Chapter 2; Clueless
"The Resistance" by Anberlin

Speak for yourself / You paper tigers / You'll crash where you stand / You've got a riot on your hands / […] / Silent alarms are ringing / Sounds of revolt draw near / A new united front / That you will come to fear.

Hermione saw Lavender Brown getting out of her police car. She knew she had to say something to her - warn her about something, but Hermione couldn't remember what she should warn her of. She only knew that danger was ahead of her, that something terrible was about to happen. Lavender fiddled with her car keys while she walked into the dark alley. Hermione wanted to yell her name, say to her that she should turn around, but she was frozen in place. Hermione couldn't move and couldn't speak, she could only watch how she walked further into the alley now.

Just when Lavender was out of Hermione's sight, a stranger in a long black cloak appeared, his hand in his pocket, following the girl. The stranger had no face, just a dark shadow where its head was supposed to be. And suddenly, Hermione remember what would happen.
Hermione tried to scream with all her might, with everything she had, but she couldn't hear anything. As soon as the stranger was out of her sight, all the sounds Hermione made in her head were overruled by the horrific sound of a firing gun and a last scream of horror from Lavender.

At that moment Hermione realised Lavender couldn't have screamed because she was shot in the head from behind - killing her before she'd know what had happened to her. Hermione saw the stranger running away. She couldn't see Lavender laying on the ground, but she could see a pool of blood streaming down the alley.

Hermione woke violently. Her face felt wet with sweat. She could hear sounds actively, and she could move again too. Not Lavender but Hermione had screamed in her sleep - she had screamed so loudly her throat burned.

She wiped her wet face with the sleeve of her pyjamas, but her skin wouldn't stop sweating, making her pyjamas stick to her skin, and she felt imprisoned by the cotton fabric. She tore the pyjama blouse open, an action that made most of the buttons on it spring off. She could barely get her trousers off with her shaky hands. She opened her bedroom window, still panting from the exhausting dream. With her pyjamas off she was almost naked, only wearing her knickers, and there was a chance people in the opposite buildings may see her. That didn't occur to her, she was too busy trying to calm down and cool down. Vaguely her mind registered that it was October, the middle of the night and below freezing point outside, but she didn't want to close her window just yet. The cold wind on her naked skin made her feel slightly better.

It was just two days ago, that Monday morning, that Lavender had been killed. It was now barely Wednesday, the time being nine minutes past three. Hermione vaguely remembered waking up yesterday night too, around the same time, from exactly the same dream. She had stayed up the rest of the night, afraid to go back to sleep - and she was planning to do the same now.

Still shaking from the murder she had witnessed in her dreams, she took a cigarette out of the pack that was laying in her windowsill and lit up a cigarette, taking huge drags that calmed her down a little, but not enough to stop her body from shaking. The smoke from her cigarette circled up and disappeared, spiralling into the night. The sky was foggy, and she could clearly see the lights radiating from their lampposts, which was a beautiful thing to see. She watched her smoke lingering in the orange lamppost light for a while, trying to concentrate on it, because if Hermione didn't concentrate on something at the moment, her mind would take her back to the things she witnessed in her dreams.

Everything had changed in the two days since Lavender Brown was found murdered in a back alley. Hermione Granger hasn't slept this badly in ages. She had trouble falling asleep, and when she finally did, it felt like she woke up immediately after due to the nightmare. Lavender's crime scene was horrific, to say the least. Hermione knew it was horrible before she had been there. She never had been at a crime scene ever before, but she has seen a lot of photographs - but this was beyond her most horrible thoughts. There were six bullet holes in the body of the brown haired, sweet faced girl. Three in the back of her head... the amount of blood almost made Hermione throw up, but she didn't throw up until they turned Lavender's body around, so she was on her back. There were exit wounds... even the most skilled mortician could not fix this. The other three bullets hit her lower back. The coroner at place said the shots in her back were completely unnecessary. The CSI team could tell that Lavender was shot in her head before she was shot in her lower back, and the shots in her head were definitely lethal.
All those facts had such a traumatic impact on Hermione that she barely ate, drank or slept. She knew she was living on water, vodka and cigarettes, but she had no appetite at all. Nauseousness, all the time, without breaks, since that Monday.

