By the time Diana’s heavy transport pulled up to the curb, the sun had finished its exit, leaving the city to the mercy of a damp, gray evening.
Rhythmic flashes of blue and red light bounced off the neat hedges and brick facades of the suburban street.
A small fleet of patrol cars blocked off the asphalt, their exhaust pipes puffing thin clouds of white smoke into the cold air.
Uniformed officers shuffled back and forth across the lawn, casually carrying plastic evidence bags and looking thoroughly annoyed by the overtime hours.
Garin pressed her nose against the cold passenger window, her small frame practically swallowed by her tactical coat.
This wasn’t like Marvin’s mansion.
The mansion was clean, hidden behind iron gates and high-tech security grids.
This was just a regular house on a regular street, surrounded by yellow tape and nosy neighbors peeking through their curtains.
It made everything feel uncomfortably real.
Her fingers tightened around the edge of her cheap paper notebook, crumpling the corner slightly.
The vehicle hissed to a stop.
Diana threw her door open and stepped out first, her heavy trench coat catching the exhaust.
Cammy, Bruce, and Felix followed with the bored, practiced synchronization of people who did this for a living.
Garin took one long, shaky breath, patted her pockets to ensure her pen was still there, and scrambled out after them.
“You brought her?”
Andrew was standing right at the edge of the police tape, his hands shoved deep into his pockets and a cigarette burning unlit between his lips.
He looked like he hadn’t slept since the previous Tuesday.
Diana didn’t even slow down, lifting the yellow tape with the tip of her scabbard.
“You’re the one who said she needed training, Detective.”
Andrew pointed a stiff finger directly at the dark front door of the house.
“I meant paperwork and protocol at the precinct, Diana.
I didn’t mean an active, unsterilized crime scene.”
“Too late,” Diana muttered, stepping onto the lawn.
“She’s already out of the car.”
Andrew let out a slow, gravelly sigh that sounded like grinding gears, but he didn’t stop them.
The conversation was apparently over.
Garin ducked under the tape as fast as she could, keeping her eyes glued to the back of Diana’s boots.
Inside, the house smelled like stale tea and copper.
The struggle hadn’t been elegant.
A standard wooden chair sat completely upended near the foyer, one of its legs splintered.
Shards of glass from shattered picture frames littered the hallway runner, glinting dully under the officers’ flashlights.
A low mahogany coffee table had been violently shoved aside, its surface deeply gouged.
Then there were the dark, sticky spots on the hardwood near the hallway.
Garin froze for a second, her throat tightening.
Her stomach did a small, unpleasant flip.
Diana stopped, not looking back, but clearly noticing the sudden lack of footsteps behind her.
“Kid.”
Garin blinked, pulling her gaze away from the floor.
“Y-Yes, Miss Diana?”
“Relax.”
The delivery was so flat, so utterly devoid of sympathy, that it actually made Garin feel a tiny spark of irritation.
Easy for a legendary huntress to say.
Diana slowly scanned the messy living room, her eyes lingering on a tilted floor lamp.
“Crime scenes are just poorly written stories, Garin.
Everything is a mess because the author didn’t know how to finish the chapter.” She gestured vaguely at the overturned chair.
“You just have to read the typos.”
Garin’s irritation instantly vanished, replaced by her usual academic panic.
She quickly flipped her notebook open and began scratching the words down, her pen clicking loudly.
Andrew walked into the room, holding a clipboard and looking like he wanted to arrest both of them for loitering.
“Diana.”
“What?”
“Stop giving the kid cheap detective monologues.
You’re ruining her.”
“You sound like a washed-up private eye from a late-night broadcast,” Andrew grunted, checking a forensic tag.
“And it’s annoying.”
The group separated without needing a formal command.
The local technicians kept dusting the baseboards, entirely ignoring the eccentric bunch that had just hijacked their scene.
Cammy moved along the perimeter of the living room, casually running a gloved finger over the wallpaper to check for residual spellwork.
Bruce stood by the back door, using his massive bulk to test the hinges for mechanical failure.
Felix, through some bizarre social alchemy, had already managed to embed himself with a pair of junior patrolmen near the kitchen, nodding along to a sports debate while eyeing their thermos of coffee.
Nobody knew how he did it, and frankly, nobody wanted to ask.
Diana walked through the house with a slow, almost lazy stride.
She wasn’t looking for hidden monster dens or glowing runes.
She was looking for the boring, mundane details that people usually stepped over because they were too busy looking for a body.
A porcelain mug of chamomile tea sat on a side table, half-full, a thin layer of skin forming over the cold liquid.
A desk drawer down the hall was left open by exactly two inches.
A heavy leather-bound book had been shoved back onto its shelf upside down.
Small, stupid details.
The kind that happen when a daily routine gets interrupted by a sudden knock on the door.
Nearby, Edward was quietly helping Andrew, using a small stylus to cross-reference Matier’s physical filing cabinets against the digital records on his tablet, his glasses reflecting the sterile blue light of the screen.
Several tedious minutes ticked by.
Garin had drifted away from the main hallway and wandered into a small, cramped study at the rear of the house.
