The Choices of Staff Members of Hydra

16

FULL OPERATIONAL DISCRETION

The neighborhood in Harrisburg Pennsylvania was well kept, with tidy yards, friendly neighbors and generally was thought of as a decent place to live. On one particular Saturday in mid-summer in 1960, with the day already feeling too warm though it was only an hour after dawn, the neighborhood was in an uproar, with people in the streets, gathering around one house, just beyond a line of uniformed police officers, with police cars parked up and down the street. An ambulance sat quietly, attendants waiting until the detectives gave word for them to approach the house that was indistinguishable from all of the others on the street, calmly smoking cigarettes, showing no sense of urgency. No one would need life saving measures when the victim was already dead. They were only waiting to remove the body from the crime scene.

The gawkers and the press tried everything they could to get a look at the body that was just hidden behind the half-closed front door of the unassuming residence. Murmurs were running through the small crowd, in hushed tones of fear, laced with speculation as neighbors and others discussed what had happened. The crowd did not part as two men pushed their way through, and many expressed anger that both men were allowed to enter the house immediately once they showed their credentials identifying them as agents of SHIELD. The men ignored the crowd as well as the body they stepped over to get into the house.

The body was of a man, middle aged, with thinning hair and a soft, round face and body. He was lying face up, the cause of death clear to anyone who looked at him based solely on the very large hole in the middle of his forehead. He had been shot by an unknown gunman as the man had walked outside to get the morning paper from his porch. In such a quiet, even outright boring neighborhood it was a shocking crime, made more so by the fact that the gunman had not been seen by anyone, even though it was morning on a summer weekend when most people were at home, and many were already outside trying to do yardwork before the heat became completely oppressive. The dead man's wife and children had been jarred awake by the gunshot and after police arrived, they'd been taken by officers to another location, dazed and on the edge of hysterics by the complete upheaval in their lives. The police were not taking any chances just in case the entire family would be targeted.

The two SHIELD agents walked up to the detective in charge, who was casually smoking a cigarette and giving orders to two other plainclothes officers, none of whom were showing much interest in moving quickly. There was a logic to the attitude, no one had any description of the gunman, no one had any idea where the gunman had been hidden, or perched, no one was even sure of his position, above or level with the victim, when the shooting had taken place. Officers were already moving around the neighborhood attempting to find anything they could to continue with the investigation, but they were coming up empty handed. With so little to go on, and with the stories from the neighbors becoming ever more lurid and improbable as they speculated, the detective's attitude was apathy. He had the look of a law enforcement officer who knows from long experience that the situation he found himself in was sure to be a cold case, one that would be nothing but trouble every time the press decided to bring it up to try and show the incompetence of local law enforcement or to increase sales of papers and viewership of news programs through the fear people would have of an unsolved murder in a seemingly normal neighborhood. The press would whip everyone in the area into a frenzy so the detectives would have to be seen as doing something, but none of it would be remotely successful.

"Who're you?" the detective asked, looking the men up and down. Both showed their credentials, but the detective did not relax, he became more overtly hostile.
"This is a local matter," he said brusquely. "Why are you here? What's your interest in something like this?"

"We have our reasons," one of the men said, unperturbed by the detective's attitude. "And your office will have our official paperwork sometime today. All we want is to be able to look at the crime scene and the house. Everything else is entirely in your hands."