God, I was the happiest man alive when I got accepted for that job. I don’t think that kind of feeling can be matched, to be perfectly honest.
It was 1997, only two years ago. I remember it as clear as day. I had just started breakfast for myself, bacon and eggs over a brand new skillet I’d bought somewhere in London.
I had just finished cooking breakfast, and I had gotten out another package of bacon due to hunger. Just as I was ripping open the package, I heard a ring at the doorbell. I threw the bacon aside and sprinted to the door, already anticipating what it was: the letter of acceptance into the detective division of the police force.
I remember getting to the door so fast, in fact, that I was even able to wave goodbye to the mailman who had delivered my letter. And as soon as I had gotten back inside and ripped it open, I saw it. In bold black letters: the word “Accepted” in the top-left corner of the page.
Anyways, that day has long since passed. As of now, I find myself comfortably situated in the seat of my bus on a nice spring morning, entertaining myself by watching an old man across from me try not to fall asleep.
By the time I got to my stop, I noticed that the man’s tiredness had won the battle. I intentionally bumped him with my suitcase as I left, waking him up. Nobody deserves to miss their stop, not even a lazy old man.
It wasn’t long after I stepped off the bus that I was greeted by the irritating voice of good ‘ol Henry Marrens.
“It’s such a nice morning, isn’t it Charlie?”
“I could gather that much,” I responded, probably a bit more grumpily than usual.
He paid it no mind. “Sarah’s already brewed your coffee at the station, by the way. Nice one, isn’t she?”
“I’m sure she is. Would you mind giving me a moment? I’d like to enjoy the nice weather in peace before I get back to work.”
Henry split off from me without complaint, leaving me to the weather I aimed to enjoy. It really was a splendid day.
By the time I got to the police station, I was fully in a good mood. At this point, even my bothersome co-detective Henry couldn’t ruin it. I pushed open the door, which revealed my usual coworkers, in more of a frenzy than I was used to. Sarah pushed between panicked officers to reach me, coffee in one hand and a folder full of documents in another.
“Charlie. There’s been a new… occurrence. You’ll need to see it to believe it.” She didn’t bother greeting me, just pushed the cup of coffee onto me and continued to speak. “It happened at the Hansen Hotel a few towns east.”
Still keeping up my good mood, and with a desire to share it, I said, “Well, it surely can’t be something too much to worry about, can it?” I took a sip of my coffee. “I think I can probably handle it just fine.”
“No, it’s not your average murder,” she replied, ignoring my attempt for friendliness. Now she was frantically sifting through the many documents in her folder, making a mess on some poor bloke’s desk. “Look at this.”
She unclipped a piece of paper from the rest and pushed it into my face. After backing up a bit to get a better look, I saw a document filled with text and a picture of a middle-aged man dead on the ground. Upon closer inspection, a bullet hole was visible in the center of the man’s head.
“It looks like a bullet hole?” I pointed to the obvious, hoping for Sarah to give me more information.
She continued talking without hesitation. “Yes, but there was no gun or gunpowder in the room at the time of death, before or after. Not even a trace. Some are theorizing it being a sniper’s doing, so they’re desperately trying to keep the information from the press.”
“A sniper? In Marksburg?”
“Exactly. It’ll be hell should the public find out about a sniper loose here in Marksburg. That’s why we’re needed at the scene. Even if we can’t disprove the idea that it’s a sniper, we need to at least figure out more details at the scene of death. Or at least a motive.”
“Alright then. I’ll head there now.”
“Actually, I’m coming with you. Henry, too.”
It wasn’t that I disliked being a detective; I loved it, in fact. But in almost every situation, I would much rather investigate alone than with someone else. Henry was my co-detective, yes, but I’d never really asked him to be. Regardless, it appeared I had no choice in the matter.
“Ah… alright. Sounds splendid,” I finally said. My annoyance was audible. Sarah, again, paid it no mind, either ignorant or simply uncaring of my tone. Soon after, Sarah, Henry and I left for the hotel.
God, if I knew then what I would be getting myself into.
