Another pot of coffee. Another long night. Another pain in the ass case. Probably another pain in the ass case that gets taken from them just when they really start to crack into it. Maybe straight up feds deciding this is their territory. If they figure they can get some good PR off it. Maybe a more ambiguous "this is not your jurisdiction; this is above your paygrade" if it's a really good case. Probably just Krakoa.
"Right now you're thinking Krakoa is gonna take this case off our hands." the junior deputy quipped while digging through a brown paper bag. He pulled out two big breakfast burritos. It was dinner time. Nothing like a breakfast burrito for dinner.
"You're not wrong." the senior deputy replied, unwrapping his burrito and folding it over to pick up any errant burrito bits.
"Wouldn't be the first time. You know how they are any time one of theirs is involved."
"Heard it was a kid too."
"You're a kid. That pyro was older than you."
"Yeah, but...well yeah. You're right. Early 20s. You seen the gas station tape?"
"Might as well put it on. That's the question right now isn't it. Who is that. Was he the one that killed the pyro mutant."
The younger deputy navigated around the computer's desktop to find the footage.
"Not much. Not super clear and we haven't been able to get an I.D. off it, but here we go."
Simple footage plays across their screen. Bog standard gas station market. Beige walls. Lighter shade of beige tile flooring. Needs a strip and some waxing but otherwise clean enough. Aisles all covered in colorful packaging for one or another variation of calorie bomb junk food. Probably will all turn out to be highly carcinogenic. Stocker is in the lower right filling up the potato chip rack. Some guy makes a beeline down an aisle, politely pressing closer to the one side so a mother and her child can peruse the candy bars. Guy heads straight for the restroom.
Subject of interest is wandering around a little more. He's got a note in his hand. Clearly working from that to gather up some groceries. It's nothing particularly interesting or unfamiliar. Salt, Lime Juice, Tajin, and Pabst Blue Ribbon.
"Fucking Pabst," the senior deputy mutters under his breath.
"Kids getting Micheladas. Who in their right mind uses PBRs for a Michelada?"
"That'd be a pretty shit Michelada."
"That'd be a pretty shit Michelada. Gotta go for Modelo."
"At least something Mexican."
"Some chamoy."
Subject gathers his ingredients up and heads to the register. This is their best clear look at him. Scrawny, straggly little fucker. Looks to be in the 160-180 pound range. Long hair, uncut, dirty. Chino shorts. Muscle shirt but he has no muscles. Ugly shit quality tattoos. It's not a good quality video but even if it were those tats would probably be too muddy to properly identify what any of them were supposed to be.
"Jail."
"Or juvie. Or dipshit friend."
"Maybe he practices on himself."
Subject pays with cash. Empties out his wallet and doesn't get much change back.
"Probably other fella gave him the money. Kid probably pocketed the cash so he could take Suzy Q to the sock hop or some shit."
"Sock hop huh. What's that from? The 50s? Jesus Christ. What are you Captain America?"
"I was just joking. And fuck you, I'm still a young buck."
Subject grabs the bag and walks out of the store. Definite limp. Footage cuts to outside the store and shows him for just a few seconds more as he drops off the curb, slightly tripping with the leg he was limping on, and moves around the back of a Toyota Corolla. Can't tell from the video if there is a passenger or not.
"Can't have been him. Too small. Too slow. Too out of it. That shit that happened at that compound, kid doesn't have it in him."
The deputies agreed on that. Maybe it was foolish. Maybe they were judging a book by it's cover, but nothing in the Subject's mannerisms or conduct would lead them to think he could wipe out a compound of dangerous extremists and a pyro type mutant to boot.
"That mutant at the compound, he wasn't exactly the Human Torch."
"True, true. But I still don't like that kid for it. More likely we'll find out he's in the car."
When it was all said and done, and Officers and Firefighters had responded to reports of the blaze, that Toyota Corolla was little more than a red hot smoldering frame. Mutants and demons and superhumans and all that shit. They had made a lot of things harder. How had the fire burned that hot and that long. How long had it been burning. Where did it start. Powers changed a lot of that. Couldn't look for traces of accelerants necessarily. Might have been started by the Pyro mutant. Wouldn't have left any trace at all if it had been.
The senior deputy muttered about as much.
"Shit," the junior deputy replied, "Might have been a portal from hell opened up and barbecued that Corolla with Holy Hell Fire."
They needed the video from the compound.
"We need the video from the compound."
In a dimly lit room in a well obscured location a shot out old detective watches the deputies discuss the situation through their screen's webcam on one screen and watches their actual screen through another. Bumpkin ass deputies are just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. It's a good indicator. They wouldn't find a damn thing. Mutant was dead. Other extremists all dead too. So far nothing tying anyone in particular to what happened. Good indicator.
Bergeron will be up most of the night using their assets to check up on exactly what the locals are looking in to. Reading the reports from the firefighters, sheriffs, cops, paramedics, coroners, all their supervisors. It was going to be a long night but it was looking like it would all lead to the exact outcome they were hoping for. A clean kill. Clean enough anyway. An effective operator.
Bergeron cracked his neck, then twisted his fingers this way and that cracking every knuckle every way he could. Didn't make any sense but it relaxed him. Turned his head to another screen to watch it again. Footage from the outpost. Didn't exist anywhere else now. JANUS had seen to that. By the end of the night he would be sending word on through and they would scrub it from history entirely. These were important first steps. He wasn't quite sure towards what, but they were important first steps.
On the screen a skinny fuck in a muscle shirt slowly morphed into their latest recruit. It was a weird list they were working from. Oddly specific and oddly low tier. Fucker was impossible to kill and make it stick but he'd never really been able to do all that much. This was a neat party trick. The long scraggly hair fell out, the body grew larger, couldn't tell from the angle of the video but his facial features were in flux. The Junkie Kid disguise fell away entirely as their recruit stepped into another disguise. It was complete when those faint blurry tattoos moved about into new positions and formed more recognizable patterns and figures.
As he approached the compound Bushwacker looked like one of them. Big, repulsive tattoos, and a case of PBRs.
Bergeron settled in to observe once more. To see what their recruit did right and what their recruit did wrong. Long night ahead.