What Was Burned

Chapter 7

 The wind was howling a wordless song between the tall frames of the skyscrapers, its partner in crime raining tears on the grey and silent streets where only forgotten echoes of the earlier day laid, sprawling on the mudded asphalt. A drifting smell of roasted peanuts and gasoline hung in the air, covering up the scent of the garbage bags laying in puddles along the pavement. A crow flew past overhead, its wings beating against the shower falling from the skies, seeming to cry at the injustice displayed on the lone corpse laying in a dark alleyway.

I stood with my team besides her, Elise Papavero, a young woman of 22 from the island of Corsica between France and Italy. A passerby had reported her murder half an hour ago and we've been onsite for a few minutes now. Because of the rain, collecting evidence and clues won't be an easy task as they would get washed away and disappear forever. We couldn't even approximate the time of death since the rain made the body cool faster.

I approached her, putting on my gloves as I stared hard at the empty sockets of the woman. The murderer had completely ripped off her eyes and, judging from the traces of struggles, when she was still alive. I slowly put my hand into her left eye and retrieved a red petal. I turned my eyes to the flower left besides her head : a startling white poppy, tainted with the blood from her gapping wounds. The rain dropped on my palm, spreading the scarlet liquid until it fell on the pavement. Suddenly, I couldn't feel any drops anymore so I looked up, my eyes briefly catching Shawn's gaze before it was hidden behind the small black umbrella he was holding above me.

"Thanks." I said before turning back to the corpse.

"No problem, boss." I smiled when I heard his voice from behind me. Such a considerate man, a wonder why he was still single.

I stood up and called the medical team to take good care of the body before I started examining the crime scene. Taking careful steps around the body without disturbing any possible clues, my eyes scanned the walls and the ground, making sure not to miss anything that could help the investigation.

The woman was on her back, her dark, wet hair sprawled under her head, her face twisted in agony and terror. Her blood, coupled with the rain, bloomed under her body like a scarlet flower, tainting the scene in a gruesome crimson hue. She had lost her shoe, which was laying at the entrance of the alley, hinting to having been possibly dragged from the main street, which must have happened not too long before the body was found. She had died of blood loss from a clean streak through her throat, just enough to cut her carotid arteries. The absence of blood from her mouth suggested that blood hadn't gone into her lungs and cause asphyxia. The only other way to die would be blood loss. Having both arteries cut, she must've have fallen unconscious within seconds the wound was afflicted on her, and must have died a minute later. The side of her skull was bloody and I searched the ground and the walls before finding a streak of blood not too far from the body. The murderer must have knocked her against the wall to stop her from resisting but not kill her. These assumptions would still need the confirmation of the medical team but I was confident in my deductions.

"Look out for any leftover clues !" I said to the people behind me. A series of affirmation reached me quickly.

I left my forensics team and crime scene team to take care of any other clues and climbed into the back of white van parked outside the alleyway. The inside was full of technical supplies and computer screens linked to the agency's main computer. I logged in and started looking up informations about the victims, now at the number of 5. The information bank had been updated since the last time I had been on it. The data from their phones appeared before me and I clicked on Yuki Bara's one. The applications of her phone appeared before me and I scanned past, noting absentmindedly the fact that she was looking for a partner using an online dating app called Lear. Nothing suspicious stood out so I went into the second victim, Celeste Lilja's phone. I was scanning through the apps when my eyes suddenly caught a familiar logo, a red heart with a white cross on the middle. I froze for a second before I quickly clicked into the third victim's phone data, my heart beating erratically in my chest. Of excitement or fear, I didn't know.