13th Hour
Lea of Mirkwood
Nicole Carey was dead. Something had come up behind her and slit her throat as she was walking to the cute that took her to her neighborhood. She had stayed out late with her friends, and if the smell on her clothes was any indication, she'd been drinking. Possibly smoking. The ID in her wallet identified her as a sophomore at UCLA.
She had been on the walkway. Her purse was found several feet in front of her; presumably her killer had rifled through it, though its contents appeared intact. She lived in the middle levels, but the party she went to was at the top of the lower levels. There was gum on the sole of her pink platform shoe.
The murder weapon, of course, was gone, easily thrown over the edge to fall between the buildings and hit the alley in the sub-level, hundreds of feet down.
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Keaton Jones was the lucky officer to find the knife. It was a large carving knife, the kind he used ton the turkey last Thanksgiving, dinged from the fall. Carefully, he put it into a plastic evidence bag.
"There's not enough blood down here for what she lost," said one of the field officers. He squinted at the dark patch, mentally measuring it. "In fact, there's hardly any."
"Sample it anyway, would you, Solf?"
Jones looked around a few more times, taking in the cold, dusty alleyway. Nothing else of importance. A quick glance at his watch told him the time: 6:13.
"Hey, it's getting late. We better go," he said, hand twitching towards the gun at his side. "The sun's going down soon and we're not outfitted for dark patrol."
"Scared of the bogeyman, Jones?" laughed Solf, standing. "Is he going to come and eeeeat you?"
"Nah, man, don't be an idiot." Jones was halfway to the hover. "Leave it to the professionals, I'm just saying."
"You are scared! Admit it!"
"Sure. Terrified." Jones turned the ignition and waved the last few men to pile on. "Pissed my pants, even."
--- --- ---
"I'm not getting any match on these prints."
Jones snapped out of his thoughts of sleep, of going home and spending an evening with his wife for once. He glared at the technician in front of him with unnecessary rancor, and the kid cringed. "You're not getting a match? Did you draw a mustache and a little face on it? Is that what you did?"
"No, sir," said the tech nervously and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. "I ran it through everyone in the L.A. system that we've got a record for. You want me to run for the nation?"
"Of course I want you to run for the nation! If you can't get a match from one city, you don't give up!" He took a deep breath and pinched the bridge of his nose as the poor guy scurried off, glancing behind him in case Jones threw something. This is intolerable. Jones sighed and stood, heading towards the door. I know there's aspirin somewhere here.
It took a good fifteen minutes for his headache to go away, and by that time the poor tech was waiting around in front of Jones's office with the news that there wasn't a match for anyone in the nation or the world. This time he followed the tech back to his computer, where he was showed the O match.
Jones narrowed his eyes. It appeared that their killer didn't exist at all. It was next to impossible to forge a fingerprint. There were always tell-tale marks. The forgeries had smears in the wax, or a certain ripple to the lines caused from scar tissue if they were desperate enough to etch it with a needle. And this one wasn't a forgery.
"Run it through the database for everyone we have. Go through the archives a hundred years."
"Sir? That will take hours."
"Fine. I'll go out for coffee."
--- --- ---
The computer found a match at two a.m. Jones knew this because he looked at the clock when the phone rang at that time. Groggy, trying to speak quietly so he wouldn't wake his wife, he answered.
"Mr. Jones, we found a match. It's a guy from the turn of the millennium. He was the CEO of Wolfram and Hart, name of Angel."
"I'll see to it in the morning." Jones rattled the handset back into the cradle and rolled over again, burying his face in the pillow. Before he slipped back asleep his mind flashed to a vivid memory of the crime, blood spattered on the slats of the walkway and the pink platform shoe with gum on it.
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