CSI: Hogsmeade Episode 1: But what's in the Back Room?
Author: Lovely Rita Girl
Summary: The third installment (and thrilling conclusion) of this Harry Potter/CSI crossover fic, in which there is trouble at Dervish and Banges in Hogsmeade, as Dervish has been rudely murdered over a mysterious and vicious creature that had been hidden in the back room and stolen away in the night.
Author's Notes: Thank you for the story alerts! I hope you enjoy the final chapter of this CSI/HP Crossover!
Part Four
Harry Potter cleared the crime scene line at the front of Dervish and Banges and granted himself, Ginny, and Ernie Macmillan access into the shop. Nothing had changed. The papers had resigned themselves to stillness on the wooden floor, the machines looked to be gathering a small layer of dust, and the door to the back room had closed itself some time after the team had left. Still. Everything was exactly as the team had left it in the first round of evidence collection, but now the movement was on pause. It was quite a chilling sight to behold; it always was.
"Oh man," Ernie broke the reverie, "after the war, I so totally got my wand fixed here."
"Really? They do that here? I thought they just repaired the mechanical things." Ginny questioned the immature CSI with a scrutinizing tone. She was good at training the new recruits because of that very tone. It gives them a sense of fear, she would say.
"Well, like, after the war and stuff, they were just fixing everything. Totally the only shop open to fix shit anymore, too. I mean, the Death Eaters totally took down everywhere else all madcap crazy-like. And man, these guys were crazy. So, like, pompous and polite about everything, like, 'Oh yesh, we will fixsh that for you, Shir, give ush just a moment of glorioush time and it SHALL BE REPAIRED.' And they were crazy quick with it too!
"Hey, look! It's the 'What's-It-For Box'. You can put your old things in this drawer here, and a little slip of paper spits out on the other side, here, and it tells you what your thing is for! Here! Give me something! Whatever thing you have on hand! I'll show you!"
"I'm pretty sure I already know what my thing is for, Ernie." Harry's innuendo caused Ginny to laugh a little before lightly tapping his shoulder with her wand in fake disapproval.
"Don't encourage him, you git. The kid's already crazy enough."
"I'm not crazy, Gin. This is just a totally awesome shop. Oh, candy bowl!"
Ernie made to grab a piece of candy from the dish, but Ginny quickly stopped his hand with her own. The glare she gave could have frozen Butterbeer. "This, Ernie, is why we can't take you anywhere. The scene must be preserved. Disturb nothing unless you intend to take it back to the lab. Do I make myself perfectly clear?"
"Yes ma'am," Ernie conceded pitifully, as though a metaphorical tail were now tucked between his legs.
Ginny unhanded him then and got herself to work. Her eyes scanned the middle of the walls, slowly moving upward. Harry, too, began looking up.
"The ceiling," Harry reminded himself out loud, "The ceiling is where we didn't look before."
"Wot'th tho thpethial 'bout the theiling?" Ernie asked with his mouth full of toffee he had produced from his own pocket. "All I thee ith the big tear from the-" (he gave a big, wet gulp) "-chandelier. Dude, what do you s'pose made it tear like that? Like, you'd have to have a lot of weight on it for that to happen. Like, a lot. Like, Dervish himself dancing from it. Get it? 'Cause he's heavy."
"Oh my goodness," Ginny hummed, "the little bugger may be on to something. You see that bit on the arm of the fixture there? Looks like a snag of white cloth, don't you think, Harry?"
"Yeah, it does. Richard Dervish did have a tear on the back of his collar. I didn't think of it before, but I wonder if-"
Flash!
Harry and Ginny turned around to see Ernie holding a camera that looked to belong to the store. "Oh hey," he said, "There's totally film in here. But, like, only two pictures left. And some weird little marking-things on the lens. I don't think either Dervish or Banges would have left this out here in this condition, y'know what I mean? Oh, sorry, what were you saying?"
"Merlin's Beard, Macmillan!" Ginny cried. "Get that camera into an evidence bag, grab a ladder, and get a sample of the cloth on the chandelier. Make yourself useful! Now, Ernie!"
In a sudden burst of movement, Ernie hastily got to work on his orders.
Harry and Ginny continued to survey the scene. Their heads tilted up, unspeaking, and before too long their hands found each other blindly and held on. Ginny was the first to speak and started the brainstorm process.
"This couldn't have been one person. There's too much damage done for a person to do alone without the aide of magic."
"Let's just say for now that Dervish was hanging on the chandelier. How'd he get up there? Look at how much it's fallen and you still can't reach it from standing on the floor."
"Why weren't all the filing drawers pulled out? There's no apparent order to which ones were, so what was the significance?"
"And what about the picture frames at the top of the wall? How did they get so ripped up without magic? There seemed to be no evidence of a ladder…"
"Why was the cage so dinged up in the back? How was whatever was in it subdued enough to be taken out of the cage without hurting whoever took it?"
