🚓 Unmasked Unmurder Case [First Person Protagonist]
First Draft Created: 2024-03-11 19:30
Last Updated: 1 month, 3 weeks ago
Our police car pulled up the kerb, sirens blaring. As I stepped out of the car, I paused, one leg on the grass and one with the rest of me in the car. The gathering crowd could be a problem. Most of my several-days-old murder cases were in a cordoned-off area, not at a crowded house party.
"Break it up!" I hollered, committing and stepping forward out of the car. Behind me, the forensics guy rustled his way out, scooping up something or other, several bags of whatever he usually needed to do his job.
Many of the teenagers had long since scuttled the moment they'd seen cops, and were bady hiding behind cars, in a tree house, or booking it down the street.
I rolled my eyes. I wasn't here to arrest underaged drinkers. I also had no case-related need to detain them, given the frozen body they had uncovered in the basement freezer while looking for more ice and identified as Mr Fin had clearly not been murdered tonight. That much was clear.
Mr Fin had suspiciously vanished well over a month ago, in late October, and the post-exam party these kids had started tonight to end off the year clearly had nothing to do with the already-frozen corpse in the basement.
What did surprise me was just how many teenagers still hung around to watch us from a distance -clearly the sober ones with nothing to hide from the cops. I had to admit, I had certainly never been so well-behaved in my own youth.
There were even parents present! Though of course, they had probably only come out in response to the panic ensuing after the discovery of the body. Or because their kids had mentioned that cops had shown up.
I felt a flush of embarrassment that my detective's mind had taken so long to click on that one, and was glad for the relative darkness of the paper-bag candle-lit path. Fair enough, I was not used to doing my investigation work in a crowd. Social anxiety is a rather embarrassing trait for someone in my line of work, truth be told.
"Ready," the gruff voice behind me said. We had reached the front door in that time, and, pointed by a still-in-shock curly-haired youngster of about fifteen, who managed to choke out "no lights", we began the descent down the stairs that everyone was clearly keeping their distance from.
A chill hit us several steps down. Honestly, it might as well have been a Halloween scene.
The basement clearly wasn't meant for entertaining visitors, stacked high with boxes and threatening to attack my dust allergies with the densely hung and burdened ancient spiderwebs whose only ensnared prey had been dirt.
These webs practically formed a curtain on either side of us, as we wove their way through the precarious box towers to the now-opened chest freezer at the far end.
The top of the freezer had begun to drip water - the overgrown ice stalactites melting due to being left open in shock. This wasn't a good way to preserve a crime scene.
We approached, gingerly, and peered over the lip of the giant chest freezer.
I fumbled at my belt, to unclip my large baton flashlight, which I hadn't needed in the dim half-light of the floodlights, blaring through the high windows to the outside at ground-height, to get a closer look into the shadow-cast freezer. Something I doubted anyone had done so far.
I heard a chuckle behind me.
"What?" I whirled around.
"It's a halloween mask".
Atop the now-melting ice encasing the frozen body was clearly a mask. It had vaguely resembled the old man, it was true. But in the bright light of my torch beam I could see it was detached, lying on top of ... the "body", which in fact was no human body and appeared in fact to be an entire frozen lamb. God. Teenagers were so dramatic.
"Oh, it just... fell in. I guess they thought that was his face?"
I found myself rolling my eyes again. Somehow I had a feeling that whoever had jumped the gun to call the cops had never actually consulted with the owners of the house they were partying at.
Then again, if you thought they were murderers and were a scared teen... I suppose you wouldn't check in with them about a "body" you thought you'd spotted in their basement freezer.
The rumour mill of speculation must've kicked things into high gear at the party and of course, nobody had thought to check.
Well.
Time to tell the masses, I supposed.
Just then, I received a text.
"Case solved...."
The new intel from head office stunned me.
Though how to ask the owners why, according to the FBI, the now-confirmed still-alive father had moved to the North Pole to become the new Santa Claus, I did not know.
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