Sunlight filtered in through partially drawn blinds. The daylight hours threw Detective Leland off. This wasn't the usual way that investigations worked. Very few murders happened in the daytime.
Most murders were over minutiae left to the night. A post-work domestic disturbance gone too far. A clumsy murder done in the secrecy of the dark. But everything about this case was… odd.
Leland had gotten the call an hour ago, just before lunchtime. It wasn't specific as to the nature of the death, so he had it in his head that some old man slipped and fell in his bathtub.
But once he arrived at the scene of the crime, it became instantly clear that this was no accident. Multiple stab wounds, blood smeared on the hardwood floor, all signs pointed to a struggle and a homicide.
But what was most interesting was the symbol painted on the wall. The blood hadn't stayed, and dripped and fell down the wall. The symbol looked like a question mark, but it was placed to the left of what was unmistakably a zero. Photographs were being taken for further investigation, but Leland wasn't going to forget the marks on the wall anytime soon.
The man was removed after a sweep of the area proved fruitless. Leland would hear from the coroner soon. He looked around the small apartment. There was no sign of a break-in; there wasn't even any evidence that another person was in the room. There was no knife to be found, but judging from the size of the wounds, it wasn't a particularly big knife that did it.
Leland found himself stumped. He would have to wait for forensics and coroner reports to even get a foothold into this.
Sure the case was unusual and had a good chance of yielding no conclusive results. The man found dead, one Jonathan Red, wasn't much of a person. He was an old man who had worked in a factory for years, retired, and lived unobtrusively. He didn't seem the type to make enemies, especially the type to kill without a trace. It just didn't make sense.
Leland had no concrete ideas in his mind.
