Do Your Part to Save the Scene (Fiona, Casual)

[FIONA "FANNY" PRICE]

Lestrade stiffened slightly when she mentioned that her only exposure to crime came from movies and inside the pages of books. ”Crime in the movies is dramatically different from that which is real,” he said testily, making a face. She nodded, held up two hands in defense. ”I know that,” she said quickly. ”That’s my point- I don’t know very much about crime in the real world.”

I’m doing the best I can, here, she thought, a little exasperatedly. It’s not my fault I don’t know how a murderer’s mind works. You’d think that would be a good thing normally, wouldn’t you? But when a murder needed to be solved, it was true enough that thinking like a murderer came in handy. Practice makes perfect, she thought grimly, and I hope I never get to be any good at this.

Lestrade seemed to notice her looking at the bookshelf. “What are you looking at? I… I may not immerse myself in fictional ideas, but I’m still open to ideas, of course.”

”I was just thinking,” she said, not taking her eyes from the shelf. ”You said this was a smart killer. Someone who wanted to send a message, maybe. Look at the bodies. They’re not stretching, they’re pointing. And look what they’re pointing at.”

She looked around the room again. ”This is one of the library’s special collections- it’s a permanent exhibit on the history of the city. Every time someone writes a book about Manhattan or Queens or Brooklyn, it ends up in this room. The more modern materials fill up those bookshelves there,” she said, pointing at the far edge of the room where the bodies were pointing. ”I was just thinking. If the killer was like you said, someone who got into political trouble- someone who doesn’t like the way things are being run… maybe this is the message. Maybe the killer isn’t just looking for attention.”

Fiona skirted the bodies by a wide margin- she wasn’t that numbed to them yet- and looked the shelf up and down. Here, at least, her knowledge of fictional crime was realistic. There was a coating of dust over the shelf, thinner in places where books had been taken out or put back in.

One strip of shelf was clean- no dust had settled on the patch since someone had pulled it out. Fiona turned to Lestrade. ”If the last person in this room before the bodies were found was looking at this book,” she said, something bubbling up in her chest like excitement, ”then this is nothing and I’m being dramatic. But if they didn’t, then someone else did.”

She wanted desperately to pull it out, to read the book now and finally have an end to this mystery. But she wouldn’t, not without Lestrade’s permission. She would read it one way or another, peruse it for clues, search it for answers- right now or later, it didn’t matter. Fiona would get her hands on the book eventually.

[GREGORY LESTRADE]

There was a pleading look in Price’s eye as she babbled on surprisingly, slightly realistic conspiracy theory. She seemed to want Lestrade’s attention, his approval, to check and see if her fantastical idea was correct. Lestrade wondered if he shouldn’t let her do it. After all, he was rather confident that there was nothing to this case until they had forensic results. He was a bit of a stickler to his ways, and he was surprised he’d even let himself stray this far today. However there was something about Price that made him want to trust her. He rather wondered if it was because he hoped that his daughter would turn out as nice as Price seemed to be, if perhaps slightly less talkative.

“Go ahead,” Lestrade acknowledged her unvoiced request, and looked down at his hands as he waited for Price to look at the book.

Who knows, maybe she’d find something. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe this was just like a movie. But he doesn’t think it will be.

Lestrade was never extremely confident in himself in terms of things like athletic ability or drawing or anything creative like that, but he did know one thing, and that was cold, hard fact. He was rather fascinated with the learnings of the world as a boy, having read through the entire young adult section of the library before he was out of secondary school, and so though he like fantastical stories with dragons and drama and everything that you wish could be realistic, and maybe it is once every ten years, he can never help but remembering fact.

He supposed it was because of McCourt. After all, the man had died in the line of duty. The job that protected people; the job Lestrade had followed in his footsteps. The job that got McCourt killed. He supposed it was because of this betrayal of karma that Lestrade sometimes disliked dramatic cases; it was why he wasn’t on special, unusual crimes, though he had done a few in his time.

_{OOC: Sorry for the SO long wait; my muse for this thread was dead.}