Return to Form

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Return to Form
Date of Cutscene: 15 October 2018
Location: New York City
Synopsis: Bullseye is back in town.

CW: Language, Minor Gore

Cast of Characters: Bullseye

CW: Language, Minor Gore
Midtown Manhattan
8:56PM

An NYPD detective makes her way through the front door of a freshly taped-off crime scene -- the high-rise apartment of Thaddeus "Ted" Vasquez, notorious Wall Street shark and star eyewitness to New York's newest white-collar crime-of-the-week. Det. Jennifer Spencer, a long-time member of the NYPD, catches the eye of one of the forensics techs and gives her a small nod.

"What do we got, Cheng?"

Liz Cheng, an Asian-American woman in her late-20's, takes a second to snap another photo of the victim -- a middle-aged man with a bloody pen sticking halfway out of his left eye socket -- before approaching the detective.

"Ted Vasquez, age forty-two, ball-point pen jammed right into his left orbital. Clean as a whistle, ma'am, straight into the brain."

"We got any prints? DNA?"

"No, detective -- as far as we can tell, your perp's a ghost. No hair fibers, no signs of forced entry, no signs of a struggle. TARU says no security footage on anybody coming into the elevator, neither, so either Vasquez let the perp in after walking up thirty-plus flights of stairs, or... there IS no perp and Teddy tripped and fell right into his pen. With his eye."

Spencer kneels down to examine the body, herself. "A pending eyewitness having an unfortunate accident, wouldn't that be something?"

"I'd say," Cheng replies. "But I got something else, here, that I think you should see. We come in here about an hour ago, yeah? Start doing our thing, and as soon as the wind picks up, I start hearing this whistling noise. So, I'm following the sound, right, and boom -- I see this at the window."

Cheng leads Det. Spencher to the massive set of windows in the office and points to a small hole in the glass with the faintest trace of blood around it that she reveals with a portable black light. She blows out a hard breath and clicks the light off. "The diameter of that hole? It's the size of a pen. And get this? It's angled. If we're talking trajectory, I'd say it was from the building across the street -- maybe one or two floors up. Three, max."

"You saying that pen came from the outside?"

"Maybe? Look, I know this sounds ridiculous, but the blood spatter on the glass, the lack of forced entry into the apartment -- this would ALL make sense if we were dealing with ballistics. Sniper, whatever, easy. But the ONE thing that's throwing this off; the biggest, most obvious elephant in the room? What kind of weirdo shooter loads a gun with a pen?"

Spencer blinks as Cheng's hypothesis finally clicks into place in her heard: a high-profile eyewitness. An inexplicable murder with a mundane object. Clean. Efficient. Professional.

"A shooter who doesn't need a gun to begin with," Det. Spencer says, pulling out her phone and dialing in a number.

"Ma'am?"

"Lieutenant, we may have a problem," Spencer says in a concerned tone, her gaze turning to the glass window. "I think he's back -- I think Bullseye is back in New York City."