Friday the 13th of January 2012
The Edinburgh residence of Wizengamot Elder Spencer Cotesworth-Head

In the early morning of Friday the thirteenth, a barn owl arrived at the home of Spencer Cotesworth-Head who was engaged in her morning routine. She stood at the kitchen table where she read from a folded Daily Prophet and sipped her coffee. Her plum Elder robes were as yet unfastened and her traditional hat sat on the entryway table awaiting her departure.

The owl wore the ankle tag of the Edinburgh owl post office and bore a single standard envelope.

Floo Network Authority Department of Magical Transportation Ministry of Magic URGENT
	Spencer Cotesworth-Head 1729 Morgana St. Edinburgh

When Madam Cotesworth-Head opened it, she had just enough time to glimpse the letterhead before the letter became criss-crossed with what looked like glowing white lightning. The page suddenly tore itself into a thousand tiny slicing pieces and lifted from Spencer's startled fingers.

The pieces began to swirl around her head until like a flock of savage insects they went for her. A neighbor heard the screaming. 

A great, milling group of patrol officers swarmed the front of the white stone building, spilling out onto the sidewalk as Lennie approached.  He elbowed his way to the middle of the bumbling mass, brought his pinky fingers up to the corners of his mouth and let out a piercing whistle.  The drove of doofuses and dimwits turned to him with dumbfounded looks and eyes (he swore) devoid entirely of thoughts.

'You've secured the scene?'

A round faced fellow was the first to figure Lennie's meaning and find his voice, 'Ughh-huhh-huh, yes sir!' he coughed.

'And you've obliviated the necessary non-magical folk, ya?'

'Ye-yessir' he sputtered, long-waxed mustaches quivering.

'Then why, by Merlin's mustard muumuu, are there forty-five people still here?'

The man started to reply but Lennie just pressed on, 'Assign one person to repello duty, two to guard and get the rest the blood hell out of here!'

The round fellow's eyes widened, he threw a hasty salute and started rushing about shouting orders as Lennie pressed through the throng and up the stairs to inside.

He came to a kitchen in utter disarray.  Upturned chairs and broken china were scattered across the floor atop pools of spilled coffee and blood.  Little horizontal red streaks adorned every surface, which were otherwise quite tidy and well kept.  Losing just a moment in sheer awe of the scene, Lennie looked over to his partner on the case, who was standing above a corpse covered with a white sheet that had been ominously stained bright crimson at one end.

'Please remind me next time to get my caffeine before I have to deal with the goofus gaggle, I may have snapped a bit.  So....this is quite a take on spin art,' he said though his signature barely-a-smirk.

It was an auspicious way to start a Friday, standing over the body of a Wizengamot Elder who had died by a thousand paper cuts in her own home.

It had been almost three years since Charlene Malone had left the Auror Corps.  Three years since she’d turned in her badge, said goodbye to her colleagues, and accepted a promotion to the Wizengamot Administration Services, which had seemed a surefire way to kick her career into high gear.  Since then, there were some things that Charlene had almost come to miss about wearing crimson.  There had been the unwavering camaraderie, the jolts of excitement to her workday, perhaps even her former partner’s tasteless but occasionally well-meaning efforts to torment the trainees.  But this type of early-morning summons certainly wasn’t one of them.

Most of the Auror Corps was still dealing with the fall-out from the full moon several days past, and so an owl had come to her.  Be appraised.... A Wizengamot Elder was dead.  But under that lay the unsaid question.  Do you think you could...?  Charlene wasn’t a member of the Corps any longer, but when a Wizengamot Elder was found mysteriously murdered in their own home, she could certainly still play the part of one, particularly when Level Two was short-handed.

She’d beaten the supervising Auror to the scene, although there had been plenty of MLE Squad regulars milling about.  She’d barely had time to approach the body — Madam Cotesworth-Head’s final resting place had been temporarily covered by a white sheet — when there was a flurry of activity outside, and in came one of her former colleagues, sauntering like he owned the place.

