The car ride was, regrettably, spent mostly in silence. Every now and then, Steve would ask Arthur some question like “So what happens to humans in Hell?” which Arthur would answer as best as he could, which usually wasn’t too descriptive. He had never really considered the possibility of him having to explain Hell in detail to someone, so he had never really thought about what everything was like. “Well, I’m not really sure? Humans down there don’t look like you do here in the least, but I have no idea why, sorry,” Arthur would say. He really had no idea. He could barely tell a human and a demon apart down there. And then, Arthur would respond with a question regarding Earth of his own. “What are we sitting in, anyways?” he’d ask, still wondering whether they were driving a magical rock or some strange creature he’d simply never seen before. Steve would try to explain that it was a “car”, but no matter how much he explained it by saying “it’s like a pair of bikes connected with metal but faster” or “it’s like sitting in a very fast bug”, Arthur simply couldn’t understand the context. All he could do was accept that this strange thing was a “car”, and that’s about it.

Eventually, Steve drove into a parking lot near a large skyscraper that had a logo on it saying “LDPD” on a shield-like fixture. “What’s that stand for?” Arthur asked, pointing at the sign. “That’s the sign for the “Los Demonios Police Department,” where I work,” Steve replied. “What’s a police department?” Arthur asked. Steve gave him quite the look before he got himself together. “The police department is a state-owned company of sorts that offers protective and persecutory services to the people, in this case, specifically the people of Los Demonios,” Steve replied as calmly and collectively as he possibly could. Arthur wasn’t stupid, he just didn’t know how anything worked.

“Are we going inside?” Arthur asked, confused as to why they were still sitting in the car. “Well, I’ve been thinking, and I don’t think it would do too well to have you around being all, well, visible and such, so I thought you could get invisible and just follow me around,” Steve said, hoping Arthur could agree so he didn’t have to explain why a kid was following him around at work. Arthur furrowed his brows in thought for a moment before looking back up and nodding in agreement. “Oh, by the way? How do you turn invisible?” Steve asked just as Arthur was about to press his voider twice. “Well, I got this little handy device from the state when I joined the military to hunt humans,” Arthur said, pointing to the little five-pointed star-pin on his chest. Steve noticed that, unlike how the satanic symbol is usually, this one was, in comparison upside-down, the point pointing, well, upwards. He did not point this out.

Instead, he simply nodded, Arthur pressed the voider twice, and off he was. Steve stepped out of the car, and the second he did, a voice whispered in his ear, “I’ll be right behind you, so don’t be afraid.” Steve simply nodded again, despite not knowing why he, a well respected detective, should fear, well, anyone. Really, considering his nightly escapades and his invisible companion, he is more of a “I am the one who knocks” than the guy who opens the door. But he didn’t say this. He doesn’t say too much, really.

The breeze was warm and pleasant, birds chirped happily, the sky was blue and only a couple of clouds wafted through the skies, really, it was a pleasant day, had I not been stalked by an invisible demon expecting me to kill “baddies”. But he seems like a pretty nice guy, so I’ll accept it all.

I quickly and easily made my way to the entrance of the prison I call “work”, enter the spinning doors, give Bill, the security guard, a smile and a look at my id, walk through the pair of doors operated by Bill, get into the elevator, and pretend I can’t hear Arthur panicking about, well, just about everything. Still can’t get over the fact I’ve somehow made friends with a literal demon. The elevator whirrs and whizzes and I’m at the 7’th floor, homicide. Yes, it’s ironic, no, I didn’t choose. People just thought that “gee, that Smith fella sure does well solving homicides, he must have a talent!” and sent me to this poor excuse of sarcasm. I could hear a faint “whoaaa” from behind me.

“Oh, Smith! Great timing!” I hear someone exclaim cheerfully. I already know who it is. A hairy man runs towards me, a stack of approx. 350 pages of pure report in his hand. His body was much like that of a gorilla, with a square jaw, square, defined muscles, square eyes, square beard, square hair, square being, a square man. He’s the perfect example of a raw, well-trained officer who somehow got promoted past street-work(mostly) and all the way up to paper-work, something I can personally relate to. This man, Farber, is my partner. I already know what that report is before he reaches me at the speed of a small ballistic missile.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

It’s the report on Anna-Lisa Persson. She died the other day, parched, starved, thin as a needle, hair non-existent, arms covered in holes, really, quite gruesome. The scary thing isn’t the state she was found in, no, the scary part is that her body was found at 6 am, but she disappeared at 4 am. Somehow or another, her body and soul had been drained entirely in less than two hours, something that would naturally take, well, a week at least.

