Predictably Alyx and Primrose were the first to arrive. They exchanged minor pleasantries but went right to work, which was good as the EMTs would be here before too long. Neither woman seemed entirely comfortable with the corpse, not unreasonably as the bloat, and blood and ruptured intestines were hardly pleasant. Eleanor remembered her first ‘meet the cadaver’ in med school, the sterile smell of the exam rooms, the reek of formaldehyde. It didn’t prepare you for a real corpse of course, but she had seen plenty of those in her time as well. Far too many. She ran a hand over her face.

“We will let the coroner do a full work up, I’m sure Fynn can get us a copy of the report when its done. Vodou huh?” Eleanor asked, taking a step back to try and see what Alyx was seeing, it remained a series of meaningless markings to her but now that it was pointed out to her she thought she could detect the aesthetic. Unfortunately, given they were in the largest center of Vodun practice west of Hatii, that didn’t narrow things down very much.
 
“What is a Latino doing decked out in voodoo glyphs,” she asked though it was a rhetorical question to frame the problem in her own mind.

“And what is that black stuff? It doesn't look like paint to me.”  
 
Primrose arrived before Alyx could elaborate. Eleanor felt a slight pang of jealousy. The woman looked great as always. [i]What did the repairer of reputations bring? And what of the court? And what of the King? [/i]Eleanor didn’t like to think of herself as a vain woman, but she was honest enough to admit that she chafed a little at the passage of the years.
 
“Sounds like a good place to start,” she agreed with Primrose, nodding towards the police cruiser. The pudgy cheek of Officer Stevens was visible against the window where he slept obedient to Eleanor’s suggestion.
 
“You might start with him, I hit him with a geas when I first arrived so his mind maybe a little tender,” the flat matter of fact delivery belied the queasy feeling it gave her to have warped the mind of a man who was just doing his job.

“He probably has some ideas about where we might look for cameras, or at least likely witnesses.” Eleanor hesitated for a moment, calculating risks and rewards in her mind with quick efficiency.

It was a considerable relief to have Jaelle able to search the car without contaminating the physical evidence of the scene. It confirmed her impression of an empty, deliberately cleaned vehicle.

“I’m thinking…” Eleanor began, pausing to make it clear that it was just a thought and not an idea that she had completely committed to just yet, “that this guy might have been a professional wheel man.” She walked slowly around the SUV trailed by Mal and the ghostly Roma.

“No way all the airbags failed on a SUV this new. Probably they were manually disabled,” she mused. They wouldn’t be able to tell that without a forensic investigation of the vehicle, something she was willing to leave to the police if they were so inclined. There was an outside possibility that the car had been in an accident before and the airbags hadn’t been repacked, but she didn’t think so.

“Mississippi plates,” she mused, pointing to one of the license plates now hanging askew. Probably that meant nothing, it had the feel of a former State vehicle, probably bought at auction for cash in order to avoid a paper trail. Perhaps Fynn would be able to shed some light on that she thought as she obediently stepped back to allow him space to work.
 
“See if you can pull a vin number,” she told the IT specialist. Any professional getaway driver would have manually erased identification numbers with acid or a file, but they might lack the expertise to thoroughly scrub it from the cars on board computers. With all their magical clout, it was possible that Fynn’s more physical investigation might turn something up that their more esoteric methods missed.
 
Once you discover it, the pain will begin.
 
She wasn’t certain how far she trusted Mal’s translation. Not that she doubted his skills exactly but arcane messages were notoriously tricky, even when you set aside things like the Cassandra Effect. They needed a vodun expert, something the Sunday Group hadn’t had since Juliette had been killed. Eleanor winced inwardly at the memory. Fortunately New Orleans was well supplied with such experts, if one could sift the charlatans from the true practitioners.  Alyx and Primrose for that. Mal might be a better choice but a genuine voodoo practitioner might take offense to being visited by an unbidden ghost, and might be able to make that offense felt.
 
There was a lot going on here that didn’t make sense. What was the black fluid? Why was a latino getaway driver, if that is what he was, decked out in Vodun glyphs? Was the mysterious message for him, for them, for someone else? Where had he been coming from and where had he been going? Eleanor closed her eyes and made a sound. To the uninitiated it sounded like nothing more than a simple tonal hum, but music, like everything else in the universe, was mathematics. Perception shifted and she was standing in a gray landscape. It was identical to the scene she had just left, save this existed entirely in her mind. Emmaline called this ‘die Arbeitsfläche’ but Eleanor just thought of it as ‘the place’. Mal, Jaelle and Alyx still stood beside her, or at least Eleanor’s mental constructs of them did. She focused her mind and formulae sprang into existence all around her, shimmering with soft golden light. The light coalesced into a point as she finished the calculation and then zipped over to the ghostly representation of the car. It moved over the corpse inside, rendering the magical gradients line by line, like an old fashioned printer. The glyphs and the black residue both shone with streaks of entropic potential, but the construction of them was very different. Both were powerful, but the black goo seemed much more angry, much more directed than the glyphs. It gave her and odd taste in the back of her throat, familiar yet defying recollection. She slipped back into the moment, only a heartbeat having passed in the real world.
 
“The black stuff is a magical attack of some kind,” she said with certainty. The violence of it burned at the back of her throat like bile as her mind tried to find ways to convey a sense of malice in a physical way.
 
“Lets see what Primrose turns up. Once she is done she and Alyx can…” Eleanor trailed off. A silver car was coming down the road, a clip on siren on its roof flashing but without sound. They should have had another twenty minutes before any official attention arrived.

“Fynn, I hate to rush you but in another few minutes we are going to be tampering with a crime scene, I’ll see if I can buy you some time…”


[hider=Synopsis]
Eleanor theorizes this is a professional getaway driver

Eleanor uses her magic to determine that the black fluid is some kind of magical attack

Some kind of police attention is arriving early and Eleanor is going to stall them while Fynn/Primrose continue to investigate 
[/hider]