Le chateau de vent

"Erika." She said it out loud. Could that be the name of her daughter or of a lover maybe? The blue-ish green tattoo looked like the work of an amateur. As if it were carved into the flesh width fuzzy blurry letters where the ink had found its way under the skin. "Could be a jail souvenir," she thought. The scar on her belly looked bad as well. It wasn’t surgical, the report said. All organs intact. It must have been from an injury. "Well, Sarah..." a friendly voice said behind her back."That’s some case we’ve got on our hands here." Claire, the pathologist had re-entered the room. "I can’t read a lot out of that poor ladies’ body. Seems like a bad luck girl to me." "A bad luck girl?” Sarah asked. "Well yes, she was killed because she was at the wrong place, wrong time. Accidental victim. It looks like whoever killed her was after her wallet." "And so they left the pearl?" robbery with murder was a poss...

It felt awkward to stand there next to the naked girl's body. She had been neatly stitched up and labelled Jane Doe 0165. The bruises on her neck, face and arms were the colour of rhododendrons. The pathology report said she hadn't been sexually assaulted. No traces of violation, apart from the blows to the head. One blow had broken her nose and there were bruises on her forehead and imprints were a hand had gripped her left arm. She wasn't really beautiful. She was short and a bit overweight, heavy around the hips. A pink blue lined horizontal scar from an operation divided her lower abdomen into 2 equal soft fat parts. Her nails were dirty and black rimmed. Traces of tobacco, food and plain dust, corresponding to what they had found in her pant pockets. Nothing could be traced back to the place her corpse was left behind. The morgue smelled heavily of disinfectant. Sarah couldn't discover a smell belonging to the girl. According to the report her stomach...

She ran up the stairs to the office and heard a voice calling. "Hey Sarah, I’ve got something for you! Fingerprints of the victim and the full pathology report. Come and get it!" Chris disappeared into his office. He was more or less the only friend she had in the police force here. He was sitting behind his desk eating a boule de Berlin. His hands and mouth shiny with oil and covered in powder sugar. "Well darling, you look tired. You haven’t been out again in some sleazy lesbian bar all night trying to find true love now, have you?" There was a twinkle in his eyes. Obviously he was in for some verbal play. But she wasn’t. "It’s my cold, Chris, I didn’t sleep well." "Oh," he looked disappointed. "I could use a juicy dyke story today, Sarah. It beats filing these.” He pointed to an immense pile of files on the table behind him. "The boss is chaining me to the desk again." "Well today the juicy dyke took a day off and s...