Blood ran down the gutter. It mixed with oil and reflected the glow of neon lights around it. The flow of people was undisturbed by something as small and inconsequential as that; why would they be, when the city around them was rife with far more interesting things than some random person’s misfortune?
No, there were people who were paid to deal with that sort of thing, and the regular city-goers of Fayeport would leave them to it. If it didn’t affect them directly, it wasn’t their problem.
As such the most attention anyone paid to the dripping biohazard was taking extra care not to step in it.
Except for one person.
Zenith Leonardi followed the trail, intent on finding the source. She needed to make sure it led back to the scene she was already supposed to be on, and not a yet undiscovered one.
So she went against the flow, body checking all who didn’t get out of her way. That number was few; though finding well-fitting clothes was a bitch, there were certain advantages to being a six-foot-two woman wearing heels.
The blood went up the street, under a traffic clogged bridge, past a row of arcades and gaming pads with flashing lights so vibrant Zenith almost lost the blood trail, and straight to her crime scene. That was both good and bad; good because it meant there wasn't another scene, bad because that was a lot of blood that was slipping away from her analysts.
Her crime scene was leaking outside of it's designated boundary.
Zenith hissed through her teeth and walked over to the familiar figure talking far too fast to one of the officers, hands flying as they spoke. Zenith stopped just behind them and cleared her throat.
Her partner, Dawn Oakley, twirled around on the spot to face her, short brown hair seeming to defy gravity for a brief moment.
“We called you an hour ago,” She whined, motioning wildly with the hand that was holding a to-go cup of coffee and nearly hitting one of the lab guys with it.
Zenith waved her off, walking around her to slip on some gloves and grab a pair of booties.
“An hour ago, Zenny.” Dawn emphasized, patting the guy - probably Callum, that man was always underfoot - and handing him the extra coffee she had by way of apology, “You are so, so late. This one is really fucked up, too, and usually you’re, like, all over that.”
Zenith watched Callum take the coffee, the coffee that was more than likely bought for her and Dawn had just forgotten. He drank it all in one go as he stared her dead in the eye.
Asshole.
“Had to make sure the blood in the gutter wasn’t a hallucination,” Zenith said flatly as she tugged the tiny foot-trashbags over her shoes.
“You know the heel is going to stab out of them, right? Oh! I have some flats in my trunk if you need them, but I think your feet are a bit bigger than mine, but, like, it’s for a short time anyways? So it should be fine? Also I have an extra scrunchie, unless I’ve lost the rest and this is my last one. Actually I think I left some in your car-”
Dawn did not stop talking, and Zenith snatched the scrunchie before hop-skipping away from its owner.
“I’ll walk on my tippy toes, cross my heart!”
Zenith barely managed to tug her unruly black hair into a loose bun and pushed through the tarp covering the entrance; the smell of viscera hit her like a wall.
She did not gag. She refused to.
Her body wanted her to, but Zenith had seen far worse things.
She reigned the reaction in and looked over the scene.
The body didn’t have any skin. That was the first and most obvious thing that stood out to her.
It was perfectly stripped, muscle glistening in the floodlights. Dried out eyes, fogged over in death, stared directly at her from where the head hung limply and brushed against the ground.
There was blood absolutely everywhere. The hands and feet were tethered in place, the bungee cords used to do it pulled taught from their anchor points on the concrete supports. Strangely enough, there appeared to be something gold under all the blood, and the analysts were working together to take pictures of how the blood was spilled before cleaning it up to uncover the gold beneath.
It looked…it looked like a design.
Zenith really hoped it wasn’t another cult.
There was a bag of tools that did not belong to any of the officers on scene, currently being photographed. A bloodied knife was randomly tossed towards one of the old loading bay doors. There was a set of large footprints in the blood that went in the direction of a side room.
It was. Uh.
It was a little too perfect? A little too manicured. She’d seen premeditated murder before, even a religiously motivated one, and they were nothing like this.
Dawn was right, this was weird.
The entire scene was like someone had taken it and shifted it one inch to the left.
The clues were too obvious. The signs that were screaming ‘cult’ were too loud. When a cult really did kill someone, there was usually a huge part of the murder that just made no sense at all; cutting off the heads and burying them in pots, branding, cutting off the hair or putting it in a specific pattern. Things that didn't make sense to people who weren't a part of it.
