Norman Cousins once said, "Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live."

And before everything that had happened, I never realized how true his words had been.

My name is Abigail Bishop. I've been a police officer in my local police department for almost a decade now, having spent the last three of them as a homicide detective. The unfortunate part about it, however, was that nothing much ever happened in this little town I've been living in my entire life—a little depressing considering the fact that this has been my dream job since I was a little kid, when all my other classmates dreamt of becoming doctors, engineers and hot-shot CEOs once they inherited their parents' well-established companies.

Seeing how I would often come to work just to organize old case files, records and reports all day, I dread the day my former schoolmates would arrange a reunion event just to brag about how successful they were, or how interesting all their lives were, compared to me.

But on one fateful day, as I was waiting in line at a nearby coffee shop to get quick pick-me-ups for some of my fellow officers back at the station, my phone started to buzz from inside my pocket, and I almost quite literally dropped my shit when I saw the name that popped up on the brightened LED screen.

And I've never ran away from the alluring, bittersweet call of coffee so fast in my entire life, for the sake of the new case I'd just been assigned to.

I arrived at the crime scene within ten minutes. It was located in the downtown neighborhood area, almost to the outskirts of town, where endless rows of trees bordered the town from the outside world beyond the borders. All the houses here looked almost similar to one another, but the yellow police lines taped all over the property made it clear which one was my current destination.

What disturbed me, however, was the fact that rather than just one house, there were two houses taped with police lines.

I decided I'd question it later when I'm more informed about the case, and what in the world happened in this quaint little neighborhood.

The forensics team was already there before I arrived, taking pictures and bagging up any evidence they could find within the property. I greeted the ones I recognized and was told that the medical examiner in-charge, Dr. Vivian Bailey, was upstairs examining the bodies. I thanked them for the tip and headed straight through the open door and into the two-floor building.

I found her upstairs, in one of the smaller bedrooms which I assumed to be the family's child's bedroom. She, too, was taking photographs of the murder victim, but, having the ears of a hawk's, she noticed me entering the room almost immediately as she looked up and gave me a look.

"About time you got here," she said. Dr. Bailey, too, was a great friend of mine, and though she had a rather stoic, no-nonsense personality, I could tell that she, too, was excited to be doing something for once in this boring old town.

"I got yelled at several times on my way here earlier, so cut me some slack, will you?" I joked a little, until I turned to my side and saw the body, and noticed how young the victim had been. "Oh my. This one met an unfortunate fate, didn't he?"

"Mm-hmm. His name was Jordan Smith, sixteen. Cause of death was major blood loss from two incision wounds found in his upper abdomen." With her gloved hands, she pulled up his shirt and pointed the wounds for me. His entire abdomen was stained with blood, while the cuts themselves were both at opposite angles, but what intrigued me was the fact that the wounds had been stitched up, though very poorly to the point that the skin around the cuts were swelling.

"Now, note the fact that I said they were incision wounds." She pointed at one of the cuts. "The killer sliced the victim's skin open, with a sharp object. Perhaps a small knife, or an x-acto knife or even a scalpel, but I don't think the forensics team has found anything of the sort within the property."

"Great." I sighed.

I raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean?"

Instead of answering directly, she beckoned me to follow her out the room. I complied, and we walked further down the hallway, to where the master bedroom should be. The door was slightly ajar but I could smell the stench of stale, dried blood even all the way from the hallway, and I doubted from how overwhelming it was that it came from just the teenager earlier.

And sure enough, my doubts were not wrong.

The master bedroom was a mess. There was shattered glass all over the brown carpet floor, coming from the smashed lightbulb still attached to a lamp stand found right next to the king-sized bed, with its lampshade located halfway across the room. In the center of the chaos was a man, lying down on his side on the floor amidst the shattered glass, a dark pool of blood growing beneath him and staining the carpet even further. On top of the bed, beneath the strewn bed cover was what I assumed to be the man's wife, lying cold but peaceful compared to the state the rest of the room was in.

"The boy's parents?" I questioned, shoulders dropping.

Dr. Bailey nodded. "Yep. John Smith, and the missus is Marilyn Smith, both in their early forties. Cause of death is the same as their son; blood loss from incision wounds, stitched, found in the upper abdominal area."

"So the killer went and killed the entire family." I crossed my arms and shook my head. "Talk about a mass homicide case."

"Oh, honey, we haven't even started yet." She nodded to one side of the wall, which I realized to be next door, at the other house which was taped off. "If you think this one is disturbing enough, you haven't seen the other ones."

I blinked. "There's more?"

I couldn't believe my own ears then. I'd wanted a job since the past month—though I suppose it was a good thing that nothing was happening because that meant that the streets were still free of known murderers who had recent killings—but this was nothing like what I'd been expecting.

And she wasn't kidding when she said that there was more. Oh, there was just so much more, and this case might be the one to bring about nightmares when I sleep at night.

The house itself was not much different from the one we were just in, with the exception of more traditionalist furniture and the presence of multiple children's toys lying around, which only brought about a more depressing note to this one than the last, from what I could assume from the toys.

