“Ronald Weasley?”
“Yeah?” Ron asked as he evaluated the two sharply dressed men approaching him with a bare hint of disguised suspicion.
“We’d like to ask you a few questions. If you could just come with us...” the one of the men - an Inspector Dugen judging by the badge being shown - said.
“Is there a problem Inspector?” Ron asked carefully. It wasn’t that Ron didn’t trust that these two were legitimately policemen; while he’d worked with many fine and upstanding members of the police force, he hadn’t worked with every single one of them - or even every single local precinct so of course he didn’t know every single active policeman in the city and its surrounding suburbs. It was just that - as far as he knew - he hadn’t done anything that would require the police to question him at this time. (It wasn’t unheard of for any of them to be contacted by the police to answer a few questions; each of them were usually all too happy to help and had their own field of specialist knowledge. Usually it was Harry being asked; as a paramedic and sometime hero it was only natural that he’d be involved in more than an occasional criminal investigation. That said there was usually some sort of lead up to being asked if they could ask questions, the people doing the asking tended to be the same people time and time again so they eventually became familiar faces, and those officers were often fine with conducting the interview in whatever informal setting they happened to be at rather than dragging everyone down to the precinct. There were exceptions of course. Neville had been asked to come round to the precinct to be read in before being driven out to the crime scene where he’d subsequently and unexpectedly ran into Daphne).
Inspector Dugen and his partner (or at least Ron thought that they were partners; it was the only thing that reasonably made sense at any rate) just Looked at him with unimpressed expressions. Again, Ron found this strange. Either there was a problem and Ron needed to accompany them down to the precinct in order to figure it all out, or there wasn’t one and Ron didn’t need to go with them.
“If you like, you are welcome to use one of our conference rooms.” said Galliant as he came up behind Ron to stand there like a solid wall. It was comforting in a way, to have that kind of unspoken reassurance that someone had your back.
Inspector Dugen didn’t quite glare at Galliant, but the sour look on his face came damn close. Still, he still did manage to get the unspoken message (for someone who’s supposedly on the up and up, you sure are acting suspicious. Is there something you’d perhaps like to confess to?) and while he clearly wasn’t happy about it he did ultimately bow to the ‘threat’ and let Galliant lead them to a nearby empty conference room.
It took Ron and the two inspectors only a few minutes to get settled in and decline Galliant’s offer to send someone in with refreshments (well, the inspectors declined the offer. Ron would’ve been happy to accept if he’d actually been given the chance to, but apparently Ron wasn’t going to be having many choices in this manner. He was really not happy with Inspector Dugen or his partner - who still hadn’t presented his badge or introduced himself so Ron had no idea what his name even was. He’d worked with enough police to know that this was not how you treated someone who you didn’t consider a suspect in whatever crime it was that you were investigating. And on that note, Ron still wasn’t sure what it was that the inspectors suspected him of (because clearly they suspected him of something; unless they were fairly crap at their jobs and treated everybody they talked to as if they thought that they’d done whatever it was). If Ron were going to be honest with himself - which he did try to be since nothing good really came out of deluding yourself - he was really starting to wonder if the two inspectors actually were inspectors and if they were, how the hell they managed not only to not get fired but somehow manage to rise to that rank).
Inspector Dugen frowned. Clearly things were not going as he’d planned and that rankled him. Still there was little he could do about it unless he wanted Galliant and the rest of Avalonus to come down on him and his partner like a ton of bricks. And he really did need Ron to answer a bunch of questions; the sooner the better. “Does the name Sophia Bloch mean anything to you?” he asked. Normally at this point he’d be showing Ron a picture of Sophia, but all the photos and other physical evidence he’d planned on showing Ron were back at the precinct, and clearly going back to the precinct just wasn’t going to happen.
Ron shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve met someone by that name.” he answered honestly.
Inspector Dugen frowned, trying to see if he could feel out the truth of that statement or not. It didn’t feel like a lie to him, but since his quirk had nothing to do with telling truth from lies (and even there things got a bit murky because a person could be telling the truth and lie at the same time, or be telling a lie that they honestly one hundred percent believed to be the truth, or about a million other things that made it hard for a person - even one who had a quirk that dealt with such things - to tell truth from lie) he had to rely on just his fifteen years of experience in dealing with people. “What about Seigfried Scholz?”
Ron took a moment to think about that. The name was somewhat familiar, and Ron thought he remembered where he knew it from, but he wasn’t completely certain. “That’s King Crimson isn’t it?” he asked, mostly to himself. Seeing as most heroes preferred to keep their real names secret out of (the entirely reasonable) fear of villains finding out who they were and going after their friends and loved ones in an attempt to neutralize or hurt the hero in question, it shouldn’t be surprising that Ron couldn’t say with one hundred percent certainty what King Crimson’s real name actually was.
Inspector Dugen nodded. “You’ve dealt with King Crimson before, haven’t you.” he said rather than asked.
“I’ve had one meeting with him at his agency.” Ron replied, still not sure where this line of questioning was going. At least he was fairly certain that he wasn’t a suspect in whatever it was that’d brought the inspectors to question him. (he was also fairly certain that Inspector Dugen and his partner weren’t particularly good at this aspect of their jobs. It was never a good idea to treat potential witnesses as if they were suspects - even if you thought that they were rather questionable. That was a good way for a witness to clam up and not be willing to tell you what you needed to know if for no reason other than no one liked to cooperate with someone who got their back up like that, and then where would you be in your investigation).
Inspector Dugen waited for Ron to elaborate on that statement. “And?” he asked when Ron didn’t.
“We will not be working together anytime soon outside of muli hero agency emergencies.” Ron replied firmly. King Crimson had been just as horrible as he’d been warned and as the rumors had made him out to be (well, some of the milder ones anyway. Ron had counted as being in public after all, so seeing as King Crimson wasn’t stupid - the fact that he’d managed to keep his supposedly more questionable activities quite meant that he was in fact a rather smart man - ), “Look. I can’t help you if you won’t be straight with me. What is this all about?”
Inspector Dugen exchanged a look with his partner, then slumped down a bit with a sigh. “Sophia Bloch has been reported missing and we have reason to believe that she’s been murdered. About two weeks before her disappearance she was excitedly telling her family about a new job - her first job in fact - that she managed to get working for a Mr. Siegfried Scholz. Her family hasn’t heard from her since, and while it isn’t unusual for a young woman of her age to not be in touch with her family on a regular basis, Sophia made it a point to call home at least once a week if not more. Given what her family described of her personality this period of no contact is highly out of character.”
Well shit. Ron sat back and thought about that. On one hand, she could be fine; just caught up in living her life and maybe getting distracted by a new love interest in addition to being busy with a new job; it’d happened before to plenty of newly minted adults when they suddenly found themselves on their own for the first time in their lives (even boring by-the-books Percy had just kind of dropped off the face of the earth for a bit once he’d moved out). On the other, King Crimson did have all those dark rumors following him (and Ron now knew first hand that some of the tamer ones were actually based in truth), and there was a serial killer roaming the streets (although considering what had recently happened over in Coventry, that might be no longer a consideration) - not to mention that there were plenty of people who saw nothing wrong with just grabbing a young woman (or anyone really) off the streets and just killing them or selling them off as part of a human trafficking ring. This might be the day and age of heroes, but people were still people and there would always be scumbags running around ruining things for the rest of them. “Whatever you need to know, just ask.”