Tracking could be murderers was far more complicated than chasing current killers.
For starters, there were typically no crimes actually committed, this made finding the evidence for future crimes near impossible. Secondly, energy was required. Something, on her good days, Hazel White rarely had.
And yet, the energy was spared and the impossible was disproved by a girl too young to know that a man with a knife and particularly pointed umbrella could be crueller than a man with a gun. This was just her typical Wednesday, unfortunately. No school, no homework, no clubs and no hobbies. Just crime. Or, stopping crime, really. And thinking about it, it's not just Wednesday, it's the whole week. Weekends included.
"Are you going to rest now?"
Archie, her legal guardian, friend, assistant... whatever he was most at that point in time, had called from the kitchen. A subtle American tone coated his voice, one that had since faded from years away from home. Every now and then, he would catch himself saying 'mum' rather than 'mom' and it always felt as strange as it sounded.
The sky was dark, almost pitch black and riddled with light pollution. It was so dark, when she paced past the small curtainless window, she could see her reflection as though she was standing in the mirror. Black eyes, grazes on her cheeks, a bloody nose, bulky teeth and tattered brown hair falling from an already messy bun. The hours were ticking by, two in the morning, and it showed in her dark brown injured eyes.
She was a mess. As usual.
"Nope." She called back to Archie as he poked a copper-haired head out of the archway that leads into the kitchen. He was young, older than she was and more experienced in life, but that was expected. Most of the people she worked with were. But, out of everyone she knew, he was the youngest at the age of twenty-two, with brotherly ease to him and a lot of care for her.
"Hazel. You need to rest, you might have a concussion."
"I don't. Anyway, that's the opposite of what you're supposed to do with a concussion."
"Not sleep," he corrected. "Rest. Sit down, stop working. Why was it tonight that you had to get yourself thrown downstairs? Of all nights? You told me you were going to take a break today."
"Sorry, next time I'll ask him to try and kill me on a weekend, shall I?"
"Next time, at least plan what you're doing before you go into a possible murderers house."
"That's no fun."
"More fun than being thrown down the stairs."
"I live for the thrill, Archie."
"The thrill is trying to kill you."
He left the kitchen, two new mugs of coffee in his hands as his feet shuffled and scuffed against the greying red of the old apartment carpet.
Hazels home was a strange one. It was in an apartment building, but one that was never really finished being built. Two apartments were finished, the others abandoned because it turned out the waterworks were too faulty to connect to every room in the place. It would have cost too much to repair it enough to finish the building. So, they left it as it was. Two apartments. One belonged to Hazel, the other Archie.
Of course, the place looked finished on the outside. But if you went up further than one floor, you would see that it lacked proper floors and the walls were still plaster. People rarely saw this if at all. It's not as if anybody had a reason to even go into the building.
"Hazel..."
She looked up from the file she flicked through, her gaze drifting to Archie who raised an eyebrow and placed the mugs down on the low coffee table as she felt the air drift from the quickly closed pages she pretended not to be reading through. The sigh that escaped him as he met her eyes told her everything she needed to know, yet he continued.
"Why are you looking through files?" He asked, his tone accusatory. "You shouldn't need to look through files if you're about to rest."
She pursed her lips, turned back to the file, then after a moment of consideration, did not put it down.
"I'm bored."
"You just finished the last case."
"Yeah... twenty minutes ago."
Another sigh, another head shake and, this time, an additional eye roll followed after. But, he didn't say anything else and instead decided to sink into the couch, lift a foot up to the coffee table and rest in her place. She might not have been willing to do it, but he certainly would. Hell, he could do it for both of them if he needed to.
With that, she continued with a smile on her partially bloodied lips and picked up where she left off with her pacing backwards and forwards by the window, her attention back on the file in her grasp as she read profiles and evidence about an unsolved case. Her speciality.
She dropped the file, turned to a cardboard box full of them and found another to flick through.
The place was full, though not with furniture. Sure, she had second-hand couches and coffee tables, a desk and the necessities all aged and holding stains that were either questionable or fascinating to watch age. But, the living room was made mostly of boxes. Stacks upon stacks of case files she rarely got rid of out of the fear of needing them for another case. Maybe that was what you called hoarding. Almost all of them were untouched after they were stored away in the boxes, but, having them there was always handy. The downside to the boxes was that they gathered dust far easier than she expected.
It made the whole place, dim under light bulbs that were too cheap to be any brighter than a candle, stink. It wasn't necessarily a terrible smell. But, it was strong. A punch to the nose the minute she stepped foot there. Dust, coffee and old paper. The smells hit in that exact order. Always. If not, the memory of the smells fixed it.
And her memory was not going to fail her anytime soon. Not when it was deemed a 'superpower' by so many people. It's what made her a decent detective, that and her carelessness when it came to confronting possible murderers.
Her whole life, she lived with a memory that was apparently incredibly good. Though, she couldn't test this since she could only see through her own eyes and search through her own head. She could be told something simple, like a favourite type of biscuit, and years later, she would still remember perfectly. She could be told something intricate, a long recipe and instructions, and she would still remember it years later. So, recalling evidence and facts came easy to her.
"You really need to sleep," Archie said, breaking the silence as he watched her go backwards and forwards, yawning for what might have been the fifth time within several minutes. She didn't notice.
"No, I don't."
"You haven't slept properly in weeks."
"Sleep is for cowards and I'm not a coward."
"I wish you were sometimes."