This was laid out like a neon sign. It was like someone was trying to say something, but the message was lost in translation.
“Detective Leonardi,” one of the analysts called, voice muffled as she walked over, “If you would follow me, please. There’s something that’s…well. You need to see it to believe it.”
“Oh, God, not another cult,” Zenith hissed, following after the beckoning woman and hoping she hadn't found the 'nonsense' bit that cults did.
The woman said nothing, just led the way to a smaller room with stiff shoulders.
It wasn’t hard to see what the issue was when they reached it.
Skin.
Skin was pinned to the concrete wall with railroad spikes.
It had been methodically cut, folded in on itself, and hammered into the shape of a letter, ‘K’, and a flower that bloomed around it. The ‘K’ itself had been painted over with gold paint.
“This took time.” Zenith commented, getting over her shock. She walked closer, careful to keep her weight on the balls of her feet, just like the promised.
The techie threw out an arm and stopped her, holding out new booties.
“Please change, we don’t want to contaminate the crime scene.”
“Ma’am, mine have no holes in them, it’s fine-“
“They have blood on them, Detective.” The comment was obvious, but echoed off the walls in its finality.
Zenith finally realized what wasn’t being outright said.
The bloodied footprints that began at the corpse stopped at the entrance to the room.
There was not a single drop of blood inside the smaller room. There was no blood smear on the walls. The skin that was pinned to said walls looked more like leather the more she looked at it. Properly tanned like a cowhide, just like the ones she’d seen at Ma and Pa’s. Bit more demented, with way less fur.
There was no doubt that it was human skin, though. She could see the ears and the lips, used as the anther of the flower.
This wasn’t hours of work, it was weeks of it.
“…Oh. This took a lot of time.”
“Exactly,” the analyst muttered, looking relieved as Zenith grabbed the new booties, “So how is the body still bleeding?”
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There was a diner just three streets away from the site of the strangest murder Detective Leonardi had ever seen; The Retro Dog. Disgustingly bright decor decorated the walls and floor, waitresses in roller skates glided through dressed in multi-colored plastic aprons thrown over their regular street clothes, a jukebox that could only play three songs sat in the far corner, and the fluorescent overhead lights were constantly battling with the neon wall lights for who would light the space available.
The man who owned it was a grizzled war veteran, although he would never tell anyone what war he’d been a part of. The only thing he ever said was that MREs were disgusting, and the one thing he’d craved the entire time he’d been deployed was a good old fashioned hot dog and milkshake. His name was Huxley Reeves, he was built like a brick shit house, didn’t know how to smile, was missing an eye and a leg, and hadn’t seen anything or anyone out of the ordinary.
“Although,” he growled lowly, setting Zenith’s hot dog in front of her, “Somethin’ ain’t right about that guy.”
Zenith idly looked over to the subject of Huxley’s suspicion.
Then she fought the urge to make a smart remark. Huxley meant well, he was just a little paranoid. She refused to be rude to the man.
The guy he’d nodded to was just some suit, drinking coffee, staring at the table with the most soulless eyes she’d ever seen, and looking like he was fighting off a migraine or hangover. Possibly both. Understandable; the lighting of the Diner wasn’t doing anyone any favors if they were prone to migraines.
Huxley was also a conspiracy theorist, and his sense of danger was skewed. A robber with a gun? No problem, not a threat to Huxley. A little girl playing hopskip in front of the Diner? She was a Russian spy.
Still fighting the urge to say something sarcastic, she smiled and nodded at Huxley, handing him her business card.
“Alright, I’ll look into that,” she whispered conspiratorially, “But if you see anything else, just give me a call.” Huxley nodded, retreating back into the kitchens and leaving Zenith was left with her hot dog.
She took an angry bite out of it and glared at the vinyl tabletop.
There were no fingerprints. No hair, no blood, no nothing from the murderer.
No trace at all.
Every single CCTV she’d been able to get her hands on that was along the path to any and all entrances to that warehouse showed nothing but a calm and peaceful night. No screaming was reported by the 24 hour business owners nearby, the homeless weren’t acting any more afraid than they usually were, although they weren’t really talking to her, and no one saw anyone suspicious.
