Chapter Sixteen

Sound the Alarm

A quickly arranged Portkey brought the two Aurors to the scene of the crime with Kingsley in the lead. As soon as he ushered Harry forward toward the building, which had a largish group of children huddled out front with blankets around their shoulders and tears on their cheeks, Harry stopped dead.

"Merlin's balls!" he exploded.

"What is it, Harry?" Kingsley asked in a tone of annoyed impatience.

He only shook his head and hurried after Kingsley. "I know this place . . ." he whispered. He stopped on the sidewalk, though Kingsley hadn't noticed and had continued to the Muggle police officer keeping watch over the door to prevent anyone from entering. There were two other officers out front, holding back a couple of journalists and leaving little attention for the flock of befuddled orphans.

He crouched down in front of a tiny girl with a thick birdnest of sleep-tangled hair. She had obviously been crying, though she wasn't now, and she flinched away from him as he drew his face even with hers. Her eyes were huge and wide and red with tears, and her frail little hands held a gray blanket around herself. A few older children immediately turned their attention on him, ready to strike in defense of their own should the need arise.

What if it's one of the children? he asked himself, and his heart thudded painfully. "Are you all right?" he asked the little girl softly. "Are you warm enough?"

Her feet were bare, but she nodded anyway. "Mrs. Beecham is dead," she whispered in a scratchy little voice that made him think she was just getting over a cold. "Gilbert saw her. And he saw the bad boy."

"What bad boy?" Harry asked. She flinched away from him again. "I won't hurt you, I promise. What bad boy?"

"The one who killed Mrs. Beecham!" she wailed. "Sir, what's going to happen to us? Our mummies and daddies died, so we had Mrs. Beecham to take care of us, but now she died! There isn't anybody to take care of us anymore!"

Harry felt anger trying to claw its way up his throat and leap out in a burst of growling invective against the deranged freak who would do something like this to children, to a little girl. He forced it down and found it in himself to smile at the waif. He put his hands on her cotton-clad shoulders lightly.

"They'll find someone for you, of course," he said with all the reassurance he could muster. "We'll take care of this, and we'll get you tucked into bed for the night somewhere." Her eyes were doubtful, and he heard a disbelieving noise coming from someone in his peripheral vision. "What's your name, sweetheart?"

"Minnie," she squeaked.

"Well, Minnie, I'll promise you something if you'll promise me something, too."

She scrunched up her nose, then nodded.

"I will promise you that if they don't find someone to take care of you, I'll do it myself. Okay? I don't want you to worry about that. And now you have to promise me something. You have to promise that you will never, ever go anywhere with a stranger, even if they're a nice stranger like me. You have to watch out for the other kids, too, and make sure they don't go anywhere with strangers. Right?"

She nodded, but her eyes were troubled. "You're a stranger."

"Not really," Harry said casually, and he stood up slowly, not wanting to frighten her by moving too suddenly. "I'm a policeman like that man there," he waved his hand at the door guard, whom Kingsley was arguing with.

"You don't have a badge," a boy of about Matt's age said boldly. He eyes Harry's blue jeans and jumper and scarf. "You don't have a uniform."

"I don't have a uniform," Harry said agreeably, "but I do have a badge." He reached into the pocket of his jeans and flipped out the official card he carried—the card Kingsley seemed to have forgotten and the card which only the two of them had, so far as he knew. "Now, I have to go inside and look around. All you kids, stay together, and keep an eye on each other," he commanded. Then he rushed to his co-workers' rescue.

"Police consultant," he interrupted the exchange, holding out his card. "See? It's all very on the record, just like he's been saying."

The thickset officer's face was nearly purple from being so red, and this only improved his likeness to a tomato. He snatched the laminated card and stared at it, then shoved it back at Harry. "Fine. You got permission, you go in. He—" he jerked his thumb at Kingsley "—stays out here." Kingsley started to protest again, but he was cut off. "No card, no entrance."

"It's all right, sir," Harry said in a low, urgent voice. "I'll go in and have a look, and you can keep an eye on the kids. Try to find one named Gilbert—he may have seen Tyrell."

Given Kingsley's mood, Harry didn't hold out much hope that the big man would go easy on the boy.

---Break---

Harry was back outside only minutes later, just as the ambulance arrived to take away Mrs. Beecham's body and a van showed up containing two social workers to round the orphans up and get them to another location. Harry reconnected with Kingsley and they hurried back to the Auror office, where Dan and Colin were waiting for them anxiously.

"It's the same orphanage," Harry said with assurance. "Tom Riddle grew up in that building." He didn't tell them that he'd seen it before in a Pensieve while searching out Horcruxes with Professor Dumbledore. "I think Tyrell was there tonight looking for information about Voldemort. He was foolish enough to think it would still have the same director. Her office was thrashed. I think he'd been tearing up her old files, trying to find something."

"You think he killed her out of anger?" Dan asked. "For not being what he wanted?"

Harry nodded, but he didn't really think that at all. What we was thinking was making his stomach clench into a painfully hard knot. The placement of her body and the expression on her face—one of some curiosity as well as fear—gave him the distinct impression that the killing had been ritualistic to Tyrell. And that had him incredibly afraid. Tyrell was getting closer and closer to splitting his soul. He had somewhere found out that Voldemort kept objects and killed people of vast significance to him. And with Colin's theory fitting everything into place so neatly, it explained why Tyrell was there. He wanted to make that orphanage significant to him as well.

Aloud, Harry only said that Tyrell was going to all the places Voldemort had been connected with.

"And that at least gives us a plan to go forward with," he said, more enthusiasm in his tone. "We now know where to set up watch. Mind you, it's going to take a lot of manpower that we'll need to pull in from other offices, but I know where to send them. The Riddle mansion, the Riddle graves, the Malfoy manor, Hogwarts of course, there's a cave by the sea that I want watched, I'll draw up a map of how to find it. Maybe Godric's Hollow, too," he added thoughtfully.

"Where are we going to get enough people to cover all of that?" Dan asked.

Harry shrugged. "We'll have to call the D.A. back together," he said, looking at Colin. Colin nodded, his eyes hard as diamonds. "Dean Thomas and Lee Jordan took over Fred and George's joke shop in Diagon Alley, I think they'll join in. Ernie MacMillan makes wands, but he works from home . . . Zacharias ought to know how to find him. Er, I think Terry Boot is a private tutor for wizarding children in primary school, you'll have to look up his registration in the Education department to get hold of him. I'll talk to Luna, and to . . . to Ginny." He looked up from his rapid-fire, jumbled plan-making to look at Colin again. "Can you think of anyone else?"

Colin shook his head, and his whole face had hardened. "Everyone else is dead," he said bleakly.

"Well, we've still got several of the old folks, too," Harry said, shooting a joking grin at Kingsley. "I'll leave it to you to round them up, sir."

Kingsley didn't smile back, but he nodded. "Let's get to work on this immediately," he said, leaving no room for argument. "The sooner we get everyone into place, the sooner we find Tyrell. It seems we've established a pattern for where he'll turn up, so it only remains to us to be there first." There was real relief in the Head Auror's voice. "We'll have him within a week."

Harry understood Kingsley's confidence, but he didn't feel it, and he really hoped Kingsley wasn't planning to tell Scrimgeour the "good news" just yet. Still worse, he had to go home and tell Ginny that she was needed at the front lines. She was going to rub it in his face, and he was just too tired to deal with that right now.

He dragged himself to his own desk to make a few lists. He'd start Firecalling first thing in the morning.