It was dark in the room. A little light spilled in from the one window, but it wasn't enough to illuminate anything but the dead body on the floor. The old woman looked as if she had been placed strategically just to take advantage of the tiny ribbon of radiance shining down from the outside.
The door swung open silently, and two men entered slowly. One bent down immediately next to the woman's body, while the other flipped the light switch on and off. "Power was cut," the kneeling man said. "Electric company says that no juice has gotten to the apartment since Tuesday."
"They couldn't turn it back on for us?" The man at the switch sounded annoyed. He was tall, with muscles that spoke of casual acquaintance with a gym, and his face was easily readable, even in the dark.
With a shrug, the kneeling man looked over at his companion. "They haven't been able to turn it back on at all. The effect that hit the room is something like an EMP - fried all the wiring." He was smaller than the man at the door, and his expression betrayed little of what was in his thoughts. This was mostly due to the paralysis that afflicted the right side of his face, but part of it was guardedness in his manner. He seemed unwilling to show the world more of himself than he needed to.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a thin, dark stick of hard wood. At a glance from his companion, he looked down apologetically. "So," the man at the door began in a light manner, "you knew her?"
"A little. She was my second cousin."
The man at the door nodded. "Forensics works best when the spellcaster's related by blood to the victim," he recited.
"Or the perpetrator," the man with the wand continued. He pointed the tip of the stick at the woman and whispered to it, "Show me the past."
A shadow of the woman lifted slowly from her body, reversing the fall she had suffered as she died. The tall man stepped toward her, taking note of her face as the shade shuddered through the bright flash that had killed her. "Looks like a hell of a way to go."
"That's what they say," the spellcaster murmured, stepping around the woman's body to get a better look at the events being played backwards. She was speaking now, but he would have to get her words with another spell. She looked more angry than frightened, which made the left side of his mouth lift in a small, tight smile. He hadn't seen her since his childhood in M'Quetsuway, but he'd liked her then. She'd had the fighter's spirit that marked all the women on his mother's side of the family.
The spellcaster looked in the direction that his cousin was facing, and saw another figure forming. It was the image of a stocky man of average size. His hair was short and steel-gray, and he had a mature but well-preserved look. His left hand was curled into a fist, which was aiming a golden ring at the woman. On the ring sat a star-shaped diamond, which glowed with a deep crimson fire. A necklace flew back onto the woman's neck as the fire died.
The tall man walked up to the old man's image and regarded it carefully. "Do you know him, too, Bill?"
"You could say that," Bill said, looking into the old man's eyes. "He's my grandfather."
The Special Projects Unit of the FBI, while it did officially exist, did not do what it was officially designated to exist for. Its handful of agents had jurisdiction wherever they chose to claim it, and many a field agent for other divisions had been angered by their flagrant disregard of standard protocols, not to mention actual laws. Since their cases came to court with a rarity approaching that of the unicorn, their authority had yet to be challenged legally.
Bill Paris was one of twenty-four agents who worked in forensics for Special Projects, but he was well-known to everyone within the unit because of his accidental relationship to a subject of a large measure of the unit's resources. He, himself, had been such a subject for many years of his life. He wasn't entirely sure that investigation was concluded, but he acted most days as if it was. It made his job easier.
