Be afraid, Detective

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. But there was no beauty to this crime scene. Oh sure, there were the bodies, blood splatters, signs of struggle. A lot of misery and violence had happened in this room. But it didn’t make sense. The door, locked from the inside. The windows with grills, all intact. No sound had been heard from people living across the hall. The guards downstairs said no one had come visiting deep in the night. And yet…and yet…here it all was. A mother and child, dead, brutally slain, bellies slashed open, guts hanging out. What made it all the more gruesome was that the child had been ripped from the womb…and then stabbed. And hacked. And slashed. Why all this violence? The killer could have finished the job much more neatly with a simple slash across the mother’s throat. That would have taken care of the unborn child as well. But no. The killer went graphic. As if he wanted to make a statement. But a statement to whom? The dead victim? Or the police? Or to someone else who may be next on the list?

So yes, it was a singularly ugly crime scene. Not because of the horrible scenes of mutilation and bloodbath. But because it didn’t make sense. And Detective Inspector Delwar hated crime scenes that took more than 5 minutes to figure out. He called them “ugly” crime scenes.