Last Seen Alive

Chapter One

Red and blue lights flashed from the parked police cars, lighting up the night and the bloated body of a young woman floating face-up in mucky, slimy water. The lights, combined with the blue-grey tinge of her skin and the green slime that covered most of her, painted a gruesome picture, and yet Michael Carter didn't look away.

The blinding white flash from a camera joined the show, making her pale face clearly visible for just a moment. Her eyes were shut and slime covered most of her face like a veil of slippery, green goo.

"I think she was strangled," Michael said, crouching at the edge of the sewage pond. Even though he'd pulled the collar of his shirt up to cover his nose, the strong smell of sulphur from the water still hit him hard.

Using his flashlight, he looked over the rest of her. Her clothes were still intact, plastered to her body by the slime. Every time the wind blew ripples across the water, she bobbed a little closer to the edge of the pond.

"Why?" asked Luke, the crime scene investigator, clicking away at his camera.

Michael pointed his flashlight at her neck. "Those black marks on her neck. Remember Amanda Tully from last year? Her boyfriend strangled her with her scarf and it left red marks on her neck similar to these. I'm guessing the blackening of these ones might be because of the water and decomposition or whatever."

A chill ran down his spine as he looked at her face again. He rubbed his hands up and down his arms and felt goosebumps on his light brown skin.  The chemical smell hit him even harder now that his nose wasn't covered, and he gagged, disgusted more by the smelly water than its current occupant.

His lack of repulsion to the horrid sight would have worried him if it weren't for the other cops on the scene, looking equally unaffected. Luke's face was expressionless, barely giving away whether he was taking pictures of a dead body or a monkey swinging on a trapeze.

Finally having seen enough, he stood and turned away and spotted Naomi Jenkins. She was standing beyond the police line talking to an older man who was picking at the yellow tape. Every other second, he'd glance in the direction of the pond where he'd discovered the body.

Charles, Harriet, Gary, and Coleman were huddled together a little way behind him, chatting away like they were having tea in the station's break room. He was tempted to yell at them to shut up and respect the dead, but they were only rookies who'd had the misfortune of beginning their service in Pinehive at the worst possible time. He knew their ill-timed chat sessions were a coping mechanism.

That train of thought always led him down a two-year path to where it all began. The murder of Henry Bandieer. It was the key that had opened the gates of hell in Pinehive, and turned a mostly peaceful town into a grade A centre of crime.

Even though some had left the city out of fear, a greater number of people came in and out of Pinehive out of curiosity. At one point, Michael had been tempted to close down the city, but he had no legal grounds to do that, even as the new Chief-of-Police. And to his utter disgust, the mayor—Paul Bane—insisted the whole thing had turned Pinehive into some sort of twisted, money-making tourist attraction. Like murder houses that people visited during bus tours. So Michael was left to deal with the increase in crime.

On the bright side, law enforcement had more money and resources now, but that still didn't stop people from slaughtering each other. He longed for the days when the sight of a dead body was shocking enough to haunt his dreams for weeks, and people wouldn't casually discuss the terrible clam they had for lunch, three feet away from a rotting corpse.

Pushing his thoughts aside, he approached Charles and his friends and they immediately fell silent.

"If I'd known you'd shut up about your bad clam and digestion troubles the minute I walked past, I'd have cartwheeled over here ages ago," he said to Charles, who looked embarrassed while the others stifled their laughter.