Monster Like You

Chapter 5

The most terrible thing about Nathaniel's death is that he was killed. And the way he was killed.

That evening, just like the week before, when I was working out the last day before my vacation, he stayed at headquarters again. Apart from the night guards, there were only a few other magicians left in the building, including Elsdon. But they were all in their department, in another part of the building.

How an unknown person got inside, despite all the security and control systems for entrances and exits, the investigation did not reveal. Neither ours, nor the Civil Law Enforcement Corps. The unknown person was able not only to enter Cerberus Corps, but also to connect to the video surveillance system by sending a looped image to the monitors in the security room. The cameras themselves continued to shoot and record, so the moment of Nathaniel's murder was captured in all its glory.

At the fatal hour for him, he was on the ninth, penultimate, floor of Corps headquarters. It mainly housed medical, biological and genetic laboratories. What Nathaniel was doing there also remained a mystery. The cameras recorded how in the last minutes of his life he worked at one of the computers of the genetic laboratory.

I knew the rest from Kiaran's words, because my access to the results of our investigation was not enough, and the CLEC considered it necessary to devote only relatives to whom I did not belong to the details and results. Harry once had the temerity to get drunk in my company. Then he told me how it was.

An unknown person, whose face did not get on any of the cameras, entered the floor where Nathaniel worked. When he saw him, they even exchanged a couple of phrases, but since the sound of the camera was not recorded, the content of their conversation remained a secret. Then the man - only half of them probably knew about the killer - pulled out a gun and fired two shots. One bullet hit Nathaniel in the chest, the other in the stomach. He fell, but the killer, contrary to expectations, did not take the last shot in the head to end his life. He just took out a device from the inside pocket of his jacket, put it on the table and turned on the timer. And then he left.

"The device counted down five minutes before the explosion," Kiaran was saying, staring blankly at the vodka bottle on the table in front of him. "For five minutes, a mortally wounded Nathaniel tried to get to him. I don't know why; he wouldn't have defused it anyway. He was just like that: you have to try to do something until the end."

The explosion then completely destroyed the genetic laboratory, the tenth and eighth floors were seriously damaged, no one was allowed into the building for a long time because of the threat of collapse, but over time everything was restored.

I almost didn't remember the funeral, it seemed too unreal then what was happening. I didn't understand what kind of world I was in. Everything looked strange, wrong. My chest was squeezed, I couldn't breathe at all, I couldn't even cry anymore. And I saw almost nothing around. But I remembered that they buried a closed coffin. And even then I suspected that there was nobody in it. There were rumors that Nathaniel's remains could not be found.

Maybe that's why I couldn't believe for so long that he was gone? And that's why I couldn't turn this page of my life in any way?

"He's found something," a drunken Kiaran muttered when he was drawn to frankness. "That's why he was killed. It wasn't the first time he had stayed at headquarters, perhaps it wasn't the first time he had been picking at geneticists' computers. I was looking for something that they didn't save to network drives. I think he found something. And they decided to remove it. And together with him, they cleaned up everything so that nothing would be found during the investigation. Blow up everything - and the ends in the water."

I listened and didn't know how to relate to his version. He and Nathnaiel were good friends. As close as possible. Kiaran worked in the Corps much longer, besides he was five years older. He had long dreamed of becoming a senior investigator, but as soon as he approached this dream, Nathaniel appeared in Corps, and soon the position was given to him. I don't know how it affected their relationship back then. When I joined the band, they were friends. However, Kiaran continued to dream about the position of senior investigator. And yet I got it. After Nathaniel's death. Perhaps Nathaniel shared some suspicions with him, but then why did the official investigation never get to the bottom of anything?