Chapter Sixteen: Safer Justice Practices

Lucius Malfoy winced as Tom Riddle slammed the Muggle tabloid onto the table, scuffing its immaculate finish. They were in Lucius's dining room, though Riddle had taken Lucius's customary seat at the head of the table. Bellatrix sat silently in the shadows, twirling her wand about her fingers. Aside from them, the house was empty.

"How could you let this happen?" Riddle asked. "Explain yourself."

Lucius glanced at the headline. MASSIVE COUNTRY ESTATE HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT. And, underneath it in slightly smaller font: Weird Tree Found Growing out of Roof.

"I…" Lucius hesitated. How had this happened? The Muggle authorities had never troubled him before. What changed? "I'm looking into the matter, my lord," he said.

"It made the papers, Lucius," Riddle said. "The papers."

"I can take care of this," Lucius said.

"How?" Riddle said. "You can't Obliviate the entire country." Bellatrix glanced at Riddle, an unreadable expression on her face.

Lucius bristled, but he fought back his response. He couldn't stop himself from thinking it, though. Maybe if you hadn't Imperiused the Ministry's head Obliviator and sent his second-in-command to an alternate world with an ancient ritual, it never would have gotten this far. That was the problem with most so-called 'Dark Lords.' They're so blinded by the prospect of absolute power that they don't stop and think about how much day-to-day minutiae they're shouldering on themselves after liberating it from the powers that be. Someone has to keep the floo networks open, pay the owl post office workers' pensions, and keep the Muggle world from discovering the wizarding one. Driving out the Mudbloods and obtaining immortality is all well and good, but what's your ten-year economic plan, Riddle?

"Muggle news isn't like ours, my lord," Lucius said. "Three weeks ago they reported they saw Bigfoot in downtown London."

Riddle blinked. "That's ridiculous. Everyone knows Bigfoot never leaves Tibet."

"Precisely, my lord. Magical Britain only has one paper of note: the Daily Prophet." Lucius had gone through great pains to make certain that was the case. "Wizards and witches have no choice but to believe what the Prophet tells them. They have no other source of information. To Muggles, this is but one shocking scandal among many. Until it gets picked up by a reputable paper, no-one will take this story seriously."

"What's to stop just that from happening?" Riddle asked.

"I'll give them a bigger story." Lucius smiled slightly. "The bigger question, my lord, is who tipped them off. My home is protected by Charms; Muggles can only come here if they already know it exists." Other wizards liked to prevent Muggles from coming altogether, but sometimes Lucius found it useful to exert some influence on the non-magical who were nevertheless 'clued-in'—such as the parents of magical children, or certain Muggle officials—and there were few better ways to do impress a person than to show them a house such as this one. Or rather, there weren't until that bloody boy put that bloody tree through my roof… It would still take months to repair the damage. "One of our enemies has moved against us."

Riddle laughed. "No-one worth concerning ourselves over would attack us with Muggles."

Lucius was beginning to have deep suspicions about the 'Dark Lord'—beginning with why it was so easy to think of him as Tom Riddle, rather than by his title. He was growing increasingly convinced that Riddle hadn't simply returned with a teen's body, but a teen's mind, as well.

"'The coward in the shadows can be more dangerous than the champion in the light,'" Lucius quoted.

"Wise words," Riddle conceded. "Who said them?"

You did, right after Pettigrew sold out the Potters. "Merlin," Lucius shrugged.

Riddle held his fingers together in a narrow steeple for a minute or two, deep in thought. "Very well," he said. "You seem to know these Muggles well, Lucius." He didn't say it with any particular intonation or expression that would hint at it, but Lucius did not fail to notice the implied insult. "Find their source when you clean up your mess."

"Yes, my lord," Lucius said, bowing low. When he looked up again, Riddle was gone.

"For a moment, I thought he was going to off you then and there," Bellatrix said.

Lucius simply shook his head. "He needs me too much for that."

Bellatrix's eyebrows shot up.

"Why ever would the Dark Lord need you?" She said in a mocking tone, but hesitated for a moment. Lucius stopped and paid close attention to her—he couldn't remember ever having seen her show doubt before. "Did you notice anything a little… different about him? Other than his body, of course."