“Ey bud! Glad ya came! Didn’t think ya’d come in on a saturday!” Farber shouted as he gave me a big ol’ bear hug and I pretended not to hear someone whisper “who is this should I stab them” behind me. “Hey, Farber. You know I couldn’t leave you alone to get ahead of me,” I told him jokingly. “Hahahahahah! You just can’t stay away from me, can ‘ya?” he joked back, patting me on the back, noticing the lexicon of a report in his hand, remembering why he was holding it, and immediately shoving it in my hands. “This is that report on that poor Anna-Lisa fella! Those forensic geeks just couldn’t keep away from her, the perverts!” Farber said, reinforcing just how much of a jock he was. How he became a detective is beyond me.

“I’m sure they don’t do that. Now, what does it say?” I asked, flipping gently through the report without paying much attention to anything except the pictures, as those tell the biggest story. “Well, I’d luv’ ‘ta call it standard, but it really ‘ain’t. ‘Parantly she was aware during the whole of it all, and she didn’t die from blood-loss, nah, that’d be too easy, somehow, she actually died from starvation. All her fats, muscle-mass, liquids, everything was just taken, blood almost least of all. Loss ‘o blood would atleasta’ been quick, but nah. Extremely curious. I ‘ain’t like it,” he said in pure pity and disdain. I had already known all this, but I might as well entertain him. I nodded silently and started walking towards my bed.

Farber (and that other one) followed along. I nodded in greeting to anyone who made eye-contact with me. Nobody said it, but I was generally known as a “cold motherfucker”, which is rather accurate, I suppose. My desk was located right in the corner, with a rather excellent view of the city. Our office was an “open” one, with no cubicles or the like. People generally enjoy this, and I suppose I do too, in general. It’s not good when I’m pursuing the work of others like me and I accidentally pop a smile, but I usually hide it in time.

I could kind of hear Arthur standing in the corner, looking out over the city with a “woooww”, but I, as always when it comes to him, ignored it. Farber seemed to notice it though, turning around sharply to stare into the corner suspiciously. Not what I think about it, he’d been glancing behind me all the time when we were talking. Could he see him?... probably not. My family couldn’t, I cannot, him being able to see him would be slightly ridiculous, even for someone like Farber, who has a literal emotional radar, I swear to God.

I slapped the report down on my desk and sat down. “I’ll come back when yer finished!” Farber said, waving as he went to his desk on the other side of the office, which is extremely inconvenient. Is it just my imagination, but did he glance to the window before he left? ...Must have seen a bird or something. I started flipping through the thing, checking which parts will be relevant to me and which won’t be. Hm. Needle-like marks all over the forearms, strange bite-mark on left buttock, no signs or any sexual abuse, she was a virgin, left a party unintoxicated(she was a teetotaller, apparently) with two friends before suddenly disappearing into the night, no signs of a struggle, found in a little river just outside the city around five hours after disappearance, no signs or either struggle or drowning… basically, just what I already knew. I could almost feel Arthur breathing down my neck, reading the report to along with me.

I had gotten around half-way through the report when I hear heavy, rapid steps headed for my desk. I finished reading the sentence before looking up to see what Farber had to say. “They found anuther one!” he said in a complex mixture of dismay at another death and glee at finding more clues to catch the bastards who did this. I felt neither emotion of the two. But I did hear a little gasp from behind me. “Where?” I asked cooly, already standing up and grabbing my coat. “Down by the pier, by the Grendarell Roundabout,” Farber said, already heading towards the elevator. I followed. We spent the elevator-ride discussing this new victim. Faber had heard very little, but he knew it was another young girl, unidentified at the moment, same as the other girl. Needle marks, thin as a twig, the such.

We got outside to the parking lot and were just about to head to my car when I asked if we could go in his car instead. “How sa?” he asked, since we always took my car. “Well, I’m not sure what happened, but my car smells simply horrid, like something died in there,” I told him. He expressed a bit of concern, before guiding me to his car instead. I could hear Arthur whimper. Faber had a nice, military-green porsche, big enough for two. I envied him, really, but killing someone and stealing their car was generally frowned upon, so I chose not to. I’m not sure where Arthur decided to sit, but… I figure he found a pretty good place to sit.

Now all that’s left is going back to the pier and hope they don’t inspect that conveniently-placed abandoned warehouse that looked just like the sort of place in which you would find whoever had decided to suddenly go after young virgins, apart from myself, that is.