The room was suffocatingly normal.
Bookshelves lined the walls, sagging under the weight of old tax codes and historical biographies.
A dust-covered desk sat beneath a window looking out into the dark, overgrown backyard.
A row of framed family photographs decorated the middle shelf.
Garin leaned in close, inspecting them with quiet curiosity.
Most of them were standard portraits of Matier Silverstein looking wealthy and stiff.
A few older, black-and-white photos showed distant relatives, and some showed smiling acquaintances at various charity events.
Nothing stood out.
It was just the visual record of an ordinary, boring life.
At least, until she looked down.
A small wooden filing cabinet near the corner had tipped over during the scuffle, its bottom edge wedged tightly against the baseboard.
Partially hidden under the dark shadow of the wood was a small scrap of white paper.
Garin crouched down, her knees clicking in the quiet room.
“Hm?”
She carefully extended her hand under the heavy wooden frame, her tactical glove scraping against the floorboards until her fingers pinched the edge of the paper.
With a gentle tug, she pulled it out into the light.
It was a glossy photograph.
The upper left corner was bent, and the edges were slightly frayed from being dragged across the floor.
Garin squinted at the image under her flashlight.
Then, her eyes blinked rapidly.
She didn’t even bother closing her notebook before scrambling to her feet and sprinting toward the kitchen corridor.
“M-Miss Diana!”
Diana looked up from the kitchen threshold, where she had been casually inspecting the expiration date on a jar of imported olives.
“What’s the emergency, kid?”
Garin held out the photograph, her breath hitching slightly from the short sprint.
Diana took it, her thumb brushing against the smooth surface.
The picture showed a younger Matier standing on a sunny balcony, looking remarkably pleasant beside a tall man in a dark, tailored suit.
By itself, it was an incredibly mundane image.
Except the man’s face didn’t exist anymore.
Someone had taken a sharp object—likely a pen or a small pocketknife—and aggressively gouged out the ink where his head should have been.
The scratching was deep, frantic, and precise, tearing through the glossy layer until nothing but the rough white backing of the paper remained.
It wasn’t the result of a careless accident; it was a deliberate act of erasure.
Andrew walked over, his heavy boots thudding against the linoleum.
A hidden ledger?”
Diana didn’t answer.
She simply turned the photograph around and held it up to his face.
The detective’s brow furrowed, his eyes narrowing as he took in the violent white scar on the paper.
“Interesting.”
Garin pointed a small, gloved finger at the ruined silhouette.
“Someone took the time to scratch him out completely.
It…
it feels like they hated him.”
Andrew gave a slow, professional nod.
“Looks personal.
Hired muscles don’t waste time defacing old family photos during a kidnapping.”
Diana remained silent, her gaze shifting from the scratched-out face to the dark hallway, then back down to the paper.
Her eyes were blank, her mind clicking through the variables like an old mechanical calculator.
A short while later, the entire team drifted back into the upended living room.
The local officers had finished bagging the broken glass, leaving the space feeling even emptier than before.
Andrew leaned his lower back against the damaged oak table, looking directly at Diana.
“You’ve been quiet.
Find something else?”
Diana glanced toward the heavy mahogany front door, her hands buried deep in her pockets.
“There are no tool marks on the exterior frame, Andrew.
No signs of a forced entry.”
Andrew reached for his notepad.
“Correct.
Deadbolt was retracted manually.”
“No broken window panes along the ground floor,” Diana continued, her voice flat.
“Correct.”
“No signs of a struggle near the threshold itself.
The mess only starts five feet inside the room.”
“Also correct,” Andrew muttered, checking his notes.
“The lock wasn’t picked, and nobody kicked the frame in.”
Diana folded her arms over her chest, the fabric of her coat rustling.
The room grew quiet, the casual chatter of the technicians dying down as they sensed the shift in the conversation.
Even Edward stopped tapping his tablet, his eyes fixed on Diana’s silhouette.
Diana looked down at the dark, dried blood on the floor.
Then she looked at the overturned chair, and finally back at the undamaged lock on the front door.
“Interesting,” she murmured.
Andrew sighed, his grip tightening on his pen.
“Diana, if you say ‘interesting’ one more time without explaining it, I’m throwing you out of my crime scene.
What are you seeing?”
Diana looked at him, her expression entirely deadpan.
“Our missing woman wasn’t surprised by an intruder breaking through her windows, old man.”
Andrew’s posture went rigid, his pen hovering over the paper.
“What do you mean?”
Diana turned her head toward the front door, her gaze steady, as if she were watching a ghost walk through the wood.
“She wasn’t running from an enemy,” Diana said quietly.
“She was opening the door for a guest.”
Nobody spoke.
The simple statement seemed to sit heavily in the cold room, turning the ordinary suburban house into something far more sinister.
Because if Diana’s dull deduction was right, then whoever had spilled that blood on the floor wasn’t a nameless syndicate thug or a wandering anomaly.
It was someone Matier Silverstein knew.
Someone she had smiled at, recognized, and willingly invited into her home, completely unaware that she was turning the key for her own executioner.