So this is what the end of your career is going to look like.
The office is a tiny, cramped corner with a dim bulb that the janitor always seems to forget to replace, but it's what you've gotten after years in the force. Even consecutive years of budget raises, trying to get ahead of panicking, furious voters haven't managed to get you anything approaching a real investigator's office, but at least the functional door means your ass isn't getting pinched by every asshole that walks by. It's a tiny achievement, but in the nigh-chavunistic subculture that is criminal justice, that's all you get.
Your boss stares you down, over the papers before you that are spelling out bad things in your immediate future. There's photographs of clean houses - sterilized floors, all the furniture removed and the walls carefully stripped of knickknacks. Their barrenness sets a cold creep down your spine. There's nothing to recover in these places, not even ruins. They've been looted of humanity, and what's left is a life-hull, not even the negative image of who once lived there. It smacks of nothing less than total negation, and the level of antipathy - nihilism - that implies is soul-shaking.
"We don't know anything, and we probably won't until the Unsub slips up," Acting Director James tells you, rubbing at the bridge of his nose with two fingers. The job's already stressing him out, not even two days in. Director Cochran had already resigned over this investigation. "I don't need to tell you about how likely that is - his methods haven't changed in four years. But I need a new brain, a different viewpoint, something, so you're getting transferred. I just thought you should hear it from me instead of through the grapevine."
The Eigengrau murder investigations are a department dead end. There's not much to solve or follow up on, and eventually the public pressure and lack of results, the sepulchral, sterilized homes the investigators see one after another, it all takes too much of a toll. Word around the office is that EG was where Cochran put people that complained too much as a pretext to disciplining them when nothing came up. Course, that turned around and bit him in the end too. These days, getting transferred there is informally called 'going cold', which is pretty much what it does to your career. The apology is nice, but it's a shit sandwich and he knows it.
The combined knowledge of the country's best investigators and crime scene forensics have determined that, periodically, a group of people known to associate together, usually two to three adults from mid-thirties to fifties, will vanish. Their homes will be stripped of personal effects and biological life - not even dust mites and bacteria survive the cleansing process.
That's it.
There's no bodies, no murder weapons, no tracks or trails. The disappearances all happen on the same night, but no one's spotted the precise moment of abduction, or whatever's cleaning out the living spaces. It's gone beyond creepy and into the outright bizarre, and it's spawned more conspiracy theories than the JFK assassination by now. It's been argued about elections and debated on talk shows, and word is there's two movies in the making about it, because fear sells, and life must go on. The forensic profile tentatively marks the Unsub down as a white male, twenty to forty-five years of age, but that's because nearly all serial killers fall within that demographic and everyone knows it by now, even the public. Some asshole on Infowars started calling it a conspiracy, the Eigengrau conspiracy, after the color you see in total darkness, your retina's rod cells firing into the silence trying to make sense of nothing. It fit too well, and the name stuck.
James spreads his hands, his face flat and tired. "Go back and visit the previous addresses. Try and stake out, if you have to, look to see if the Unsub's been visiting. Nelson's been trying to grow plants in the last apartment that got hit, but nothing will so much as put out a leaf. Try something along that angle. I'm spitballing at this point, and to be frank so should you. We're out of good ideas and it's time for stupid ones."
The office is a tiny, cramped corner with a dim bulb that the janitor always seems to forget to replace, but it's what you've gotten after years in the force. Even consecutive years of budget raises, trying to get ahead of panicking, furious voters haven't managed to get you anything approaching a real investigator's office, but at least the functional door means your ass isn't getting pinched by every asshole that walks by. It's a tiny achievement, but in the nigh-chavunistic subculture that is criminal justice, that's all you get.
Your boss stares you down, over the papers before you that are spelling out bad things in your immediate future. There's photographs of clean houses - sterilized floors, all the furniture removed and the walls carefully stripped of knickknacks. Their barrenness sets a cold creep down your spine. There's nothing to recover in these places, not even ruins. They've been looted of humanity, and what's left is a life-hull, not even the negative image of who once lived there. It smacks of nothing less than total negation, and the level of antipathy - nihilism - that implies is soul-shaking.
"We don't know anything, and we probably won't until the Unsub slips up," Acting Director James tells you, rubbing at the bridge of his nose with two fingers. The job's already stressing him out, not even two days in. Director Cochran had already resigned over this investigation. "I don't need to tell you about how likely that is - his methods haven't changed in four years. But I need a new brain, a different viewpoint, something, so you're getting transferred. I just thought you should hear it from me instead of through the grapevine."
The Eigengrau murder investigations are a department dead end. There's not much to solve or follow up on, and eventually the public pressure and lack of results, the sepulchral, sterilized homes the investigators see one after another, it all takes too much of a toll. Word around the office is that EG was where Cochran put people that complained too much as a pretext to disciplining them when nothing came up. Course, that turned around and bit him in the end too. These days, getting transferred there is informally called 'going cold', which is pretty much what it does to your career. The apology is nice, but it's a shit sandwich and he knows it.
The combined knowledge of the country's best investigators and crime scene forensics have determined that, periodically, a group of people known to associate together, usually two to three adults from mid-thirties to fifties, will vanish. Their homes will be stripped of personal effects and biological life - not even dust mites and bacteria survive the cleansing process.
That's it.
There's no bodies, no murder weapons, no tracks or trails. The disappearances all happen on the same night, but no one's spotted the precise moment of abduction, or whatever's cleaning out the living spaces. It's gone beyond creepy and into the outright bizarre, and it's spawned more conspiracy theories than the JFK assassination by now. It's been argued about elections and debated on talk shows, and word is there's two movies in the making about it, because fear sells, and life must go on. The forensic profile tentatively marks the Unsub down as a white male, twenty to forty-five years of age, but that's because nearly all serial killers fall within that demographic and everyone knows it by now, even the public. Some asshole on Infowars started calling it a conspiracy, the Eigengrau conspiracy, after the color you see in total darkness, your retina's rod cells firing into the silence trying to make sense of nothing. It fit too well, and the name stuck.
James spreads his hands, his face flat and tired. "Go back and visit the previous addresses. Try and stake out, if you have to, look to see if the Unsub's been visiting. Nelson's been trying to grow plants in the last apartment that got hit, but nothing will so much as put out a leaf. Try something along that angle. I'm spitballing at this point, and to be frank so should you. We're out of good ideas and it's time for stupid ones."