As for actual customers, thankfully, her methods had worked as intended by filtering out, those she wished to avoid — for instance, a husband who just wanted someone to go stalk his wife to see if she was cheating.
It was somewhat disappointing that her first real customer under the Crow and Raven Agency didn’t walk into her front door bearing a suitcase full of cash and a troubled stare. In fact, she found them. Four days after opening her agency, while getting breakfast, Krahe did her usual schtick of asking about local news, something this establishment’s proprietor had come to know her for. Pointing to the corkboard next to the counter, he told her of a recent missing-persons case: Juno Oldfield, age 17. A full-time student, employed part-time at a small factory that, by the sounds of it, did something roughly equivalent to plastic injection-molding or perhaps resin-based 3D printing. The case was, at a glance, mundane — Krahe almost dismissed it at first. A girl who had run away to live with her delinquent boyfriend, typical story. Problem was, her parents didn’t buy that, and, after learning the details, neither did Krahe. She had vanished about a week prior after one of four local delinquents, named Aldrich Herebor, had kicked her off her bicycle. Him and his friends had spent several hours prior to the incident harassing the local young women. That was all she got at first. Even once she tracked down the Oldfield family home, even once she spoke with Juno’s parents, she didn’t get a clear sense of motive. Even so, even with a vague mist surrounding the case, Krahe couldn’t help but feel there was something more to it — and if there wasn’t, then she would be perfectly content resolving it as a simple missing persons case. In fact, it would have been nice to for once have something tie up with a nice bow, even if she didn’t expect such an outcome.
The girl’s mother, with shuddering eyes, was beside herself, and though her father exuded a quiet worry as he comforted his wife, there was a cold anger in his eyes. It was from him that she got most of the info, with the mother being in no state to say much of anything coherent, spending most of Krahe’s visit looking off into the distance and quietly sobbing. They had actually put up an official contract a mere two days after her disappearance, and, not expecting contractors to take interest, they had even directly submitted a plea with the city watch. The city watch agreed to investigate and even put out an public statement regarding the matter, requesting information on her whereabouts, but this, too, ran into a dead end. That dead end? Three voice messages, recorded on cheap memslates, dropped off in the small hours at the family’s home over the course of three days. This was the origin of the claims that she had run away and didn’t want to come back. At her wits’ end, Ms. Oldfield submitted the memslates to the city-watch, hoping that the background noise might help them find where the recording was made. This act functionally killed the city watch investigation into the matter, as, under the law, Juno was well within her rights to leave home. Her father then made his way around the neighborhood, questioning people in a desperate effort to find someone who knew something, anything, focusing his investigation on the four delinquents.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
As Juno’s father continued talking, Krahe changed how she viewed the case once again. It wasn’t a mystery. The suspects were the most obvious perpetrators imaginable. If things truly were as described, the “who” would be a foregone conclusion, the “why” and “where” were the questions.
The four delinquents were low-level gang members, the lowest of the low, bottom-tier members of a minor gang. Chimpira in a manner of speaking. Even so, they were infamous and somewhat feared in the area, throwing around their gang affiliation at any opportunity to threaten someone. Since they only harassed and at times stole from civilians, it worked for them. In addition to Aldritch Herebor, Joseph “Joe” Ogura, Youssef Radanov, and Hegio Calvus. All humans. Juno’s father also suspected two others, whom he had seen in tow with the four aforementioned young men, but he had only ever seen them twice, and didn’t know their names.
Krahe immersed herself into the case to the fullest extent, biting into it as a starveling beast would bite into its first prey in weeks. The pegboard in her office rapidly became populated with images, notes, and multicolored lines of thread. It wasn’t the most practical for actually categorizing information — the cogen, her personal computer, served that purpose best, especially when it came to organizing the substantial amount of sound recordings and notes she had made just as part of this short case, such as the interview with the victim’s parents. But when she was stuck, when she couldn’t quite work something out and her fingers hovered listlessly over the keys, putting thought into a physical form and pinning it to the pegboard had a strange, almost supernatural ability to recontextualize things and help the cogs get moving again.
Were it an option, she would have spent everything she had — time and effort both — solving the case, not necessarily to save the girl faster, but because a singular focus was refreshing compared to juggling a hundred matters at once. That wasn’t an option, however. Between finding the people she needed to find, keeping track of the suspects and waiting for them to lead her where she wanted them to lead her, throughout the span of three days, Krahe still found many hours of free time. And as those hours passed, just like the case came together, so too did the theurgic pattern of Wandrei Faust’s sibling. On day 2, she even resolved one of the Solomon Howitzer’s main issues, that of guiding-line breakage, coming another step closer to truly making it work. During these few days, Krahe also received word of Favonia’s much-delayed return from the Stormsalt Jungle, and some of the pieces required to facilitate the soulbeast hunt also fell into place, these being that Garvesh made contact with an able and willing tracker, and that the tracker in question knew of a soulbeast who fit the criteria.
But this piece of good news, as significant as it was, didn’t bring her peace. It was like hearing that she would be able to eat in the evening, when right now, it was noon. Still, it was something.
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