Find the Horcruxes (crack/au)

Day breaks in Chicago, during the long, hot summer of 1926. The city holds out hope that the heat wave will break, or if it doesn't, that maybe the Yankees' winning streak will. Irving Berlin rules the radio, and dirty dealings rule Chicago. Meanwhile, Regulus Black languishes in the Cook County Jail while Sturgis Podmore, Investigator for Hire, starts looking for answers.

When we left our detective, he was having a moment of quiet introspection. As we peek back into his world, he's back in action - not at the office on the South Side, but Downtown.


( Another bowl of Cornflakes, a cup of black coffee, and one more smoke as he walked to the streetcar eventually led him to his old home away from home: the CPD, Precinct 1 - Downtown. )

We return again to Chicago, 1926: the Windy City in the Roaring Twenties, home to mobsters, bootleggers, guys and dolls...and the office of Sturgis Podmore, private investigator.

When we last saw the detective, he'd just agreed to take the case of a lifetime: finding the evidence that would get Regulus Black out of a murder charge that everybody from Mayor Tom Riddle on down wants to see him take the fall for. It looks like an impossible case - but if anyone's an expert in the impossible, it's Sturgis Podmore.

( Friends. Now there was an interesting term, and one that Podmore had learned the folly of using too easily. )

Chicago, 1926. Summer has left the city nights dark and sticky as molasses, clinging to the denizens of the town and dragging them down like flies. Smoke comes from the factories and the cigarettes that nearly everybody consumes, and hot jazz flows from the speakeasies that everybody knows about but no one's talking about. Who's in charge varies from day to day - sometimes it's the mayor, sometimes it's the mob, but they're all criminals just the same. And once again, we find ourselves looking in on the office of one of the few men in this crazy town who's not a criminal: Sturgis Podmore, disgraced cop turned gumshoe for hire.

When we last left the detective, he'd just been paid a visit by gangster moll Celeste Lestrange, pretty little princess of the Lestrange family - a group of mobsters who alternate strangleholds on the city with their rivals, the Blacks. She's got trouble and she is trouble, and as usual, trouble has found Sturgis Podmore.

( Regulus Black's about to go down for a murder he didn't do. )