Hermione Granger and the Theft of Magic

Chapter 18: Picking Out Gifts

[A/N: Thank you to Calamity Owl for beta-reading this chapter!]

"I've got an update for you, Rookie," Sue said.

"Ouch!" Harry replied as his arse came down hard back into his chair. One of these days, Sue wasn't going to catch him off-guard like that.

She snickered and passed him a parchment. "That will never stop being fun. Anyway, there's an update for you on Marcus Flint's case."

Harry rolled his eyes before skimming the parchment. "So his lawyer allowed the Veritaserum questioning to go through? I thought he was fighting that tooth and nail."

"The compromise was that all questions have to be routed through his lawyer," Sue said. "If he objects, there will be a judge on hand to determine whether he'll be forced to ask it."

"That's understandable for a normal criminal, but Marcus is facing the Veil," Harry said. "Even if there wasn't much chance of stopping the Veritaserum questioning, I would have thought the lawyer would try anyway. A concession to protect Marcus's secrets isn't going to help the man much on the Other Side."

Sue grinned. "Morgana, I love working with you. That is exactly the question I asked. "The barrister just wants the conviction and doesn't care what else he might be guilty of, since he's probably going to be dead in a few days. I see something like this, though, and it makes me wonder what else Marcus might know."

"It doesn't sound like we'll be able to get that out of him during questioning now." Harry frowned. "Is there anything else unusual, maybe that we could use to get a warrant to search his home or bring known associates in for questioning?"

"I don't think...wait, the solicitor was also unusually pushy about getting Flint's possessions returned to him so he could pass them to his next of kin," Sue said. "That's supposed to happen tomorrow."

Harry grinned. "To the Evidence Room?"

"To the Evidence Room," Sue said firmly.

Without another word, they hurried down to the evidence lockers and signed for the evidence from the Flint case. Sue poured it out of its magical stasis bag onto the evidence room analysis table and they stared at the surprisingly ordinary collection: a few assorted sickles and knuts, a handkerchief, a Firewhisky flask, pocketknife, a blank scrap of parchment, and a wand.

"That's it?" Harry asked. "That's probably not enough to pay for the time it took the solicitor to prepare the letter demanding it."

"We must be missing something," Sue said. "Let's see if the table knows something we don't."

Harry stepped back as she tapped some runes on the table with her wand. "I thought a quick table analysis of evidence was mandatory. Wouldn't that have been in the initial case report?"

"It is mandatory, but that doesn't mean the DMLE flunky assigned to do it actually did it," Sue said. "Once you've been here long enough you learn not to trust anyone but yourself to do their Morgana-forsaken job."

The table hummed for a moment in a way that somehow made Harry's bones vibrate instead of his eardrum before it lit up in two places: underneath Marcus's wand and under the blank parchment.

"Well, would you look at that?" Sue said. "This case just got a little more interesting."

"How can we get that analysed before we have to give it back, though?" Harry asked.

"We have an unknown magical item here that may have been used in an assault on an Auror," Sue said. "We can't allow it out of the building until we finish analysing it."