Unknown Point of View...
Tay was sitting down at his desk, in his little apartment, somewhere in the center of Big Bucharest.
No one was on his lead, no one knew him in this city except for his neighbors, which regarded him as Tay, a simple guy in his twenties, introvert, who was either working a part time job to pay off his student loans, for an university he didn't even finish, either coddled up in his apartment.
Tay was smoking marijuana, as he did frequently.
In front of him he had a nice, elegant table with refined foods, some sushi which looked like it had been cooked by a chef, and some perfumed candles, and an open window, to replace and clear the air, after smoking.
Tay liked everything to be clean.
*
"You're not a very good detective, miss. But, okay, I'll accompany you since a miss like you shouldn't be out there alone." Jacob winked at her.
"I'll ignore the sexism in that, and we might get along just for today."
Ariana stormed very lively out through the front door, and the duo darted through the garden.
Work was being done in the backyard, indeed.
A crime scene team of archeologists were swarming the area, ground penetrating radar was being used to scan the soil, and people were determining whether to dig it up.
Whether any body was buried underneath.
The cops brought two trained police dogs to sniff things up, but they were kind of bored and their smell wasn't triggered by anything in particular.
To Ariana, things didn't look as if they would pan out, so she didn't even stop to inquire.
She and Jacob just went on, past the backyard, up a meadow.
Jacob felt as if he was following the lead of an insane girl, who wasn't even dressed right for the job, and who only made up theories and stories.
It hadn't passed too much time since she suffered a head injury, on top of it all.
But he just went on, because he was very passive by nature.
"Arghh, if I knew I'd be walking through soil I wouldn't have picked these heels." Ariana squirmed as she felt as if she was getting stuck.
"It seems it had rained recently, since the soil is so penetrable."
"Yeah, would make it easier for a criminal to dig up bodies." Jacob shrugged.
"I don't think anyone's earthed out here. But damn it, I'm taking my shoes off."
And to Jacob's great shock, the crazy girl really took off her shoes, leaving herself barefoot.
He started chucking.
"Didn't think you'd actually go through with that..."
"Closet up whatever you have to say." She stormed, freer, through the wilderness, under the blue sky, holding her heels in her hand.
"You might get hurt, I'd better give you my shoes. I have socks too." He really bent down intending to take his shoes off.
"Eww, no. I don't want to soak my feet in your perspiration."
"I wanted to say that, now that I saw your naked feet I can marry you. It's an old Chinese saying, but I don't think we'd ever get along."
"And the most important reason, my heart's already taken, and I'm faithful. And you're really not my type," Ariana emphasized as she walked on the top of her toes in order not to get anything stuck in her feet. Jacob watched her, amused.
"Ok, an island finally." She breathed once as she started putting on her heels, when they were in front of what looked to be a barn, in the heart of a very forsaken farm. The one Ariana had seen from afar. Jacob frowned.
"Is this the place you wanted to investigate?"
"It's a start. It's just this inkling that I have." Ariana licked her lip as she studied the exterior of the old farm.
And then she rounded the building, now wearing her heels, until she found the door.
"Ok, after you of course," Jacob said, hands in his pockets, very resigned to his fate.
Ariana entered the barn, noticing that the farm was probably closed, forsaken.
There wasn't any sign of recent activity inside.
All the places where livestock were housed were forsaken, there was a lot of dirt and hay all around, and a musky feeling.
She wrapped her eyes around the place, drew them along the walls, dipped them in the hay, and even bent down to sniff.
Jacob was feeling, in conjunction to this, both amused and guilty that he didn't feel like trying that hard.
"Do you really think there's something in here?" He checked with her, to see what her will was made of.
"I don't know, but something tells me there might be more up here than in the house." Ariana shrugged.
She walked around, and Jacob noticed that, despite her being very rich and looking like a pompous person, she didn't mind getting her heels dirty.
That was something he actually admired.
"How long do you think it's been since anyone's been out here?" Jacob grimaced as he moved around, doing some inspecting.
"It's not that far from the town, maybe the resident's kids run up here," Ariana suggested, as she walked through another room, deeper, divided from the rest.
She was standing now in the back room of the barn, filled with golden, musky hay, which looked somehow very suspicious to her.
It looked as if it had been rearranged recently. And the smell, oh the smell...
"I'd say someone's been here recently," Ariana called then out, alerting Jacob.
He followed then swift into the room, finding her just standing there in the middle of the hay, on top of some of it, like a ghost, her own hair being golden.
"What are you doing?"
"Do you notice the smell here?" She turned her face to look at him, flourishing a perfectly nailed hand.
He sniffed the air, but he had noticed the strangeness of the smell ever since he entered.
It reeked of dung, and very subtly, of death.
"You're right, there might be something here... very well buried."Jacob said.
"Wait, I think I saw some shovels in the other room."
Jacob returned swiftly holding a shovel and a spade.
"Who gets the spade?" he asked with a wink. Ariana rolled her eyes.
In the end, they ended up pulling at the hay, hauling it up with their utensils and throwing it over their shoulders, out in the hall.
Shortly, they had cleaned up the room, finding a round, alien circle of soil in the center, as if someone had dug through the cement recently. They both agreed that that was mighty suspicious.
