A/N: So, here we have a nice murder mystery for you all. It will be fairly graphic, and there will probably be eventual lemons. Please let me know what you think and if I should continue.

Until then, have fun guessing 'whodunnit' and theorizing on why!

Disclaimer: Nope, own nothing except the plot

***

Prologue:

I approached the steel door with equal measures of anticipation and dread.

On the one hand this was what I lived for. The thrill of the mystery, feeling the cogs turning in my head, the moment the penny dropped and everything came together. However, no matter how much my job meant to me and how long I'd been doing it for nothing could ever quite prepare you for what was on the other side of that door.

I made sure I had plenty of menthol wiped under my nose and pushed the door open with a steady hand. My eyes immediately zoned in on the white sheet which was draped over a cold steel slab, hiding from my view what I had come here to see. The smell was the first thing that hit me. I might have tried to mask it with the menthol but the smell of decomposing flesh still sank into my nostrils. It didn't help that the victim hadn't been found until four weeks after he'd gone missing, half rotting in his very own lake. How it took the investigators that long to find his body I have no idea.

Flashbacks of my prep notes came into my head. I had a rough idea of what was awaiting me under that sheet but reading about something and seeing pictures was very different to experiencing it in real life. I took a deep breath before pulling back the cloth.

The method of death would have been pretty obvious even if I hadn't read the post-mortem notes. A deep incision ran the entire length of his neck. Standard; nothing I hadn't seen before. It was a very clean line, no tearing or ripping, so I immediately assumed a sharp object had been used to deliver the final cut to this man's life. I wouldn't glean any information from this injury. It was too run of the mill, too common, too straightforward. No. If I wanted any clues to the identity or motive of the killer from the murder itself then I had to look further.

It didn't take me long.

His body was covered with a layer of abrasions. He'd obviously been knocked around a bit. But the part that held a lot of my interest lay at the ends of his hands. Each of his fingernails had been removed. And not cleanly may I add. While the neck wound may have been precise, clinical even, the fingernails were not. When the body had been examined fragments of bamboo were found imbedded in the fleshy nail beds. It was pretty obvious that the victim had been tortured. But why? That was the question.

Now this might seem bad enough, however the worst was yet to come. When I had read this file and passed it to my assistant he had to run to the nearest trash can before he lost the contents of his stomach.

I was a woman and it made my stomach turn.

Instead of slowly peeling the sheet back any further I ripped it off quickly, like a band-aid. It didn't help. I still had to turn my head and catch my breath before turning back to what I knew I had to look at.

The crotch of our victim was entirely mangled. It was a mess of cuts, bruises and rips. However, that wasn't even the worst of it. His penis was nowhere to be seen.

Somebody had removed and disposed of Royce King's penis.

It was gone. And did any of the investigators that had been working on the case have any idea where it was? Of course they didn't. Did they have a list of suspects? Sure they did, it was as long as my arm. But were they any closer to catching the criminal now as they had been upon Royce's disappearance? No. Of course not.

That was why I, Isabella Swan, had been drafted over from New York to Seattle. I may be young, barely thirty, but never before has a case beaten me and I don't intend to start now. I was dedicated, hard-working and sharp as a kitchen knife. I prided myself on my intuition and not letting anything get past me. If anybody could crack this case I knew it'd be me.

I finished out my examination of the body as thoroughly as I could, made my notes and took them back to my office to add to the ones I had already compiled.

So we had one Royce King; founder of 'King & co. Legal Firm', husband to Rosalie King and a generally well respected man about town. Went missing on August 14th, reported missing by his wife on August 15th and discovered face down in his lake on September 12th. He had clearly been tortured before being murdered, though due to the decomposition of his body we couldn't be entirely sure of a date of death.

The investigators I had taken over from had compiled their list of prime suspects. Top of the list we had a Mr Edward Cullen and a Mr Jasper Whitlock. Owners and partners of 'Cullen & Whitlock' – the main rivals of Mr King's own business. The motive was certainly there. They had competed for the same clients and been pitted against each other on many occasions, there were a list of complaints filed from both parties complaining about the other on more than one date and there had even been an interview with Jasper Whitlock in a local paper in which he claimed Royce King was nothing more than 'a two-faced, corrupt bastard'. Hmm, I'd have to take a look into Mr Whitlock's claims myself. Although King's record was squeaky clean he'd obviously done something to piss off somebody and I had to make sure it wasn't Cullen or Whitlock.

However, the SPD had been looking into Cullen and Whitlock for weeks and had yet to uncover anything. I had a feeling they were barking up the wrong tree with this one but I had to make sure all bases were covered. I'd be paying them both a visit very soon.

Next we had Mrs Rosalie King. Ever since her husband's disappearance she'd been playing the grieving widow to perfection. She didn't have so much as a speeding ticket on her record and to all intents and purposes had been the perfect citizen. However there was one thing about the situation that made warning bells go off in my head about her. The fact that King's penis had been removed screamed woman scorned at me. If the murder had been a business dealing then would the torturers have gone down that route? Maybe they would have just to make me think exactly this. I knew Rosalie had been called in for questioning but she had an alibi for his time of disappearance and no apparent motive. She'd been at a spa with her sister Alice Brandon the day King had gone missing and their marriage was seemingly perfect. No matter. I'd still have to question her, see if there wasn't anything the SPD had missed.

I also had a few routine lines of investigation to follow through on. For example I'd have to talk to King's business partner Emmett McCarty and I had a list of King's bank and credit card statements leading up to his death to look through.

I definitely had a lot of work on my hands and I would start first thing tomorrow by paying a little visit to 'Cullen & Whitlock'.

But for now, nothing was getting done. At least not until I had a cup of coffee, with two sugars and a healthy dollop of cream inside of me.

***

A/N: So what do you think? Do you like it? Shall I carry on? Anyone wanna guess early on who did it and why?