After a small talk and they finished the delicious meals, Peter slowly drunk the smoothie and said in a low voice, “Guys, I want to do something. I wonder if you could go to a place and investigate something with me. It’s going to be dangerous. And we have to fight if necessary.”
He could say it openly because he knew that he could trust them. Everyone sitting in their table all came from QRT team and they are all familiar people. Although their friendship might be only around a year old, they feel that they could trust each other completely.
“ Guys, if I told you that I was under a curse all the time till I got purified in Cerriro Town, would you believe it?” , asked Peter in serious look. Ronald, Allen and Ben sat up straight immediately. Ben said, “I am going to call Dale, Glenn and Mark.”
When Ben stood up and wanted to go, Peter stopped him, “ Ben, wait a second. We are going somewhere to talk about this.”
Then, Peter glanced around and said, “Come on guys, let’s go. We will take a walk along the road.”
Ronald and Allen shrugged at each other and also stood up. When they passed by the trio of Dale, Glenn and Mark who were giving candies to the children on the porch, Ben called them, “Dale! We need to talk.”
Then, he gestured Glenn and Mark who were looking at him with doubts to come over too, and he added, “Peter has something troublesome.”
A few minutes later, the group of seven men sat down under a big tree on the roadside which was already a few hundred meters away from living place. While taking a breathe of fresh air and looking at the green crops, Peter said, “I have never talked about my past, right?”
Mark said impatiently, “Make a long story short, Peter. You know my brain can’t take in too much things.”
Everyone felt helpless about Mark at the same time. But no one felt offended nor angry. Mark, a Russian, used to be alcoholic guy sinking in strong rums all the time for some reasons. It was until he was pulled into QRT team, became friends with everyone in the team and decided to make a change under the a certain offensive talk of Peter, he hit gym with everyone regularly and became normal again. As for how Peter did? It was that morning when Mark came to office in the half drunk state, Peter compared him with a certain Russian guy in Marvel who died as a villain and accomplished nothing until he died. Although Mark didn’t even have any idea about who the hell that guy was, how could he take that. So he decided to do a physical debate, and then he was beaten by Peter with a punch. After that day, Mark decided to change himself. Now, he doesn’t even resent Peter but he even feels thankful. Otherwise, he might not have decided to quit his job and chose to join this team seeking the unknown future. However, after these days, he feels that he had made the best decision at that day.
Peter looked at the black sheep in the team helplessly and said after brewing for a while, “Long story short, I was serving as detective inspector of CID directly under Texas state governor office at that time. I was cursed by someone while I was investigating a very vicious criminal gang which was targeting young girls in Texas city at that time. Then, I got demoted and deported to this city.”
After hearing this, everyone’s reaction was different. But they were all thoughtful. After thinking for a while in silence, Ronald asked what everyone wanna ask, “How was your progress? Were you acting alone or with a team at that time?”
Peter sighed and said in a sad tone, “It was with a team of five people including me. We worked together for years and made lots of vicious criminals got the punishments which they deserved. I was forgetting them because of the curse acting on me. That curse is so evil. Even after I was purified by the mysterious founder of Sacred Heart School, it still left me with permanent damage. As soon as I remembered about what happened back then, I did a quick search through my network. Hey, they were all found dead after a week I left the state and came here.”
All six men at presence are not fools nor idiots so they immediately realized that Peter and his team might have found out something so they were silenced. Peter escaped for some reasons but his team members were not that lucky. However, they don’t care about the risks they are going to face. Instead, they all became very interested.
Ben narrowed his eyes and asked, “Peter, I am now very interested in what happened to you. Can you tell me in detail. No, actually, you don’t need to tell the whole story. Just tell us about a few main things. For example, about the case, and what you found.”
Peter said calmly, “We came to know about a strange case from a mom who lost her daughter. She was a very angry and sad mother. Her daughter was also a little cutie in the photo we received from her. It was rather an email of death will than a normal reporting mail. When we wanted to call her and ask after we read her mail, we couldn’t get in contact with her. So, we called local police station and asked. However, we were informed that she was already dead a few days before that. Well, coincidentally, we were in Houston at that time. We noticed that something was not right. So, we decided to investigate secretly first. We hurriedly left Houston just on that day and drove to Texas city where the case happened. After driving for half an hour, we got there. It is just a small city with around 50,000 inhabitants.”
Then, he thought for a while before he continued, “However, we couldn’t ask anything from locals. We strolled around the city like normal campers who came to visit and fish. We went to bars and tried to understand the situations. All we got was just a bunch of rumors and strange stories. And the worst was that there were no missing person but only dead people from accidents and diseases. Of course, we didn’t believe the evil. So, we used our department’s network. Guess what? Unbelievably, what these folks said was true. There was no missing case recorded in our data base. But, we decided to change our way of thinking. We searched with dead young girls.”
At that point, Peter grasped his fists tightly and said with obvious anger as his tone was slightly raised unknowingly, “And, we found a lot, dead records of lot of young girls. They all died from various reasons. One or two young girls would die at every month. Moreover, it turned out that the similar situation was happening all over the federation and not just a small county. But they all had one similar thing which was that they would die in several days before the new moon. In some places, the young boys were also included in the list.”
Peter glanced at his new reliable teammates and said, “We realized that something went terribly wrong so we decided to keep it secret. First, we cleared off all of our search history in the server. Then, we also deleted the mail from unfortunate mother and even the photo of her with her child which we printed out was set on fire. Moreover, in order to not let the third party know that we were investigating about it, we agreed to never ever talk about it and set secret codes. As veteran detectives, we thought about all situations and we were being extra careful. But, hey, who knew that things would turn out like this.”
Peter finally sighed, loosed his fists, and said helplessly, “We guessed and had a lot of suspects. Finally, we decided to monitor all elites of Houston secretly. It took three months and we finally found out a routine and got a list of suspects among many people. Just a dozen people but their identities still managed to surprise us. A mayor, several city councilors, two judges, two from police and a very rich man who was well known for charity. They would do a closed door dinner party on every new moon day. No other people got invited. And why it must be on new moon? So, we quickly spotted them. We wanted to do a big move and it was also our worst and stupidest decision. We reported about what we found out to our superintendent and requested a warrant order on a day which was just three days before next new moon. Then, we got fucked instead of getting the warrant order. It was said we took bribes. Then, we got to court in our home base Austin. However, we were helpless. Even with insufficient evidences, judges and juries judged us as guilty. And that’s what happened.”
