Mandelbrot Bound: Unforeseen Chaos

[x-dominion.livejournal.com]

Garrison and Wanda visit the crime scene, and find more than they bargined for.



Kane ducked under the police tape and held the end up for Wanda. While there were still a couple of uniformed cops outside of the building, the FBI and NYPD forensic teams had already closed the scene down for the day. Most of the efforts would be on the body of the victim for now, and that alone was going to take a lot of time.

The room which they had found the body in was echoingly empty. She'd been brought there, and based on the investigation, had been trapped in it for at least six hours before being killed. Incised on the concrete was the strange symbol, sprinkled with the blood from the victim. Beside it was the bizarre deathtrap which they'd removed the victim from.

"Here we are. Hardly a romantic getaway."

"I was going to say I have been whisked off to worse places but…" Wanda eyed the strange trap as she edged under tape, Garrison dropping it once she was through. "I think this is up there. How long was she dead before anyone found her?"

Even though the police had already been over the area carefully, Wanda was still careful about where she walked. She had no desire to either mess up any further potential evidence nor get any of that particular evidence on her shoes. She gave the deathtrap another horrified look before turning back to the symbol on the floor. She had been rather hoping that it would match that unknown symbol found in the tunnels but it was different.

Just their luck.

"A couple of hours." Garrison pulled out a pen and used it to move the edge of the deathtrap. It was a curious machine, a backpack looking motor; cogs and gears heavy and oily. It was attached to an old style sraitjacket, and a sinister looking coccon of metal flanges. On the front of the jacket, there were four heavy dials with keyholes inset into them, and dangling from each one on a chain, a key. As Kane shifted it, a slurry of black blood oozed out.

"The victim had been placed in the straitjacket, and the motor activated. Thanks to those flanges, it worked a little like a portable rack. It very slowly began to pull her shoulder and hip joints out of position. Each of these dials turns off one of the ratchets. We think the game was to make her try to either get an arm free or bend enough to slip the keys in and turn them. She failed. It would have taken about three hours to fully dislocate the joints, and another two to actually tear them from their sockets, which is how we found her. She would have died from a combination of blood loss and shock." Kane pointed to a point on the steel, in which the mark on the floor was also machined into the metal.

Wanda had taken an instinctive step back when the blood had oozed out and now she was circling the symbol on the floor. "So at the very latest, the killer had this person for five hours," she commented, shaking her head. "And that was only in the trap. No telling how long he had her before he started tearing her to bits." The symbol had been done very neatly and methodically, everything drawn perfectly. Considering the amount of care that had been put into the death, she wasn't very surprised.

"Were all the others traps as…twisted and thought out as this one?"

"Pretty much. Elaborate mechanical traps, professionally smithed but not mass produced. Whoever our boy is, he's definitely trained as a machinist at some point in his life. One of the questions we've got is how he takes his victims. No drugs, no signs of a struggle; each one of them simply quietly walked out of their homes or businesses into getting messily killed." Garrison shook his head. "One of the reasons Duncan suggested 'alternate' theories from you lot. Mind control of some type, maybe, or some magic spell?"

On the other side of the symbol, Wanda paused and crouched down to take a closer look. "Anything is possible," she agreed, studying the markings on the ground closely. "For instance, there is a form of voodoo that will turn a person into a willing zombie. I doubt if this is the case but worth looking into. This..." She pointed around at the various sections of the symbol. "Do look a little familiar. What I think I am going to do is take some of those pictures and send them to an old friend of mine, better versed in the actual mathmatics behind chaos theory. Amanda and I will take a look at the magical side...maybe even the mutant side of it?"

"If possible." Kane paused and knelt down beside the deathtrap for a moment. "That's new." He muttered, looking at the three cannisters lying on the floor. He didn't remember them from the initial investigation. Suddenly, all three started to hiss, venting something into the air.

"Shit!" Kane backpedaled away from the cannisters, now leaking gas. He'd managed to only catch a brief whiff of the gas before clamping down and holding his breath. Thanks to his superior endurance, Garrison could go a quarter hour without air, but he still had some of the gas in his lungs, and spots were starting to swim in his vision.

At the curse, Wanda had jerked her head up and opened her mouth to say something - a mistake. She ended up getting a lungful of gas before she clamped her hands over her mouth. Her instincts were screaming at her to get out, get to the door and she tried. She managed to get to her feet but ended up collapsing only two steps out.

There was a burning in her nose and throat despite trying not to breathe anymore of it in.

Kane grabbed Wanda by the back of the jacket, and pulled her up into his arms. He was woozy, but didn't have to breathe more of the gas to get out. Still, his head swum as he staggered to the door. Only to find it locked. He put down Wanda, unsteadily bracing himself to rip the door off the hinges. Before he could, black lights exploded behind his eyes as something crashed into the back of his head, and he went down in a heap.

Behind him, a man lowered a shovel and adjusted his gasmask. "Leaving so soon? But there's just so much of the game left to play."