Just as horrifying as the murder scene was the fact that Lavender shouldn't have been at that place at that time at all. Her police car was parked neatly on the curb; she was shot after only walking a mere fifty feet. There was no record at the police station for a radio transmission to her car, or to any other car. Nobody knew or could find a reason why Lavender Brown was there at that time. This mysteriousness made Hermione's mind work so hard it had trouble concentrating on anything else, while being able to concentrate on other things but the murder would make a difference to Hermione. Work and personal life were now almost the same thing, and she had hoped that would never happen.

There was also no trace at all of the murderer. It seemed like a perfect crime. The bullets were identified as belonging to a Glock 21, but the specific gun was untraceable. It was most likely manufactured illegally. Added to that, none of Lavender's co-workers knew about any recent or unsolved fights or arguments she was involved in. The MIT had questioned her friends, her family, but they all said the same as her co-workers. Further investigation was pointless. There was nothing at all that could be used to find Lavender's killer.

There were so many mysteries to solve. Hermione was part of the MIT because she solved mysteries like these, but this seemed unsolvable. She felt a lot of pressure on her, like everybody expected her to see something everybody overlooked, something that would solve and close the case immediately. Hermione had spent her whole Tuesday reading every single written word in the case file. There was nothing to be found. She felt useless. 'Useless'. The word hit her hard, like somebody had thrown a brick at her head.

The half-finished cigarette fell out of her hands, out of the window onto the curb. She slammed the window shut, but she could barely hear the noise. She let herself fall on her bed, hoping she would fall into a deep sleep. Normally, you can feel when you are about to start crying: your nose sort of tickles, the backs of your eyes sting, and your throat closes up. That didn't happen to Hermione. She skipped all those steps and broke down crying so instantly it felt like her eyes were about to be flooded out of their sockets and her chest panted up and down so fast she was almost hyperventilating. Hermione couldn't say if she didn't make a sound or couldn't hear herself.

First, the MIT and the CSI team thought it was a murder on Lavender as a person, but they discarded that very soon. There was no clue to be found for a personal vendetta between her and someone else and the Glock that was most likely illegal reeked of a murder in a organised crime circle. So they started investigating the murder of police officer, Constable Lavender Brown, instead of the sweet, innocent civilian girl Lavender. Somehow, this calmed Hermione down a bit when she was told about that in the Wednesday morning MIT meeting. It was not the first time a cop was murdered out of vengeance. Still, for most people, it didn't change anything. The loss was just as painful, a person was gone and it didn't matter for what Hermione felt calmer did not mean she felt better, because she didn't feel better at all.
She came yawning out of the meeting. It was almost two o'clock now, which meant she had been sitting in the same chair in the same room for about six hours. And for what? There was nothing to do regarding the murder, due to the lack of evidence and the absence of Zacharias Smith, who had gotten so annoyed with everything around eleven o'clock that he went out to interview the man who had found Lavender again. Hermione's head was not reacting well to all the sounds around her. It had been quiet around the office when she arrived this morning, but it was the opposite now.

It was chaos. Everybody tried to be calm while trying to calm everybody else down, which resulted in a weird kind of panic. Everybody speculated the weirdest things about her murder, thought back to everything Lavender had ever said or mentioned to him or her or discussing persons who hated the police in general. She stood still, no more than a couple of feet from the meeting room. She saw the members of the MIT walk past her, but she paid more attention to everyone else. She didn't know why she looked so intently at the emotions everybody was sporting on their faces, but she reckoned she wanted to recognize on those looks - just for confirmation she wasn't the only one who had been feeling so exceptionally bad.

It was an hour later when Hermione came outside the building. She searched for her cigarettes and her car keys in her bag. She wanted to go home an hour ago, but she had seen Parvati in the hallway. Hermione had said something nice to her about Lavender, since Parvati and Lavender had been best friends since Hermione could remember. But Parvati started rambling to Hermione, replaying conversations between her and Lavender, to see if Hermione could find anything suspicious. Parvati talked about things Lavender had said about her hair pins, her bunny, the pasta she had eaten the week before... and Hermione had listened to her. Parvati was too kind and too heartbroken to be whipped off like that. Hermione empathized with the girl, who apparently hadn't got the message it could easily be a murder of a police officer, instead of specifically Lavender. So Hermione listened to her, although she kept losing track of what she was saying.

