It is a truth universally acknowledged that those who fight the hardest win. It's a supposed truth, an accepted truth. And Elizabeth was living proof of it. Elizabeth had been born to a working class family. They always had enough to survive, but never enough to truly live. Her father had been a bookbinder, working for a publishing house, slaving away for hours every day. Her mother was always bouncing between jobs, her manner impertinent and her rear end constantly on the chopping block.

Elizabeth likes to think she was successful, considering what had happened and all. Her family had never truly been there for her, even less now that they were gone. But she shook off whatever feelings of neglect she felt. She had a job to do.

"Doctor. We need you." Elizabeth ran to the side of the victim.

" There's a slash on the jugular vein, he would have bled out in minutes. They slashed the femoral, too. Stab marks in the kidneys. He was flipped over; whoever did this did it out of rage. It's not methodical, its emotional, passionate. But he's dead all right".

"Well then." James smiled. "I guess its time start doing your job."

Elizabeth scoffed. James was ridiculous, he always had been. Her grad student, he was helpful and all, but usually not worth the trouble he caused. But he tended to come up with the explanation when Elizabeth couldn't. And that was a fine reason to keep him around.

"You first. I need pictures of the body, and the entire scene out from at least five meters. I'll do blood spatter. We'll need to find dentals, DNA, anything to identify the body."

"You've got it doctor." James smiled and went about his work. Elizabeth let a hint of a grin crawl on her face. She liked being called doctor.

She ran the red string through the hoops, doing a basic analysis of what had happened. Elizabeth had a gift. She could run an entire murder scene through in her head, based only on the traces of blood left behind. She could decipher the crawls and drips. She knew the difference between splatters and splotches. She knew that an automated tool caused similar patterns, while melee weapons caused irregular, jagged cuts on the body and jagged spurts of blood. She knew everything from the blood, because the blood was the evidence that could never be washed away. You could try, but Elizabeth would always find you from the blood you left behind.

She tore the gloves off, blood pooling in the fingertips of the rubber. They had gone over every inch of the site; it was time to go back to Jane. Jane would be able to help with the rest.