Like the fact that he's got the power of a living legend and the impulse control of a hormone-addled teenager? "No," Lucius said. This incarnation was infinitely preferable—and more easily manipulated—than the last. Bellatrix was feared and respected by the other Death Eaters, so he needed her loyal to Riddle. Significantly more feared and respected than he was. If she began to waver… "He does and says exactly what he means to, as he always did." Lucius wondered idly if there was any way he could arrange for her to be… martyred for the cause.

Bellatrix nodded dubiously. "How much do the taxmen want?"

Lucius told her.

"Is it still three and a quarter pounds to the galleon?" she asked.

"No. It's up to five."

"Blimey," Bellatrix said. "Still, wouldn't want to be in your shoes." She glanced down at his Italian leather loafers. "Shiny though they may be."

As Bellatrix left his office, Lucius realized he wasn't altogether certain he disagreed with her.

He turned back to the tabloid on his desk.

Who would stoop to using Muggles as a weapon?

o—o—o—o

Fiona adjusted her robes uncomfortably as she skimmed through the book in the aisle of Flourish and Blotts. She doubted she'd ever get used to robes. They were a little too much like dresses, which she never much cared for, either—far too much loose cloth to be grabbed if some street hooligan resisted arrest. She also wasn't entirely clear on what she was supposed to wear under robes. Did witches wear trousers under their robes? Underskirts of some variety? Tights? Fiona didn't know and had no real way to find out, so she did wore what she was sure any sensible person would, given the option: trainers, sweatpants, and a stab vest.

"…and all they found of him was his little finger…" Fiona mused. She kept coming back to that line. Was it rhetorical? Simply added for effect? But she'd seen it in the other books, too. Still, it was possible that one writer came up with it to add a little zest to the story, and others cited the first one, and then each other, until it became established fact.

But, well…

Fiona had some mates who'd fought in Kuwait, but even before that, she'd known that that just wasn't how explosions worked. They didn't just vaporize people—not at the scale of this one, at least. She'd seen enough movies to know that. The only real 'vaporization' she'd seen had been from Terminator 2, but that was an atomic blast, and a nightmare besides.

The wizards had passed it off to the Muggle world as an exploding gas line. Fiona remembered, because her cousin's boyfriend was among the twelve Muggles killed. (If her cousin was to be believed, he'd been a bit of a git, mind, so it was no great loss to the world). The footage from the news showing the devastation certainly made it look like a more-or-less conventional explosion, though the wizards could have faked that.

Fiona was tempted to just throw up her hands and say 'it's magic. There's no reasoning with it.' But all the books she'd found agreed that the spell had made a bona fide explosion, not some fancy magic-disintegration-blast-thingy or whatever. And that meant it had to follow some of the rules of a proper explosion, and simply deleting ninety-nine percent of Pettigrew's body from existence wasn't following those rules, especially because the other twelve victims had left, well, corpse-shaped corpses.

Oh, and this was after Pettigrew shouted that Black had betrayed the Potters to Voldewhatsit—though how that had entered the public record, Fiona couldn't say, because everyone present at the time had been promptly blown up. Then, who should stumble across the scene? None other than the Minister for Magic himself, who testified that Black was standing there, covered in blood, holding Pettigrew's finger, and laughing.

No, scratch that. He didn't testify, because there hadn't been a trial. Bloody Goering got a bloody trial, but not Black?

So, allegedly, Black killed thirteen people with a single spell in broad daylight, with twelve of them dead by explosion and one of them dead by spontaneous existential failure. Then, he was caught bloody-handed (so to speak) by the Minister showing every symptom of shock before being thrown into a prison whose guards steal happy memories (such as those of being, for example, completely innocent) before being given a chance to testify, which was bizarre, given that he was apparently the only surviving witness to Pettigrew's accusations of guilt, which, as they were not happy memories, did enter the historical record.

And all of this happened on the wizard equivalent of bloody V-E Day, with the Death Eater leader dead and his followers defeated or dispersed. Nobody was even close to paying attention to what was happening with Black and Pettigrew (other than the twelve dead Muggles, who were rather too close) given that news cycle. It was little wonder that nobody noticed the laughably thin case against him.

The question wasn't whether Sirius was framed. It wasn't even who was in on framing him. It was who wasn't in on it.

Fiona slammed shut the book, A History of the Wizarding War, and roughly reshelved it.

This wasn't even a bloody miscarriage of bloody justice. It hadn't even had the chance to get that far. This was a bloody contraception of bloody justice.

Secret communities and secret laws and secret prisons for secret crimes. It rankled.