Hazel kept pacing. Short legs tracking back and forth in circles around the coffee table, trying not to panic. She seemed as well put together as a girl who had less than four hours of sleep, been thrown downstairs, almost killed and still managed to get home could. But she could still feel the pulse in her wrists, the pound of a heart that beat in the nervousness of questions like 'will I get out of this one?' It was like adrenaline was pumping through her body constantly, wearing her thin. She felt like she was being asked a question she didn't have an answer to in front of a crowd of hundreds. But, that wasn't what happened at all. She faced worse than that.
Yet, there she was, trying her damn best to smile past that anxiousness.
"While you're here," Hazel spoke up, hoping to fill the void of silence that lasted only a few seconds. A few seconds too long. "Please make sure you keep your phone on you at all times. Tonight was bad, but last time was even worse."
"Last time? That was hardly important."
"Archie, my late-night theories are very important."
"Anything involving a romance between Goatman and Mothman is not important enough to wake me up at three in the morning."
"You take that back."
He did not take it back.
"You're really going to pick up another case?" Archie asked, watching her switch out file after file, "already?"
"I told you, I'm bored- and hey, this one," she held up the file in her hand, "is even a little interesting."
She read it through once, then a second time as she stopped pacing and dropped down into the chair beside the couch Archie sat on. He stared at a wall, his eyes heavy and distant while she took in every piece of information she could.
She remembered this case. It was everywhere, everyone was talking about the missing boy who disappeared as if he was dust in the wind. The investigation went on for a year, but eventually, when hope was lost and the police dropped the case (for an unknown reason, still to this day) it ended up going forgotten. It was interesting the same way a roadside accident got people staring. Tragic but still it was food for the curious to devour.
The more she read, the more she hungered for the answers.
The boy, a seventeen-year-old at the time by the name of Jason Barber, was last seen at school the previous day. The next, he was gone. There was no trace of him, no footage found from CCTV, no connections to another person, no hint and no idea where he could have vanished to. Was it possible he ran away? Sure, but it hardly made sense why he would.
Rich family, friends, good grades-
It was possible that he ran away, she thought. It wasn't a possibility to dismiss within seconds of considering it. But the case as a whole got her mind racing, and that was what was important.
"Jason Barber." She said, catching Archie's quick gaze as he turned rather rapidly towards her, his coffee still in his hand and moments away from meeting his lips. He pulled it away and held it on his knee. "Went missing two years ago and still hasn't been found. Could be dead or alive."
She tossed the file onto the coffee table and gave a nod of her head.
"I like that one. I'm not bored anymore."
For just a moment, all they could hear were the passing cars on the roads outside the windows, the subtle breeze of a city known for its bad weather and her usual heavy breathing.
"No," Archie said, placing his coffee on the table beside the file, adding sound with both his voice and the clank of ceramic on glass. "Not that one. Pick another."
The crease between her eyebrows grew as she leaned forwards and reached for her own coffee made for her so long ago that it was teetering on cold. Her face scrunched the moment she sipped it, but it didn't stop her.
"Why?"
"I remember that case." He said, "I always got a bad feeling from it... The kid was around your age, if you start investigating it, you could end up the same. You're a magnet for trouble and you know it."
"That's dumb reasoning. Besides, I'm eighteen. That's a whole years difference."
"At least think about it. Rest tonight, get cleaned up then decide tomorrow when you aren't possibly concussed."
She sank, let out a groan then agreed with an affirming hum.
From the sight, Archie gave a nod and picked up both himself and his coffee.
"I think I'll head to my place," Archie said, glancing around the apartment he spent most of his time in. They rarely slept because of all of their work, so going to his own apartment only five steps away from hers wasn't needed. However, a break from the dust that gathered around was always nice. "Goodnight, Hazy."
She let him leave, knowing that the moment he stepped out, she would be engulfed in half agonising, half eerily soothing silence. It always caught her off guard. The silence felt too unnatural, it felt synthetic.
But it wasn't there.
She had heard the door shut, the drearily yelled out 'get some rest,' from the man who knew she wouldn't. But there wasn't the silence. Instead, there was the sound of her own movements filling the void as she leaned forwards, took the file and hurried to her kitchen where she had abandoned her phone.
She wasn't a girl of very many friends. There were tons of people who knew the name Hazel White, it was plastered in the papers with mystery, wondering who she was, what she looked like, hell, they didn't even know how old she was. All they knew was that she solved crimes nobody else could. But there were two people who knew her. Archie and Roderick.
She looked to her front door from the kitchen doorway, made sure Archie was really gone, then dialled the numbers.
It took six seconds to get an answer.
"Hazel, what the hell did you do tonight?"
"Hi Roddie," she sang back.
"What did you do?" He continued, his voice low and a little gruff from years of smoking. Though he hadn't touched cigarettes in five years by this point, it still took its toll. "I sent officers to the location you sent, they found fresh blood but the suspect was unharmed- I appreciate you catching the guy but who's blood was that?"
"Mine." She answered, still with a chirp to her voice. "I left all the evidence and stuff in your office- or Archie did, actually. But that guy was gross."
"Hazel-"
"That's not why I called though," she interrupted him. He didn't argue, despite the definite difference in power dynamics. An eighteen-year-old probably shouldn't be interrupting a Chief superintendent, yet there she was, doing exactly that and he was letting her. "Y'know the Jason Barber case? Can you get me all the evidence and information you have on that?"
"I knew that'd be the one to get your interest," he said, the subtle sound of chatter behind him, likely as he worked late into the night much like she did.
He was the man who pretty much made her. She was well known in the city, well, her name was. But it was partially because of him. She picked up the cold cases and solved them, but he was the guy who let her do it, he gathered the interesting files for her and let her have free range.
"There's not much on it, but I'll bring what I can tomorrow morning on my way to work."
"Thanks, Roddie! I'll let you get back to work."
"Bye, Hazel."
And that was that. The choice was made and now all that was left to do was start.