Johanna entered District Thirteen's dining hall halfway through the time allotted on her arm schedule for breakfast. After grabbing some food, she headed to a table on the opposite side of the room that, from her position, looked like it had the most free space.
It wasn't until she got closer to the table that she realised why—Cressida and Plutarch were sitting at it, along with Alma Coin. Johanna certainly had no more desire to talk to them any more than she wanted she wanted to talk to anyone else in this godforsaken hellhole of a district, but she knew she gets looks and questions the next time she showed up to a meeting, because she was sure Coin and Plutarch had already seen her. Coin saw everything, and Plutarch saw almost as much when it came to the former Victors.
As Johanna sat down at the far end of the group's table, she heard them murmuring about ideas for upcoming propos. Cressida briefly glanced up as Johanna squeaked her chair back to sit in it, but her arrival was otherwise unacknowledged.
Alma was just about to dismiss the impromptu meeting when she heard a coughing fit break out from the table behind her. She turned her head, noticing Cressida and Johanna whip their heads around much more sharply than her own steady façade would allow for. At the next table, Boggs was leaning over, supported weakly by his arms as his throat coughed and choked harshly before finally giving in to its attacker and causing the man to collapse.
The president heard the shouts around her for a doctor, felt the presence of Johanna Mason coming up behind her and placing a hand on her shoulder, unable to acknowledge anything other than the fact that nothing would ever be the way it should be again.
In Johanna's opinion, it took far too long for a doctor to make it from the clinic to the dining hall. In reality, he had only barely been too late to save Boggs' life, but too late was still too late. The Victor hadn't known the soldier very well due to his quiet nature, but she knew it was a loss. He had been one of Alma's best commanders, and she knew any future fighting would suffer without his input.
Most of the discussion at the day's Command meeting centred on Boggs' death. Since District Thirteen had so little crime, there weren't very many solid procedures to follow when something happened. Well, that was false. There were procedures—interrogations, autopsies, searching the crime scene for evidence, and the like—the real problem was who would carry them out, not having anyone fully trained for any specifics relating to crime scene investigation.
In the end, it was decided that Plutarch would lead the interrogations while Cressida and her camera team would document anything suspicious in the dining hall. There were a number of doctors in the clinic who were willing to catalogue anything unusual with the body, though only one, from Three, who knew enough about chemicals to test the poison and figure out when and how it must have entered Boggs' blood stream.
It hadn't been a slow poison—it would have needed to have been administered at some point during breakfast that morning—so Plutarch spent most of his time with the people who had been eating their morning meal with the man.
Sisters Leeg 1 and Leeg 2 claimed that they had seen nothing out of the ordinary happen. A soldier under Boggs' command, Elbert, had briefly come by to exchange a few words before quickly moving off to another table to eat.
Finnick and Annie had seen hardly anything at all, focussed only on each other as their wedding approached. The Leegs' conversations only a murmur, Boggs and Elbert only a blip on their radars.
Elbert himself had hardly anything to say for himself. He had asked about training modifications that day, as he'd twisted his ankle the afternoon prior and it was still sore. He'd paid no mind to the loving couple nearby and gave only a short smile as greeting to the sisters.
By the end of the day, the district was no closer to finding Boggs' killer and were left without one of their best fighters.
Two days later, there was another murder. Elbert had found Leeg 1's body in an unused crawlspace near the clinic. Though she'd been stabbed several times all over the torso, it didn't appear that she had made any attempt to escape and get herself the medical attention that was only yards away.
Naturally, as the one to have found the body, Elbert was interrogated again. The doctors had determined that Leeg 1's time of death lined up with Elbert's story of finding her that morning on his way to the training yard after noticing a few small spots of red only the usually pristine white walls.
All of the blood found had belonged to Leeg 1, as had the few smudges of partial fingerprints left on the walls and floors of the crawlspace.
Not many in Command were entirely convinced—there were easier ways to get to the training yard than the path that Elbert had chosen, he could have returned to the area to report the murder, and he'd now been found at both crime scenes. Their only other connection was Leeg 2, being the more recently deceased's sister, but she'd been scheduled on the opposite side of the complex all morning.
When Beetee failed to show up for the morning command meeting, Haymitch was sent to their shared room to find him strangled in his bed. Haymitch himself had spent the vast majority of the night roaming the halls, as was his usual, and claimed not to have returned to the compartment before the meeting. The only thing Cressida's team had found that even resembled a clue was a heelprint left in the layer of dust surrounding Haymitch's bed. However, due to the district's clothing distribution process and only having a partial print, the true foot size could not be determined; no one was even able to definitely say whether it was Haymitch's or not.
That left the group to speculate on the murderer's motives and possible identity. If it had just been Boogs and Beetee, it could have been someone who didn't like how the district or rebellion were being run, but Leeg's death wouldn't have had any long term effect on the decision making process, and if command had been the issue, Coin, Plutarch, or even Katniss would have been higher-ticket kills.
Based on the methods of killing so far, Boggs' death was the odd one out. Leeg's stabbing and Beetee's strangling had been much more violent and direct methods of killing than poison, hinting that the killer was more likely a male than a female.
It was almost a week before Effie was found dead in a hallway near the command room, a bullet wound in her head and a bloody pillow at her side. Effie's death seemed to bother the investigators greatly, for the most part because it felt like the killer was telling them that they knew where the decisions were being made. As it was Effie, however, it was harder to put her death down to the anti-command motive theory. Multiple members of the leadership had expressed dislike of some of her actions and decisions in the past, so unless she'd just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, the investigation team was down a theory.
Instead, they decided to focus on who had clearance to be on the floor that Command was on. It was at this point that the team decided to rule Elbert out; having just gotten the clearance two weeks before Boggs' death, he was now connected to so many of the murders that everyone figured that someone had to be framing him. Either that, or he was much less intelligent than they had originally believed him to be.
Through Effie's death, they had lost the only motive and suspect that the team had been able to come up with.
Plutarch was found dead in the same place as Effie two days after her body had turned up. From this, the remaining investigators believed that Effie was not the intended target and had been attacked at the first sound of footsteps clomping down the hall, so the leadership motive was tentatively back on the table. For once, though, Elbert had a solid alibi, being scheduled on the complete opposite side of the complex all day and had been seen by at least a dozen other people at the time the doctors had deemed Plutarch had died, so at least part of their deductions from Effie's murder seemed to be proving correct.
It was at Coin's address about Katniss becoming the Mockingjay that the final murder attempt was made. A shot rang out from the crowd, heading for the President. Fortunately, Johanna had never been one to listen to instructions and had been in the shadows of the balcony, reflexes fast enough for to dive in the bullet's way, getting caught in the shoulder and falling to the floor.
Even as the victor fell, heads in the crowd whipped around to the source of the sound. Coin pulled Johanna out of direct sight of the gathering area and as a doctor rushed up from the gathering area. The President walked back out onto the balcony as all eyes were finally settling on…
But that wasn't the whole story. Let's start this one more time.