A/N: Hey! Thanks for all the reviews. Looks like all I have to do is gripe and the reviews flood in! I do have an apology to make though. I did receive one review for chapter 5 from Wen. In fact, Wen is one of my most loyal readers on this fic and has sent me an in depth review of every chapter via email. Sorry Wen. I just wasn't thinking when I said "no reviews." Anyway, sorry this chapter is a little late getting up. I went out of town last week and didn't get back in until yesterday afternoon. But hey, the chapter's up now and we can all be happy again.
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Two weeks after the murder, things were far from quiet at the mansion. The phone rang constantly with reporters wanting an interview with Scott, Xavier, or anyone else from the Institute. The police had stopped calling, which was good because it meant the X-Men didn't have to deal with their questions anymore, but on the other hand it meant that the police felt they had all the evidence they needed to convict Scott. The X-Men were very thankful that the BPD was done asking questions though. They had managed to keep the X-Men a secret. The police had no idea what sorts of bunkers were hidden below the mansion. They didn't even know that the rest of the Institute's residents were mutants like Scott! It had been tough, but the X-Men had all managed to keep their cool and protect the secret perfectly.
But despite this victory, the kids were not getting along well. Kurt's attitude toward the rest of the team had changed. His refusal to accept Scott's possible guilt was causing him to separate from the rest of the X-Men. He was slowly finding himself more and more detached from the group. Everyone else noticed this, but felt there was little they could do to stop it. As time went on, Kurt's faith in Scott's innocence only grew so that soon he decided to take it upon himself to prove that Scott was not guilty since the police clearly had made up their minds already.
On the two week anniversary of the murder, Kurt waited until close to 2:00 at night and then teleported from his room to the kitchen. Everyone else was asleep, but he was careful not to make any noise if he could avoid it. The X-Men had stayed out of the kitchen as much as possible. All the food had been moved to the downstairs kitchen area and no one ate in the dining room anymore. To be honest, no one wanted to be in the room where "it" had happened.
Kurt tiptoed to the place on the floor where Duncan had been found. There was a faint red coloring still in the tile floor where he had lay. Most of the blood had been cleaned up, but the floor was forever stained. The Professor had already made arrangements to have it replaced soon. But for now Kurt could still inspect the scene of the crime as it had been the night it happened.
There were three small holes in the floor. Kurt examined the bullet holes, but he didn't know enough about guns to tell anything from them. He looked around the room, but everything else seemed normal. Nothing in the kitchen had been disturbed by Duncan or his attacker. Kurt spent a few more minutes looking around the room, but it was clear there was nothing to find here that the police hadn't already found. Kurt sighed. Hopefully tonight's expedition wouldn't remain this uneventful. He had struck out at the crime scene, but he had two more places on his list to inspect.
Kurt closed his eyes and ported to the mansion's front gates. He was in his uniform and wasn't wearing his image inducer. After all, he figured he would blend in with the night sky best if his body appeared dark blue. He began teleporting away from the Institute's grounds, porting farther and farther away until he found himself outside Duncan's house near the edge of town. He stood on the sidewalk and looked at the house for a moment. The lights were out and the house seemed cold and quiet. Duncan's parents hadn't taken his death very well. Kurt didn't want to meet the parents who could have. It had been long enough now that no one was bringing food to them anymore and they were only now beginning to move on with their lives. Kurt took a deep breath, picked a dark window, and ported inside the house.
By luck, he found himself standing inside Duncan's old room. The bed had been made at some point and the room seemed clean. Surely Duncan hadn't been this much of a neat freak! He figured Mrs. Matthews had cleaned the room thoroughly since Duncan's death. Kurt began walking around the room slowly, careful not to cause any noise that would attract the attention of the man and woman downstairs. He sifted through Duncan's belongings for about 30 minutes before deciding there was nothing useful here. Mrs. Matthews had cleaned the room of any evidence that may have been left lying around. He sighed again. Strike two.
But just as Kurt was about to port away, he noticed Duncan's computer sitting on the desk beside the bed. He sat down in the small office chair and turned the computer on. Once it started up, he began searching the memory. He didn't really know what he was looking for, but he hadn't come all the way here in the middle of the night to find absolutely nothing of any use. He sorted through Duncan's collection of mp3s and games before stumbling across a lone document titled Fun with Mutants.
"Vhat have ve here?" whispered Kurt to himself as he opened the document. What appeared on the screen was a list of what looked like goals Duncan had set for himself. First on the list was "manipulate conference into making me MVP." Kurt scrolled down in shock as he realized that each item on the list could be accomplished with the help of a telepath.
"Pass the SAT by making Jean tell me the answers."
"Pass Chemistry."
"Pass Trigonometry."
"Be first senior class to ever get away with a senior prank by making Jean mess with Darkholme's mind."
The list went on and on and each item was more shallow than the last. Finally, Kurt checked the properties for the document. It had been created and the day before Duncan was killed! He printed the list quickly and put it in a small compartment on his belt, then ported out of the house.
So far, Kurt had managed to find one piece of evidence in the hour he'd been gone from the mansion. He knew he didn't have much longer so he hurried to his last stop, the Bayville Police Station, to sort through the gathered evidence.
