the wizards who had been called in to deal with the case. Harry worried for a moment that he had perhaps stalled too long in taking charge, but a scan of the grim faces surrounding him showed he wasn't the only one that had needed some extra time to regain his composure.
"Ron, go give the detectives from the homicide team a call, we're going to need them on this one and they should see the scene as fresh as possible," Harry directs his teammate. Ron nods in response and heads off with purpose.
"Hermione, can you send a patronus to get Marr's team to come out? We're going to need to talk to them about what Summers was working on and why he was here this morning." He turns away from her serious face as she mentally composes the best message to send.
Harry addresses the rest of the gathered aurors next. "Let's get some actual barriers set up around this scene to keep people out. It's still early, but we're pretty exposed here and the last thing we need is anybody contaminating the scene. The rest of you lot that aren't keeping people out, start asking around. See if you can find any witnesses who might have seen or heard anything suspicious."
With the obvious next steps underway, Harry takes a moment to worry. It's not a certainty the man's controversial position with the Auror Department is related to his murder, but considering how and where the body had been positioned, and the ominous, hateful message? Those alone were damning enough, but the specific timing of this event is also another factor. The New York Augury had run an article just last week about the Auror Department's slowly expanding policy of pulling in muggles on some of their cases instead of obliviating them. The writer had been no Rita Skeeter, and had been perfectly willing to be completely vague about the identities and specialties of the muggle representatives working with the Department, but there was still an inherent danger in drawing attention to the program. The number of angry howlers that had been making their way to both the paper and the Ministry since were clear evidence of that. No matter how much Harry had wanted things to be different here to what they'd been back home with Head-In-The-Sand Fudge in office, the wizarding world as a whole was still a hidebound group that did not deal well with change.
Beckett's team had taught him not to jump to conclusions, but they do have a very obvious place to start looking here. Therefore when Ron returns after finishing his call, Harry sends him off again to get a listing of everyone who would have had access to the records of the Auror Department regarding their hiring of muggle experts. Meanwhile, he and Hermione run through all the routine magic tracing spells they normally use at a major magical crime scene as they wait for Beckett's team to arrive. Unfortunately, the choice of the middle of wizarding New York's main district as the location left a great deal of their spells hopelessly muddled by the background traces of magic.
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A/N: I think I'm falling back into bad habits of sitting on things long past the time they should be considered done, so I'm gonna put this out now even if there's that one bit I'm not quite... Aside from a final editing run made during posting, this story is finished and will be eight chapters total. As always I appreciate feedback and am interested in hearing what people think, good, bad, or indifferent - though at this point the story is unlikely to be changed much bar minor grammar mishaps.