When a Detective (See later entry) in Urban Fantasyland is on the case, there are surprisingly few random events. What may look like a tragic accident will often have supernatural forces behind it, or at the very least will be related enough to the events at hand that it will stretch the idea of coincidence to the limit. The proper pacing and arrangement of accidents is something of an art when staging a Mystery Play. Poetic Justice plays a large part in how and when accidents occur, especially near the climax of the mystery.

For accidents that truly are accidents, with no actual involvement with the events of a Mystery, see Herrings, Red.

-Quote from an internally circulated employee email at Mystery Play LLC, presumably not for public consumption.

You know the story. A guy or gal with more magical power than is probably good for them, with a problem with authority, bulls their way through the intricate plans and bullshit politics of the high and mighty to answer a question that can’t be solved by the regular police because they won’t believe that “A wizard did it” is a valid answer. It’s a tried and true formula with a reasonably broad appeal.

And it’s one that my bosses put together packages for and charge exorbitant rates to experience from the point of view of the detective. Mystery Play LLC is selling an image, and both rich brats from the Old magic families and the Magebros who want to disrupt the Spell formula industry will pay good money to be a protagonist for a few weeks. They get to wear a magic trench coat and solve problems with a quip and a wand, and I occasionally slip and punch one of them a little too hard from time to time. The insurance covers it and they have to sign a waiver to participate in any Mystery Play LLC tour package.

See, I play the Heavy. I’m never the mastermind behind the plot, but I’ve got a face that could only get work as a pretend thug or a real one, and all told I’d rather the guns and wands people are aiming at me are loaded with blanks.

It’s a solid gig, it pays well, and ever so often I get to play against type- I do a real good “Partner with only one month left till retirement who dies in the first act” too.

Unfortunately, things had just gone entirely off script, because the guy who’s supposed to solve the pre-prepared case was lying on the floor with a hole as big as a grapefruit where his face used to be, burned clean through and out the back of his skull, based on the fact that I could see the carpet through it.

I stared for a long while, and then called the director. “Hey, uh. He’s gonna be real hard to provide threatening exposition to, boss.”

“What, is he drunk? Slap him awake, it’s covered by the waiver.”

“He’s dead. Someone iced the customer before I got here.”

I took the earbud out for a bit after that. When the director starts screaming his curses start being actual fucking curses.

Once he’d gotten all the yelling out of his system, I put it back in and asked the most important question. “So how fucked are we? Who is this guy, anyway? All I’ve got is the profile he submitted for his Detective character.”

“What, you don’t recognize him?”

“He’s got no face, boss. Whoever did for him burned a hole clean through his head. Inside looks cauterized, so it was either a wand or Lawson finally invented a laser pistol.”

Boss was silent for a moment. “Have you seen Lawson this morning?”

“Boss, I was kidding. Anyway. He was there during makeup check and gave me the usual loadout for this sort of scene.”

Clark Lawson was the head of our props department, a pretty solid guy, for someone born in one of the old magic families. (Which one I couldn’t say- tracking those lines of inheritance is a full time job and not one I’ve got the smarts for.) But he had the misfortune to have a rare magical deficiency where he could only power and use magical devices and not cast any spells of his own. Still better off than someone like me, but apparently a big enough shame that his family dropped their support and he had to find a real job, which led to him leveraging what magic he could do and making the gear we use to sell the Mystery Play illusion.

“Okay, good. Then I’ll send him over to take a look at things, Don’t touch anything, obviously. We’re...going to want to keep this in house for a bit. The client and the people behind him, it’s a lot better if we have someone we can hand over as the culprit before they make their own judgement.”

That pretty much cinched that the dead guy was from one of the old families. They weren’t inclined to listen to any law but their own. The other kind of guy we get who wants to play wizard detective for a couple of weeks don’t tend to have any backers but their shareholders, who can be terrifying, but not “We control magical society” terrifying.

“Sure thing, boss.”

He cut the line then, presumably to go yell at Lawson, leaving me alone with a dead body. Not the best conversationalist, and I wasn’t supposed to touch anything in the room, so I did the only thing I could to pass the time- I looked through the dossier on the ‘character’ he’d been playing.

There’s a few different packages we offer, usually based on the magical talents of the guy buying it. One of the most popular is the Chosen Everyman, where the detective is the focus of a prophecy that makes him important to the story of the play and that’s why he gets involved. The basic set up is that they’re an outsider to magical society and that gives them an edge.

But our dead boy had picked the Cynical Pro, which was a little surprising. The Cynical Pro package is all about being skilled, world-weary, and an asshole to everyone they meet. This of course makes it a pretty popular package, nearly as popular as the Chosen Everyman. Their schtick is that they claim to be in it for the money because they’re a professional but get personally involved despite that stance. Our guy looked a little young for that, but it’s hard to judge when there’s no face.

Derek Criss was the name attached to the package- an alias, of course, for the immersion. Apparently the gimmick this time was that he was an ex-stage magician who quit the job after learning there was real magic out there and became a private eye. There was a photo included, but wasn’t great, and it’s not like I could compare it to the guy on the floor. The ears looked right, probably, I guessed. Hopefully Lawson would turn up soon and could give us more, or the Boss would stop being so weirdly cagey about the client’s identity.