Besides, Hermione knew how important it was to have somebody to listen, because Hermione herself couldn't empty her heart. She felt uneasy talking about it with Harry or Ron - she couldn't exactly say why. Her best guess was that it was because she didn't want to show them how weak and useless she felt at the moment. She knew Harry would send her home the minute she told him she was feeling like this, but she didn't want to be sent home because she would even feel weaker and more useless than she felt now. So she decided to keep her mouth shut about it, let it rest and hoped that her emotional state would fade soon. She knew it would, it had to.

Hermione flicked her cigarette bud away, and stepped into her car. She had kill the engine as soon as she had started it: Harry came running out of the building, motioning her to stay parked. She immediately knew it was completely wrong, just by the look of Harry's face. The last time she had seen him looking like this, with an expression on his face that made him appear forty instead of twenty-four, was two days ago, when Lavender had been murdered.

Mere minutes later, Hermione sat in a chair in the meeting room. Zacharias Smith had been found dead. Murdered. The MIT voted Harry their new chief instantly. Normally, Harry would have been very happy to be the head of the MIT - but under this circumstances, Harry wanted to be everything but. He did not resign, though, and Hermione knew he would never do that. Harry was the bravest person she had ever met. He saw this work as his solemn duty - and no matter how afraid he was, Harry accepted a long time ago that there were things that mattered more than his own life, causes that were worth dying for as long as it helped the world to be a better place. He was also very loyal, and he would never leave his team alone in times like these. Hermione and Ron used to laugh a little sometimes at his words. They found them so melodramatic, almost like he saw himself as the next superhero. Now, they both envied his bravery. Both of them were scared out of their wits. They never said none of this to him, of course - Harry had learned to be brave and loyal the hard way, and laughing at him for what he said and did felt disrespectful towards their friend.

Hermione thought she couldn't feel worse after waking up violently from her nightmare and crying very loudly into her pillow for the rest of the night without falling back asleep. Apparently, she could. Harry had just informed the team on the murder of Zacharias Smith, which was exactly like the murder of Lavender. He was found at a place he wasn't supposed to be at all. His car was neatly parked. Same type of bullets, traceable to a Glock 21, untraceable to a specific one. Three shots in his head, three shots in the lower back. Dark back alley. Shot from fifty feet distance. No suspects. No fights. There was nothing.

Ever since the murder of Zacharias Smith, every police officer braced him or herself. Everybody was afraid now; who would be next? Would they be next? Nobody was safe any more. But nobody resigned. Nobody resigned yet, Hermione knew; sooner or later, people were going to resign from their jobs at the police station.

Panic was the first and only word that Hermione could think of when she entered the building on Thursday morning. The whole office was in a state of panic. They were already panicking, after the murder on Lavender, but now it was for everyone to see. She felt a sort of annoyance - these people were trained to deal with crisis situations. Hermione knew that the first step in any crisis plan was to keep calm - and she didn't even had a crisis training.

But she knew where it came from, the panic. Of course she knew. Nobody had slept properly since Monday. Nobody was at ease with all the extra guns. Everybody was suspecting everybody. Everybody was thinking over every single conversation they had with Lavender and Zacharias. Everybody was jumpy when suddenly talked to. Nobody felt remotely safe. Everybody's world has changed in just four days - although that realisation didn't come until the third murder.

Hermione was fiddling with the handcuffs she had got while she walked into her office, locking her door behind her. Everybody had got a gun, a taser, and a pair of handcuffs now, and so did Hermione. Everyone also got a police radio installed in their cars for emergency situations. She was not really convinced, to say the least, that these safety measures would prevent a third murder, but at least it would made everybody who worked for the police feel somewhat safer on the streets, even if they were not police officers. Lavender was barely a constable - she was in training. she had worked at the police administration for some years, and normally stayed indoors. She wanted to do something active, something on the streets, something different. This was the last 'clue' the MIT had regarding her murder, but when Zacharias Smith was found dead too, they knew that hadn't to do anything with it. Zacharias was the MIT team leader before he was dead - and he apparently just came from the witness of Lavender's murder, questioning him again.

