Her scent

Wake up call

It’s 2 A.M. and Margret is woken up by a powerful and repetitive noise. It’s the work pager that insistently rings.

"Mmm... Margret Tucker speaking."

"Rise and shine, beauty. Dillard Mitchell on phone."

"Oh... it was you. What’s up?"

"May I take you out on a date?"

"Argh, cut the crap. What happened?"

"Nothing, I meant it. Let's go out like two full responsible adults. Are you up for it?"

"... Mitchell, are you kidding me? Have you checked what time it is? I hope you better have a pretty good damn reason or at least not be drunk again, or I swear to God..."

"Wow, there, tiger. I just like making you angry. That’s the best perk I’ve got out of this job, after all. Grim Avenue nr. 2, hurry up. Oh, and get those high boots of yours, it's going to get pretty messy."

Margret Tucker is a supple woman around 31 years old with a pretty unaesthetic physical constitution for a woman. Her stumpy appearance was a result of her intense training for swimming and basketball. Despite of her calves’ rough forms and wiry arms due to the way-too-pronounced muscles, she has a clean, slim face, that looks like it’s part of a whole other body. Her curly, bloody-red hair was flowing off her shoulders highlighting her thin lips, discretely trimmed with some colorless lip gloss, and her bright sky-like blue eyes, slightly tempering the shape of her shoulders. Her brushy eyelashes were sometimes highlighted by a Mascara or some eyeliner softly applied.

At 3 A.M. , a black matte Volkswagen, slightly overused, stops on Grim Avenue and Margret gets off in a hurry, dressed with a long large T-shirt and a pair of jeans, with some kind of coat over them that looked more like a bathrobe, along with a pair of muddy overused sneakers, originally white.

"Hey, Margret, it’s so generous of you to finally show up. A little bit more and it would have been pointless… Late comers do the dirty work."

"Shut up, Mitchell. Well, now I’m here. So, what do we have?"

"Here? Ah, at about -5 degrees, mud all over and a hell out of a blizzard. Inside, on the other hand… that is where the real party begins", says Dillard, with an enthusiastic face, pointing to a warehouse that looked like a hobbit hole compared to all the other giant buildings surrounding it.

"Argh, just move your ass and lead the way."

They both step over the high wooden threshold, going under the metal improvised archway made to mask a sustaining beam and finally reach the back room. They barely open the door when a smell of fresh blood, rottenness and lavender perfume strikes them.

"Oh, wow, what’s with this smell? It’s like a decaying strip club."

"You are closer to the truth than you know.", says George. "It’s the scent of our victim. Stinks of lavender since we came. I’m surprised you couldn’t smell it from outside."

George Black is one of the best coroners of his times, a worthy in domain. He is a slim, nearly 80 inches tall man at about 88 lbs. He is a hyperactive person with a loaded past full of different types of addictions, including alcohol and drugs. His lean face shows the fact that he smokes at about 2 packs of cigarettes per day, even though he always says he's quitting, yet he buys them pieces so nobody keeps a track of how many he smokes...  or borrows from others. The ones that don’t know much about his addictions or past say he is just as old as he looks, a man without any life results somewhere in the middle of the defacement process, friends usually making jokes of him that „he will soon have an autopsy on himself”. His grey, almost-gone hair complete his look, perfectly hiding his real age of 40 years old.  

The body is sitting on a chair and tightly tied with an elastic rope. The whole body is covered in blood and lavender perfume, except for the face. The face seems untouched, like the killer preserved it on purpose. 

"The victim is Alice Bloodworth, a 29-year-old stripper, black haired, heavily made up", says George. "She’s been missing from home for the last 3 days according to her neighbors, she was living alone, her parents passed some time ago and the last time anyone saw her, she was driving her own car to quote "see an old friend”, as her boyfriend says, though he is not much of a help as he swears he knows nothing of this so called friend. If it wasn't for his alibi, he would be my main suspect. I personally still don't like the guy, but from now on it's your investigation. The perfect victim, if you ask me."

Above the victim there was an old-fashioned lamp hanging from the ceiling, irregularly spreading some pale weak light, the kind of lamp used for interrogatories.

"The victim doesn’t display any outer or inner lesion, although she is covered in blood. We will wait the result of analyzes because the blood might not be hers. The only strange thing with this girl is... her face. That’s it! It’s way too clean!"

George rushes out, then runs towards the victim with a little wet rug and starts wiping her face off. Yes, he can still run. Slowly, the forms of an inner lesion is outlined, the girl’s face turning a darker and darker purple as George was wiping the makeup off, like digging for Atlantis. After wiping a generous part of her face, he stops for a second and looks at her with a look somewhere between perplexity and ecstasy. He turns then towards us and says:

"I am not sure whether you want to hear this or not but... this poor girl's face has been cut off, she was left to bleed out then the killer put her face back on using makeup to cover the outline. She does not seem to have any other marks of violence though… all I can say for sure right now is that it took some time until she died. You wouldn’t have wished to be in her place, I assure you. Nobody to touch the body until the autopsy."