Dogs of War: Excuse Me, Officer

[x-scarletwitch.livejournal.com]

After the flight, Wanda heads off to check out the scene of the accident and finds the only police officer who's taking this with more then just a grain of salt.



Having no transport of her own, Wanda had sweet talked her way into getting a lift from one of the police officers at the station house to take her to the scene of the accident. It hadn't been all that hard and soon she was at the accident. The car left since she could probably get a ride from the office in charge and she glanced around, trying to find him.

There he was. She wrinkled her nose at the smell of burned rubber in the air. "Excuse me, officer?" she called. "I'm Agent Madelyn Bartlet..." A small voice inside her head was laughing hysterically. "From the FBI."

"FBI? What the hell are the feds doing doing here, Miss?" Trooper David McLellen straightened up from where he'd been crouching, beside a series of spectacularly sharp skid marks. Half tons did not stop on a dime, after all, and the semi's weight had etched dark lines over the asphalt.

"Hey Dave, maybe from that X-Files office. You can ask for a job." The trooper who was wrapping up a tape measure said with a grin. "Oooohhhoooohhooohhhoooh!" He sang has he climbed into his car and drove off.

"Yeah, yeah... asshole." David muttered. "Sorry 'bout that, ma'am.

"Certainly not a problem," Wanda said and then nodded at the retreating car. "To be perfectly blunt with you, as I was not with your main office, I am mainly here because of the...lack of attention in all the weird happenings. We simply felt that your fellow officers were not exactly paying the best attention to things. But it seems that you don't feel the same way?"

"Weird happenings... it's something like that. Look, no crimes have been committed, and that's what these boys focus on. If it's not a couple of kids with a nickel bag of pot or some jackoff from the city trying to do one-fifty in a BMW, it's outside of their training." David scratched the back of his head. "Hell, this is technically my day off. Just... something doesn't fit with all of this."

"It certainly looked odd from what I was reading before I got here." Wanda gazed down at the skid marks and then knelt next to them. "What is your take on all of this?"

"Officially, nothing." David muttered, annoyed with how the scene had been handled. "According to the driver, he was pushing past Gatlinburg when something stepped out on the road. He braked, but a rig like that doing sixty doesn't just stop, you know? Ended up slewing until he fetched up against that tree over there."

She frowned, staring off into the woods. "In this area, are deer common enough for them not to be stopped for?" she asked. "A truck going sixty would certainly win that contest but he attempted to avoid whatever it was, as if he didn't know what it was or if the truck would hold out on from the impact."

"If he'd hit a deer, there'd have been pelt in the grill. Truck moving that speed could have flung the rest of the carcass a couple of hundred feet into the woods, but there would still be impact signs." David walked over to the tree the rig had hit in coming to a stop. It was a massive oak, strong enough to not topple from the impact. "See the marks on the bark? Whatever that truck hit was still in front of the grill when it was stopped by the tree."

Wanda joined him and studied the area for a second. There was no blood splatter, nothing that would indicate a large animal had gotten struck. "It was still in front?" she repeated. "But since it is not here now and we cannot find any remains elsewhere, where did whatever it was go?" Her gaze traveled to the forest beyond where they stood. "It probably fled away from the road..."

"Ma'am, if that was a deer, or even a person, it would still be half-embedded into that oak. Even with his speed down around twenty miles an hour, that's a lot of heavy metal slamming something into solid wood." McLellan motioned her her to follow him around the tree, where he pointed to a set of large tracks, much like a dog's, leading away from the tree. "That's what I don't get. There isn't a dog alive that could walk away from that crash, but something is telling me it's not just a coincidence."

"I tend to believe that things, more often than not, are connected, even by the thinnest of threads." Giving him a tight lipped smiled, she turned back to the tracks. "How good are you at tracking, officer?" she asked suddenly, turning back to him.

"Never taken me more than a day into the season to get my first deer." David hitched up his gun belt. "With the weather, it's going to be wet back here. Hope you don't mind getting muddy."

That got a laugh out of her as she stepped off the road--careful not to disturb the trail. "Getting dirty was never a concern of mine," Wanda replied. "I grew up very in very rural areas and tracking was certainly a way of making sure dinner was on the table."
"Back in Knoxville, we had a Safeway." David said wryly, stepping into the mud with a squelching noise.

"And people these days enjoy hunting with coupons," she said lightly, pointing out where leaves had been broken. "Look, the foliage isn't disturbed beyond this height. So at least we know how tall this thing is."

"Big sucker... at least three feet at the head, maybe more." McLellan stepped carefully around the prints, stopping once to measure it with his finger. "Deep prints too, even in mud this wet. Thing's at least a hundred pounds or more. That's one big hunting dog... but not big enough to survive that crash."

"I doubt anything outside of a moose sized animal would have and even then, it would have been gravely injured." Shoving her hair back from her face, Wanda eyed how far apart the tracks were from each other. "The tracks...they do not seem to be how a wounded animal would be walking, do they?"

"Whatever we're following wasn't hit by that truck. But if that's the case, what the hell did it hit? Maybe someone set something up, scared off the driver and removed the roadblock? One of those 'missing' kids, maybe. They've all got parents with cottages or hunting shacks out of town. This could be some kind of prank."

"Maybe but I don't know. A prank is one thing but are these children stupid enough to attempt a prank that could end in someones death, including their own?" Taking care to step over a log, Wanda continued, "And this thing appears to have been up against that tree at some point. Whatever's going on, I do have a bad feeling about it."

"That's what I said when I reported them missing. That skin thing over at the docs can't be real, but it sure looked close enough. Maybe some kid with some obsession with that Texas Chainsaw movie, where he wears the bits of-- huh." David cut off as he stopped. Ahead, the prints continued for another five feet, and simply stopped.

Wanda came to a stop as well and rubbed her eyes but it didn't help. She exchanged glances with the police officer. "Well, that was unexpected." Just in case, she took a look up but was unable to spot any, well, marks that would indicate that the creature had climbed up. The tracks just disappeared and not in a "they were hidden" type of way.

"Alright, it's a dog the size of a teenager, that what, flew away?" McLellan shook his head and slumped down on a log. "Ma'am, I take it back. I hope you are from that X-Files part of the FBI, because there's nothing that makes sense otherwise to me."

She pursed her lips slightly. It wouldn't do to tell him she may have seen weirder. This was, currently, still taking the cake. "What would make a great deal of sense to me right now is a hot cup of coffee. I do not think we will learn anything more out here."

David nodded. "The truth is out there, but the thermos of joe is in my patrol car."