He gave Beth a simple nod as she made her way for the front entrance.
A wall of sound hit her as she opened the doors. Music, laughter, conversation, and the tinkle of glass on glass at the bar came in through the receptors in Beth’s cerebral computer as if someone had started playing the audio in the middle of the track. Through all the sound, she managed to hear her own name called out.
“Beth!” Marcus hollered. He beckoned when she turned to face him.
The aroma of finished wood rushed into the detective’s nostrils as she made her way around patrons and staff until she was able to take a seat at the bar beside her partner. The whole place reeked of fresh lumber and aged whiskey. Beth couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or not, though the business had a strange saloon-and-Irish-pub fusion in its decor. It would not have felt out of place to hear a player piano clanging from the corner, or someone singing whilst dancing atop a table.
“You got here sooner than I expected,” Marcus said, nodding to the half-finished drink before him. “Want one?”
“I just finished my coffee, Marcus,” Beth replied with a slight frown. “Are we here to work, or is this a social call?”
“Of course, of course,” Marcus said. He took two large gulps, downing most of the rest of his beer, then wiped the foam from his mustache. “Sorry. Let’s go have a look upstairs.”
“Upstairs?”
“It’s where the victim lived,” the redheaded man replied. “It’s where she was found.”
“Lead the way,” Beth insisted.
Marcus took her away from the bar, around a few women arguing and a server trying to calm them, to a staircase on the side, by the restrooms. They held onto the hand-carved banister as they made their way up to the second floor.
There was a door at the top of the stairs that, once they passed through and allowed it to slam closed behind them, blocked out almost all of the noise from the pub below. All that could be heard was the creaking of the floorboards as they made their way down a hallway. Doors lined the walls, each with a letter and number, until they came to E2.
Beth noticed the door was ajar. She saw a police officer pass on the other side through the opening.
“After you,” Marcus offered.
She pushed the door open wide and entered the apartment.
Without delay, the subtle yet sickly scent of decay reached her and she wrinkled her nose. A few cops were taking holograms of the scene with some of the department’s high-end cameras while another seemed to be searching for something on the kitchen walls.
It was a small apartment, barely more than a studio, with half-walls dividing the space into sections. The kitchen was just another part of the living room, which branched off into what Beth could only guess was a bedroom. There was a recliner and a coffee table in the main living area, but that was all. Despite the lack of space, the apartment’s resident managed to cover nearly every inch of the walls with knick-knacks, photographs, artwork, and news clippings. Beth saw a lot of faces repeated throughout the images.
Probably the victim’s family, she thought.
The detective was about to ask where the body was, but answered her own question before speaking.
She couldn’t help but wince when she saw the old woman, or what remained of her. There was blood everywhere, soaking the carpet and the couch and splattering the walls around her. The corpse lay crumpled in front of the sofa, the coffee table turned over and its contents spilled over her.
“Looks like she was beaten to death,” Beth said, kneeling down to look closer at the body. She ran her finger along the old woman’s brittle straw-colored hair, revealing the bulk of her wound. “Something heavy and blunt, if I had to guess.”
“That’s what we’ve been thinking, too,” Marcus replied, standing a bit aways from the scene with a tinge of disgust on his face. “You can almost taste it in the air.”
“What’s her name?” Beth asked.
“Vicky Fontane,” her partner answered. “She’s lived up here above the bar for over twenty years now, according to the owner and her neighbors. Always kept to herself. Said hello to people whenever she went out, but never more than that. No one seems to know anything about her.”
“What about family?”
“There hasn’t been any to speak of,” Marcus started. “At least, not that we’ve discovered yet. We’ve even tried to get into contact with potential flings from her youth, but it’s been fruitless. As far as we can tell, she was a lone wolf. Full on urban hermit.”
“Someone must know something about her,” Beth insisted. “Did she have no friends? No associates of any kind? Who did she shop with?”
“It seems she did that all online,” her partner said. “And no, we haven’t found anyone who would describe themselves as a friend of hers.”
“Strange,” Beth observed.
“Some people just don’t mesh well with others,” Marcus said. “They just prefer solitude. The quiet.”
“I can understand that.”
She lifted the body so it was like Vicky was mid sit-up. The color seemed to drain even further from the dead face, like the blood was seeping down into her slippers.
Just below where her head was resting, Beth spotted a few fragments of something opaque. It almost looked like china, but not quite as fine. Perhaps porcelain?
“Have you seen this?” Beth asked.
Marcus came over to peek at what she was indicating. It took him a moment, and after some squinting, his eyes widened.
“We were waiting for you to move the body. But that’s a peculiar find. We haven’t found anything broken around the apartment aside from the lock, the table, and her skull.”
“Very funny,” Beth commented. “But I think we have a