Fiona glanced at her watch. She'd debated leaving it behind, being unsure if witches and wizards wore them, but decided it didn't really matter—even the magical community must have a few weirdoes. She'd just play it off as something her 'Muggleborn' friend got her for Christmas. (Did Wizards do Christmas? There was so much to learn.)

3:43. Damn. She'd missed another of her mandatory therapy sessions. Oh well; she'd deal with the fallout when this whole thing blew over. She wasn't quite sure what this 'whole thing' entailed, but it had something to do with Black, something to do with Malfoy, and something to do with Milo.

Fiona Smythe, Master Detective, she thought ruefully. She was pretty sure she knew whodunit, though she wasn't entirely clear on what they dun, or why they dunit. Which was exactly the opposite of the way you're supposed to investigate a crime.

She turned to leave, and accidentally bumped into an unknown witch and wizard. They looked vaguely like each other, with similar dark brown hair and heavy cheekbones. The wizard walked with a cane and had close-cropped black hair and a slightly surprised expression on his face. The witch was a stocky little woman with a mean look to her. She'd never seen them before (at least, she didn't think she had. Having a repeatedly-wiped memory could create all kinds of anxieties that her therapist was itching to discuss.), but something in her gut didn't like them.

"'Scuse me," Fiona murmured, looking down to avoid showing her face and trying to step around them.

"Watch where you're going," the witch snapped, then turned back to the wizard. "Now, where were we, Amycus?"

Amycus… Fiona thought, trying to walk casually out of the store. Why does that name ring a bell?

"Did that witch look familiar to you, Alecto?" Amycus asked.

Bollocks. Fiona remembered where she'd last heard the names Amycus and Alecto before. The Carrows. They'd been some of that Volder-fellow's most violent supporters during the so-called 'Wizarding War' back in the eighties, but had got off claiming they were bewitched. More recently, Amycus had been the bait that had led a lot of good people to their deaths in the London Massacre last year. She picked up the pace, navigating her way through the winding aisles.

"Yeah," Alecto said. "She looks a mite like Ash, doesn't she?"

"Who?"

"You know, our cousin, Ashley." Evidently, Amycus didn't know, because Alecto felt the need to clarify further. "The fat one." Fiona clenched her teeth slightly, despite herself. Fat?!

"Oh, Fat Ash!" Amycus said as Fiona reached the door. "No… she looked more like… tip of my tongue…" Fiona pushed the glass door open, causing the bell hanging above the door to sound out. She wasn't sure if it was the bell attracting his attention, or just bad luck, but just as she left the shop, Amycus and Fiona locked eyes. His narrowed in what Fiona prayed was not recognition. "…that Muggle Auror lady what shot me."

Now that was hardly fair. Fiona had no memory of the events of that disastrous raid, but it was on the record that her own firearm hadn't been discharged that night. The only 'Muggle' (Fiona hated that word) lady who had been doing any shooting that night had been Lyndon. It wasn't just that he'd made her; he'd made her as the wrong copper.

Fiona flung herself into a roll onto the muddy street as a pair of red bolts of magic smashed through the storefront's window after her. They went over her head and took an unsuspecting young witch in the street full in the chest. The witch went down without a word, unconscious. Well, Fiona hoped she was unconscious. She'd read that killing spells were supposed to be green, but Fiona wasn't willing to bet her life that just because a spell wasn't green didn't mean it wasn't dangerous. Also, for all she knew, wizards and witches just straight-up saw magic differently. Maybe red magic looked green to them. Or maybe the author of the spellbook she'd read was colourblind. On top of that, as a cop, she was well aware of the difference between 'nonlethal' and 'safe'.

She picked herself up off the ground and sprinted down the street as more spells flew after her. Just when she thought she'd lost them among the panicking crowd, they simply appeared directly in front of her. As in, one moment there was open space, and the next, bam. Two dark wizards. Or a witch and wizard, to be more accurate. It was bloody inconvenient not having a common, gender-neutral collective noun for persons of a magical persuasion.

"Shit!" Fiona debated turning around and running away, but she'd never make it—the street was starting to thin out, and the witchards would have a clear shot at her. Instead, she did the last thing anyone—including herself—would expect.

She charged them.

"Waaaaaaaagh!" She screamed. To distract them, of course, and not because she was terrified. She was a stone-cold fighting machine. Margaret Thatcher reincarnated in copper form. The Copper Lady. Totally.

