Frankie.

The cliche ‘Hair like spun gold’, was simply the best way to describe the shiny coil of blond that nestled between her shoulder and her neck. Sunlight, peeking through the shutters, glinted on the strands, reflecting metallic shards back at me. Startling and sharp.

Perhaps it was the sheer beauty, so unsettling, so out of place. Perhaps the cliche, which had popped into my mind unbidden, so apt in its provocative truth. Whatever it was, the scene stabbed a chill into my veins.

I have dealt with death, so very often in my life, most of it violent and ugly. Familiarity has made me immune, death's reality has been removed from me, by its inability to move me. This blood soaked corpse with its perfectly preserved vibrant, young locks cleaved, cleanly, through my toughened hide.

The room was expensive, but shamefully dirty. Laminated Imbuia surfaces, littered with the dregs of last nights party-empty wine bottles, coke cans and cigarette packets -looked forlorn and scratched, many strewn with rumpled cellophane which, sparkled incongruously in the reflected light, like garish tinsel advertising a good time.

The motel, known to cater to the call-girl industry, was located in the up-market Johannesburg suburb of Fourways, but with a view of a used car lot. Not the type of scenery needed to make hiring rooms desirable. Each tier of the building's ugly facade, blinked dark glass windows at the second hand cars down below. The passages were as dank, as the rooms were cramped and unimaginatively decorated. Not a space anyone would willing choose to spend their last moments in.

The girl was probably in her late twenties, but the vulnerable angle of her neck above her naked form made her seem younger. She had been securely fastened using, of all things, white cable-ties. A dark red gash at the base of her throat, partly hidden by the fall of her hair, looked to be the cause of death, but then again-although in the face of murder it is impossible not to speculate-I have learned never to pre-judge the ingenuity of killers, or the workings of their twisted minds. On my mental checklist I added a tick next to getting someone to interview, the reception, door and room service staff. Experience had taught me that hospitality employees were usually reticent to a fault, but one simply never knew, persistence might have a payoff.

"Try not to contaminate this set-up guys, I would hate the perp to walk on a technicality." I was talking to the room in general, nevertheless, I knew I had been heard.
A tap on my shoulder gave me an excuse to tear my eyes away from the girl and give my attention to Andy, one of my ‘fiber and spec’ guys.

“Weird one Frank, guy’s albeit given us his address. This place is like a forensic gold mine,” he held out a woman’s handbag for me to get a look at what he meant,

“See... girl's ID, driver's license everything... Hanging outta here, why would he leave this behind, do you think?” I nodded my head at him, then gave the place a more studied look. Andy was right, there were even clear footprints outlined on the blood streaked carpet.

“Fingerprints too, Frank. He made no attempt to clean up, really sloppy, or just plain crazy.” Andy was muttering more to himself, now, than to me, shrugging his shoulders, after dropping the bag into an evidence pouch. The oddness of the scene should have piqued my sense of judgment immediately, but I didn’t have my customary distance to use as a mood detector that day, the room was way too structured.... Even calculated, but I didn't visualize purpose in it.

Andy and his team quickly dispensed with final mop-up. Remarkable, I thought, how they always managed to wipe out every trace of most crimes in a few hours. They had scrubbed and scraped. The room looked spotless, but try as I might I was unable to eliminate the image of the girl, or the thickness of the congealing blood that had filled the space only a heart-beat ago,
"We're off to Nick's, after," Andy said, throwing a friendly arm over my shoulder, "why don't you tag along?" he said before I could disengage myself from the scene unnoticed.
"Thanks, sounds good." I answered. Rather than going home to my empty apartment, I had been lassoed into a boy's after party, never the right gift for any participants liver.

Out on the hi-way, I rolled down my Jettas windows to get a current of fresh air into my nostrils. Death has a sink to it. A sink that tends to cling to anyone who has been close. It mingles into your hair, puts an invisible stain on your clothes. Clean air helps, it's not capable of dispensing with the reek entirely but at least it makes you feel better.

