What Happens at the CCPD

Reaper

Pre lightning. Kinda quite dark. 

**********

It was October 4th. 

Barry didn't like October. It was almost always the busiest month for the CCPD. 

Sure he used to like Halloween and dressing up and going door to door for free candy, and the kids were still pretty cute, but now all he could associate the month with was the painful number of crimes that came with it.

And as always, the Reaper. 

The Reaper was a serial killer, who didn't come out any time other than October. The CCPD had been trying to catch him for years. Only for two of those years had Barry been in the program. But they'd made no more progress in those two years than any others. Barry wanted nothing more than this murderer behind bars. Hopefully this was the year they would have a breakthrough. 

Already the first cases had come in. Yes. Plural. 

There was no pattern to when the Reaper would strike. No one ever saw anything. And no one ever survived. 

Barry's nose was buried in the tests he was running when a knock sounded on the door. Barry started upright and Joe winced apologetically.

"Sorry, Bar," he said, "but we've got another one."

*****

Barry wanted to be sick. He probably would be later, but for now he shoved aside his emotions and did his work.

"Anything new Allen?" Otto, the senior investigator asked.

His lips pressed into a thin line as he shook his head no, "Not easy enough to see right away. Any prints?"

Otto shook his head. It didn't surprise them. There were never prints. The Reaper was appropriately named the way he came and struck without warning, leaving only death in its wake. 

Otto clapped Barry on the shoulder, "We'll look a little longer, hang in there buddy."

Barry turned back to the scene.

!WARNING! SLIGHTLY DISTURBING DESCRIPTIONS! 

There were two children, probably about ten, laying in a dark pool of blood that had gushed from their slit throats, the signature of the Reaper. 

There was nothing except them. There was no trace of struggle or even a third party. It was like their throats were slit where they stood and they collapsed into a quick death. The Reaper never beat the victims or did anything to them other than swiftly kill them. There was no pattern to the victims either. There was just death. 

OK IT'S DONE. I KNOW IT WAS A SMOL PART BUT SOME PEOPLE HAVE VIVID IMAGINATIONS.

Barry took measurements and looked for prints and did everything in the book to find a clue. 

But the shadows might as well have killed them for all the evidence left behind.

Barry paused. 

His brows furrowed. There shouldn't be a way to go undetected. Shadows couldn't kill people. There were no footprints on the ground... but what about the walls?

Every murder done by the Reaper had taken place in an area that had at least two walls of some sort near to each other. Once it was between two semi trucks. Another it was the corner of a store. 

Barry shined his flashlight on the wall and started dusting. He would dust the whole damn wall if he had to. Something was telling him he was onto something and he wasn't gonna lose it for not being thorough.