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01-20-2002, 10:50 AM
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Danny
Wolvark Sloghandler
 
: Apr 2001
: York, England
: 3,961
Rep Power: 27
Danny  (11)

Thank you for your encouragement, people...

Chapter 2

The tone tore through the air and through Visk’s skull like a surgical laser. Burying his head under his pillow, Visk did his best to ignore the piercing ring, but it just kept coming. In the end, he had no choice but to pull himself out of bed and crawl over to the Fone.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Visk?” It was Frack.

“What is it?”

“Where are yer?”

“At home, why?”

“Yer should be here by now!”

Visk glanced at his clock. Stopped. Shit… “I’ll be right down, just give me a couple o’ minutes.”

“Don’t bother, I’ll come and pick you up. There’s been another one.”

Visk froze. “Another…” Please don’t say murder…

“Another Murder…”

* * *

The building was abandoned, but still sturdy. The walls had not yet begun to crumble, but the old wallpaper had peeled long before, and there was no intact furniture. The local Council had been planning to demolish it long ago, but hadn’t yet found a profitable use for the site. Glukkons weren’t superstitious, but Visk was prepared to bet they’d be even less eager to build on this site now…

This one was, if anything, worse than the last. The floor was so sticky with blood, it only reluctantly gave up its association with Visk’s feet. The blood was ubiquitous, covering the floor, the walls, and all surfaces with a thin layer of viscous scarlet liquid. There was so much blood in the room that it was hard to make anything out against the messy red background.

The victim appeared to be tied to a chair, the only intact piece of furniture in the building, but closer inspection revealed that nails had been driven into the wood through his ankles and thighs, and his wrists had been nailed together behind the back of the chair. Incisions had been made into his calves, thighs, and arms, and his head had been pulled back, the feather tied round his mutilated wrists. His arms were both broken, possibly in an attempt to free himself from this painful position. The head was forcibly tilted upwards, the face facing the ceiling, the mouth gagged with a thick strip of cloth. The eyes appeared to have been wide open, but were now sunk into the skull; the eyelids wriggled. Visk tried not to think about maggots.

“The deceased is mudokon, skinny, pale green skin,” Frack dutifully reported to the station, “Appears ter have been bled to death. Victim is tied to a chair, and some clean incisions have been made into limbs, which were apparently the chief cause of death. Time o’ death fairly recent, judging by the corpse, which is mostly intact, and appears to have only recently stopped bleeding. No apparent decay.” Frack switched off the radio, and reached out tentatively with a scalpel, to take a closer look at one of the incisions in the thigh. Visk looked over his shoulder, but backed off, gagging, at the sight of the masses of maggots that were consuming the corpse from the inside. Frack turned away to watch Visk. “You alright, kid?”

Visk made no reply, but composed himself enough to glance back towards Frack and the corpse. “Yer can’t possible pretend this was suicide…”

Frack looked from Visk to the corpse and sighed. “This never happened…”

The outrage in Visk’s voice was almost tangible. “Oh, come on! Yer can’t just brush a case away because yer don’t like it!”

Frack’s eyes flared. “I can, and I have to! I have no desire to lose my job, which is what’ll happen if we follow this through.” He visibly calmed himself. “Look, yer’ve got a whole career ahead of yer, if you play yer cards right. Don’t throw it away like this…”

Visk was silent for a while, but then he looked up at Frack. “What if this is the same killer? What if they’re connected somehow?”

“How could they be connected? Why would they be? One was out in the countryside, near the river, the other in the middle of the city. One was hung, the other bled. What connection could there be?”

Visk hung his head, thinking. “Let me stay and check it out. Tell the Boss the body made me ill or something, and I had to go straight home.”

Frack began to shake his head on impulse, then caught himself, and slowly nodded. “What good’ll it do, though?”

Visk didn’t reply directly. “If I discover that they are connected, d’you agree we need to investigate properly?”

Frack nodded even more slowly. “Okay, but only if yer have concrete evidence.”

