It was good not being stuck reacting. The Hammer liked being in control - being on the hunt. He thought back to the Tyger, back to being the one who was on the prowl. It was his hand that dared seize the fire. Harry dialed back his approach: keeping his head down in school and class so as to not arouse suspicion. For good measure, he had begun in the common rooms - looking over his own with Lumos Tenebrosus to see if there were any signs of the moonlight glow of unicorn blood. Unsurprisingly, the tower was clean, and from Neville's report the Hufflepuff basement was also free and clear.
Harry had to settle for examining the stairs and hallway leading to the Gryffindor common room. There were plenty of questionable fluids but nothing that resembled the distinct glow of the magic blood or the spittle that was at the scene of the crime. The dungeons were where the trouble was. Given the proximity of the Slytherin commons to the potions class, the Hammer needed to be sure he wasn't under observation when he began. Returning to the potions' hallway after dinner, the place seemed deserted.
"So what happens if we find something?" Neville asked, peering down one side of the hallway as a lookout.
"We'll go to the headmaster, of course. He'll have to listen to us if we have evidence." Hermione said with an air of confidence.
"Yeah, right." Harry murmured as he lit his wand, the blacklight highlighting streaks on the stones in the hallway - their colour was inconclusive. Opening up the door to the potions class felt like a mistake. The glow of his wand lit up the room in a cacophony of colour - the potion reagents glowing the gamut of colours, but all of them different from what he was looking for. The surfaces of the tables were a mess of liquid remains even in spite of the magical cleansing the room was subjected to on a regular basis.
"Did you find anything?" Neville called back to him.
"Nope, give me some time!" The Hammer replied, trying to sort through the different kinds of light he was finding on the ground - by their patterns alone he couldn't make heads or tails of anything. He decided to abandon the search in the student areas and began to look in the area where Snape's desk was, starting in the corner and following the way out toward the shelves of more dangerous ingredients that were kept nearer the back and used by older students. The different glowing hues elicited under the shifted Lumos was a varied mix that seemed to break the rules of normal exposure, but the Hammer figured it was a property of magic.
Coming up to the door to the storeroom in the back, the Hammer still hadn't found anything that resembled the white glow of unicorn blood or the dark aubergine of tainted spittle. He stopped, looking around with the wand held out in front of him, struggling to find anything relevant. Harry still didn't quite want to believe it - it would have been clean and easy to blame Snape. He had motive and he had means and the kind of adult cutthroat ruthlessness that would have made killing a unicorn something that wouldn't have bothered him.
While the Hammer was lost in thought, jumping through his own mental hoops, the door of the storeroom in front of him swung open to reveal a black clad professor with a familiar scowl on his face.
"Having a party, Mason?" Snape spoke with a familiar deadpan. It wasn't lost on Harry that he had changed which name he called him by. The light of Tenebrosus won out against the weak incandescent bulb inside the storeroom, highlighting Snape up his entire front side. There were splotches and stains from the reagents spilt on his robes that illuminated under the light, but yet again still nothing. The whites of the professor's eyes radiated with a piercing intensity under blacklight, his already dark pupils now like the void between stars. The Hammer muttered the counter charm and put his wand away.
"Guess not." Harry said, meeting Snape's stare, "Looks like you're not the one I was looking for."
"Pray tell who or what it was you were looking for in my classroom with your little charm?" He turned the last word into a sneer.
"Clues to a murder. But at this point just the wind, apparently." The Hammer turned to leave. If Snape was surprised by his admission, his expression didn't show it.
"If it wasn't your method to acquire your things through means other than theft, I would be giving you detention for petty thievery, Mason. Longbaugh wouldn't be able to save you this time." Snape said to him as the Hammer crossed the room.
"I'm glad your opinion of me is so lofty." Harry replied, closing the door behind him before exhaling in relief. The other two turned around at the noise, running up to him to ask what had happened.
"Well, Snape was in the storeroom," They gasped. "But I don't think he's our man."