Suddenly, Hermione felt a huge urge to throw her gun and taser out of the window. She was thinking over every single fact regarding the two murders for the what must be the thousandth time, angry with herself because she couldn't find anything. She wanted to do something, find something, so desperately it almost killed her. When she heard someone knocking on the door, she let everything fall on the floor. She was about to throw her gun towards the window, in the hope of breaking it. Maybe it was better she was interrupted. After all, she did want to stay on the team and if Harry heard she was throwing stuff that was manufactured to inflict harm around the room he would send her home immediately.

"Hermione?" she heard Ron say.

"Yeah," Hermione said absent-mindedly, while picking up her stuff. She didn't want to talk to Ronald right now, she wanted to be left alone. She was glad he stopped her, without knowing it, from throwing stuff through the window that is not supposed to be thrown through the window.

"Hermione, it's Hannah," Ron said, his voice shaking. Hermione froze, and let the gun she just picked up from the floor fall again.

"No." This couldn't be true. "No, not her. Please not her," Hermione begged.

But the third victim was Hannah Abbott. Her death fell hard, really, really hard. She had barely heard the things Ron told her from the door post, while she was sitting in her chair. He had briefed her in short, because she needed to go to the meeting room immediately. Ron told her that Hannah was shot six times in her head and that that almost completely destroyed her face, but what Hermione hit harder than the murder itself and the animosity with with they were done, was the fact that Hannah Abbot was one of the kindest people ever - everybody who had ever met her said that. Hannah had married Neville Longbottom, someone with a heart as kind as hers, and Hermione sighed. The poor boy - he had lost so much already.

Friday morning. Nobody liked Fridays anyway, but this was an extraordinarily unlikable Friday. Four days days since Lavender's murder. Two days since Zacharias' murder. Just a little more than a day since Hannah's. Everyone Hermione saw that morning appeared to be feeling exactly the same: devastated. People stared at her as she walked by, she noticed. The looks on their faces was a mixture of desperation, devastation, and hope. It made it frustrating for Hermione to walk through the building. She already felt incredibly guilty. She knew that complaining about being bored at her work and the first murder taking place on the same day had nothing to do with each other, but somehow she still felt guilty about it, like her brain hadn't really accepted that fact. She was anything but bored now, she was extremely busy with double, triple and even quadruple checking every single word in every single report, finding nothing at all. She had spent the whole day doing that. After the briefing about the murder of Hannah, she had gone home and rigorously started reading all those reports - she hadn't even tried to sleep and just worked the entire night. Maybe not sleeping was the reason for her frustration at the eyes directed at her. She knew she was looked at because she was seen as a final hope and it laid so much pressure on her. She had solved murders before. Old murder cases, even, files from over twenty years ago. She had found something useful in them that could reopen a investigation and eventually lead to an arrest and a long jail sentence - and everybody expected the same would happen now, but it was quite hopeless. A final hope. It sounded far too dramatic for Hermione. It was barely a full week since the first murder and most murders weren't solved in a week's time, but then again, the whole case was so hopeless that everybody was clinging to everything they had that could possibly help them. But maybe those thoughts weren't that crazy... She could vaguely remember that she had, indeed, found something useful yesterday. Had she? She did remember searching for an empty file map... copying things on her printer...

The next moment, she found herself sitting in her usual chair in the meeting room, a steaming hot cup of coffee in her hand. She couldn't remember getting herself a coffee in the lunch room. Why would she? She wasn't planning to drink it. Someone was talking, she vaguely noticed. She put her cup on the table before her. That small movement took her a lot of effort; both her body and her mind were extremely tired.