Fiona collided bodily with Amycus, whose injured leg crumpled beneath him. She grabbed him by the hair and robes and rolled him over, to get her between him and his sister.

"Bloody hell!" Amycus shouted as Fiona wrenched at his hair. "Get her!"

"I can't get a clear shot!" Alecto protested.

Amycus awkwardly threw a punch at her chest, but winced as his knuckles hit her stab vest through the robes. Fiona seized the opportunity and slammed her forehead into Amycus's nose with a very satisfying crunch.

"So use a bloody Stunner, you stupid cow!" Amycus shouted at his sister, blood pouring from both nostrils.

"Right!" Alecto said. "Stupe—" Not wanting to risk the chance of getting hit, Fiona instead worked her feet under Amycus's torso and kicked him off her in Alecto's general direction. He slammed into Alecto's shins, not quite knocking her over, but definitely ruining the aim of her spell.

As Alecto was distracted, Fiona reached into her pocket, grabbed the tiny can of not-strictly-legal pepper spray she had concealed there, aimed it at the witch, and held down the button.

"Merlin's beard!" she screamed, clawing at her eyes. "It burns! She hexed me! She hexed me! She's a witch! It's the wrong bloody woman!"

"It's a ruddy potion, Alecto!" Amycus shouted, pulling himself to his feet. "She doesn't have a wand!" Amycus tried to aim his wand at Fiona, wiping blood out of his eyes.

The little pepper spray bottle ran dry, so Fiona whipped it as fast as she could over her shoulder and released her grip. It hit Amycus square in his already-broken nose at about Mach three. The dark wizard screamed and fell to his knees, then gasped again as he was reminded, painfully, that he'd recently been shot in one of them. His wand fell from his hands, and Fiona snatched it off the ground before it could be used against her again.

"Scourgify," Alecto muttered behind her. Fiona spun, trying to remember what that was a spell for. Hadn't she seen it in One Thousand and One Household Charms? It was the Scouring Charm. It was harmless. But why would Alecto cast a cleaning spell now?

A cleaning spell.

Fiona turned to find Alecto's wand held straight at her face. Alecto's eyes were perfectly clear.

Bloody magic, Fiona grumbled inwardly. It's not bloody fair. With that much spray to the face, she should have been incapacitated for ten or twelve minutes at least.

"Who the hell are you?" Alecto snarled, her wand hand trembling with anger. "How did you get here?"

Fiona had to supress an urge to roll her eyes. Alecto was carrying a tool that could act as a 100%-effective non-lethal incapacitant. There was no reason to threaten someone with it. Alecto could simply have stunned her, warped her somewhere dark and quiet using magic, and then threatened or ensorcelled answers out of her.

Something that had been drilled into Fiona during training was that disarming someone with a gun pointed at you is extremely risky. Someone shaking, scared, and amped up on adrenaline can pull the trigger in milliseconds. Technique was important, as was speed, because you had to do it perfectly on your first try, or you were probably dead. More important, though, was distraction. You needed your assailant's brain focussed on something other than you and their gun. Even something small, like talking or listening, could make a huge difference in their reaction time at the scales involved.

But wands weren't like guns. Guns, already aimed and loaded, were an instant away from firing. Fiona was willing to bet that in trained hands, a wand could be used to cast spells about as quickly as a gun could be accurately aimed and fired. But all of that time was on the leadup to the attack, with the incantations and whatnot, whereas, firing a gun, most of the time was after the bullet was fired, stabilizing the weapon and re-aiming after the recoil. Guns could even be fired after you'd grabbed it with both hands and still kill you, as long as the other person's trigger finger was still in place. But wands? Wands needed fancy gestures and twirls and swishes and the like. Precision, concentration, and grace. From what she understood, it was borderline impossible for a wand to 'go off' in a struggle and hurt somebody.

Fiona grabbed Alecto's wrist with her left hand and twisted, forcing her to drop it. Then she wrenched Alecto's arm behind her back, kicked her legs out from underneath her, and pinned her to the ground with her knee in the small of her back. Her right hand instinctively reached for her handcuffs, before remembering she hadn't had any since she'd been removed from active duty—and they'd be inaccessible under her robes, even if she was.

Even if she did, she couldn't very well arrest them in Diagon Alley—she'd never get them into London proper before the wizard police, or whatever they called themselves, arrived. Speaking of, Fiona wondered how long she did have before they got here. On the one hand, lack of phones would slow down communication, but on the other hand, they could simply beam over here Star Trek-style, which would more than make up for that. Fiona needed to make herself scarce.