Ernie interjected their session with the brilliant addition "you dudes don't even sound like you're talking to each other."
Being that they had been interrupted, the moment was gone and Harry and Ginny dropped their hands from each other and collected the new evidence bags to take back to the lab.
"Thanks for your help, Ernie." Harry told him.
Ginny just ignored Macmillan altogether and walked out quickly.
Eddie Carmichael and Cho Chang were too excited about their findings to properly bicker. Macmillan brought them symbolic gold when he had returned from his quest out in the field, and now they finally had solid leads to work from. As the clock struck noon, they argued only half-heartedly about how well the current Minister of Magic was or was not doing and Harry entered with Hermione ready to hear what all of the buzz was about.
"You see, Herm," Carmichael gloated, "That little piece of fabric Macmillan brought me, although so small it was very difficult to work with, I happened to use my amazing talents to match it to your dead guy's collar. Now you know he was hanging from the chandelier, and from what I saw on the Coroner's Report, what caused the mysterious bruising."
"That's excellent, Carmichael. Just what we needed. What about you, Cho? Did you find anything?"
"More than you were hoping for," she beamed back. "The marking on the lens of the camera practically looked like hand prints, so I ran them, and although I couldn't find a match, I figured the hands must obviously be very small, possibly even small enough to fit in the cage. And if they were touching the camera, maybe they took a picture and showed who else was in the shop."
"And?" Harry was getting impatient. Lab techs always loved a big build-up.
"And…all the photos were normal posed photographs of Dervish and Banges, except one. It's -well, see for yourself."
Cho handed the two a sepia-toned photograph. Too close to the lens to be in focus, something danced around the little frame rapidly, as though examining the camera. Behind it was the shop, all the fixings and trimmings being torn apart. Though the head of whatever was in the picture was blurry, Hermione couldn't help but think she had seen the shape before.
"Harry, call up Neville."
"Neville? Why?"
"Just do it, Harry."
Harry placed the tip of his wand to his throat and said to no one in the room, "Neville, could you please come up to the lab for a moment?"
Within two minutes the Coroner's Assistant arrived, and Hermione thrust the photograph in front of his face. "What does that look like to you, Neville?" She asked.
"It looks like bad photography, Hermione."
"No, what does the little thing moving look like?"
"Oh. Well, I'd recognize those beady little eyes anywhere. That's one of those little devil Pixies that nearly killed me second year of school."
"I thought so."
"Wait," said Harry, "The Cornish Pixies that Lockhart unleashed at us? They picked you up pretty high, didn't they, Neville? How high do you think they could have lifted you?"
"All the way to the ceiling if they wanted, I suppose. Those buggers were like ants, carrying way more than their weight."
"All the way to the ceiling, Hermione." Harry said to her.
"And then tearing up the books, Harry." She smiled back.
"You suppose they could figure out how open a door, Weasley?"
"Sure thing, Potter. They're clever little pests."
The pieces of the puzzle had finally fallen into place.
Part Five
"Thank you for coming in to answer some questions today, Mrs. Dervish." Copper was leaned back in his desk chair as far as it could go. His feet had been resting on his desk until Mrs. Dervish had come walking down the hall, and he liked to make a good impression despite the mess his office had become over the years.
Books and files covered every free inch of desk, shelf, and table top space he had. Old stained coasters rested on top of a few of the piles, and his window looked as though it hadn't been cleaned for years, as it had a film of grime covering it that obscured the view outside.
"Patti." She told him politely. "Call me Patti, Lieutenant Copper. Or may I call you James?"
"Lieutenant Copper. So you've been unreachable these past few days. Must be unfortunate to come back to this kind of news. Tell me, Patti, why would your husband have been smuggling Blue Cornish Pixies and hiding them in the back room of his store?"
"I don't rightly think he was smuggling anything, sir. No he-"
"No? That's odd. He left them out of the inventory, made no mention to his business partner about them. If he wasn't smuggling them, what was he doing?"
"Our youngest daughter turns nine in a little over a week, Lieutenant."
"Oh, well isn't that sad for her? To find out just before her birthday that her father was smuggling pixies."
"He wasn't smuggling them, Copper! She's having a Pixie Tea Party for her birthday. We thought it'd be a nice treat to have pixies flying about the yard. Their delivery was much too early, so Richard was going to keep them in the store until the day of the party so they'd be a surprise.
"You know, Lieutenant, I think you see the worst in people, and when it's not there you still assume it is. I think you'd have more of the answers you need if you would allow people to speak before accusing them of such things. I am a widow now, and I know my deceased husband did no wrong in his life. I could use a little sensitivity, or at the very least, not being berated."
At that, she quickly gathered her coats and stormed from the room.