“I will do.”

Frack sighed, and bagged up his own equipment. “Good Luck,” he wished Visk as he stepped outside to get back to the station.

Visk had never been alone with a corpse before. He wasn’t a superstitious person, and he liked to think he was quite cynical about the supernatural, but there was something undeniably creepy about being alone in a [literally] blood-red room with somebody who’s been dead for about a day. Okay, you can handle this… Just try not to breathe in… Visk approached the corpse tentatively. Donning his rubber gloves, he gingerly opened the wound in the leg that Frack had opened earlier. Holding back his disgust, he scraped out as many of the maggots as he could, and tried to look at the shape of the wound. It had been a fairly clean cut, made by quite a sharp blade. There was no lateral stretching of the flesh either, suggesting that it had been cut inwards, rather than downwards; the whole incision had been made more or less simultaneously, with one edge of the blade, instead of being punctured with the point then extended downwards with the leading edge. This suggested quite a long blade, possibly curved. This didn’t really help much, as knives of all shapes and sizes were freely available in the market twice a week, but it was evidence, so he noted it.

He made his way to the doorway of the room to catch his breath, and then realised that the door had been open when they had gotten here. If nobody else had touched it, then maybe the killer’s fingerprints might be on it. Rushing to his bag, he seized a can of flour, and began to sprinkle it on the handle. The handle seemed fairly clean, but Visk continued anyway, becoming quite frustrated with the brass knob.

“Do you know who killed Rab yet?”

Looking up, Visk saw a young mudokon stood just outside the doorway to the building. “Not yet,” he replied, and returned to his irritated dusting.

“There was some glukkons ‘ere yesterday.”

Visk froze, and slowly looked up at the mudokon. “Glukkons?”

“Two of ‘em; a huge one and a short, skinny one. We was excited, cos Glukks don’t norm’ly come down here.”

Visk straightened and walked outside to the mudokon. “Did they come to see… Rab, was it?”

“I dunno; once we realised we wasn’t gonna be able to nick anything from ‘em, we lost interest. But they was around here when we left, and when we came back they wasn’t, but Rab were like that…” His eyes dropped to the floor.

Visk tentatively put his arm around the young mudokon, but removed it when he realised it wasn’t helping. “Did you know Rab well?”

“He used to look after us all. He told us the best places to find food, and how to avoid the cops, and… And now he can’t…” Tears welled up slightly, but the mud blinked them back.

Visk looked around, nervously. He wasn’t good at comforting people , and was becoming quite uncomfortable. “Look, do you know why anyone would want to kill Rab?”

“Nobody would… He was, like, the nicest person anyone around here knew… Him and Tel from up by the river were gonna arrange for all the workers in the city to go down and protest about the new Dam, but now they’re both gone, so I don’t know what’s gonna happen…”

“Hang on, they’re both gone?”

The mudokon looked at Visk. “Tel went out to the villages up where the dam’s gonna be built to try and organise things that end, but he never came back.”

Something clicked in Visk’s head. “This Tel… Was he quite, well, fat? With dark green skin?”

The mudokon nodded. “Yeah, how did you know?”

Visk put his hand on the other’s shoulder, and tried to think of a tactful way to say this. He failed. “The same glukkons who killed Rab killed Tel… I’m sorry…”

The mudokon nodded, sadly. “I thought so. Rab weren’t well known, so they must have learned about him from somewhere… Thanks for telling me, anyway…”

“No problem…”

The mudokon began to walk away. Visk watched him until he turned a corner, then shook himself, and turned back to the murder scene. Glancing at the floor, he realised that his flour can must have sprung a leak, since there was flour all over the floor. His eyes widened as he saw, beside the footprints of himself, Frack, and some muds, several clear prints of the same glukkon shoe he’d seen at the last crime scene…

[ January 20, 2002: Message edited by: Rettick ]
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Guns don't kill people, People kill people! Using Guns.

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