Chapter Seven: Ron Weasley and the Missing Boyfriend


Working with these police detectives was a very different experience than what the three of them normally did as aurors. There was a lot more time spent asking questions and sitting around rather than getting called out to places and chasing down the obviously guilty. Ron wasn't quite sure how he felt about that. He wasn't stupid, whatever he sometimes felt spending as much time as he did with Hermione. This made their normal cases seem downright simple, though. Yet if it meant that they caught more people who were guilty, it couldn't be a bad thing, and it was kind of interesting to look at a case like a puzzle to be solved.

However, right at the moment it was more frustrating than anything. That writer kept monopolizing all his girlfriend's time whenever they weren't working, and he'd hoped that after the day of questioning they'd been through that they'd have some answers. Although he didn't blame the muggles for that; it was obvious from listening to them that they were unable to do a lot of the things they normally would to investigate a crime with their technology. So they could hardly be held responsible for the lack of fast progress.

The day after the round of interviews, the detectives came back in saying that they'd finally heard from their medical examiner. Dr. Parish had been working independently of the rest of them to process the evidence taken from the crime scene, the body, and the other incidentals Beckett's team had turned over. Unfortunately, nothing much had come of it. The weapon had no fingerprints on it. There were no fibers or traces on the body, and nothing that looked like the normal signs of a struggle.

Dr. Parish did mention that there had been some weirdness with her postmortem, though. Sara had been stabbed while laying on the ground and she had a strange pattern of bruising. Contusions on the front of her body and face indicated that Sara had fallen forward to the ground without attempting to break her fall at all. Of course, he and his friends immediately realized that someone must have cast a petrificus totalus spell on Sara before killing her. After they'd explained that to the detectives, Beckett continued on with her summation to say that since the woman had already been on the ground, the angle of the knife wound wasn't indicative for either height or handedness, but it had definitely been the COD. Furthermore, the medical examiner's attempts to confirm the time of death had led her into problematic territory, because the preservation spell on the body had thrown its temperature and rigor off. Dr. Parish had told the detectives that she figured she'd be able to narrow her estimate if she was allowed to study the spell's effects in controlled conditions, but they had a sufficiently small window from Sara's regular daily timeline (as well as evidence from witnesses and the contents of her digestive system from breakfast) that it wasn't a priority unless they ended up with a suspect to nail down an alibi for.

While the weapon had no prints, the note was covered in them, to the point many were impossible to distinguish. The lab had positively identified Sara's, her roommate's, and at least two other sets they didn't have a match to amongst Sara's friends and relatives. The vials they'd taken from the boyfriend's apartment had only his and Sara's prints. There were no prints that shouldn't be there in the storage areas, and the main shop was full of unidentified and unusable ones as expected of such a public scene.

Ron assumed from the tone the detective used when telling them all this that normally there was more to go on than what they currently had. A lot of the casework so far had been a matter of the detectives telling them what they would normally do and the group of them together trying to come up with some equivalent they could do with magic or the Auror Department's resources and connections. Ron hadn't had any idea how easy it had become for people to be tracked in the muggle world in ways that just didn't apply to wizards. Nearly any time muggles bought anything, talked to anyone, or even sometimes anywhere they went it could be tracked. There were a few nifty ways that magic worked just as well or better, like owls and point-me spells, but those were easy enough to circumnavigate with the right kinds of warding magic for sufficiently powerful wizards. Perhaps that was also true of the muggle trackers, but it wasn't the impression he was getting from the way the detectives talked.

Yesterday, after Ryan, Esposito, and Hermione had gotten finished questioning the two Laslo women, Beckett had passed it off onto his team to decide who would go and look into the alibis of the two women. She had also asked a couple of questions about hiring someone to kill someone else in the wizarding world. Ron's two friends weren't exactly surprised by the idea, from their expressions, but he definitely was. That wasn't really something wizards did. Beckett seemed a little reluctant to dismiss the idea, but with assurance from the three of them she eventually switched her focus back to the missing Charlie Rhodes.

The group of them had spent the rest of the evening talking over various ways they might attempt to track Rhodes, coming to few conclusions. The three aurors had already tried most of the ways one could track someone with magic and come up empty. Wherever Rhodes was, there were enough powerful wards that it was going to be impossible to find him unless someone turned him in or he got himself caught out in public. A few members of the Magical Enforcement Squad had been sent out directly after the interview with Charlie's brother, but as of today, they still hadn't turned up anything, either. For the moment, they'd just have to hope his brother could talk Charlie into turning himself in, and keep someone periodically recasting the detection spells.

Once it became clear there was nothing more to cover there, they'd eventually switched back to talking about the Laslos again. They had gotten confirmation of the alibis of the Laslos for the morning of the murder – both of the women had several people willing to vouch they were where they'd said they were and Mr. Lazlo was at a quodpot team practice. They talked a little about whether they would do any further investigation into the family, but never came to any solid conclusions.

Ron and his two friends met up the next morning to brainstorm over breakfast about any magical options they might be overlooking because they were so focused on the muggle team's suggestions. The end result was only that the three of them were a little later than normal getting in to the office. They walked in to find Charlie Rhodes waiting for them. The man was obviously quite nervous, but had apparently decided to turn himself in and tell them his story. If it had been up to Ron, they'd have gone ahead and questioned the man right then, but both Harry and Hermione objected that they should wait for the muggle detectives to arrive. Sure, they were the experts, but it wasn't like he and his friends were incompetent, for Merlin's sake. And Ron was quite frankly getting tired of how much time had been taken up by so little progress on this case.

