The Evidence

Disclaimer: Except for an OC, the characters here and the world in which they inhabit are the creation and property of JK Rowling.

"He was there and you let him go? WHAT WERE YOU THINKING, KATIE ASHER?"

Few people ever saw Kingsley Shacklebolt angry or upset in any way, but Katherine Stanton was getting a good dose of it right now. Proudfoot and Tonks could hardly contain their giggling in the hallway. Remus took out a scrap of parchment and wrote "Katie Asher/Katherine Stanton" on it. Kingsley had been assigned to keeping the lines of communication open between the Minister and the special investigator. At the moment he was communicating rather loudly.

"He's not going anywhere," Katherine answered calmly. "He knows as well as you do that there's not a shred of evidence except the word of one witness who hates the man already. And do you mind using my professional name, please?"

Kingsley's voice lowered but somehow got angrier. "Are you saying Harry Potter is a liar and that you don't think he did it?"

Katherine smiled like a large cat toying with its prey. "Oh, he did it. He did it, and right now he's smugly sitting in his own kitchen, eating a tomato sandwich and planning how he will get away with it. He was the only one on that tower who could and would do it so cleanly." She leaned over Kingsley's desk. "I would prefer to capture him in such a way that we can actually convict him, however. Style won't convince the Wizengamot."

"That's why we will use Priori Incantatem on his wand."

"He's managed to clear this past month's worth of spells from it long before now, if he even used his own wand that night."

"That would take some complicated magic."

"For a wizard who took O's in how many N.E.W.T.s, and who has increased his knowledge and skill a hundredfold since then?"

Shacklebolt sat down, hard. "Did you get any sleep last night or did you just read our records on him?" He thought for a moment. "Do you think he will get away?"

"I think that there's much more to the story than we know. I would like to speak to the witness, but I understand he's unavailable?"

Shacklebolt nodded. "Until the end of July. Poppy is keeping a close eye on him, and then it's his family home. If we try to move him before then, he'll be exposed. Every Death Eater in Wizarding Britain knows who and where he is and is under orders to capture him if possible, including those here at Ministry."

"If that's the timetable, then that is what I will have to work from. In the meanwhile I can study the boy's statements, study the crime scene, and learn all I can about the enigmatic Severus Snape."

Katherine spent a long morning on the top of the Astronomy Tower at Hogwarts School. She examined the statements and walked through each person's position and steps as though she were choreographing a dance. She spent an hour near the wall around the school property going over the duel between Snape and Potter in the same way.

She suddenly stopped and looked at Tonks, who was holding a folder filled with various parchments. "Why didn't Snape just kill Potter? Doesn't He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named just want the boy dead?"

Tonks looked back over Harry's statement. "Snape said that Potter needed to be killed by You-Know-Who, himself."

"So why didn't Snape kidnap the boy at that point and deliver him to... He-Who...oh, this is so tedious...him? Snape had Potter, wandless, injured, at his mercy. They were feet from a place where they could Apparate. Hagrid was dealing with the fire at his cottage, and there was just Potter against a half dozen Death Eaters. They could easily have used a binding charm and taken him. It's curious."

After lunch the team returned to the Ministry and started to assemble their notes. The papers and personal effects from Snape's office and living quarters at Hogwarts had been boxed and taken to the Ministry. Proudfoot and Tonks were called away on Auror work while Lupin sorted through the information they had gathered and re-gathered.

"Not a very happy childhood," she mused. "Perhaps some domestic abuse..."

Remus poised his hand to reach for any of several folders. "Where did you see that?"

"His house is better kept than when his parents were alive. The places where the walls have been plastered over and repainted are clear to see if you know where to look."

"And you know where to look?"

Katherine simply gave Remus a vacant stare before speaking again. "His mother was magical but his dad was a Muggle. That doesn't always work out. Even when both try very hard they end up living separate lives. His mum was from a well established purest-of-the-pure-blood family, she was in Slytherin House, she was the whole thing, and then married a Muggle. For all we know, his dad simply showed up on the scene and married her. I wish we had more background on that."

"So when he got to Hogwarts, he took after his mother's side of the family. That makes sense."

