Case File No.56

It was just your typical Seattle day – light and dark gray clouds intermingling together, sprinkling throughout the day, wind blowing near constantly. I was sitting in mine and Anna’s office when the Boss came in and dropped 2 huge boxes on my desk, nearly spilling my cup of coffee all over my keyboard.

“Here. You and Anna are covering this case,” he grunted.  “Solve it. Fast.”

He walked out of the room and left me to the case. I wiped off the few drops of coffee that made it onto my suit. I sighed. You would think more boxes would mean an easier case to solve – more evidence, easier to find suspect – but no. Generally speaking, the more boxes the Boss handed me the more work I had ahead of me. My partner, Anna, wouldn’t be pleased either. I sighed and sipped my coffee for a few unfortunately short minutes, staring at the boxes in front of me. After much internal bargaining, I stood up and opened the first box and peered inside. It was full of DVDs, journals, crime scene photographs, physical evidence – hair, bits of flesh, nails, blood samples. This already looked like it was going to be one of the most gruesome cases of the year. I looked at the clock and decided to take the boxes home and organize them. I left the office building and walked out into the crisp autumn air. It struck me that not many people were out that evening. It was just after five o clock. Shouldn’t more people be getting off work? I reached my car, put the boxes on top of it, unlocked the door and piled in. I put the boxes on the passenger seat of my beat up car and started the drive home.

I got home around 5:45, after stopping to get some food for dinner. I made myself tacos and sat down in front of the television. I ate quickly, watched my favorite comedy show – King of the Hill. I would need something funny to get me through these boxes. I emptied the contents out onto the table in front of me. I noticed there were photos from three different crime scenes, so I started by organizing everything by victim. Why it wasn’t in the first place, I wasn’t sure at that point. But as I started going through everything, I had an idea why. It was all so gruesome. No one would want to deal with this. Maybe that’s why me and Anna got the case. We were the best detectives there. Stomachs of steel. Everyone probably assumed we would be able to cope with it. Looking through it though, I wasn’t sure we could. It wasn’t like we had a choice though. People were dying and Anna and I were assigned the case, so we had to end it.

After organizing everything by victim, I started on the pile with the earliest dates. I picked up the first of many photographs and gulped as I examined the picture. What was left of the body was mangled. As if someone…had been eating it, ripping pieces of its flesh off, tearing it to bits. The body was lying in a bed. The white sheets were soaked with fresh looking blood. They were ripped in places, like the person had struggled. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. The body was too destroyed. I thought it was a woman because the hair on the head was long, but everything was too mangled and bloody to tell. The chest was torn to pieces, the ribs were broken, sticking out, the heart was missing, three fingers were gone, the nose was gone, the eyes were lying on the floor. I could hardly bear to look.

Not wanting to look at the pictures anymore, I picked up the journal they’d collected and put in the box. I opened it and flipped to the last entry.

"11/3/12, 8:50 PM. I don’t know how much longer I can take this. I’m scared all the time. Paranoid. Something’s always watching me, opening my doors and windows whenever I’m asleep. I’m sure I’ve developed insomnia. I just can’t sleep anymore. Oh God, someone help me. I’m going insane. Something’s going to get me, I just know it. Every day it’s the same thing. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. My mom told me to go get help. I don’t want help, I want this THING to leave me alone!! Oh God, I shouldn’t have written this. Now I’m just even more scared... I remember growing up I was always scared of what’s under the bed, behind the shower curtain, or waiting in bed next to you, waiting for you to roll over… that heaviness that you feel when you so desperately want to look behind you, but can’t bring yourself to move… None of those were ever as terrifying as this feeling I’m plagued with now… I know I’m going to die. Whoever reads this, you all know what I’m talking about. That overbearing paranoia and fear or your own imagination when you sit in a dark room, all by yourself… "