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Episode
002 |
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“We must be clinical only to be kind.” Penn Jillette, How to
Play in Traffic The sun shone brilliantly down on
the city. The diffused colors of the
brick and stone buildings stood out vibrantly against the daytime. Crowded around one alleyway, a handful of
people shifted and moved, attempting to see past the bright yellow tape that
declared ‘Danger’ in sharp French lettering. On the opposite side of the narrow
street, an urban motorcycle came to a halt.
On the back, a young man slipped off his riding helmet, shaking his
short brown hair. He looked at the
scene of spectators with blue eyes and swung off his bike. He kicked the kickstand down, leaving the
helmet on the saddle. Hitting a button
on his keys, the biked beeped once and was silent. Dressed in a black turtleneck and slacks with a
dark blue coat, he headed toward the crowd.
With a black, boxy case slung over his right shoulder, he muscled his
way into the crowd. “<Let me
through, >” he insisted in poor French.
“Come on, guys,” he protested in English, continuing to fight his way
into the scene. “<Let me through!
>” As he neared the tape, two police
officers rushed to him, holding their hands to stop him. As they neared, he fished through his
pocket, finally producing a wallet.
Flipping it open, he revealed a five-pointed star of blue metal with
two chevrons descending from the point.
The Parisian police took a good look at the star, then backed away,
letting him slip under the tape. Through the barricade, he nodded
respectfully to the two police officers and walked into the alley. The buildings on either side scaled up
high, nearly blocking out the blue sky above all together. Over the top of the alley, a metal ceiling
held glass overhead as an almost roof, save for a few missing panes. He slowed at the sight of a small ambulance and the
two EMTs waiting with it, both with bored expressions. They glanced at him with worried looks,
then went back to talking in hushed tones. As he slid passed the ambulance,
he found a second barricade. But instead of police officers, the black-suited
government officials kept a vigilant watch away from the distant crime scene. He approached them, taking out his badge
again. “<Eliot Copeland, >” he
said, struggling with the accents.
“<I’m with the Advanced Paranormal Tactical Responders. >” “Eliot!” came a shout from the
crime scene. The two government
officials and Eliot turned as a tall woman with strong blonde hair dressed in
all black came over to the line. “He’s
with us,” she said uncaringly in English.
The two men glanced at each other before backing away. Eliot slipped under the line and headed towards
her. “Close to home for once, huh?” he
joked, joining her as they walked towards the back of the alley. “What’ve we got?” “Aside from a late response?” she
asked coolly to him. He looked away in
embarrassment. But she stopped,
causing him to stop as well. He looked
towards the brick wall to see a splash of red blood staining the brick. His eyes trailed down to see a body amongst
the bags of trash. With only one
glance at the human remains, he turned away suddenly, heaving onto the
pavement. “We’ve got that,” she
concluded, staring at the body. The young Korean man stared into
the blue glow of the computer screen, his fingers flying over the ergonomic
keyboard. He sat back, crossing his
arms. As he did, the woman sitting
next to him leaned forward towards the screen, her short-cropped pink hair
turning yellow in the computer’s light.
“What’d you find, Jin?” “Not much,” he said. “The victim’s name is Krystal Stuvoitch,”
he said. “She’s an International Law
student at the “Is she here on a holiday or
something?” the woman asked. “That’d be my guess, Emma,” he
surmised. “We won’t know until the
others get done processing her personal effects. Hopefully we can find out who she’s staying
with.” “Yeah,” Emma said hopelessly,
staring at the picture of the woman on the computer screen. Standing over the trash and the
remains of the body, a darkly dressed young man stared intently at the
remains. He studied the blood splatter
and the desecrated form, then turned around as a young blonde woman in a
black trench coat stood up from the ground, slipping a cork on a beaker of
the runoff water. “I can’t see
anything, Irene,” he said in an absent tone.
“At least, not anything you wouldn’t expect from an attack of this
nature.” “Keep at it, Jason,” she said in a
rough Scottish accent. “There’s got to
be something.” He turned back to the body,
standing over her again. He slipped
his hands into his pocket while the white sky passed slowly by overhead. “What we have,” said the honey-skinned
man with the circular spectacles as he stepped in front of the wall-sized
screen, “is a blatant attack by a paranormal.” Before him at the glass table,
seated in eight of the ten chairs, was the assembled team. To his immediate right sat Emma, her
innocent-looking eyes staring at the image of the dead girl’s body. Next to her, a large, muscled man sat in
military BDUs. In the middle of the
table was Eliot, with Irene sitting between him and the intimidating blonde
woman at the end. To his left sat Jason who kept
brushing the longer hair on the left side of his head out of his face, while
Jin sat next him. In the middle of the
three remaining seats sat a dark-haired man with an intensely bored expression
as he stared at the top of the glass table.
“We know that the body was not drained of blood,” the middle-eastern
man said, continuing before the eight.
“We also can account for all the pieces of the body, so it wasn’t
eaten.” “If no blood is missing and it wasn’t eaten,” said
the woman at the end of the table, “then that means it wasn’t an attack for
sustenance.” She looked down to the
opposite end of the table. “Jason, did
you pick up anything?” He swept his hair nervously out of
his eyes. “Um, not really, Sarah. I mean, I saw her running into the alley
and turning back. She got startled by
a cat, then it just gets kind of crazy.” “This girl was here on vacation,”
said the man in the middle of the right side of the table. His voice was thick with a heavy German
accent. “She wasn’t a threat to
anybody.” “Which makes this malicious,” said
the man opposite Sarah. They turned to
him as he looked back at the team.
“Look at the tear patterns,” he said with a cold indifference. “This was done with the intention of
inflicting pain and harm.” He turned
to the front. “Assif,” he said to the
man standing, “this guy was just after pain.” |
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