Hermione had taken it upon herself to try and attempt to make a two-way mirror with magic between the rooms that they had been using during their less-than-productive time the day before. As usual, she had quickly come up with exactly what she was attempting, which meant that all of them had the chance to listen in on the questioning of Charlie Rhodes. Hermione ended up being the one going in with Detective Beckett and her partner – he'd been chatting and laughing with Hermione again while the detective stared in at Rhodes – and the rest of them stayed in the main room, watching.

Ron was a little surprised that the detective immediately cut to the heart of the matter by asking, "Who were you dosing with love potion, Charlie?"

While the man stuttered and stumbled over his own words, the author added, "It was Janna, wasn't it."

"No! Why would you think?" The man looked pretty bewildered, and then took a deep breath to finally talk. "Janna would never - ! Janna was part of the whole thing!"

"Alright, Charlie. Just take a moment, and tell us exactly what the three of you were into," Beckett said. Ron was impressed with how empathetic she managed to sound, despite himself. It wasn't really that he didn't like the detectives, or appreciate them, he was just frustrated.

"The three of us, we were, we were friends – at school, and after. Janna and I started dating, we were in love. And it went well between us - for a while," he took another deep breath and another pause. "But my parents didn't approve of her. Her family wasn't prestigious enough. Sara had a similar problem with her parents, they wanted her to get married and she wanted to work on her reputation as a potion's brewer, open up her own shop. So Janna and I pretended to break up, and Sara and I started to pretend we were going out. We didn't really think it through, I guess. I mean, obviously we couldn't pretend forever, right?"

Beckett made an agreeable noise, to prompt him to continue when he stopped and looked up at those in the room with him. When that didn't seem to be quite enough, she asked him again to explain what had happened.

"Janna and I, we wanted to get married, eventually, but we didn't know how we could manage it. Then Janna got this idea. What if my family suffered through such a huge scandal that my parents would be the ones who weren't good enough for their friends? No one could fault Sara for 'dumping' me and no one could fault me for making any match I could manage. We didn't think anyone would get hurt! That's why we chose the plan we did, it was just love potion!"

"Ha!" Ron said softly to himself. Just love potion indeed. Bloody dangerous stuff. Harry gave him a sympathetic look, but the two detectives in the room with them just looked intrigued. Too bad; Ron wasn't telling that story for anything.

"Who did you give the love potion to?" Castle's voice from the other room interjected itself into Ron's thoughts.

"My cousin Alice. We never got along, and she always put on airs about the prestige of the family, and other nonsense like that," he said mockingly. "Stupid cow always thought I liked her more than I did, so when I suggested we should get together to talk about family stuff - it was easy to feed her the potion. Some of those potions, they focus on the first person you see, but we were careful to pick one that we could give a specific target to. It worked, right at first. Alice ended up desperately infatuated with a terribly disgraceful wizard by the name of Argus Plott, who was just plain desperate. They both worked at the Ministry, but far enough apart that it could seem possible they'd just met up and hit it off."

"We were well on our way, you see? Alice had declared to the family, and they were all horrified, trying to cover it up or get her to change her mind. It didn't occur to anybody to make her stop visiting me, though, and I just kept giving her the potion. Janna thought we should go all the way and let her marry the guy. But Sara, well, Sara started to feel bad about it. She said we'd done more than enough, and she wanted out."

"And that's why you killed her," Beckett stated coldly.

"No! I wouldn't! We wouldn't! Sure, I didn't agree. I tried to talk to her, tell her that it would be too obvious that it'd been magical if Alice suddenly changed her mind so soon. It just made her more obstinate. She said if I didn't stop right away, she'd go and tell my family herself. I was angry, yes, but I wouldn't have killed her! I mean – Andrew said you'd found the letter. I was talking about Alice!"

"Wait, what?" Castle asked, "your cousin is also dead?"

"No! She just got sent to live with a different part of the family in disgrace. Look, Sara didn't tell on us. She gave me an ultimatum but before I could say anything, I got an owl from my parents saying I'd been disowned! I don't know if Alice figured out I was dosing her or what, but she apparently had agreed to the meetings to spy on me! She found some of Janna's stuff at my place, and told them we'd never broken up! Getting rid of Sara wouldn't have done me any good."

"So why did you smash up all the pictures of her in your apartment? Why did you run, Charlie?" Beckett asked, leaning forward over the table that separated them.

"The pictures, they were all posed of us as a couple, for my parents. It wasn't real, and I was so mad that Alice had spoiled everything. I ran because I panicked. Sara and I were fighting, and you thought I was her boyfriend, and the thing with the potions wasn't exactly legal and I just, I freaked out and I ran."

Ron was a little surprised when Beckett's first words, about ten minutes later, were, "I believe him." There hadn't been any indication of that in the room that he could see. The detective's demeanor had remained aloof and disbelieving, even as she asked him for an alibi and more information about his family and his ex-girlfriend. She'd also asked him about the missing necklace, and he'd been just as surprised as the roommate that it had disappeared.