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Infernal

Posted on January 21, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

It was hot, not at all like the way it looked on television. Nobody in their right minds could wear a suit and tie in this weather. Hell it wouldn’t be wrong to say that nobody alive could wear a suit and tie in this weather. So hot that three feet away shimmered and shook in the steam the air had become from being merciless cooked by the late morning sun. I’m not mistaken; it is the late morning sun that’s doing the cooking.

Beautiful, rich and extremely spoilt women would do the bidding of a pus-and-boils-infested Neanderthal even if it required them doing things to parts of his anatomy the Creator had never meant to be used in that way, if hey could do it within the confines of an air-conditioned room for three whole minutes. Proud, miserly, nearly-dead-without-quite-knowing-it people would give up the opportunity to live forever if they could exchange that opportunity for a glass of ice-cold lemonade in this crisp, white heat.

This wasn’t the promise of burning in hell that was the only guarantee most sinners walked off this mortal coil with. No sir, this was much worse than all that. Eternity and the damnation it brings is already upon each and every one of the sixty-seven men and women who are required to be present in the open on a Saturday afternoon so that they can cover all the angles on a crime scene before the heat causes the exposed innards of this young woman to cook just enough to fire up a scent that will draw every single scavenger with a taste for human flesh within a twenty mile radius. Noon was merely a quarter hour away and if we didn’t work fast, a near impossibility at temperatures like this, a couple of the currently living might be lined up alongside the young woman unfortunate enough to have met her end in a manner that would have been an ignoble way for a small animal to have ended up upon being captured by a jungle carnivore.

It’s not my job to catch the killer or even to offer theories on who he (if it is a he) might be or where he might hang out after committing a heinous act like this. It is bad enough that people kill each other in the name of war, peace, jihad, religion, disrespect of religion or whatever cause that enjoys media acceptability. It is much, much worse when someone kills for sport or because some childhood insecurity can only be massaged so that it doesn’t chafe as much for a finite amount of time. I look a this…mass of flesh that has come free of the skin that is supposed to contain it (because I cannot bring myself to refer to her as ‘this woman’ or ‘the victim’) and I wonder what sick, twisted bastard would go through the trouble of causing so much physical harm both before and after this woman’s death while watching the sun come up. No one could have done this much damage unless they had time. The spatter reports, the coagulation of the blood and the fact that a scavenger attracting stink was mere minutes away from escaping into the air suggested that the killer did have time and the victim before hadn’t been a living, breathing human being for atleast five hours.

It’s realizations like these that cause me to want to throw it all up, or away. My breakfast, my career, my belief in the system or my fear for my life. You could have lived a very good or very bad life only to end up as worm food that’s been chopped up for easy consumption.

And all I can do is file all the information away, hoping that someone in some other department can find an answer.

Somewhere, beyond the shimmering that the eye can see, is the killer, probably hanging around on the periphery, savouring our discomfort and obvious lack of any real leads; like the Devil lording over this infernal heat, watching mere mortals play catch up.

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