"But you were so sure about him - the way you talked about it, he made so much sense." Neville scratched his head.
"I guess we'd owe him an apology if he wasn't going to murder us for bothering him during his time off."
They returned to their rooms with a growing sense of unease - the feeling that there was something different, something actively changing beneath their noses was apparent now. The Hammer laid in his bed, hovering a ball above him as he let his mind wander in thought. If Snape wasn't involved with the unicorn poaching, it didn't lend to the fact that he would be involved in the heist for the Cintamani stone. But it didn't necessarily exclude him - after all the games the adults played always involved betrayal and cat's paws to work for you. Then there was Professor Quirrell.
From what the Hammer had seen so far from the five or so months he had been exposed to him full time, Quirrell was a mess of a man. Whatever had happened to him in that forest in Albania had left deep marks that he'd be paying for until the end. The Hammer started to wonder about vampires, but the ball began to waver - vampires weren't the point, really. Trying to figure out Quirrell's motivations for his actions was the main idea. The man put up a meek front and faked a stutter, but aside from talking to himself in deserted rooms there wasn't anything to pin to him specifically aside from being involuntarily associated with Snape.
That aside, it was still a mystery why Quirrell would want to make a move for the stone. Was he acting for personal gain or under orders? Was he associated with Voldemort? How was he associated with Voldemort or the remnants of his power? It was true that his general instability would be a possible explanation to his motivation, but what about it would connect him to open practitioners of dark magic? For that matter, what were the rules that separated all the other magic from dark magic? Their classes had gone over naturally hostile magic and magical creatures but still hadn't drawn the line between acceptably harmful magic and unforgivably malicious ones.
The Hammer lowered the ball back to himself and tossed it back into the open mouth of his trunk, hearing it echo like it was falling down a well. Now wasn't the time to ponder the ethics of magic. He sat up in his bed and put his wand and glasses on the nightstand. He'd have to go see the Chief about it. Even if the evidence was entirely circumstantial, he had promised that he'd turn in whoever it was he had pointed out as the suspect.
The Hammer grumbled to himself. He had promised Hermione he would, but he still didn't like it. He didn't have to like it, as far as he was concerned, but a man was only as good as his word. His father had told him about the steps that normally came after this - once the people in the right places knew, uniformed constables would help in the arrest and then the prosecution would begin and the suspect would get their chance before a Crown Court and the punishment would be decided there. Did wizards have something equivalent to that? Their single maximum security prison in the middle of the North Sea seemed to imply they did, but for how backwards Wizard society seemed to be, he doubted there would be a way to plead and argue a case with a barrister or solicitor. After all, why not just take a peek into people's minds to determine the truth?
"Hammer, just go to bed, wouldya?" Anthony Goldstein said to him groggily from the next bed over. Harry mumbled an apology and rolled over.
"We'll tell him together." Harry said sometime during breakfast the next day.
"I hope this doesn't wreck our scheduling. We've got those midterm exams coming up and I'm still not sure how well I'm doing." Neville commented.
"I'm sure if this leads to something, the Chief's little group is going to owe us enough extra credit to pass us through second year." Harry assured him. Hermione looked sufficiently smug about the whole idea. Harry didn't know what enticed her more: reporting something to the authorities or the idea of extra credit.
"Do you know this week's password?" He asked her, causing the smug expression to exchange itself with one of confusion.
"No, I don't. Who do you suppose we should ask?"
"My money's on McGonagall. She is the deputy headmistress."
The Hammer spent the day tapping his foot in class, excited at the prospects of catching the culprit. It'd also be a weight lifted off of his shoulders when he could return the stone to them. Harry didn't have any particular use for turning lead into gold or even for an elixir of immortality. Seeing what the wanton use of potions had done to Petunia made him shy away from the whole concept. A part of him wondered what his life would have been like if she had married that Dursley knob she talked about sometimes.