Again, he was able to port inside the building without being noticed, but he had no idea where the evidence room was. Kurt began roaming the halls quietly. It was late at night so there shouldn't be anyone here, but he couldn't take any chances. He soon realized that he was in a hallway full of offices. He scanned the doors for a familiar name until he found one labeled "Lt. Frank Varley." Kurt recognized the name as the man who had interviewed he and the other X-Men the night of the murder. He glanced around and ported inside the room.
Lt. Varley's office was clean, no mess at all. He hadn't left papers on the desk or anything like that to make things easy on Kurt, but he had left his filing cabinet unlocked. Kurt opened the drawer labeled "Open Cases" and began rummaging through the files until he found the one marked "Summers, Scott."
"Jackpot!" he said to himself as he pulled the file out of the drawer and opened it. Inside were lots of pieces of paper. He sat down at Varley's desk and spread the papers out in front of him. The first page consisted of Scott's mug shots. Somehow it just seemed strange to Kurt to see a guy wearing sunglasses in his mug shot! He moved on to the next page and found a description of the crime.
"Victim called 911 at 8:50 PM and officers reported to Xavier Institute. They found the suspect kneeling over the DOA and trying to move him. Suspect was apprehended and taken to HQ. Baker and Miller interrogated. Suspect apparently killed victim over a girl from school."
Kurt read the short description with interest. He began to wonder why Scott was moving the body when he noticed something else in the corner of his eye. Varley had made an extra note at the bottom of the page in all capitals and underlined it.
"SUMMERS IS MUTANT!!! TELL MEDIA!!! THEY'LL LOVE IT!!! "
It sounded to Kurt as if Varley had purposely made this case a huge media event! Now that he thought about it, it had been Varley who had first made the announcement to the media that Scott was a mutant and it had been Varley who had fielded the questions about what that meant. Varley had made numerous appearances on national news programs to talk about Scott and the case and mutants in general.
"He's trying to get famous off the case!" said Kurt out loud. He was immediately sickened. He threw the paper down on the desk in disgust and moved on to page three.
The next sheet of paper in the folder was the phone records from the mansion that night. Kurt pulled it out and looked at the sheet. According to the records, a call had been made to Duncan's house from the mansion at 8:10, about forty minutes after the other X-Men had left to fight the Brotherhood.
"Vhich explains vhy Duncan's car was there and vhy he came to the mansion in the first place," said Kurt, thinking aloud.
He moved on to the next page and found a list of tangible evidence gathered. He read each item slowly, memorizing it for future reference.
EVIDENCE1 .22 caliber handgunwith fingerprints matching those of suspect
6 bullets. 3 from victim's body and 3 from floor. All match gun signature. 2 other bullets were fired, but were unrecognizable.
1 surveillance tape. Acquired from Jerry's Gun and Pawn Shop.
Kurt reread the last line again. He hadn't heard anything about a surveillance tape from a gun shop. He quickly began reading through all the other papers until he a found a small note that had been made recently. Varley had scribbled the note himself on a yellow Post-it and stuck it on the last sheet of paper in the folder."Baker has gun shop tape. DA wants a copy by Friday."
Kurt hurriedly put all the sheets of paper in order and slipped them back into their folder, which he then returned to the exact same place in the filing cabinet that it had been in earlier. Then he ported from the room and began looking for an office for a "Baker."
He walked down the hallway until he got to the stairs without seeing a door that said Baker on it. He turned around and went back toward where he had first come in. Maybe he had turned the wrong way out of Varley's office. He reread all the labels as he walked back to the other end of the hallway. He passed Varley's door again and began paying close attention to all the labels. Finally, at the very end of the hallway, he found one marked "Det. Ed Baker." He breathed a sigh of relief and ported into the room.
Baker's office was not as clean as Varley's. In fact, it was downright messy. Finding a tape in here would not have been easy, except that there was a TV and VCR in the corner of the room. Kurt checked and, by sheer luck, there was a tape marked "SUMMERS" inside the VCR. He turned the TV on and pushed play.
The tape was grainy. Like most surveillance cameras, the time and date were in the corner of the screen and the picture had no color. It was all black and white. The camera was mounted over the head of the man at the cash register. Nothing happened for a moment. The man at the desk was busying himself with marking prices on some of his merchandise. Then a teenage boy wearing dark sunglasses walked into view. There was no doubt about the identity. It was definitely Scott on the tape. He stopped at the desk and began talking to the owner. There was no audio, but Scott was clearly looking at the handguns in the glass case. Kurt watched in shock for ten minutes as Scott talked to the man. Finally, the owner pulled the gun out of its case and they returned to the cash register where Scott paid for the gun with cash. He bought some bullets as well and then left the store. The tape cut off soon afterwards.
Kurt stared blankly at the screen for several minutes. The date on the camera had been the same day as the murder. The time had said 7:58 PM when Scott left the store. That was just 12 minutes before the 911 call. Kurt started the tape again. It was definitely Scott. And there he was buying a gun. Kurt began scrounging around the office until he found another tape. It had a label on it and he was sure it was evidence for another case, but Kurt didn't care. He copied the surveillance tape onto it and fixed any mess he might have made while searching through Detective Baker's office. Then he grabbed his copied tape and teleported out of the building. Slowly, he returned to the mansion. Even he had to admit that the evidence against Scott was strong. Maybe too strong.