He walked out of the police station bathroom with the case file tucked in his jacket; no one even suspected him of the theft of it. Nathan caught the nearby bus in the direction of where the case file said the address of the pedophile was. Justice had to be served… The kids had to be safe in that neighborhood. There were no other ways…the feeling of being watched only seemed to get more proud. As a man once said. Tonight is the night. It had to be.

Gabriel Brooks

Sitting near the port watching the boat that Ellis Craine was on slowly go away by the second, Gabriel Brooks let out a small sigh as he stood up from the bench and walked back to his car to drive back to the crime scene, where he obviously expected Ashcroft to be. But to his confusion, when he arrived at the scene, he asked one of the cops where he was. They said he wasn’t here…so…where the hell could he possibly be?

He glanced around and noticed the nearby police station; he knew he had gone there when they had gone to the barn. He probably was there again? Nathan wasn’t the kind of guy to just disappear randomly… Brooks was, though. He walked into the police station and went to the main desk. The cop who was assigned to the main desk told him that the man he was looking for had been in the evidence room; he had requested to look at some old cases that Brooks had been working on. This caught his attention… Nathan was snooping behind his back, huh? Did he figure it out? Was that why he was gone? Brooks couldn’t really blame him…

However, as soon as he walked into the evidence room, he noticed something was wrong. His whole box of case files was empty… Did Nathan run off with all of them? What the hell was he planning to do, that stubborn kid…ugh… Brooks kicked at the floor lightly and noticed a brick had been moved from the wall. He crouched down to examine it; he gently pulled on the brick and tilted his head as he saw the empty space behind it. There was the missing case file… Nathan hid them from the rest of the station? Was he helping his secret being kept as a secret? …Strange… This was unlike the Nathan he knew.

Nathan Ashcroft

The night was near. Nathan was watching the house of the pedophile from the nearby park bench to make sure that he was tracking the right man down. He had bought at the local shady petshop a high dose of experimental-tranquilizer for animal… Why, you might ask…? Just wait and see…

The wait wasn’t long. The man walked out of his house to take out the trash of his diner; it was him. That damn bastard. Nathan had found his target. As the man was walking back toward his house, Nathan stood up from the bench, taking out a syringe filled with a liquid form of experimental-tranquilizer, which he jabbed right into the back of the man as he pushed him inside the home. The man let out a yelp as he fell to the ground, quickly turning around to look up at the man who was attacking him…but the man was already covering his face…with…an empty bag of potatoes? Really? A single hole had been cut through the bag to look out of. The man was staring deeply into his eyes.

Nathan silently tilted his head to the side just like that masked horror movie guy he had seen before… Nathan simply kept staring into the man who wasn’t even fighting back. He was utterly terrified of him. It really did not take that long for the experimental-tranquilizer to knock the man out for long. Nathan let out a small chuckle as he saw the man defenseless on the ground… He was now free of doing anything to this bastard…but he knew one thing…he couldn’t get caught…he needed to find a way to get out of here…without leaving any evidence.

Nathan picked the man up with his gloves and lifted him up on his shoulder, where he walked up the stairs and laid the man down on his bed to make it look like he had simply taken sleep pills before sleeping, which would explain the high dose of it in his blood when the police would check the man’s blood.

Nathan slowly closed the door, making sure it didn’t look like it was closed from the outside, before slowly walking down the stairs and glancing at the oven. Nathan gently tilted his head. Fire…? A small smirk crept up his face under his mask. The hallucination episode he had did show a fire burning evidence…was this what the Watcher meant? …Very well… Nathan crouched down in front of the oven and grabbed a string and attached it to the inside of the oven, leaving it partially open, before running the string down the hallway and attaching it to a mattress that was next to piles of paper… It seems our little pedophile was a writer, huh? What a disgrace… “Good riddance,” Nathan thought as he walked back to the oven and poured a little bit of alcohol directly inside of it before turning it on and walking away from the home. He didn’t even check on if his plan was going to work, as he knew he would need an alibi that he wasn’t at the scene of the crime when it happened, so he went into the nearby bus and caught a bus heading away from the house, which he paid for in cash so it wouldn’t be traceable.

As soon as he noticed the smoke appear in the sky, he got out of the bus and took another, but this time in the direction of the house, as he knew that he himself lived just 5 blocks down from the pedophile’s house. This meant that he could just tell the detectives that he saw smoke nearby his house and was curious. Nathan got out of the bus as he got back nearby the house and made sure at least one or two residents had seen him walk out of the bus. He had also left the bag of potatoes inside the house so that it could burn off. He walked up to the bench he was sitting on earlier and sat down and simply watched the chaos of the house burning. He knew the firefighters would take too long. He had done it. He knew he did, and just like he had predicted, the first cop on the scene was none other than Gabriel Brooks himself; he wasted no time running into the fire trying to play as the hero. But Brooks wasn’t a hero… He never was… He pulled the man out of the house, but it was way too late. The man had died from the smoke. Brooks had run into a fire to try and save a pedophile out of all people…how pathetic, Nathan thought.

Nathan slowly got up from the bench, making sure his suit was clean as he walked up to Brooks and acted as if he was trying to help Gabriel to save the man. Gabriel looked at him, surprised that he was even here, to which Nathan simply said he had gotten curious when he saw a fire as he was going home. Gabriel bit right into his lie. This was easy. Nathan had to bite back a laugh. But I didn’t.

He helped Brooks cover the body from everyone else, and they both walked off to the bench where they sat down, and Brooks started talking about what he had seen inside the house. He was clearly trying to find the cause of the fire before a professional did. After letting him finish, Nathan tilted his head to the side and hummed gently before saying softly.

What about the oven? A risky move on his part. But Gabriel never caught onto it. Good.

Gabriel tilted his head to the side as he was thinking back of what he had seen as he rushed inside the house… The fire did seem to be bigger there… “There was also a lot of smoke coming from the room down the hallway,” he murmured, which Nathan didn’t comment on to not bring attention to himself.

They both kept on talking until the firefighters had cleared the house of all the fire so that they both could head back inside to fully investigate the house. But one of them was merely there to make sure he didn’t leave any evidence of his presence.

Nathan walked upstairs carefully in case one of the steps would break under his weight, which none of them did. Brooks stayed downstairs to investigate Nathan’s theory about the oven. Well, could you really call that a theory?

Nathan let out a small sigh of relief as he saw that he had left no evidence of himself anywhere. He walked back downstairs and announced to Brooks that he had found no evidence of foul play anywhere upstairs…and Brooks concluded the same.

They both walked back outside as Brooks walked up to a nearby officer and declared the man’s death as an accidental death during a house fire. Brooks wrote down in his report that the man had died while sleeping when his oven malfunctioned and started in his sleep, which started the fire.

Nathan had actually gotten away with the murder; he now definitely knew he could get away with another if he needed to. Which he will.