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The ride to the Hansen Hotel was smooth but slow, and a couple of other police cars surrounded the hotel. Among them I recognised my seldom-seen work buddy, Oscar, hunched over in the front of his police car. I felt a rush of relief seeing him; as much as I liked my job, Oscar was the only person I worked with that I truly enjoyed being around. Not to mention, I rarely saw him.
After getting out of the taxi and striding right past Henry and Sarah, I gave a small knock on Oscar’s car door. He flinched, and I adjusted my bowler hat while he turned around to see me, a big smile on my face.
As he rolled down his window, I spoke. “Nice day today, isn’t it?”
“I could gather that much,” he replied with a smile. “Glad to see you on the case.”
“And I’m glad to be here.”
“Be careful in there, alright? And don’t let Henry bother you too much.”
“I’ll try,” I sighed. “Trying to get these nutters off my back will probably be harder than solving the case, I bet.”
“At least Sarah’s a looker though, eh?” Oscar grinned.
I rolled my eyes. “Be glad that you’re safe in that car of yours, or I’d hit you.”
Oscar chuckled at my threat. I turned around to leave, chuckling a bit myself.
Stepping over caution tape, I entered the hotel, now quite a ways behind Henry and Sarah. After arriving at the room in question, I noticed my coworkers had already gotten onto the job.
The hotel room didn’t look much like a crime scene. That was, aside from the detectives, forensics equipment, dead body and blood. The late owner had obviously taken good time in keeping it clean. A white porcelain vase lay smashed on the ground next to the dead man.
“The body’s fresh,” Sarah said without looking at me. “Henry already gave it a good look-over.”
I highly doubted this, especially due to the fact that they had only gotten to the room a minute before me, at best. I was once again reminded of how much I despised working with other people. Taking matters into my own hands and ignoring Sarah’s words, I investigated the body anyway.
The victim was on the older side, likely in his fifties. His clothes were untouched save for a few specks of blood. His eyes were wide, likely due to a sharp pain before death. It didn’t appear to be instant.
Examining the bullet wound, two things stood out to me. One was that the wound was in the perfect center of his head. I pulled out my tape ruler—the wound was exactly 6.88 centimeters from either side of his forehead. A coincidence, maybe, but it stood out to me nonetheless.
The second thing that stood out to me was that the bullet wound was oddly small; not small enough to fall out of the range of bullet sizes, most likely, but small enough to look off. I wrote these things down on my notepad, the distinguishable feeling of something being... wrong… apparent in the man’s wound. But I couldn’t place what it was.
Just in that moment, Sarah called my name.
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“Charlie?”
“Yes?” I came to her. She had her gaze fixed on a spot in the wall by the floor. I quickly recognised it to be a bullet hole.
“I think we found the exiting hole of the bullet. Looks like we do have a sniper on our hands.”
“Can we be sure?” I said, looking out of the small windows of the room with wariness.
“That’s the only real explanation I can think of. I mean, it ties together, right? Sniper who has something out for this poor bloke shoots him, and the bullet travels through his head and out of this portion of the wall.”
I then recalled the odd shape of the wound and the pinpointed accuracy, but the thought was pushed back by a wave of annoyance.
“But where’s the entrance hole?” I said, annoyed at her overlooking such an important detail. Henry had stopped what he was doing and joined me and Sarah to look at the bullet hole. “If there was a sniper outside, he would have to have shot the bullet from outside, right? So where’s that bullet hole?”
“Well,” Henry started, putting a finger at the hole by the floor and drawing it towards him, “retracing its path, we can tell it was going roughly this way…” he got up, moving his finger along an invisible path in the air as Sarah and I watched.
Now stopping his movements, with his finger frozen in the air above the body, he said, “Charlie, Sarah, can you tell roughly how tall this man is? Or at least, from his feet to the bullet wound.”
I whipped out my measuring tape again as Henry continued.
“Since I’m above the victim’s body, he had to have been standing somewhere around here. And if I traced the path right, then the bullet had to have been where my finger is when it entered the man’s forehead.”
