Post Mortem

Chuck has us using Twitter - something I don't have - but I jumped on the site and used the YouAreCarrying line and it came up with some funny stuff. Mine was:  Deidrie's Necklace, A magazine, the second clue, a tourist brochure, the second contact, a maid's note.... and the below is what I did with it. 

I hated doing this kind of thing.  The crime scene was bad enough, having to work through the blood and guts of the whole thing with the forensics there along with the police and reporters just off there in the background… but I hated going through their pockets and bagging up everything in readiness for what the family needed to pick up.

But this guy had some weird stuff on him, so I decided to wait until the cops looked at it all before giving it back to the family.  I labelled it carefully and had everything ready for inspection, along with my report all e-mailed to the right people after I worked the guy over – and the cause of death didn’t take long… a gunshot wound to the head!  I mean, jeez, who didn’t see that killing him?

I noted everything carefully:

‘Deidrie’s Necklace’ – it was in a box and labelled with a card.

‘The Strand Magazine’ – something he had collected from the post office and had bought on ebay… this magazine had been out of business for yonks.

A card from the game of ‘Clue’ – it was the second clue to the first clue of the game, he had cheated on the game as I had found it in his front pocket.

A tourist brochure of San Francisco – and yet we were in Boulder.  Strange.

A contact lens box with only one contact lens in it … ah!  There’s the first one… in his left eye, “Hang on…his eyes are green, the lens’ are blue… okay…”

From his jeans pocket I pulled out a maid’s note: a shopping list on one side of paper and a list of house hold chores to do.  A few of the chores had been crossed off.

I thought this was a strange lot of things to have on a guy.  But I  bagged each item up and lined them up for the cops to look at, just in time for them to show, look at the things, take the report – with the photos and everything inside the folder – and the let me know it was time to let the stuff go back to the family.  I thought that it was over, as I pushed Mr Mullens into the locker and closed the freezer door.

Two weeks to the day later, I had another guy come in with exactly the same things on him.  The cops – as well as me – thought this was the beginnings of a copy-cat serial killer and started up a file on this, trying to piece together what these two have in common.

There was nothing.

Well, except this person was a woman – Mrs Mullens.

I put her body away and wondered if the person who did away Mr Mullens was the same person who did away with Mrs Mullens.  I really tried not to let this bother me as I closed up the Morgue and went home.

Then it hit the news, there was another murder close to my home – down the street, actually – and so I was called to take in the notes and work on the body.

I walked into the crime scene and found it was almost a duplicate of Mr Mullen’s murder… right down to where the furniture was place.

I got a shiver up my spine, “Wow.”

Sergeant Cole nodded, “Yeah, it’s a duplicate, eh?”

“Creepy.” I stepped up to the body with my booties on my feet, costume on, hair gathered up and gloves on my hands, “I’ll need to do tests for this one… they weren’t shot.”

“No.” Cole said from the front door, “Poisoned.”

Back at the morgue, I found the same lot of things on this person.  This was getting to become a regular thing as I scooped up everything, bagged it all up, photographed it all and made it ready to be seen by the police. 

Then, I noticed the maid’s note:  it was the same, but different.

Grabbing the other two murder files, I pulled out the photos of the maid’s notes and found they were the same lists but different.  On Mr Mullen’s list, three of the ten chores were crossed out – shopping, vacuuming, clean the bathroom.  On Mrs Mullen’s list, five of the ten chores were crossed out – shopping, vacuuming, clean the bathroom, make the bed, laundry.  I looked over at the new list I had and found there had been a new one added – making it eleven things on the list – but all but five things had been crossed out:  shopping, vacuuming, make the bed, dusting, laundry, ironing. 

This made me wonder, how these lists were made, who made them and how did the murder know exactly what these people did in their lives to get these things done.  I tried not to think about it, as my long day had come to an end and I packed up everything to go home.

My house was in darkness as I arrived home, I was looking forward to a nice quiet night alone to watch a bit of television and read a book.  Yes, it had been a long day.  As I walked inside the door, I found that my fuse box had gone.  So, I picked up the torch on the way through to the hallway – where my fuse box was – and switched it on.  I only caught a fleeting glimpse of the Sergeant Cole’s face as something hard and cold hit my face.

I came to on the floor.  From the position I was in, I realised I was in the same position as the others who had been murdered.  My glasses had been removed and only one contact lens had been shoved into my left eye.  All the things I had found on the other two bodies had been place on me – Deidrie’s necklace, a magazine (of some kind), a second clue from the game of ‘Cluedo’, a tourist brochure (from San Diego this time), the box with the second contact lens in it and a maid’s note… all of which had been carefully place on my person by Sergeant Cole.

My head hurt from where he had hit me, but I managed to whisper softly, “They will catch you.”

His face leaned in close, “No, honey, they won’t.”

I smiled, despite the pain of my shattered cheekbone, “But they will.  I sent all the reports, the lists, the names to your Captain with my suspicions of why they were picked.”

He sat on the floor grinning, “And what did you conclude?”

“The Mullens’ were your neighbours when you were young.  They’re Jewish; and you hated them.” I said, “You had a good reason to hate them… you loved their daughter, Deidrie.  You dated her for a while, bought her a necklace and proposed to her.  But when her folks didn’t want you in their family, you hated them with such a passion you never forgave them.  Deidrie married somebody else.”

The grin had slid off his face, “How did you know that?”

I looked at him, “Well, you see, Sergeant, you were looking only at Deidrie, weren’t you?”

“Well yes, of course.”

“You never considered that she had a little sister, did you?”