Hell, there’d been a group of kids trying to get access into the crime scene because they apparently skated there all the time, and had even been there yesterday.
There had been nothing unusual by their accounts.
They swore they had nothing to do with the gold that was decorating the ground, and that was another thing. Some of the techs that were cleaning it swore up and down that it was gold leaf, not gold paint. Which meant that this took even more time than originally thought.
It would be awhile before the blood was meticulously mopped up and away from the gilded flooring so they could see what the hell the gold leaf was there for, and Zenith had opted to hit the streets.
Nothing, nothing, and more nothing.
Not only were they losing time, she felt like she was wasting it.
There had to be something.
She was just glancing over it and not realizing what it was, probably. Like when she’d lost her car keys last week.
That didn’t bode well, because she still hadn’t found them.
But the sun was rising, and with the sunlight came more clues.
Zenith waved over one of the Waitresses and paid her bill, shoving the rest of the hot dog in her mouth and making her way out the door.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
She’d have to walk through the streets and double check for any possible leads.
The haze from the morning was starting to evaporate with the rising of the sun, creating an eerie red and orange glow that lit up the city. The people who lived in it were oblivious to the strangeness of the crime that had happened only hours ago, heading either to their jobs or home from a long night of work.
Tacky neon orange dolphin statues stared down at Zenith from on top of light posts, reflecting the first rays of the sun, and she preemptively pulled out her sunglasses.
She could already tell it was going to be a blistering hot California day.
Which meant that if that corpse wasn’t at the morgue already, it was being sped over there soon to avoid the heat messing with it.
Zenith changed her course and bee-lined for a coffee shop. She was going to need the caffeine, and she had a bunch of day businesses to visit and some sleep to catch up on before Colt actually did his autopsy.
The quicker she could find any potential witnesses, the quicker she could have a rendezvous with her favorite, illusive lover; sleep.
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The streets were alive with the sounds of swearing. Also car horns.
Zenith stood outside the door of the Diner, considering where the victim possibly could have come from, what stores had CCTV pointing toward the street, who would have been around, and the most likely place her victim would have been picked up.
Next she sent a text to Dawn, who was disgustingly awake, relaying that they would need to split up to tackle more leads at the same time. Dawn, in her car, could go store to store. Zenith, on foot, could talk to anyone who may have been around at the time.
The homeless were surprisingly helpful, once they decided to talk to Zenith.
They slept light, kept one ear out for threats. If anyone had heard anything, they would have steered clear of the area to dodge cops messing with their stuff. But they said they didn’t hear anything at all. Some of them said it was the most peaceful sleep they’d had in ages; that even the strays had stopped barking.
None of the few around the warehouse had heard anything at all, not even a car engine.
She sat down on a neon pink barbershop bench with a heavy sigh and hoped that the CCTV lead had been more fruitful. Unfortunately, when Dawn pulled up in her half-dead Hellcat, she reported that no one’s CCTV had caught anything weird. No cars went to the warehouse after the skaters left, no one walked there with a human-shaped bag slung over their shoulder.
For all intents and purposes, one minute there was an empty warehouse free for the kids to use as a secret base or whatever, and the next there was a gruesome murder scene.
Zenith could feel her brain trying to sort through everything, but it kept meeting dead ends. She could see Dawn doing the same thing.
“You know,” Zenith yawned, covering her mouth, “We probably aren’t going to get anything new before we can get that preliminary from Colt, and we’ve already covered as much ground as we can without an ID on the victim.”
Dawn nodded, valiantly fighting back her own yawn as she started walking towards her car.
“I think best when I’m on your couch, so we should definitely reconvene there.”
“Completely agree, you’re absolutely right.”
“And we should pick up pizza on the way there.”
“Naturally; what else would we eat?”
“I want anchovies on mine-“
“I will steal your car and leave you to walk to your own apartment if you stink my place up with that again.”
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Dawn barely managed to get her car to come to a complete stop before it ran into the side of Zenith’s place.
The pizza was saved at the last second, and Zenith barely paused to even glance at Dawn as she staggered out of the car and to the massive bay door control panel, flicking the switch with the edge of the pizza box she was holding.
The Hellcat delicately rattled in, and Zenith followed after it, pushing the button on the opposite side to close the bay doors.
