"Nothing to investigate, it's just another one of many"
"But they are getting more frequent"
"We do not have enough staff or funds to investigate another case. Our department has to prioritise"
That is what I hear every time we show up at another one of those scenes, and always have to have to answer, same tone, same "priorities" and "shortage of employees". That is what I have to say. The police department around here has been struggling for as long as I can remember, the station smelling like dust and instant coffee while the very few souls that worked there had to go out frequently to "protect the city" and "be a hero" but most have already lost their motivation. They still do the job, they just don't do it with as much enthusiasm as when they started. Here dreams were brought back to reality almost instantly. And here I worked, as a crime scene investigator. I don't quite know why I chose this job, it was as if it just clicked. Or maybe back then I was also trying to play the hero? The thought made me smile at myself.
The case i had been assigned to involved a person going missing, or at least a majour part of their body, if it can be described as a body. If it resembled anything,... it did't, it looked like reddish brown liquid coating a large portion of the room, the heavy smell of metal hung thick, the once white bed now painted with shades of maroon, and crimson.
"Am I the first to touch this case?"
"Yes"
"The file includes nothing about the remains being DNA tested, Rodgers. What has the police department been doing, this stuff looks like it has been here for like at least three to five days."
"I am just a new employee at the job, i dont really know how cases like this get handled, I was tasked with driving you here and we are here."
I went silent, such a direct and guarded answer was not really something I expected from Rodgers, who was normally silent and stayed out of conversation. It was nothing though, such a scene would rattle anyone, except myself of course, as i was not new to this kind of gritty reality.
"Emilia Stone, real name Jessica Carter, ran away from home due to unknown reasons." Read the newspaper from a week ago. I walked around the room, finding a diary. I put on gloves and picked it up. 6th to the 12th of September. With pages after covered with messages like "DON'T LISTEN TO HIM" and "CLOSER CLOSER CLOSER EACH TIME" in increasingly deteriorating handwriting. Those were not the last pages in the journal itself, but they were the last ones that were legible, the rest stuck together with part of what remained of their owner, too fragile to be just pried apart on the spot.
I closed the journal, putting it in an evidence bag. Any person who would be writing things like this was either not in good mental shape or making a Halloween prop. The latter seemed unlikely, but it was my way of coping with seeing the scene. Dark humour.
"Could this be a suicide?" Rogers, who was waiting at the door asked.
"unless the victim used explosives, which we have no evidence of, as there is no shrapnel or char marks, it is practically impossible to get such an even and thorough coverage of an area in one's own insides. Though at the same time, it could have been an intruder, that would explain practically everything except the blood and finely ground flesh missing…. You know what? I'm writing that down.
Rogers looked uncomfortable.
"Oh, you can wait outsi— and he did exactly that."