Hermione had a lot of those small black-outs the past days, finding herself suddenly somewhere without remembering she was going there. Yesterday, she got her groceries twice, got coffee thrice, and she just could not remember a lot of stuff. She didn't know if she had forgotten she had eaten something last night or if she hadn't eaten at all. It was probably the latter - since Monday, Hermione had barely eaten. And now, she couldn't remember what she had done between getting coffee in the lunch room, and getting here.
When thinking about food, she felt hungry and nauseous at the same time. It cost her a lot of might to concentrate on what Dean Thomas was saying at the moment, the smell of the coffee distracting her a bit.

"Saying that," he concluded the first part of his speech. Hermione sighed. What had he been talking about? "We may have something," he announced, trying not to sound relieved. Hermione's instinct said to sit right up, but her body refused to move unnecessarily. "Boot and I thought it may..."

"Yeah, where is Terry anyway?" Ron asked. "He should be here, right?" Hermione suppressed the instinct to slap a hand to her face - not that she would have the strenght to do that if she couldn't have resisted that urge. Ron was not stupid, not at all, but he had a lot to learn if he wanted to be respected as a MIT member. For example, you don't interrupt someone when he or she is talking. And secondly, you don't address a team member with their first names because you are colleagues inside the walls, and not friends. Still, Hermione thought Ron's promotion was the only positive thing about this whole week. Ron was a perfect strategist, being able to predict the behaviour of others excellently, proving this on various occasions where he easily outsmarted people on the streets. Zacharias Smith never noticed Ron's obvious talent - or he had ignored it for some reason - but promoting Ron was the first thing Harry did when he got voted MIT team leader.

"Yes, Weasley," Harry said to his friend, "But Friday has always been his day off..."

"My wife just died," Neville said with a mingling of new found inner strength, fear and worry on his face. "I'm off on Fridays too. I am here."

"Listen," Harry said, ignoring what Neville just said. He probably knew what they were all thinking of. "He just has a day off, okay? Speaking of Terry Boot - I want you to know I made him Head of Constables since I can no longer hold that function since I am Head of the MIT... Thomas, I am sorry for interrupting you , please continue."

"Yes, sir," Dean Thomas said. "We think that the murderer hacked into our personnel database, and that is how he knew, for example, that Hannah was working here." Hannah was the first murdered without wearing a police uniform. Hermione had wondered a lot about this fact the night before - how could they have known Hannah was a constable police officer when she wasn't even wearing her uniform? This was proof for this theory of Thomas and Boot... Before Hannah's death, the team had thought about someone who just shot a cop as soon as he saw a police car, luring him or her out of their car somehow. This theory was very quickly wiped from the table - mainly because of the fact that the ones who were murdered were all murdered from behind, and not from the front, and that there was absolutely zero evidence. Hermione wanted to ask a question, but couldn't find enough strength to raise a hand at the moment - but she kept trying.

"That is a possibility, yes," Harry said, writing it down. "Is it possible to track down a hacker? See if anyone entered the database?"

"We don't have the technology yet, sir," Dean said. "But Boot called an expert yesterday and he is coming to the station tomorrow to install software and do research on it."

"Is budget informed?" Harry asked.

"Yes, sir," Dean said, "Finnegan said this murder series has unlimited budget."

Hermione remembered she had written down a lot of options herself yesterday, possibilities on how they could've known Hannah was an police officer. She would show her list of possibilities to the MIT another day, though; Dean Thomas had just informed the team of his theory, a theory that was most likely to be found true. Hermione was sure it was somewhere high on her own list too, but she decided that she would only share her list if the theory of Thomas was wrong, and that was most likely not the case. It was a logical explanation for Hannah's murder. Slowly, her hand raised up in the air.

"Good," Harry said. "Granger?" Hermione suddenly hesitated to ask the question, but she did it anyway.

"Are only the police officers in that database, Thomas?"

"Yes," Dean Thomas said. "You are not in it, if that is what you meant, since you are hired as a specialist here, and not as a member of the police."

"I'm sorry," Hermione said. "I just..." What did she wanted to say? She was sorry she was, if the theory was true, safe? It felt good to know her life was most likely safe, and horrible too, because the lives of her friends were not. "I'm sorry." Hermione looked down.

It was quiet in the meeting room for a second. Dean Thomas touched her upper arm and glanced a small reassuring smile at her - a smile that said that it was okay - that he would've asked the same. Hermione nodded at him, thankfully.