Lennie Bretaskógr was undoubtedly a good Auror. She’d worked alongside him and with him for years before she’d transferred to the Wizengamot Administration, and ever since she'd been a trainee, it had been clear that he knew his stuff.  But his sardonic sense of humor had the bad taste to pop up in all sorts of unfortunate places.  This apparently included the late Madam Cotesworth-Head’s disastrous kitchen, as the Auror wasted no time in cracking a joke about the deceased’s apparent manner of death.

Charlene cocked an eyebrow at him.  She wasn’t impressed.

“A witch is dead, Bret,” she said evenly. “A Wizengamot Elder murdered, no less.  I think that calls for a certain sort of decorum whether or not you’ve had your morning coffee, don’t you?”

Charlene's a good sort, even if a bit stuffy Lennie thought.  She was a member of a very selective club: people Lennie respected enough that they were allowed to call him Bret without it pissing him off.

"My greatest apologies Madam Malone, I didn't mean to tromp all over decorum." Lennie said oozing sincerity, bowing extra low and flourishing his hands outward into an almost iconic posture. He held the pose a bit over-long, before standing back up sporting a slight smirk. He crossed the room and drew back the sheet carefully, examining the body with a fastidious carefulness that was belied by his cavalier demeanor. After a few moments he stood up and faced Malone.

"Seriously Char, does the ministry issue bum-sticks to new WAS members or do you have to buy them yourselves?" He crossed to her and waited half-smiling for a handshake, hug or headlock. He couldn't resist adding, "Besides, I don't think Madame Cotesworth-Three-Quarters-Head minds."

Charlene sighed at the exaggerated apology, although it didn't stop the hint of an exasperated smile from playing at her mouth.  Shaking her head, she stood behind him, arms crossed, waiting for the Auror to finish his examination.

It wasn't pretty.  Madam Spencer Cotesworth-Head looked like she'd died by a thousand tiny cuts, as if a horde of tiny pixies had daringly struck at her with needles again and again until she'd fallen.  Scattered on the floor all around her were tiny shreds of parchment, as if whatever had sliced into her had shredded the letter she'd been holding just as surely.  But nothing else in the room seemed to have been sliced into, although the entire room looked like it had been upturned in a panic.  Whatever spell Madam Cotesworth-Head's attacker had used, it had been precisely targeted. 

Lennie seemed to have finished his initial examination.  He rose and turned to face her again, with the cocky smile that half the Auror Corps seemed to have perfected.

"Yes, not wanting to crack jokes over a body definitely means I have a surgically-inserted bum stick," Charlene retorted, rolling her eyes at him.  "Would you like to check to see if she has one, too?"

But it wasn't worth getting rankled over.  Relenting, she gave the Auror a half-smile, stepping forward to offer him a firm grip.  "It's good to see you, Lennie.  Although maybe not in these circumstances," she allowed, her gaze flicking back to the corpse.  "I hate to think this is what it takes for all of us to catch up these days."

"Blimey, was that a joke out of Madam Malone?" Lenny asked with feigned surprise on his face.  "Good to know that the Ministry at least coughs up for the surgical method, I've heard the others are less pleasant. Seriously though, we really should catch lunch sometime or something, you're just down the hall for Merlin's sake."

Lenny stood up and pulled out his wand, took aim and pronounced, "Wingardium leviosa."   A small cloud of the paper pieces floated up in front of his face.  He squinted and craned his neck back and forth examining the paper scraps.  They were all shaped exactly the same, tiny elongated right triangles, as though the letter was put through a shredder to make confetti.

"Hmmm, strange.  The slices in this paper are all regular, the pieces are exactly the same. But I think..." He allowed the pieces to drop and bent down, looking at Madam Coteworth-Head's injuries again. "Yeah, just as I suspected, there's no regular pattern on her face. What do you make of that? Seen a lot of weird stuff, but I don't know any spells that would slice her mail into a regular pattern and then go all willy nilly on her noggin'."

