Dead Reckoning at Stark Tower

Synopsis

When the dust settles after a brutal engagement with a Kree splinter fleet, the Avengers return to Stark Tower battered and victorious — only to discover one of their own lying dead in the secured briefing room on the forty-seventh floor. The victim is Marcus Vell, a newly inducted Avenger with the rare ability to neutralize any superhuman power within a ten-meter radius. He has been poisoned — a method so deliberately mundane in a tower full of gods and soldiers that it immediately suggests calculation, patience, and intimate knowledge of the victim's movements. Every hero present has an alibi involving abilities that make traditional detection nearly impossible: Thor was reportedly in Asgard via bifrost, Wanda claims she was dreamwalking, Vision passed through three walls simultaneously, and Carol Danvers — the most powerful person in the building — says she was simply flying above the clouds, alone, with no witnesses. Enter Elliot Marsh, a former forensic consultant and the only entirely ordinary human residing in the tower as Carol's husband. Dismissed by most as a civilian curiosity, Marsh possesses something none of his extraordinary housemates can replicate: an unenchanted, unaugmented, thoroughly human mind. He begins to notice the small contradictions. The coffee cup placed at the wrong angle. The time-stamp discrepancy in FRIDAY's logs that everyone else overlooked. The too-perfect alibi that required someone to know exactly when the power-nullifier would be alone. As Marsh methodically interviews each Avenger — gently, conversationally, the way one might discuss the weather — he unravels a conspiracy rooted not in hatred but in fear: someone believed Marcus Vell was about to expose a secret that would shatter the team permanently. The locked room, it turns out, was locked from the inside by design — and the murderer never left.