"Ok, I don't know how your intuition could have brought you here but...I think something's here," Jacob said, tapping his foot as they both stared at the earth.
"I read about a case like this once, a murder which took place on a farm. When we got here and I looked at the landscape, it just hit my memory," Ariana explained herself before she'd look suspicious.
But if a corpse was really underneath their feet then, then everyone would trust her more at work, and not overlook her because she was new.
"Let's dig." Jacob nodded strongly, as they both grabbed their utensils. But not after long, Jacob poked the cusp of his spade in the soil and hit something hard.
"Wait, I think it's only covered by a thin stratum of soil." They soon uncovered a large, sepulchral square wrapped up in nylon wrapper.
Ariana bit her lip as she studied it. Jacob nodded to her as he started unwrapping, layer by layer, like one huge, square shaped, smelly onion.
After he rendered it accessible, they encountered the box's cardboard's surface. While Jacob had expected he'd be up unwrapping a lot of layers, like a Russian doll game, as he raised one of the cardboard wings, he gazed straight down into a dark, dark hollow box, where a body was laying peacefully.
There lay a girl, freshly dressed in new clothes just like Anya McGuiver's body, but who looked to have been dead for a few weeks; her body was well preserved, though. Ariana took a close look at this victim, then widened her eyes thrice their usual proportion.
She knew that girl.
The victim's name was Megan Keene. She was the second person to go missing, about three weeks after Anya McGuiver,on March 17th, and was last reported to have been running some laps in the Queens Park.
But what shocked Ariana was that she had known Megan ever since she was little.
Megan had been a childhood friend and was her classmate in highschool, and Ariana had thought she was living in a different country now.
Ariana didn't know prior that she was on the list of the missing, because she had only studied the recent cases, and missed that one.
But there she was; Megan Keene, nicely dressed and lifeless.
"So we have to go alert the others now of what we found." Jacob was running a hand down his face. He looked up at Ariana. "I don't know how you did this, but you've had a terrific intuition this once, Ariana."
But Ariana wasn't paying attention to him finally giving her some credit, because she noticed something else, inside of the sepulchral human sized box.
"There's something next to the body, could you grab it?" she asked of Jacob.
Jacob grasped with his eyes the little red, Christmas box which looked like a joke thrown in, and brought it up, taking care not to touch the corpse.
They unwrapped the ribbon around it, both of them thinking that this was surely something the mastermind killer left behind for them.
And what they found after unwrapping it up changed the game, in the matter of one minute.
"A letter." Jacob, guided by Ariana's restive eyes, went on and unfolded the envelope.
"Hello,
If you're reading this, you must be thinking I'm dead.
But you're actually very far away from the truth. It will take some more effort for you to find me, a lot more than what you're doing right now. No, despite what you hoped and thought, Webster Robinson isn't my identity, my name...
He was an innocent man who committed suicide in prison for a crime he didn't commit.
But, do not worry, we all commit mistakes. That's why, I've decided to assist you in finding the remaining bodies, scattered all around London...
We'll play a little game, which I've comprised, and set the rules of:
The rules are as follows:
1.You have to follow the seven hints, and look for the six remaining bodies, in the order I prescribe, attached underneath.
You have until 2th of September, which is a month from now.
If these rules aren't respected, then you can all look forward to a really bad Autumn.
If they are respected, though, congrats, you would have found all the victims.
Unknown"
*
Johnson's Electronics, later that day...
Bernard Johnson, Ariana's father, was coddled up in his office on the thirteenth floor of the glass building of offices allotted to the Johnson Corporation, watching the news on the tall wide plasma TV.
He was rubbing his chin and his small blue eyes were seeking something on the screen violently. Something he couldn't fight.
For months he had been ignoring the signs the murders had been sending off his way, despite it being as evident as running a metal detector over a gold mine.
He was restlessly moving around his office, pacing back and forth, south and west, and then he rushed back to his laptop and looked up the victims' names again, his hands grabbing the edges of the desk.
It was unmistakable. All these victims were, one way or another related to the incident from back then. These victims seemed to be either former employers of Johnson's Electronics from over ten years ago, or relatives: their parents, siblings, nephews or children.
He was running a palm down his face, bewildered. He never would have thought it would come back to bite him, one day.
He found himself incapable of lying to himself though, despite the fact that he couldn't let anyone else know, besides the few persons he trusted. These murders were related to that incident from ten years ago.
His lifetime secret.
Who could be doing this? He didn't have any idea. Anyone who had tried to betray him, in the past, went missing, so he has had peace all these years.
He was frowning deeply, staring down at some papers on his desk.
He then proceeded to take a sip of his coffee, now cold, and try to calm himself down. It couldn't be that bad, right?
No one from the police could possibly link all these people all that way down, with the way things have been cleaned and taken care of in the past. As long as this entire thing wouldn't be somehow tracked back to him, things were alright.
Everything would be well, like before.
He found that this positive chain of thinking actually calmed down his heart rate and made everything look bright, so he rang the bell perkily.
"What do you need, Sir?" His valet appeared in the door. Yes, he had a valet.
"Ah Jack, "he started. "I need another coffee. This one's gone cold. Oh, and bring in a bottle of whiskey."