Tess stared at the birds on the park bench as they hopped around and fluffed their feathers, opening their beaks to sing. In the distance children ran about, shouting and yelling as they played. Closer she could see people standing around, drawn in by the flashing police lights. A hologram shielded the public from the horror beyond. Police robots zoomed round, scanning for potential evidence to alert the officers and forensics team standing by, although several held the hologram by the edge of the crime scene. Everywhere was filled by noise, even the sky rumbled as a storm inched closer, ready to soak the crime scene investigators before they could gather all of the evidence.<br/><br/>Tess was surrounded by silence. Her gaze drifted up as lightning flashed a fair distance away, sometimes her ears would ring, remind her that her ears once worked, but for the moment, they gave her nothing.<br/><br/>A tap on her shoulder made her turn and she found her superior, looking a little impatient, as if he had been talking to her. The man stood several inches taller than her, filled with lean muscle and a mop of curly black hair that he could never seem to keep out of his eyes. His excuse was never having time to get it cut. He tapped just below his ear with a frown and Tess glared at him before touching the earpiece within her right ear. It crackled to life and she heard her superior speak, narrowing his blue eyes at her. He was a handsome man, but he was married to his job.<br/><br/>“I thought I told you to keep it on.” Jameson was irritated, but Tess knew that she was not the cause of it. The dead body only ten feet away was the cause of the frown. Murders were becoming more common, and she knew that Jameson feared a serial killer, another person to get around the sibyl system. Tess used to be one of those people, but she could see her reading reflected back at her every time she looked at a scanner. A crime coefficient score was what determined if you were a criminal or not, regardless of innocence. A score of less than a hundred was healthy, up to two hundred was an offer to get treatment, three hundred turned to forced rehabilitation. A latent criminal read at five hundred or more, and Tess could see a score more than double that on the scanners. Sometimes she could see it slipping down as she drew back the memories of being unnoticed by the scanners, but it would only last a few moments.<br/><br/>“I wasn’t listening.” Tess responded. Her own voice sounded different with the earpiece, or maybe she was just as bitter as it sounded. Jameson gave her a glance and simply sighed.<br/><br/>“This got something to do with your brother?” Jameson asked, looking back to the body. He did not fail to notice how Tess bristled and gave him a glare like no other. A glance showed her crime coefficient rising as she glared and he found himself wondering how she had been one of those to get around the system. She had few emotions other than anger.<br/><br/>“How the hell should I know.” She spat, glaring at the body and stalking away back towards the car. It was only the two of them for this case, Jameson’s other hunting dogs were loitering around, looking as if they were getting bored. They knew this was Tess' specialty, they were better away from the crime scene. Tess considered taking the earpiece out, tossing it to the ground and losing it, see how Jameson would like trying to talk to her without it, but she doubted that Jameson’s superiors would be happy with that, she was already a loose cannon.<br/><br/>Jameson let her go and watched as she waited by the car. He had little doubt that her keen eyes had already examined the body, and was putting pieces of a puzzle together in her mind, five steps ahead of everyone else within the crime scene. The body was female, or at least, it had once been. Dark hair and closed eyes in a face that sat in a halo of roses, while the rest of the dismembered body lay around it, drained of blood. The arms from the elbow down were crossed beneath the head, and the rest of the arms, the torso and the legs were below that, as if simply discarded there.  It was a brutal murder, and it wasn’t the first one like it.<br/><br/>Jameson checked his watch, knowing that the new superior would be arriving soon, and he could only hope that Tess did not make a scene. She’d already killed one superior, and that had left Jameson with more latents than he could handle. Tess had been tossed back into the rehabilitation centre after the incident, but Jameson had missed her skills, and had requested her back, despite how much trouble she could cause. She could be amiable when she wanted to be, but that was a rare occasion. Jameson just hoped that the new recruit was as good as people said, otherwise Tess would walk circles around her.<br/><br/><a class="username" data-user-id="1190" data-username="@Chrystal Dark" data-xf-init="member-tooltip" href="https://blackdahliaroleplaying.com/members/1190/">@Chrystal Dark</a>