Fiona reminded herself that Alecto was a hardened killer who had access to fancy magical healing besides, then lifted her head up by her hair and slammed it into the cobblestones. Unlike in the movies, people don't often conveniently fall asleep after moderate trauma to the head, so Fiona let her go and, using both hands, snapped her wand in half like a twig.

By this point, Amycus was still whimpering on the ground and clutching his nose, so Fiona decided to take the better part of valour and made a runner.

It wasn't until she'd sped through the Leaky Cauldron, earning a bunch of startled looks, out onto the busy London street, gotten several blocks away (almost getting hit by a city bus in the process) and into a crowded shopping mall that she let herself stop. She sagged against a wall, panting for breath and trembling as the adrenaline coursed through her system. Her bad leg spasmed wildly and she nearly collapsed.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph," she muttered. That was way too close. She hadn't expected to see a bunch of Death Eaters in the middle of a book store, but, on thinking about it, why the heck hadn't she? Bad guys needed something to read now and then, too, and they'd already been exonerated by what passed for the wizarding world's justice system, so they were free to wander in public. She hoped nobody'd snapped a photo of her face, though, for all she knew, Alecto could just use magic to produce lifelike pictures of her from memory.

"Are you all right, ma'am?"

Fiona's eyes jolted open, and she reached reflexively for where her nightclub would have been hanging in normal circumstances.

A middle-aged woman with a heavy French accent pushing a baby carriage looked at her in concern. Fiona realized that she was still wearing her robes, and dozens of people were staring at her. She'd chosen the public place so that the wizards wouldn't follow her there, but hadn't fully considered how strange she'd look to the nonmagical residents in the city.

She swallowed, tasting adrenaline, muttered something about a fancy dress party, and staggered back into the street. She had to lean against walls and streetlights to compensate for her bad leg.

Stupid. She'd been stupid. She should have worn a mask in the raid on London like the Firearms unit had. She should have a better disguise when she went to Diagon Alley. She shouldn't have made such a scene when they found her, but instead denied it until the authorities arrived. She shouldn't have looked back into the bookstore as she'd left. She should have worn less conspicuous clothing under her robes, so she could take them off and blend in with the rest of the city. She should have had a getaway car waiting for her outside the Cauldron.

Fiona tried to hail a cab, hoping that all this wouldn't come back to bite her later.

o—o—o—o

"Then she bloody well broke my bloody wand!" Alecto practically shrieked. "I want her flayed, Malfoy! I want her skin!"

"You're certain it was the same woman?" Lucius asked calmly. "It was dark that night, in London. There was a lot going on. It would be easy to make mistakes."

"It was her," Amycus said, holding a bloody handkerchief to his nose. "Remember those fancy kung-fu moves she pulled on Selwyn? She did the same to us."

"This was right before Alecto accidentally killed him, was it?" Lucius asked. Merlin, but that whole night had been a string of fiascos.

Alecto bristled. "She threw him in the way of my spell. It wasn't my fault."

"So you're saying that an unarmed Muggle woman managed to best both of you, and get your wands?" Lucius asked. "Were I in your position, I would strongly reconsider what you 'remember' happening before telling the Dark Lord. He is not as… merciful as I."

"I was injured," Amycus said. "My leg."

"I was informed that the best healers in the country had given you a clean bill of health," Lucius said. "There's nothing wrong with your leg, Amycus. Any pain you feel is purely imaginary."

Amycus scowled, but said nothing.

Lucius leaned back in his chair. "I had been lead to believe that Lockhart had taken care of the Muggles that survived that encounter," he said. He'd been as surprised as anyone to see Lockhart taking credit for the Muggles' actions, but had decided to play along with it at the time. "But I now see that I was… mistaken to leave this matter in the hands of one outside of our little family."

"I want her, Malfoy," Alecto said again.

The Ministry made detailed reports of any incident that their personnel were involved in that resulted in violence, particularly when there were deaths. He felt certain that the Muggle law enforcement would do similarly. The records would be kept in a reasonably secure location, but that was no matter. A few threats here and Imperiuses there, and he could get through any amount of security. After that, it would be a simple matter to find out which Muggle personnel had been involved in the raid and track them down at their homes.

"You'll get her," Lucius said.