"But, if his dad's a Muggle, why buy into the whole pure-blood superiority thing? He must have hated his father and he must have had good reason. Which brings me back to the abuse."

"I see."

"At the same time, there isn't a single book or publication of pure-blood propaganda in his house or rooms at Hogwarts, not even Nature's Nobility, out of hundreds of books MLE catalogued. All Death Eaters, even the illiterate ones, have at least that. One of these files shows Snape punished students for using the word 'Mudblood,' too. His loyalties are quite odd. I'm missing a major piece of this puzzle, somehow."

Katherine sat back and thought, her hand tapping her mouth as she tried to put it together.

"What do we know about the relationship between Dumbledore and Snape?"

Remus looked at Katherine carefully. He had found her files under both names and read them shamelessly. Katherine (Katie) Asher had been a Hogwarts student two years behind him. Her mother was magical, a relative of the Longbottoms, and her father was a Muggle. She sorted to Hufflepuff and received good enough grades to be accepted into the Auror program but otherwise did not stand out in any way. There was a note in the file signed by Rufus Scrimgeour to indicate that she was accepted as a trainee with the Auror program. The next page showed a copy of a marriage certificate to a Cyrus Stanton, Muggle. Several pages appeared to have been tampered with and then there was a note that the husband and father were both deceased, on the same date, at a Muggle hospital.

From there, the file on Katherine Stanton showed that she moved to the United States and trained with their Auror program. Several notes signed by Kingsley showed that she had received commendations in the USA. As American Aurors often did, she trained with several government agencies while there. After completing her training, she spent several years working with the Americans. Afterwards she started working privately as something between an investigator and a bounty hunter. It was hard to tell from the file where Katherine's loyalties might lie, but based upon the source of most of the information, it seemed she would probably be loyal to Kingsley.

Remus returned to the question at hand. "Very little," he answered. "I think Snape spent time in the Headmaster's office when we were students, although not as much as my friends, James and Sirius. Our foursome could be fairly destructive in our way." He smiled in fond remembrance.

"I see in the school records many indications that Snape was not your friend." Katherine raised an eyebrow as she looked at Lupin. It was a demand that he explain.

"James Potter and Sirius Black took an instant dislike to Severus Snape, and he to them, the very first time we all rode the Hogwarts Express. When you add the House rivalries... well, we were never going to be friends with him."

"What about you, Remus?"

He sighed. "In another time or place, I would like to think that Severus and I could have patched over our youthful stupidities and become collegial. We did work together for one year... but my being friends with James destroyed any possibility of friendship, at least for Severus."

"So you have a bias?"

"It gets more complicated than that. I expect you've read my records, too?" Katherine nodded while holding his gaze evenly, indicating that nothing she read had bothered her. "So you would understand that my situation was eased by having Wolfsbane Potion prepared by a top Potions master. He prepared the potion and covered my classes at the time of the full moon. By doing both, he made my year as Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor possible. Dumbledore didn't give him a choice, and Severus did it. I'm in Severus's debt."

"So any bias you have...?"

"That bias would be based upon the fact that he murdered the man who mentored so many of us," Remus said with a flash of anger on his usually calm face. Then he relaxed. "Yet Dumbledore said, time and again, that he trusted Snape... The two spent hours together in that tower office, discussing who knows what. Before the murder, I would have said the one person who knew anywhere near as much about the plans of the resistance to You-Know-Who as Dumbledore would be Snape."

She kept thinking. "From Dumbledore's notes in these records, it seems as though he tried to replace some of what Snape didn't get from his father. There's at least some mentoring involved. It does seem rather odd that Dumbledore would give so much of himself to a man who would end up killing him. If he knew Snape was planning to kill him, why would Snape have been kept on staff? It was not like Dumbledore to be completely fooled like that. And if Snape knew so many of Dumbledore's thoughts and plans, why haven't the Death Eaters acted more decisively with all of that knowledge? There's no way to sort this out."

"So what's the next step?"

"I've received an odd invitation for an event scheduled at the same time as the funeral. Dumbledore was my headmaster, too, and I wish I could pay my respects. However, I believe it's in the best interests of the case if I attend this other event."

A/N: This has been beta read by Trickie Woo.