I checked my rear-view mirror before switching lanes. A heaviness behind my gray-blue eyes, already sweeping into dark circles of fatigue under them, alerted me to the fact that this girl, so defenseless in her nudity, her senseless vicious death, had already begun to pull me in. The answer was always amongst the labyrinth of objects at the scene, it's a truth, a fact of crime. A killer never leaves the root of the deed without polluting it with something personal. The frustrating thing is that it's almost impossible, without hindsight, to identify that something. A scrap of note paper, with what looked like scientific jargon on it had been fished out from under the body when it was finally removed. The script was barely distinguishable, having been in a position of much friction with the writhing skin above it, but I had my hopes.

Nick's establishment was located across the road from our offices, a drinking hole, would probably suit as a description to anyone coming across it without having experience of Nick's special brand of personal attention.(and ridiculously good food). A surprise in any Bar. The brick entrance way, next to its grassy parkade, smelt like home.
"How's the wife and 'wickeds'?" Nick the Bartender asked, once I was seated in front of him. He prided himself on knowing tidbits about all of his regulars, and since our department tended to spend more time in his establishment than in our own offices, it wasn't surprising that he knew a little about most of us as well as any interesting gossip attached.

"All, good." I loved my kids or 'wickeds' as Nick liked to call them. I had been separated from my wife for a few years, but we hadn't, actually, managed to get divorced yet. My life, or rather the department's demands interfered with normal existence. Marissa, my wife, hated living under siege, as she called it, during my investigations. I also suspected that she couldn't take the fear anymore - never knowing if I would come home at all, let alone in one piece. She had known I was committed to being a cop when she married me, and in the early years she hadn't minded it much, but after the girls were born, Shiloh first, then Natasha, everything changed.

I was constantly on call.- she called that 'detachment from family'.
I drank tequila to relax.- she called that 'alcoholism'.
The list of my offenses was indeed long, and she had that list pinned to her heart.

I'd moved into my own apartment four years ago. It was meant to be a temporary arrangement until I could find something better. Time had simply washed over my intentions, caving into procrastination, and carrying my plans away on its relentless tide. Psychologically I knew I would never be able to truly make a space of my own seem comfortable without my family, but that's simply the way it had crumbled into being.
Andy slipped into the chair next to me,
"So what are your thoughts Frank?"
"We'll have to wait and see. I hate the cable-ties, the cigarette ends, pity she had to have those as her last memory." I meant it to be non-committal, but Andy's shock would have been comic, if it wasn't as tragic as it seemed,
"What, am I not allowed to view the victim in a personal way?" The days stress cut into my voice. I felt lousy,
"Sorry, Andy, that wasn't ....."
"Forget it Frank, I know, believe me, I know." He stemmed the flow of my sentiment with a weary sigh.

After that, except for the background music, and the sounds of people jostling for liquor, we simply drank.... A lot, in silence. Eventually the sky through the Bar's windows turned from royal to pitch, the day's melancholy was a weighty thing, grim with the swirl of fate it wanted to cloak us in, while sending us into the mist of its confusion.

Stacey.

She remembered that it was very cold, and very wet on the day that it happened, the rain, beating a resounding tattoo against the fragile glass windows of her house. She knew that she would have been far more afraid of the downpour than she was, if circumstances had been different. The brass knocker on the front door was sturdy and beautifully wrought, it was also substantial enough to drown out the sound of the weather with it's ominous clang.

From her corner of the hall, quite, secreted, and still, she saw him. Big and burly he was, clad, head to toe, in black with shiny brass buttons singularly out of place along the front of his jacket. He face, although pasty white, was highlighted by two rosy cherub like globes on his cheeks. He had a booming voice, and of all the unbelievably nasty things that were, that week, he was the worst.

She watched as he circled Cook Janie, she saw Janie stare transfixed, at the toes of her shoes as he questioned her. She knew, by instinct alone, that Janie would tell truth, as best as she could anyway...

Questions echoed around the great rooms, and the constable, seemed to swell with each new one, as if the facts as abhorrent as they were, were somehow of his own making, without ever being his fault. His measure took the weight of it and multiplied it into a case for his own self-importance. it made much of him, and little of her. You would think people would be kind when they came to announce a death to a child, he treated her as if she were the culprit.

Thoughts of that dreadful day were a cloud across her mind, a mind that was swiftly drifting away from the world in an rank anonymous motel room splattered, wall-to-wall in blood.