"Well, lady," Copper said to the empty space, "if you saw everything I have, you'd assume the worst in people too."
"It's about time you badges showed up to look into those damn pixies! They come flyin' in here first thing yesterday morning, probably smelling the fresh bakes, and eatin' my entire day's worth of prepared sweets."
Madam Rosmerta maintained a gentile, welcoming face despite her harsh tone as she complained to the two CSIs. She had already charmed the bar glasses to clean themselves, and was absent-mindedly wiping down her bar. "Y'see, I sent owl to you lot yesterday morning soon as them blue bugs arrived, so you mind telling me what took ye so long?"
"Well, actually Madam, we're not the cops." Ronald explained. "We're CSIs".
"Then what the bloody hell are you asking me about those pixies for? Seems they only been bugging all my customers that come in, so I keep sending owls up to your offices, and the first you send me aren't people come deal with them? Well, what's the point in having ye here, then?"
"Madam, just tell us when the little buggers first showed, and when they left, okay?" Ernie lacked the tact necessary in dealing with the public, but his boyish charms always seemed to get him excused from his blunt and insensitive tones.
"Well, it's like I said, they show up yesterday morning and eat all my pastries. So, they start getting hyper, and I start giving them a jug of Butterbeer ev'ry couple hours 'til they pass out. Been doing that since just to keep them quiet so as you can come pick them up."
"They're still here, Madam?" Ron jumped at the chance to cut Ernie off.
"Yeah. They's in the back, passed out as ev'r."
"Ernie, get the cage."
Epilogue
The break room in the Hogsmeade Crime Offices was a dismal attempt at recreating a relaxing home environment. One large yellow kitchen table with four mismatched green chairs stood in the center of the room, while second-hand couches in various shades of brown and grey lined the walls. The walls themselves had once been covered in olive green wallpaper that had since started peeling and turning closer to a shade of puke, while revealing the paneled fake-wood walls beneath the sheets. Eight CSIs sat in the room then, drinking the Butterbeer keg Madam Rosmerta had sent with the boys as thanks for clearing out the pesky pixies.
"After everything we've seen during and since the war, I'm glad that good Mr. Dervish wasn't actually murdered. Well, by a human anyway." Harry offered up the toast from the couch as Ginny threw her legs up on to his lap.
"Strange, really," Carmichael attempted deep thought on the matter, "I could have sworn it was Banges. Just always seems to fit, being killed by your partner in business."
"I'll be sure to keep one eye open when I sleep." Cho announced from across the room. She topped off her Butterbeer and plopped at the table. "Anyway, the beer is good."
Draco savored the flavor of the beer in his mouth before reminding everyone, "I always figured pixies were vile violent little things. Never liked them myself."
"Yeah," said Hermione, "I believe you've never been a fan of anything cute."
"'Cept for maybe Ferrets, Right Malfoy?" Ron flashed his big innocent grin at the blond man, who smiled and rolled his eyes.
"I don't get it.," Ernie slurped at the contents of the cup. "Why ferrets? What? I don't get it."
"And you never will." Draco finished his beer and put the empty glass on the table in front of Cho. "And now, I've got to get home to Astoria. Good night, lads and ladies."
They gave a round of echo of goodnights while the other seven continued with their sweet beer, and Ernie continued to press for answers.
"They're not going to tell you, Macmillan," chided Cho, "it's obviously just one of their things."
"Hey, maybe you should put that in the 'What's-It-For Box'." Ginny helped.
"That reminds me," Ernie started to no one in particular, "what's going to happen to the pixies?"
"They'll be given back to Mrs. Dervish. Then she can do as she will." Harry explained calmly.
"They don't, like, get sent to jail or anything? I mean, they killed someone."
"Well," Hermione offered, "all they did really was carry with their pixie antics. It was the old chandelier that technically killed Dervish. Besides, what are you really expecting to do with a pixie? Send it to Azkaban for the Dementor's kiss?"
Ron laughed at the ridiculous idea. So heartedly, in fact, it became infectious to the rest of the room.
The rest of the evening simmered after that until all of the CSIs went home. Ernie was the last to leave, and as such turned out all the lights and walked the empty hallways to the front door. As he walked past the personal items collection window next to the reception desk, he noted the cage full of pixies still asleep from all their Butterbeer and muttered something to them along the lines of calling them creepy.
One pixie awoke and stared at Ernie with big blank eyes before letting out a sleepy yawn. So sweet and innocent it looked, Ernie couldn't help but respond with saying "so that's how you get away with murder."
He turned out the lights in the front hall and exited the front door into the cold night. The door locked itself behind him, and the moon shone a light for his path back to the Three Broomsticks so Ernie could find his way to more Butterbeer.
Fin.
Author's Note: Thank you, everyone, for reading! Any and all feedback/reviews would be greatly appreciated, as always, and I hope you all enjoyed.