And then we reached the master bedroom, and compared to this one, the last crime scene was relatively clean, because never in my life have I ever seen so much blood, all in one room alone.

Crimson-red droplets splattered on the walls and on the floor, along with a trail of blood smeared on one side of the wall leading down to the dead body slumped over on the floor, his chest decorated with multiple stab wounds that indicated that this one didn't last long—at least, not long enough to put up some struggle like the first house. Another body was found on the bed, this one female, but unlike the last one, she was lying down perpendicular to the bed, her chest and abdomen also decorated with stab wounds and covered in blood.

What shocked me the most, however, was the message the killer had left for us, written in crimson-red liquid that I could only assume was the victims' blood.

'GO TO SLEEP.'

I've read about psychopaths and sociopaths, especially those that ended up being serial killers, some of which were some of the nation's worst. But I don't think that any of them was as gruesome and horrible as this one was.

"I know, right?"

I turned to Dr. Bailey, who had her arms crossed and her eyes staring at the bloody message as well, a sarcastic smirk on her face.

"It's almost poetic," she said. "But what concerns me most, and I think it should concern you as well, is the fact that this was nothing like the last one. The victims are Samuel and Diana Walker, along with toddler twins Lisa and Marie. Parents in their early thirties and the kids are both three years old."

I held my hand over my heart—what sort of twisted monster could do something like this, I thought. Murdering two families, including their children, in cold blood… No person—no human—could do this. I was sure of it from the very beginning.

"Cause of death?" I didn't even need to ask, really, but I did for confirmation.

"Multiple stab wounds," she said with a heavy sigh. "Chest and abdominal area. Struck the heart, lungs and pretty much any major organ, artery and vein there is. It's going to be a mess to try and perform autopsy on these poor souls. God, who—no, what—could do something like this?"

"Not the same one who did the other one, I think." I crouched down and examined the body the best I could while keeping a distance and my balance, not wanting to fall face-first onto the bloodstained carpet. "When did each of the murders occur?"

"Time of death for the Walkers was approximately at 12.09 AM last night, and for the Smiths, it was about five minutes right after."

"Five minutes." I chewed on my lip. "I don't think that's enough time to get out of the other house and straight into this one. Not to mention the drastic change in M.O.; nobody can commit such a brutal murder like this and be calm and collected in committing the other one." I glanced over my shoulder and stared at her. "I think we're dealing with two different murders this time around."

"Okay, hold on just a sec; are you implying that the two murders that occurred last night just so happened to have happened at almost the exact same time, just five minutes apart? Like this is all some coincidence."

I wasn't implying it was a complete coincidence, though. I was never a believer of coincidences, but rather, that there was a reason behind everything. Behind every phenomenon in this entire world, throughout history. That there was no such thing as a mere 'coincidence.'

"Maybe they had an agreement," I suggested, but it wasn't a strong argument, to the point that I was aware of that fact myself. I just didn't know how else to explain this 'coincidence.' "Maybe there is some connection with the Smiths and Walkers, along with the ones who were behind the murders. Vendetta could be a motive. You never know what people are hiding from you from beneath the surface."

"Very cryptic." She placed her hands on her hips and glared at me. "Are you suggesting something there, Bishop? Because please, don't hold back any information—or any juicy gossip from me, all right? For example, if you've finally found yourself a man to spend the rest of your life with."

"When pigs fly," I sneered. "But don't worry—you'll be the first to know."

She laughed, but when her sight fell on the crime scene again, she was brought back to the harshness of reality, as was I. "Well, that 'coincidence' is something that you will need to look into; my job is to cut open dead bodies and see what they have to say—the details of their cruel fate—and report back to you with such details. I think I'll work on the Smiths first—find out what the hell was the killer doing, trying to stitch back the cuts they made. Also, to spare my stomach from throwing up that hella delicious pastry I had for breakfast this morning."

I watched as she, along with a member of the forensics team, bagged the bodies to take them back to the morgue and later the autopsy room, where she could get to work in her field of expertise, all the while examining as much as I could of the crime scene, deep in thought.

There was no murder weapon found in either of the houses, much to my dismay. We did, however, notice that one of the kitchen knives in the Walker household was missing from the knife block downstairs—whether it was missing long before the incident or it had been used as a murder weapon was yet to be determined, because we found absolutely no prints on either of the crime scenes, aside from the victims' own ones. But from the looks of it, the killer—or killers—had used different weapons, because from what Dr. Bailey described and later confirmed before she left was that the weapon used to stab the Walkers left rather large stab wounds, and a knife like that couldn't be used to make such delicate cuts on the Smiths unless it was under an extremely trained hand.

Still, there was not much we could do at the scene. There was not much of a lead we had, period. My assumption that it was two culprits was still contradictory and had no proof whatsoever, until I received results from both the forensics team and the medical examining office from Dr. Bailey.

Until then, I went back to the station empty-handed and with a heavy heart, but once I got back there, I didn't realize I was going to receive yet another surprise about the case—and not one I was particularly pleased with, either.