Charlene slanted a sidelong look over her shoulder at her former colleague, but didn't deign to respond to the teasing as she turned back to the room.  Luckily, Lennie Bretaskógr was a more-than-able investigator and a good friend, which meant that she was usually willing to let the pestering slide.  He was right, though: the Auror Office and the Wizengamot Administration Services were only a few doors away, and it was a shame that she'd let so many relationships with her old comrades fade away simply because they were all busy.

Lennie had his wand out.  Charlene stepped back to examine the rest of the room as he caused the tiny scraps of paper to all take flight, and then summoned them to gather in front of him.  Most of the furniture in the room had been overturned, along with the coffee pot; there was broken china scattered across the counters and the floor, and blood had been smeared all over, as if Madam Cotesworth-Head had flailed helplessly in hopes of escaping her attacker.

The corner of something white, mostly covered by an overturned chair, caught her eye.  Pointing her wand at it, she summoned it with a silent Accio.

The white, elongated object tugged itself free, and then floated over to her.  It was a white paper envelope, torn open.  There were bloody fingerprints along the edge, and coffee smeared across it, but she could make out the addresses on the front.  Sent urgently to Spencer Cotesworth-Head from the Floo Network Authority.

Charlene examined the envelope for a moment, and then, with a flick of her wand, sent it spinning to Lennie.  "I don't know," she said, looking over at him.  "There's not a single cut on that envelope, either.  You don't see any other letters from the owl post about, do you?"

"No Char I  don't see anything other than the bloody paper." Lennie said, and after a moment amended, "The bloody paper, not the bloody paper."

So one piece of post, one newspaper and a whole lot of blood and broken china Lennie thought.  He squinted as he looked slowly back around the room, soaking in the whole picture.  An image started to form in his mind, a macabre dance of flitting paper pieces and their twirling bloody partner. He flicked his wand and brought the paper pieces floating back up to his face on a hunch.  "Most of these pieces are soaked, but the few that aren't only have blood along one of the long sides." He muttered, "Hmm, maybe Reparo"

The pieces knitted themselves back together into a letter that was..."It's some boilerplate rubbish from the Floo Network Authority. It was marked urgent, but it's just some usage statistics update." Lennie said, turning to hand the letter to Char with a puzzled look on his face. 

Charlene raised her wand to lift the piece of parchment from Lennie's hand.  With a flick, she levitated it to float in front of her, pursing her lips as she examined it carefully. 

It was indeed soaked through with splatters of blood, but as the Auror had observed, the blood splotches didn't all match up with each other.  The message, too, didn't make any sense. 

"The Wizengamot has been involved in monitoring that mess with the Floo[1], but I don't think Madam Cotesworth-Head has been dealing with that," she said with a frown.  "The Elders certainly don't get regular updates on usage statistics like this."

She'd already had a bad feeling about this whole mess.  A Wizengamot Elder was dead, which was never a good omen.  But this was clearly intentional: not a spell gone wrong, but someone attempting a strike at an official at the heart of the Ministry.

"Specialis Revelio," she said, flicking her wand over the floating parchment.

The floating parchment promptly began to glow a bright neon blue.  An instant later, the uncanny blue light seemed to shatter, exploding into a thousand floating pieces.  The glowing blue shards hung in the air for a split second, and then began to dart and streak about, creating a flurry of light as they danced through the air.

It took a moment for the dance to finish, for the last of the darting lights to fade away.  The jagged lines on the parchment glowed a bright azure for an instant longer, and then that too dimmed, leaving the parchment as it had started.  The dark red splotches of blood were already starting to dry to a rusty brown.

Swallowing, Charlene found Lennie's gaze once more.

"I'm not sure what spell that was exactly," she began carefully, "but I think we may have our murder weapon."

1.	Referring to incidents of the Floo spitting out travelers in unexpected places.