Auror Thomas Thorton was married with two boys, brewed his own beer, and was about ten years Tonks senior, both in age and in experience as an Auror. That was to say, they didn't have a whole lot in common other than the work. Sure, they'd sat in many a meeting together, traded a few office appropriate jokes, and he once offered to pick up coffee for the group which put him firmly in Tonks's okay-coworker category. But they didn't swap stories about their weeks or stop by to chat for no reason. And he'd never asked her for help on a case. But he apparently knew her better than she knew him.
"Got something you might want in on," he told her, slightly out of breath and flushed under his beard. "Weird stuff. You like weird stuff, right? If you hurry you can get there at about the same time as Roberts. He's lead. Tell him I had another case," he said before turning and hurrying away from her desk without waiting for a response.
Which was weird and not at all standard procedure – cases weren't optional or something you could trade like an unpopular chore. But Tonks knew when to ask probing questions and when to shut up and do some investigating. So she grabbed her gear and shot out of the office as quickly as she could. Whatever it was, Roberts wasn't going to be thrilled with the change in personnel, which meant Thorton must have had a good reason for being willing to risk it. And weird stuff usually only meant one thing these days, the elephant in the room everyone seemed to be trying to ignore – Death Eaters. So of course Tonks was going to jump at the chance to get in on the investigation.
He could have warned her it was a murder case, though. Not exactly the kind of thing you wanted to walk into blind.
Even with everything that had been happening recently, murders weren't a common part of the Auror's day to day job. Most of the "bad guys" they caught were disgruntled neighbors hexing each other over disputes about hedges or con men swindling bad charm work or something like that. Which didn't mean it wasn't dangerous – people were always dangerous, sometimes more so when they weren't actively trying to be – but it was usually something they could corral before things got too far out of hand. Murders just didn't happen in the magical community with the frequency that they did on muggle TV. So it wasn't something that Tonks was expecting to get thrown into that day, without any warning.
Especially not one so bloody.
There was probably no good way to die, but having your throat slit was probably one of the messiest, Tonks found out.
Horace Slughorn had been a professor of potions at Hogwarts back before Tonks's school days. He had retired to a quiet life of respectability, books and regular deliveries of good liquor and special orders of handmade chocolates. He had died in his sitting room, his green brocade housecoat tacky with blood all the way down and his head rolling slightly to the side, still connected only by the bone and the flesh along the back of the neck.
At least Tonks wasn't the first to vomit. And she managed to keep it to a minimum off to the side where someone else had had the same problem. The smell of blood, piss and death was apparently heavy enough to make even a seasoned veteran choke on it.
"What happened to Thorton?" Roberts demanded, not even looking up from his work. Apparently he could tell who had come in just by the sound they made choking down vomit.
"Had to switch," she muttered, keeping it simple while she tried to get her brain back online. She couldn't help being annoyed at the lack of warning, but Thorton wasn't particularly an ass, or one to shrink from his duty, or have a delicate constitution. If he felt the need to switch with her, there had to be a reason and she had the sinking feeling it was going to be important. "Catch me up?" she asked, keeping her eyes open and breaking it down into pieces that on their own were slightly less horrible one at a time, just like she had been taught. It had been a violent death, only made even worse by the fact that something had clearly terrorized Slughorn even before the attack. Based on the trail of…mess…the man had pissed himself before his throat was slit – which was information that she hadn't really wanted to know.
"Some signs of struggle," Roberts told her curtly. "Knocked over end table suggests he was coming out of the kitchen and fell backwards. Must have been cleaning up the dishes."
And there was a collection of broken china. The matching set made it a bit hard to count at first, but there had to be at least three cups but no spilt tea on the rug.
"But he wasn't attacked from behind?" Tonks pointed out.
Roberts hesitated in his summary long enough to look it over with her. If Thorton was a bit out of Tonks's social circle, then Roberts had to be on a different planet. He had been a solicitor before becoming an Auror – not an unheard of switch but certainly a more roundabout approach to the field than most of them had had. And he had a way of reminding people of it all the time. But he liked expediency and he liked clever ideas. The only problem was if it ended up not being a clever idea, he was more than happy to verbally flay you for it. Tonks held her breath, waiting to see which way her luck would go this time, but Roberts didn't reject it out of hand.
"Looks like he backed up from the kitchen," Roberts said, talking through the possible scenario. "A fourth person in the kitchen, maybe? First two distract Slughorn while the other goes around to the back."
"Or after the first two leave. I don't normally clean up while people are still here. Do you?"
Roberts snorted. "Depends on how ready I am for them to leave," he said but he didn't argue with her.
They got down to the real work then. Spells to preserve the evidence. Spells to test for things that were hidden. Spells to test for things that were cursed. Spells to find things, spells to fix things, spells to break things, but no spells to magically tell them who the killer was. Except all of their spells did tell them one thing about the killer. He hadn't used magic. Whatever he had done before slitting Slughorn's throat had been enough to paralyze the man with terror, but it hadn't been a spell. It told them a lot about their killer and absolutely nothing that they could use to find him. What kind of dark wizard didn't use magic?
But everyone just seemed happy to not see a Dark Mark hovering above the house, even if they had no clue on what had happened. It was a sad day when they were all hoping someone had decided to kill a helpless old man for no reason at all. Standing outside of the house, taking in deep lungfuls of clean air, Tonks figured whatever this was, it was too weird not to be Order business.