The living space of her renovated warehouse was only one step up from the elected ‘car zone’, concrete giving way to wooden floors framed by a high ceiling full of exposed pipes and wires. The living room bled into the kitchen that bled into the office that bled into the greenhouse, and old Christmas lights wound their way up the old support pillars. The stairs led to a second floor she’d built herself, but the living room kept the original ceiling height.
In the greenhouse she could hear the dog waking up, the great beast running into different pots and shelves as he stretched, and picked up her pace to set the pizza on the kitchen counter before the enormous Saint Bernard could meander his way into bumping the food out of her hands.
By the time Fender managed to trot towards Zenith and Dawn, the pizza was safe and Dawn was already kneeling on the ground with her arms held out. He redirected his target and with a hearty thud, Dawn was knocked back onto her butt, hands already busy petting the dog.
“Aww, he’s such a little fluffy puffy doggy woo! Who’s a breath of clean air after that fucked up scene? It’s you! Yes! It’s you! The good boy! The sniffer snoffer! The sniff snoff boff-“
“Dawn, remote duty,” Zenith interrupted with an order, desperate to stop the random nonsense words before they got worse. Her partner bounded up and almost seemed to launch herself towards the living room area to dictate what they would be watching.
Zenith, for her part, took a moment to give Fender her own pets before deeming it safe enough to carry the pizza boxes in his presence to the living room, plopping them on the coffee table.
She didn’t know what Dawn had chosen, since as soon as she sat down on the couch she was out like a light.
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Five hours later saw a refreshed Zenith lounging in the Coroners office, waiting to find out how their John Doe had died. The door slammed open against the wall, deepening the already existing dent, and her corpse-doctor walked in, looking exasperated.
“Yeah, I know what happened, but I also really, really don’t,” Colt sighed, slapping her shoes off of his desk.
She leveled him with the most unimpressed look she could muster.
“Wow, you’re so good at your job, I’m so impressed, surely we will be able to solve this with that in depth conclusion,” Zenith drawled, voice as flat as her stare.
Colt dropped the clipboard in her lap and threw up his hands.
“Fine then, you go over it and tell me what the Hell happened here.”
Zenith plopped her feet up on his desk again and did just that, ignoring the disgusted noise that Colt made when she did.
“Blah blah blah, multiple stab wounds, evidence of being skinned alive, more useless stuff, internal organs missing-wait. What?” Her feet left the desk as she planted them on the floor so she could lean forward, completely focused on the report.
Multiple stab wounds that weren’t actually stab wounds, and all performed postmortem. Cause of death was the skinning itself. Corpse showed evidence of freezer-burn. Skin was professionally tanned. The stab wounds were actually surgical cuts that were loosely stitched back together, and the cuts were made to remove the organs and replace them with sixteen pounds worth of blood bags. Those bags had been stabbed with a knife to simulate bleeding. Also, there was a cufflink shoved halfway down his throat with nothing of real note about it.
All blood bags were type A+.
The victim had blood type O-.
“…We didn’t happen to find the organs, did we? Were they in, like, a ceiling panel or something?”
“Nope,” Colt sighed, leaning against the doorframe to glare at the skinless corpse, “Not a clue where they are. But also, not a clue why they shoved him full of blood bags. I’m leaving that bit to you.”
Zenith put down the clipboard and pulled on some gloves, making her way to her John Doe.
“There was a letter painted on the wall,” she muttered, thinking outloud, “The bloodtype is not his own, the skin was arranged like roses - kind of like a really, really fucked up love letter.”
“How is that a love letter?” Colt asked, voice going up a pitch.
“I mean, we’ll see. Was there anything to ID this guy?”
“No, and without the skin from his hands I can’t fingerprint him. We’re waiting on dental to pull something up.”
“We don’t know how long he was frozen?”
“Considering the freezer burn, at least two or three months.”
Zenith hummed, thinking back to any missing persons cases that would have been around that time. That wasn’t really something she handled, not unless there was reason to believe the missing person was dead. She did, however, distantly recall the department being constantly barraged by reporters and some rich family around then.
“Wasn’t there a missing persons case, some big name went missing like four months ago?” She muttered, the golden ‘K’ flashing through her mind.
“Yeah, Jared Beiler, newest on the Board of Directors for Mordrel Security. Chief Basil couldn’t go a day without answering questions about the hunt for him.”