"Granger?" Harry said. "You had something too right?" Hermione realised she did. She had found something. She had written something important down yesterday... she couldn't remember what, exactly... and she had put it on the online meeting agenda, right... What had she found again? She had been so tired - she still was - she could not recall what she had found. It had something to do with... bullets - or something. Hastily, Hermione retrieved her copy of the case file from her bag, and opened it. Everything came back as soon as she read her notes.

"I think we aren't dealing with one murderer, but with several," she said, hoping nobody noticed she had temporarily forgotten what she had found. "I may be wrong, and over-analysing things," she instinctively excused, "But Brown and Smith seem to be shot with a lot less accuracy than Abbot was."

Hermione took the crime scene photos attached to her notes, used all her might and willpower to stand up, and clicked the photographs on the whiteboard with magnets. She pointed at Lavender's entrance wounds, barely able to really look at it. She still had a massive headache, she was lucky it wasn't noticeable in her voice yet.

"Longbottom's CSI team already noticed the angle of these wounds - and that they differ. And they said it was because you can hold a gun in different ways... So I discarded my theory in the first place, but when I saw this..." She pointed at Hannah's wounds - "You'll see that these shots are just two and a half inches apart. Shot by an expert. And these..." She pointed at Lavenders entrance wounds - "Are almost eight inches apart, while Brown was shot from fifty feet and Abbot from almost seventy. You can't shoot this inaccurately first, and that expertly later. The change in angle may be because of height differences."

Hermione had prepared some sort of conclusion, she recalled, but she felt like she was about to faint. Why did talking and standing use so much energy? The hand she used to point at the wounds felt incredibly heavy. She needed sleep. She needed rest and she did not need any more horrific crime scene photographs. She felt like she needed to talk about everything that had happened with her colleagues, but she also didn't: everybody talked about it all day long, so when she was finally alone with a friend like Harry or Ron for a while, they talked about different things entirely.

"Granger..." She heard Harry say vaguely. How long had she stood there in front of the whiteboard, without talking? It could have been just seconds, but it felt like hours. "That sounds good. But with three murders... I don't know. It could be that the murderer just... is a professional, yes, but just found the fun in it after his first victim, and just used them as... practise, instead of just as victims. There are a lot of possible explanations for these facts."

Three murders. Murderer. Professional. Fun. Victim. Practise. Victims. Those were the only words Hermione heard.

"Technically, it's possible," Neville said without much sound. He had not even looked at the whiteboard, just listened to her all the time. Hermione could understand, of course. She wouldn't fancy looking at the gunshot wounds in the head of her dead spouse either. "I'll let my CSI team compare shooting techniques. But it sounds very plausible. This... this also means we're even further away from closing this case if there are multiple people murdering our... dear colleagues."

"Doesn't have to be," Ron said, patting Neville on his upper arm with the same kindness Dean Thomas had shown towards Hermione. "I mean... if you catch one, you catch them all, basically. And with more people, it is more likely that one of them makes a mistake soon, and leave enough evidence for us to catch one. We'll catch that bastard, okay?"

"I'm done," Hermione said. She felt her knees wobble, and she stumbled back to her chair, letting herself fall into it. She was tired. She was so tired. She was also hungry, she realised - but the thought of food almost made her throw up right on the spot. She just couldn't stand any longer. She had broken down, it had been too much now, everything added up. Nobody could easily handle the murders plus the lack of sleep that came with it, but looking at the crime scene photographs every minute of every working day, not talking about it, and being alone at home without someone or something to distract her mind for a while was way too much for one person.

The phone in the conference room rang. No more, Hermione thought. Please let it be something else...

The last thing Hermione remembers is falling of her seat after she hears Harry say the words, "Terry Boot has been found, dead." She feels some body warmth on her, some arms that lay her down safely on her back. She hears somebody shouting that an ambulance should be called. Hermione's eyes close, and her world blackens.

Speak for yourself / You paper tigers / You'll crash where you stand / You've got a riot on your hands / […] / Silent alarms are ringing / Sounds of revolt draw near / A new united front / That you will come to fear.

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