Chief Inspector Richard Crawford scratched his tired eyes and looked at the clock. 11:34pm. What a day...
14 hours ago, his men, working alongside agents from the BTFC, stormed the headquarters of one of the largest of London's crime rings. What they found had shocked and confounded them all.
The criminals had been taking animals - dogs, cats, rats -, stuffing them inside illegally imported female bodysuits, and sealing them up. The zippers had all been ripped off, melted, whatever. Then the poor creatures had been sold into prostitution.
It got worse. The ringleader and his two bodyguards had enter the building. When they broke down the doors to arrest him it had been bedlam - women shrieking like animals, climbing the curtains and furniture, biting and scratching - and by the time the situation was under control the ringleader was gone. The place was surrounded, he couldn't have escaped, but he and his bodyguards were just gone.
Crawford stared at the fifty one mugshots splayed out on his desk, and the fifty one bodysuits stared back at him with placid, animal expressions. He'd wager his badge that forty eight of them contained nothing more than traumatised, terrified animals. But the other three...
"Think I got everything you asked for, Chief," Constable Charles gasped, as she stepped into his office carrying a heavy box. "Hard to find a pet shop open at this time though." She dumped it on his desk. The smell of bones, meat, and old leather filled the room. A thick, studded collar and leash dangled over the side of the box.
"Good work, Constable. That'll be all."
His eyes shifted from the dog leash, back to the mugshots, and settled on a brunette in a pink, shoulderless dress, wearing a distinctly human smirk on her face. That one. He'd start with that one.