“Right, and the detectives in charge of his case?”
“Clayton and Lore were on it. There a reason you’re hyperfocusing on that one out of the fifty others that were going on at the same time?”
Zenith hummed and set the clipboard down, standing up and making her way towards the door.
“Just a hunch. Hey Dawn, can you handle the rest of the questions and paperwork here? I gotta go hunt down Lore.”
She remembered the reports; the CEO of Mordrel Security was Kimora Mordrel. The golden K, perhaps?
----------------------------------------
Korin Clayton had a fifty megawatt smile, blond hair he probably spent way too much time on combed back into some sort of pompadour, and if he entered a room, everyone would know it whether they wanted to or not.
To contrast him, his partner was far more quiet.
Lyric Lore had perfectly average messy brown hair, was unobtrusive, silent, and for lack of a better word, creepy.
Current theory Zenith had on them was that it was deliberate. One commanded the attention, the other observed the room and got the information needed. She’d seen them off the clock, and they weren’t nearly as loud or creepy then.
She commended them on that; it was a good strategy, and Clayton was exceptional at grating on her nerves. That was not what she needed at the moment.
“Leonardi! Hey, girl, how’s it going? I heard you were on some really messed up case, rumor has it the Chief is gonna reassign your other ones-“
“Cut the crap, Clayton. Tell me how Beiler disappeared.”
The smile didn’t fall from Clayton’s face, but the sincerity of it did fade.
“Well if you’re gonna be like that-“
“He just vanished,” Lore’s quiet voice said from directly behind her, and Zenith barely stopped herself from punching him. She turned around and looked down at the shorter man, who only had a small smile to betray his amusement. “He went into work. He did not come out. Nothing on the camera, car was exactly where it was left. No witnesses. Nothing of note. He was there, and then he was not.”
Zenith mentally compared it to her homicide, and hissed through her teeth.
“Shit, you found him, didn’t you? The fucked up one, right?” Clayton muttered, and when she turned to face him the smile was off of his face, and a hand was lightly covering his mouth.
“Maybe. We’re waiting on dental.” Zenith answered, equally quiet.
If the corpse did belong to Jared Beiler, it was going to be a media shitstorm, and the less people knew the specifics the less likely they would leak something to the press.
“Yeah, it’s pretty weird,” Dawn whispered, appearing on Zenith’s right and making her jump, “Did you guys check Mordrel Security for any potential crime scene?”
“Not for that kind of scene,” Clayton answered, his eyes showing none of the joviality from before, “Because it came across as a kidnapping, and we were pretty sure it was for money. Besides, there’s no way a homicide that bloody could happen in an office building like that and not get caught on the security feeds.”
He was right. A murder as gruesome as the one she was on? Happening in the headquarters of Mordrel Security? There would be no way that their own security systems wouldn't pick it up.
Lore said nothing. He just crossed over to Clayton’s desktop and pulled up a file.
“I have sent it to you, Leonardi. If that is Beiler, then you will need to know all that you can of him.”
Zenith nodded, turning to go to her own desk to peruse it.
It was never good when a homicide detective was the one to bring a lost person back to their family, and for his family’s sake she really hoped she was wrong about the identity.
But that part of her brain, the part that recognized patterns, would not shut up about the golden K.
Was the killing a message to K, or was K a signature?
It would be very, very easy for someone as rich as the CEO of a tech company to pay others to have seen nothing, after all.
But how to meet with said CEO without probable cause? And where did Beiler fit into it? What was his relation with the woman outside of being a part of her Board of Directors?
She pivoted to her desk, intent on finding out.
----------------------------------------
After going through the file at her desk, Zenith came to the conclusion that Jared Beiler was far more stalker material than the person who had killed him.
The man collected femurs.
Femurs.
Other than the femurs and the goat tattoo, the man was so ordinary it hurt. He really didn’t get up to much. No history of drugs, didn’t go to parties in college, had very few friends. People didn’t have a bad thing to say about him, or really anything good either.
He just existed.
He went to work, collected his bones, and stuck to what he knew. Zenith could respect that, he knew what he liked and avoided things that would interrupt him or get in the way.
