Chapter One: The First Murder

I sifted through the new files on my desk, checking for the most interesting ones. After two hours of being in my office, there was nothing good. However, I had hope. It was early yet, and it had been a boring week at the Bureau. Those streaks never lasted, and I had a feeling today was when it was going to end.

Indeed, it seemed that it had. A young man, one of the new agents out of Quantico, cautiously entered my office holding a sheaf of papers. I raised my eyebrows.

"Yes?" I questioned him. He coughed.

"There's been a murder, and apparently it's something you would want. I, uh, got sent to give the details to you," he said quickly, setting the stack on my desk and backing out. He was gone in a few seconds. I shut the door behind him and picked up the papers. It was, indeed, a murder.

The victim was Tessa Lee. She was twenty-seven, and I knew her rather well. She was one of the closest friends that Demetria had, and now she was in the morgue with a gunshot wound to the chest, just beneath the shoulder and just above the heart and left lung. It would have taken a few minutes to kill her.

It was a very unusual way of shooting someone, and one that I had not encountered before. Distinctive, and I had a feeling that the shooting was not a one-time occurrence.

I set down the papers in a tidy stack and grabbed my keys from the desk's surface, locking my office's door behind me. Outside, I paused just as my hand stilled on the door handle. There was someone watching me: a man standing across the street with a wry smile on his lips. Short blonde hair, a scar across one cheek. Tall, lean and well-muscled.

A bus blocked my view from him and when it had passed, he had vanished. I frowned and drove off in the direction of the mortuary, lost in thought. For some reason, the sight of the man deeply unsettled me.

The morgue was, as usual, a bit chilly. People passed me silently in the halls. They were the living among the dead, and they knew that they were unwelcome. The atmosphere was the same when, a few minutes later, I brushed through the doors of the room holding Tessa Lee, the murdered girl.

As I put on gloves and a white lab coat, I padded over to the body. It had already been pulled from its storage unit, but it was still zipped up. I flexed my fingers, gripped the freezing zipper, and pulled it open to reveal the dead girl I had once known.

She had been, I supposed, a rather pleasant person in life. None of this showed in death; her pretty features were twisted in agony, and there was dried blood at the corner of her mouth and leaking from her nose. Her light skin was pale and her dirty blonde hair was tangled, the ends tinged with blood.

I unzipped the bag further to allow access to the bullet's entry wound. It had hit the top of her lung, ensuring death. The papers had stated that she had been alone heading home from the grocery store when she had been shot from the top of a nearby building. There was no sign of the shooter, and no evidence had been recovered. Whoever the killer was, he or she was well-trained and intelligent.

There had not been a struggle or an attempt to run, indicating that Tessa had not seen her shooter. The only wounds were the one from the bullet and a few scrapes from where she fell against the rough concrete sidewalk. What I was observing was consistent with what I had read in the files given to me. After she was shot, she fell, turned, and lay face up and unable to move. She was found when still alive, so only a few minutes after the shooting. She had died en route to the hospital.

The rest of her body revealed no other unknown facts, and what I gleaned from it any friend of hers could have told police or FBI agents. What I needed now to find was a motive. I pondered this interesting puzzle on my short drive back to FBI headquarters. So far, none had presented themselves, but I knew that interviews with Tessa's friends would take place the next day or shortly after.

As I was packing up, the Assistant Director rang me. I slowly answered the phone, puzzled. "Agent Raven Holmes," I spoke.

"Listen, Raven. I know you got assigned that shooting this morning, but I'm thinking about handing it to the local PD. It's not that strange, and we are way too busy to take run-of-the-mill killings right now," he announced.

"Sir, if you trust my opinion, let me have this one case. There's something about it that is not right at all, and I actually knew the victim. You know that I could solve all these cases on my desk really soon, but this one is different. Please, sir. It's important to me," I vocalized.

There was a sigh on the other end. "Fine. I will transfer some of your other cases to different agents, but you're going to need to work hard on this one. And try to solve this one quickly," he replied. I grinned.

"Thank you, sir." He hung up.

I grabbed the rest of my things and headed out of the building, calling Demetria on the way. I informed her of Tessa's murder and told her I was on the case, assuring her that the killing would be solved soon. I had no idea exactly how long it truly would be until her Tessa Lee's murderer would be avenged.

When I entered the darkened house I shared with my redheaded friend, I tossed my bag onto the hall table, shed my jacket, and jogged upstairs. It was only a few minutes before I was lying in bed thinking over the day. The most striking thing about my truly strange day was the location of the shot, and how utterly mysterious this new case was.