It took another half hour for Lawson to show up- the client had paid for one of the deluxe Play packages, which meant we were renting out an entire Wainscotting Neighborhood, one of those gated magical communities where you have to have a special knack or specific knowledge to get in, or be really good at getting lost. It gave a more authentic experience because it was a small city in its own right, and took extra time to navigate. But it also meant that most of the locals would be in on the gimmick, so there was less risk of danger to innocent bystanders.

Lawson looked about what you’d expect a man who specialized in crafting magical tools with a chip on his shoulder about not being able to do “Real magic” would look like, which is to say he looked more like a wizard than most actual wizards who aren’t airbrushed on the side of a van. It’s got a practical side as well- the ridiculous beard hides his face from any relatives, and the outfit puts the wind up everyone. Still, his act can be a little grating.

“Gadzooks, what a terrible display, I shall endeavour to…”

I rolled my eyes. “Save it for the marks, please. Don’t suppose you recognize this guy?”

Lawson eyed the body. “Can’t really say that I can place his face.”

Handing him the head shot from the character profile, I asked, “This any better?”

It was Lawson’s turn to roll his eyes. “No. This is his ‘character’ look. He was wearing a glamour. A lot of the guys who go for Mystery Play Vacations do. That’s one of the stock faces we have on file.”

“Greaat. So we’ve gotta wait for the boss to ID him, unless you’ve got something in your kit.”

“I’ve got a lot of things in my kit, but first let’s try and figure out what killed him. I doubt he was cleaning his wand and it went off, but better to eliminate that possibility.” He placed his bag on the desk the client would have been using. My script called me to smash it in half while threatening the guy, but it didn’t look like it had been pre-weakened. If it had, the weight of Lawson’s bag probably would have done it.

As he was rummaging in the bag, Lawson eyed the wound in the dead man’s face. “On the upside, we can eliminate one suspect almost immediately.”

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“You, obviously, Ray. If you’d killed him, he’d be in a lot more pieces or his skull would have been crushed by blunt trauma and not burned.”

I glared at him, but he wasn’t exactly wrong. I play the sort of parts I do because if I hadn’t gotten picked up for Mystery Plays, I’d probably be doing them in earnest. Lawson kept pulling things out of his bag- a few I recognized- the dowsing rod, a square level, and some sort of respirator mask. The rest I didn’t. I waved a hand at the mask. “I don’t think he’s got much trouble breathing. Or maybe more trouble with it than that could help with.”

Lawson scoffed. “Ye of little faith. Besides, it’s for me, not him. Some of the tests I’ll use produce toxic fumes.”

“And you didn’t bring one for me?

He shrugged, strapped on the mask, and leveled the dowsing rod at the corpse. “It’s not poisonous to trollbloods. Very little is.”

“I’ll just...wait outside anyway. Call me back in when you know something, okay?” I ducked out of the room, grabbed the door I’d kicked down when I first got here off the floor, and sort of haphazardly hung it back in the frame.

Hearing Lawson work is nearly as uncomfortable as seeing it, even through a mostly closed door. For one thing, I’m pretty sure I heard the corpse trying to talk without a mouth, nose, or tongue. I mean, I don’t have a personal or religious objection to necromancy- if I did, I couldn’t do this job because like 60 percent of my roles involve layering on zombie makeup and playing a specialized ‘brute’ undead with a bunch of summoned undead extras as my support, but it just sounded incredibly uncomfortable. And what followed was worse. Eventually, everything was quiet, and I risked looking inside, covering my mouth just in case.

The corpse didn’t seem to have moved, but Lawson was sitting at the desk drinking coffee from a disposable cup. At least I assumed it was coffee. I wouldn’t put it past Lawson for it to be something else, to be honest.

“So, what’s the word?”

“He doesn’t know who killed him. They were wearing the same glamour he was. If I had to guess, the plan was for them to take his place and set up a proper alibi, but your work ethic interfered, so they ran when you kicked down the door.” I glanced around the room. The one window in this room was fake- it looked out on an illusory vista. So I kicked down the bathroom door. The window over the tub was open. If they’d squirmed out of that, they probably weren’t human. I called back out into the office.

“Did you call the boss and ask him to lock down the neighborhood? They probably couldn’t get far.”

Lawson nodded towards the corpse. “Right after he told me.” Lawson paused. “He also told me who our dead man is, probably because he figured that I should know.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Well?”

“My cousin, apparently. Louis Carrefour.”

That was a name I recognized. The family name, anyway. The Carrefours were one of the oldest of old magic families on the continent, having crossed over from France sometime before the Louisiana Purchase. They were not known for their restraint or proportionate responses. I groaned. “So on a scale of 1-10, how fucked are we, anyway?”

“About a twelve, I’d have to say,” Lawson took off his wizard hat and wiped his brow with it. “This could be incredibly bad.”

“So are we going to bring in local law enforcement, or does the boss want to keep this in house, still?”

“Local law enforcement would probably report it to the family, for procedural reasons and -that- could lead to this entire community getting blown up. Possibly literally. No, what we’re going to do is recast, maybe lure the killer out because they think the target survived with a death substitute charm or something.”

“Isn’t that a little short notice? And where are we gonna find someone willing to walk into the part with this little notice and “By the way, you’ll be targeted by a real killer?”

That’s when the boss’s voice piped up over the comm. “Haven’t you always wanted a leading part, Ray?”

It was then I realized what the plan was, and answered the boss the only way I could: “I want time and a half and a hazard bonus.”