Author's Note: Written for Day 09 of the 2020 August Fic-A-Day.
The first thing Kensi had done after getting home from her lunch with Buffy was to boot up her private laptop and do a quick search for Hemery High School and a string of murders in the mid-1990s. The search result quickly confirmed what Buffy had already told her; someone had been killing students for several months and all of them had attended Hemery. There were also several articles on the school dance, with the main headlines screaming about a gang attacking it and killing and wounding many students. Pictures of the burning gym were also available along with snaps of the remains after the fire had been put out.
The name 'Buffy Summers' wasn't anywhere in any of the articles, which probably explained why Nell and Eric hadn't flagged it. Or maybe not, they did now she had been expelled shortly after. With no proof, there wasn't much they could do about it.
It was more difficult to find anything on Sunnydale. Online newspapers weren't quite as common back then as it was now, and they didn't appear to have been at the forefront of news broadcasting. No one appeared to have bothered to upload past issues for research reasons either. That most likely meant either nothing ever happened there, all copies had been lost in the collapse, or someone had a lot to hide. Given the circumstances, she was putting her money on the latter.
A more general search for the town gave her many memorial websites in memory of people who had been killed or gone missing there. The number was staggering. As she sifted through them a disturbing pattern came to light. Several of the websites said the Class of '99, Buffy's graduating class, had the lowest mortality rate in the history of Sunnydale High, despite an explosion during the ceremony killing nearly half of the students and many others.
Further research told her the death rate among the students had begun going down shortly after Buffy moved there in 1997. That had to be a coincidence, right?
A search using Buffy's name leads her to the official website for the International Defender's Council, but no social media websites. If she had any, they were private or under a false name. There were also a few official statements pertaining to local cases the IDC had taken jurisdiction over, but nothing that helped her research.
She would've preferred if the Meerkats could've done more deep searches, but with the C&D she was probably pushing it with the few searches she had already done. Hopefully, there would be no consequences.
By all public accounts, her old school acquaintance was an upstanding citizen with no criminal record.
She had just closed all the tabs along with the private browsing window, and pushed the screen down, when she heard the front door open, and a loud familiar voice called out, "Honey, I'm home!" Kensi smiled and went to greet her fiance as she let his voice flow around her.
Everything would be fine. Buffy wasn't a member of the mafia, a serial killer, or some other criminal like Deeks had suggested earlier. She was just someone Kensi went to school with a long time ago, someone who wanted to go to lunch with her when she was in LA. She could do that. Right?