None of his acquaintances noticed anything odd, he hadn’t seemed depressed, hadn’t gone from depressed to concerningly better one day and telling everyone he loved them, his possessions, his desk, car, and house were untouched.
A dead end.
Literally, if she was right, and staring at the same file for the past two hours hadn’t changed anything in it. The only thing it had changed was her growing urge to set the computer on fire.
“Hey, what if we go back to the warehouse? Just to look around with fresh eyes?” Dawn wondered, doing her best to convince Zenith to walk away from glaring at the computer screen.
Zenith stood up and motioned for Dawn to follow her.
----------------------------------------
The drive to the crime scene was short, and Dawn made sure to park two blocks away from it.
“Vultures already there?”
“Yeah, apparently it’s pretty bad. I was thinking we go through the alleys? See if we find something?”
Zenith shrugged, making her way towards one of the danker alleyways and pointing at one in the opposite direction.
“You go that way, I go this way?”
“Rodger dodger!”
Unfortunately the alleyways, much like the report on Beiler, did not give much help by way of finding out anything actually helpful.
Trash, more trash, drug paraphernalia, posters for bands that had been disbanded for years on the walls; but nothing like a dropped blood bag or drag marks heading towards her scene.
Most of the alleys had the blinking lights of small CCTV cameras watching them, and Zenith started to take notes of where they were and what businesses they could belong to. Maybe there was one that she and Dawn had missed in their initial sweep.
She wasn’t holding onto much hope, though.
Zenith was standing in a puddle of questionable liquid, marveling at an old Pelco camera that was still in use and working, when she heard a soft thud followed by a curse. Tucking the notepad away into her pocket, she cautiously made her way to the noise, hand hovering over her gun.
A woman in a business suit with wrecked black hair and a bloody nose was backed against a wall, and three men were surrounding her.
It looked like it had been four, but one was on the ground, unconscious. Zenith felt like the bully stick in the woman’s hand had something to do with that.
The detective started to remove her gun from its holster to scare the remaining men into at least leaving, when the woman they surrounded exploded into a flurry of movement.
Her hand snapped out to the right, cracking across the temple of the shortest men, effectively removing him from the fight. She ducked under the one trying to grab her from the left, and knocked his legs out from under him for the sole purpose of slamming his head into the unforgiving brick wall behind her.
The man in front of her reached for his lower back, and Zenith moved.
Regardless of how impressed she was, a bully stick versus a gun was a bad bet.
The man who’d met the wall hadn’t gone down, and was distracting the woman.
Zenith’s hand went from the gun to her personal taser, a safer bet in such close quarters, and she struck the armed man just before he could make contact with his own weapon. The high setting she had on the taser brought him to his knees in an instant, and in another she had him handcuffed before he even realized what was going on.
That done, she turned to assist the woman…only to be thrown back by a punch that felt like it was trying to break her jaw.
But it wasn’t the other man that had done it.
The woman glared at her with wild, unhinged grey eyes, a snarl on her lips and her fists raised to deliver another mean left hook. She’d just taken down three men larger than her, and was ready to square up against a woman who held the same height advantage.
It was stupid, but admirable.
The feral raccoon behavior was making her heart flutter.
Zenith knew instantly that she was smitten, and also that she had to set up an appointment with her dentist, because at least two of her teeth were now concerningly loose. The drive to impress the woman overrode her common sense, unfortunately, and Zenith found herself placing a hand above the wild-eyed beauty’s head as she loomed over her.
“Hey, how you doin?” Zenith purred, the blood from her freshly split lip splattering on the other woman’s expensive looking dress suit.
The other woman did not look impressed.
Instead of swooning, she opted to gut-punch Zenith so hard the detective had to bend over and fight against the urge to vomit.
The unhinged woman shoved past Zenith, making her way toward the men that had accosted her and threw a business card at the detective as she walked away.
“Call that number to pay for any damages I just did and leave,” the woman ordered, placing a foot on the man Zenith had cuffed to roll him over.
She paused.
“…Handcuffs?”
Zenith couldn’t believe her luck, letting out a guttural laugh as she forced herself to straighten up, card in hand. It would be a shame, but it looked like her job had to take precedence over winning a date.
“Congratulations on assaulting an officer,” the detective said, tugging out and flashing her badge at the now very pissed off woman, “Kimora Mordrel, you’re under arrest.”