After changing into their casual clothes when their classes were over, the three of them met up in the hallway outside of the Transfigurations wing down the hall from the Gryffindor part of the castle and the Headmaster's office, confident in their next steps. Knocking on her door, they entered Professor McGonagall's office, finding her at her desk. The Deputy Headmistress's realm stood in contrast to Dumbledore's: where his was a chaotic compilation of doodads and gizmos that seemed to serve little to no purpose, hers felt spacious and wide because of the graceful organisation of her mementos and practical items. The word sparse came to Harry's mind, but in reality aside from Professor Longbaugh she seemed like the most normal Professor in the school.
"Mr. Mason, Ms. Granger and Mr. Longbottom. I hope you all have been staying out of trouble." She removed a set of half moon reading spectacles from her nose, setting them down on the desk.
"Evening Professor," Harry tipped his hat to her, glad that everyone had basically given up trying to do anything about his headwear, "How are you?" The others greeted the professor as well, all of them stopping a pace short of her desk.
"What can I do for you three?" She asked.
"Well, we were wondering if we could go see the Chief."
"Headmaster Dumbledore, that is." Neville added, trying to be helpful.
McGonagall posted her quill into its stand, "I'm afraid that's impossible."
"What do you mean, impossible? Did he fall into another dimension?"
"I mean that he's no longer at the school. He received an emergency summons to the Ministry of Magic earlier this afternoon so he's in London as we speak." She replied in a measured tone of voice, "However, whatever you need to say to him can be said to me."
The Hammer put a hand on his mouth and dragged downward - this wasn't something he would have foreseen. Looking between the other two he made the decision, "It has to be the Chief, Professor. I can't be sure if anyone else will act correctly with what I have to say."
"I can assure you that I will act with the highest order of integrity with whatever information you have." The Professor reassured them.
"Well it's about the Cint- Philosopher's stone you've got up in that corridor."
The expression on McGonagall's face started as surprised and rolled into something that was in the ballpark of scepticism.
"I don't know how you found out about it, but I can assure you that it is very well protected."
"See? This is why. You don't believe me and you won't believe that someone's going to steal it."
"Professor, please, we've been watching this for months. We have it on good evidence that another Professor is going to steal it." Hermione cut in, begging to be taken seriously.
"I can assure you that our teaching staff has been thoroughly reviewed. I have the utmost faith that none of the professors would be responsible for something so unsavoury."
The Hammer sighed, putting his hands into his coat pockets and stormed out in a huff, his two friends coming out into the hall behind him.
"Harr-" Hermione began.
"You two really would've been perfect for each other. All those rules and trust in people." He looked at the floor.
"We'll get the evidence, then." She replied.
"I think we should move fast." Neville tugged on the Hammer's sleeve, pulling him out of his sulk.
Harry smirked, "Right then. Let's go."
Following up on his final theory, they made it to the DADA classroom and all produced their wands. Peering inside and finding the room empty, they stepped in boldly and lit up the room with Lumos Tenebrosus. Harry made a beeline for the lectern and followed his hunch to the teacher's desk. The main area lit up white hot, but not where he had expected it. There were traces of unicorn blood behind where a normal person would sit or stand, splatters of spittle accompanying the presence of the sanguine evidence.
He knelt down to follow the trail, seeing it go from the desk and up the aisle. Harry spoke a word that earned him a rebuke from Hermione as he followed the trail to the door.
"I think we're already too late." He said as his friends joined him, "Let's see where this leads."
The three used their lit wands to follow the pinpricks of artificial moonlight along the halls - some of it was smudged and faded, but in the end by the time they reached the central stairwell and saw it ascending, it was already obvious where it - where Quirrell - was headed.
"We should go back and show Professor McGonagall. She'll believe us this time."
"What makes you think this is going to be any different, doll? What kind of sense does following a forensic trail make for most wizards? We either do this ourselves or nothing gets done and this son of a bitch gets off scott free." He looked at her with hard eyes, extinguishing his wand.