“171.6 centimeters from his feet to the bullet wound,” I said.
“Now measure the height from the ground to my finger,” said Henry.
As I measured, I could see Sarah’s face growing more and more intrigued. When the tape measure reached Henry’s finger, I read it and announced, “172.9 centimeters.”
“Then we’re getting somewhere,” Henry said. “We now know that the bullet was right here when it entered the victim’s brain.” He pointed to his still finger with his free one. “And if we continue retracing this path between here and the exit hole in the wall…”
He moved his finger as he walked, higher and higher, until he tapped a spot on the wall with it. And when he lifted his finger, there was no hole.
“What in the hell…?” Sarah exclaimed. Now, even I was getting confused. Henry was a klutz sometimes, but he wasn’t a stupid detective. Surely he couldn’t have been that wrong…? Henry’s triumphant look was wiped away, and he looked between his finger, the body, and the exit hole with bewilderment.
“The entrance hole should be exactly where my finger is! Or at least nearby!” Henry looked around the spot on the wall with confusion.
Sarah suddenly gasped with realization. She frantically made her way back towards the exit hole and pointed at it. Henry and I followed.
“What if what we think is where the bullet left the room—the exit hole—what if that’s actually the entrance hole? What if someone inside the hotel was the shooter?”
“What-” Henry started.
“Hear me out!” Sarah interrupted. “It’s the only logical explanation for there not being an entrance hole! We know for a fact that the shooter couldn’t have been outside, since there’s no entrance hole from outside. But if the shooter was inside the hotel, in a room, shooting the victim through one of their walls—somehow, I don’t know—then it’s entirely possible that the bullet slowed down enough not to leave an exit hole through the victim’s room! The exit hole could literally be the exit hole through the victim’s head!” Now Sarah got up, her finger tracing the same path that Henry traced.
“Henry, the path you traced wasn’t a retracing of the bullet in reverse. It was a perfect recreation of the path the bullet took, starting from the hole in the bottom of the wall!” Henry and I were at a complete loss. “And after it passed through the victim’s head, it slowed down a bit. Henry, can you mark where you thought your entrance hole should be?”
Henry pulled out a marker and put an X over where he predicted his entrance hole to be. Sarah traced her invisible path towards Henry’s X.
“If it slowed down, then it wouldn’t leave an exit hole in the wall here. Instead, it would fall a bit and leave a mark in the wall instead of a hole.” She put her finger on Henry’s X he marked, and then slid it down the wall until it reached a tiny dent in the wall.
“There’s our answer.”
“Well then we just need to find the bullet, don’t we?” Henry asked.
“Exactly. And once we find that, we can find our perpetrator.”
The three of us frantically looked everywhere the bullet could have possibly landed, in almost every corner of the room, but we found no bullet. All I could find under Henry’s X was a few dropped coins and a spoon.
Checking around the body for any sign of the bullet, I caught a glance at the victim’s face. It was still imprinted with the last feeling he felt before his death—fear. Not pain, but fear. And then I realized that his wide eyes were focused on something. Standing over him, I moved my face closer and further from his until I found his eyes focused on my face. They were full of a desperate and terrible terror, one that was hard to explain. I measured the distance between his face and mine, and then stood myself in his place, right around where we thought he might have been standing at the time of death. I measured that distance in front of me, and then looked at the spot I marked. It was just in front of the wall, in front of Henry’s X and above the dent in the wall.
This invisible spot, I soon noticed, was an epicenter. When I concentrated my eyes on the spot, everything else in the room seemed different. And then I realised—everything else in the room had moved away from that invisible point in the air just a little bit. The sparse chairs centered around the small dinner table were all moved just a bit, and the bowls on the table were nudged. The books stacked on a wall had been moved away from that point, and when I looked closer, I saw that the dust that had covered them had been disturbed.
It appeared almost as if there was a… shockwave. A shockwave that had blown everything in the room away, just a bit. Whatever caused it had to have been far, far stronger than a regular gunshot. And that shockwave had occurred right in the invisible spot I had my eyes on.
