Camera forgotten in one hand, the woman stared wide-eyed and ashen-faced at the middle of the room. They’d never bothered to cover up the corpse in the first place. Maybe she hadn’t quite expected to see the main attraction right as she’d stepped into the room.
The inspector himself cut an imposing figure in the corner of the room where he stood stoically. Well, not anymore. Now he’d walked over near the door where one of his colleagues stood shifting from foot to foot anxiously. “Miles. Why did you bring her here?”
His tone wasn’t very accusative, but the other guy seemed to shrink a little anyways, “Well… I, ah, I didn’t expect her to be like that… she told me she wasn’t an amateur and she did seem like the kind of person who’d take things in stride.”
Than sighed and smoothed out nonexistent wrinkles from his cuff, “In any case, the status of the case has been edited. Press releases are still given for major turnouts, but no more on-site imagine or interviews are to be allowed from now on.” His colleague nodded and stepped forward to place a hand on the woman’s shoulders.
The touch seem to jolt her consciousness back and she swallowed, pulling her gaze away, “I’m sorry about the intrusion, sir. With the new rules, I guess I have to leave now, right?” Her eyes were regretful at the lost time and the lost chance, but they still held a trace of horror. She left easily alongside Miles.
One man was left alone in the room and he returned to his corner to continue thinking. His eyes never focused on the body as he contemplated the criminal and the case. He had already spent enough time examining each and every cut and bruise, as meticulously as he had treated all the other bodies. If it was up to him, the lonesome dead would have been cremated or at least left in peace in a morgue somewhere already, but the CWP and PCID still want the bodies to be left at the scene of crime. Unfortunately for him, having the heavy authority of the government behind you didn’t do much good if you didn’t quite exist.
They were beyond help. Never dwell on things you can’t change: that was what he’d lived on for so long, and it would continue to keep him in good standing. Don’t think too hard about what you hate seeing.
Back onto the topic of the killer. The crime scenes were unassuming and showed little. The bodies only told a tale of a variety of weapons, significant strength, and an inhuman thirst for pain and blood. None are very definitive in any way, and are to be expected out of a serial killer like this. Motive and personality? The most he’d received was from that little call out to the world this killer had made. It was the absolute sign of mental instability, which means multiple new and unpredictable factors would now have to be calculated, something he’d rarely encountered in the past years of this occupation. The modern systems implemented in daily life easily roots out those with dangerous conditions, whether mental or physical, per usual. Under expectation, no system is perfect either, so a few slip through the net and are all the harder to catch.
In any case, all his deductions from the message could never account for the fact that he had no idea if the message was actually from the mystery killer, or from some wannabe with a love for sick jokes that made his life harder.
He had a gut feeling that it was. The tone behind the message was sickeningly familiar, but there was no way it was the same person. The methods of murder in themselves were a lot different… but that could just be the motive change, right? Maybe it really was the same killer. This would be a second chance.
Where was he going with all that? He needed proof. No wild guesses means no let downs. As proven one too many times in this career already, gut feelings could be dangerously wrong.
