Chapter Four: The Job

                “Stone, you are once again late. I almost decided to retract my offer before, but you got here in the nick of time.” remarked a man lounging on a cushy office chair, the typical fat cat in Stone's opinion. 

                “Save your breath and my time Chief, you’re the one that’s wasting my business.”

                “How dare you? If it wasn’t for the Minneapolis Police Department your little shitshack of a company would never get off the ground! Besides, where do half of your cases come from?”

                “Typically from paranoid rich guys that want us to follow their whore wives.”

                “Okay, where does the other half come from?” Stone breathes out a sigh, annoyed by the Chief’s response.

                “You guys.”

                “Yup, so you better make sure that you follow the rules. Anyway, back to the case.” Klein slides a plain vanilla file with the name Emilia Dominguez printed on it. Stone carefully dissects the file, scanning through old pictures of a twenty something mother posing pictures with an assortment of friends and family, including a daughter around the tender age of five. He notices some scraps of poetry that Klein explained the police insisted to obtain to examine psychologically for depression symptoms. He then sees the image of Dominguez’s head scattered across an apartment wall, along with her daughter."Looks to be a standard murder-suicide. I just wanted to call you over to make sure you haven't gone too rusty over the last couple of months. Just need some extra verification that this is a suicide, you know, to extradite the process." casually opined Klein, apathetic and callous to the gruesome scene, accustomed to even the sickest of affairs.

“Well I am flattered that you checked on me to see if I was still sharp, but you told Marceau that this was a biggie, not some boring suicide. When did this happen?” Klein merely pointed towards the date, 12/25/17. Stone then finds the suicide note, written messily and shakily with the stains of tears haphazardly strewn into the blood-smeared paper, and gulped a little when he imagined the same nerve racked fingers that hastily scribbled across the very same page slowly wrapping and squeezing the trigger while clutching the mangled remains of her daughter, imagining her doe-like eyes widen as the grave realization hits her. But as he further glanced at the handwriting on the paper itself and looking at the scraps of poetry, he reverted back to his unflappable smirk. “This might surprise you, but this is not a suicide. It was murder.”
(Part Two)