The stench was terrible.

She lay there, tied to the bed, bound in ways that defied logic, defied sense, defied any reasonable need to prevent someone’s movement let alone any particular kinky desire for restraint.

Ropes tied to ropes bound about more ropes lashed to further ropes which ensured the complete submission of the flesh to which they were all insidiously preventing any movement at all.

The excessive arrangement alone could have caused death in any number of ways. Coagulation of the blood in situ, embolisms, lack-of-oxygen based gangrene, just to name a few.

But that was not what killed her.

The stench was terrible, and the scene to which it an integral part of was worse if such a comparison could be made by a sane mind. The stench was blood. The stench was rot and decay. The stench was simply a cherry on the top of what a darker mind would call an icecream sundae of a murder.

Full of nuts.

Trey stepped through the door, stepped back outside, and promptly threw up.

“That shit smells worse than you do after an all-nighter.”

Harvey smirked and pulled out a small jar, brightly painted red. It would have been perfectly at home and totally passed over in the confines of the room beyond. Even if it weren’t for the blood, the room would have been deeply saturated in red. Curtains, bed spreads, carpets, all red. Perhaps in a way it was fitting that the murder took place in such a room. Harvey twisted the lid from the small tin with a deft twist and dipped a finger into the sticky unguent, giving a brief stir, before drawing it out and rubbing it across his top lip.

Smiling in smug satisfaction, Harvey tossed the small tin over.

“You might want to do the same.”

The grizzly scene before them now provided a stark contrast. A grim tableau of vital fluids, rendered flesh, and the by comparison pleasing smell of mentholated eucalypt.

“So what went on in here?” Trey asked one of the officers trying to avoid losing their hastily scoffed down office bagel.

“Near as we can tell, sir, she was an escort. We kinda figured something this fucked up had to be done by your boy, which is why we called you in.”

“How do you figure its our boy? Or that the killer’s a male at all?” Harvey interjected.

The officer blushed “Well, s’gotta be, right?” he stammered “You never hear of chicks doing this kind of shit.”

“Not that I don’t enjoy raining on your parade, Constable, but you should really read up on Tracey Wigginton some time. What’ve you got, Trey?”

Trey was using a pencil to sift through gobbets of flesh that had plastered themselves, along with bits of bed linen and a fine shrapnel of bone fragments to the wall opposite the bed.

“Not too sure… It looks like” he lifted the object up, slipping it around the end of his pencil, bringing it closer to his face, and using his mobile phone to illuminate it that bit better. Even through the slick smear of gore on it, it was a restrictor pin from a device such a fire extinguisher or:

“a grenade pin?”

Harvey & the constable both did double takes.

“A grenade pin, sir? Like, a hand grenade?”

“Mmmm, looks it.”

“Y’sure it’s not just from the fire extinguisher or something? Where does someone get a grenade from?”

Harvey was already in the corner of the room inspecting the fire extinguisher. “If it’s from an extinguisher, it’s not this one’s. Pin’s in place and it was retagged only last week. But the boy’s got a point Trey. Where the fuck does someone get a hand grenade from?”

“Got a better point for you.”

“Yeah?”

“How come no one heard the damn fucking thing go off? You don’t explode a whole whore without people hearing something.”

Harvey gingerly leaned against the dresser, containing possibly one of the few horizontal surfaces in the room that was dry enough not to require a trip to the dry cleaners and began to rub the bridge of his nose. They stepped out of the room, away from the site that by rights should have been disturbing, but was more and more becoming part of their workaday lives on this case.

“Well, the ball gag certainly gives us a good reason as to why no one heard the girl before our grenade here went off. Quick sedative to get her compliant, maybe? Ties her up in this boyscout bullshit bloody orgy, crams an anti-personnel where the sun don’t shine, and high tails it? Dunno man, there’s stuff in there that just doesn’t sound right to me.”

“Forensics are doing toxicology already.”

“Nah nah, that’s not where it’s not working for me…”

“The lack of sounds is pretty weird. Hey!” Trey dragged the constable back inside the room “Did your team or forensics find any casing fragments in here?”

“I… I don’t know. I’ll check.” The constable left the room with the speed of a man who’d just been offered tobasco lubricated sodomy.

“If there was a grenade,” Harvey mused, “And it blew up, where are the burn marks?”

“Mmm, mmm” Trey’s face lit up “And for that matter, how come she’s still in one piece? Either the ropes would have snapped, bringing half the room down, or they would have kept her in place so that the force of an explosion would just tear through her like fucking a taped up hamster.”

Harvey raised an eyebrow “Your ability for metaphor knows no bounds.”

“Simile… That was a simile.”

You might also like to read:

1. Penitence & Therapy pt8
2. Penitence & Therapy pt5
3. Penitence & Therapy pt6
4. Penitence & Therapy pt3
5. Penitence & Therapy pt7

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