Chapter Text
“What’s happening?” Nikolai asks when he gets into the office and sees his team crowded around a whiteboard, “new case?”
Dominik nods, “recent abduction.”
Nikolai looks at the two photographs on the whiteboard. One of a pretty girl, maybe in her late teens. The other of a hot professor type, with almost unnaturally dark eyes.
Fuck. This is just the sort of case likely to be all over the news in hours, and to end badly if they don’t act quickly.
“How long has she been missing? Is he her professor? Any evidence?”
“Wrong way round, Nik,” Dominik says, “while Professor Aleksander Morozov is a star Physicist at Os Alta University and Alina Starkova has just taken his class, she isn’t the one who’s been abducted … he is.”
Nikolai frowns, “are we sure that –”
“It’s all on camera. She wasn’t subtle about it, didn’t even try to hide. Caught up to him in the parking garage yesterday evening, pretended to ask him a question and then tasered him.”
“What’s her motivation. Obsessive love? Some grudge about grades?”
“She’s a top student, has always got at least 95% in all her exams. We’re thinking some sort of obsession – she went to a lot of his office hours, always staying as long as possible. And we found all his publications in her apartment, dog-eared and annotated with her own thoughts. Might be a romantic fixation but could also be an academic one, likely both.”
“How are we doing on tracking them?”
Dominik shrugs, “it was easy enough to follow their path in the city, but we lost them soon after. She dumped the car, so realistically they could have gone in any direction.”
Nikolai wonders what Starkova’s goal is. It won’t be easy for her, face plastered on the news and trying to lie low, especially with a man who is taller and broader than she is to keep subdued.
“What else significant was found at her apartment, aside from Morozov’s publications?”
Dominik hands him a book about the historical significance and supernatural beliefs regarding eclipses, “we think this might be important. There’s a solar eclipse coming up in two days, and she also had some really weird articles about how the solar eclipse can give a couple complementary powers – sun and shadow, light and dark, that sort of stuff – if you’re joined in the right place at the right time.”
For a moment, Nikolai just stares at the book, “… so, are you saying that Starkova believes that if she and Morozov have sex at some sacred place at the moment of the eclipse, then they’ll both get superpowers?”
“Err … yeah, that’s about it,” Dominik nods, smiling wryly.
Nikolai sighs. He’s seen weirder cases, but not by much.
“Right, let’s get someone researching sacred sites associated with eclipses.”