Looking back at the victim’s body, I noticed the shirt, on the front of his body, had been pressed into him, while in the back, it was loose. The shooter hadn’t been in another room in the hotel—the shooter was in the room with the victim at the time of the murder!
“Henry, Sarah. I’ve figured it out.”
They turned towards me.
“None of our theories were right. The shooter wasn’t outside the hotel or in another room. He was right here, where I’m looking right now.” I extended my measuring tape out to the spot I was concentrated on.
Henry was incredulous. “But how in the hell could that be possible? There’s no way he could have gotten in and out so fast, much less shoot unnoticed from that spot you’re talking about anyway.”
“And what about the mark in the wall? That could only have been caused by a bullet!” Sarah added.
“But the killer wasn’t unnoticed. The victim’s eyes were concentrated on him in the moment before death, and, look-” I pointed to the victim’s hands. “One is open, like it could have been holding something, and the other is clenched. He had tried to defend himself against the shooter before the kill. Not to mention, the gunshot wound is way too perfectly aimed for the bullet to have been shot from the outside.”
I pointed to the spoon on the floor, under the dent in the wall. “Henry, pass me that spoon.”
He obliged and I held the spoon in my hand. “Let’s rewind from the victim’s perspective. He notices the shooter while standing right around here.” I motioned to where I was standing, just by the body. “Spoon in hand, he panics and tosses it at the shooter. He either misses or the shooter dodges, and the spoon impacts the wall, leaving a dent.” I walked over to the dent in the wall while flipping and turning the spoon. Eventually, I found its correct alignment and matched it to the dent. It fit perfectly.
Sarah and Henry are shocked, but attentive. I continue.
“The victim’s futile efforts give the attacker a chance to shoot. The weapon fires a small bullet through the center of the victim’s forehead and through the wall, leaving the hole that we see now.” I then motioned to the hole in the wall by the floor. “The blast from the weapon, which we can now infer is unusually powerful, pushes everything in the room back a little, along with knocking the victim into the position he is in now.”
I now turned around to face the hole by the floor. I had already been prepared to finish my little speech with something witty, along the lines of “with this kind of information, it seems like we may be touching the surface of something major,” and, who could blame me? An assassination of a seemingly innocent man inside of his own cramped hotel room, using a weapon both small enough to fit in a man’s hands, and with enough power to cause a small shockwave? This was something more mysterious than I was used to—of course it was the surface of something major.
But, I had no idea up until that moment how major it truly was.
And, apparently, this mystery stretched way, way deeper than I thought.
When I turned around to face the hole, still in the man’s previous footsteps, I saw something terrifying.
The hole was the first of many. Now finally aligned to see the bullet’s true, exact path, I saw that the hole stretched through not only the wall I was trained on, but the walls in the next room over, and another room, and another, and another, like a tunnel that didn’t end. And it stretched farther and farther, deeper and deeper into the ground. The bullet hadn’t stopped. The bullet never will stop.
Sarah and Henry noticed my sinking expression and stood next to me to get the same view I had. Upon seeing the sight, their already worried expressions sunk further.
Suddenly, Henry and Sarah broke off from me and sprinted to the door. I followed them into the hall, down the stairs, and out of the hotel. They ran across the street and turned to face the hotel.
“What in the bloody hell are you two thinking?! What was that about?!” I wheezed once they had stopped. Neither was looking at me, instead focused intently on the hotel.
“If that bullet—no, that… thing, really traveled all the way through the hotel and into the ground, the damages could be much worse than we imagined…” Sarah uttered.
And right at that moment, I heard the unmissable sound of a police siren. From down the street, police cars and ambulances were whizzing by us, headed in the direction we saw the bullet go. One policeman pulled over in his car and walked over to us, urgency in his stride.
“Are you three with the station?”
“We are,” Henry answered.
“Then you will probably want to head back there for the day. There’s been a gas leak and explosion in a building down the street. Apparently something punctured a gas pipe underground. We have no idea how.”