OT COMIC BOOK COMPATIBLE! This is just for the television show, nothing more or less. Pete is not married to Lana, etc.

He did not understand his own calm. It was inexcusable, but yet it existed, a ghost in the back of his mind, a mockery to himself and all who had ever encountered such a situation.

The shock was still seeping in, slowly but with a steady pulse. "She's dead."

"She's dead. She's dead. She's dead..." the thought continued to repeat in his mind like some sort of looped recording. There she lay, her body slumped, her blond hair plastered to the side of her smooth cheek. Her neck was a discolored and he immediately identified this as a bruise that can only come from human hands.

Her bottom lip was chapped, blood crusted over. It seemed apparent that she had been biting down on the piece of flesh as she was strangled to death, many other signs of her struggle were apparent: There were fingernail marks clawing into dirt, clumps of grass enfolded in her limp hand. Her "Mary Janes" were scuffed, the earth surrounding them suffered accordingly.

He still could not believe it. It was all

simply too outlandish to believe, she could not be dead. Not

her, not Chloe. She was too strong, too full of life...but the pulse, or rather the lack thereof, does not lie.

One of her shoe buckles were broken and tarnished, her camisole torn at the spaghetti strap sleeves, her blue jeans covered in clumps of dirt and coated with grass stains. Her nose was misshapen, like the killer had hit her in a feeble attempt to quiet her, though it had evidently not worked.

Chloe Sullivan, maiden name, had been twenty-eight when some fiend had taken her life, robbed her light and talent from the world, and thirty-three year old Archibald Stewart, P.D., had every intention of discovering why.

The coroner snapped pictures, identifying her mere moments after a tourist who was just passing through uncovered her body. Her ID was in her pocket along with her wallet, everything still intact apart from the owner. It had been nearly dawn when the driver had seen the limp legs laying from outside the underbrush. By that time she had been dead for only three or so hours, the body picked clean of any

clues, hairs, prints, blood.

Archie was a rookie, only on the force for two years, and this was not the worst that he had seen. It was a crime of passion yet, near the end, whoever had committed this foul act seemed to have sobered up drastically. The officers were milling about the site, taking tire imprints and such. Clark Kent arrived on the scene moments before the victim was sealed inside the opaque bag that read, "Smallville Coroner," in white letters on the side. The look on his face was enough to rule the man out as a potential

suspect.

"Chloe," the word had not even left his mouth, but his lips formed the name with such sorrowful grace that Archie felt compelled to...comfort him with something, anything.

"Were you related?" He asked, desperately trying to find something to do with his idle hands. Archie resolved to picking his nails down and beyond the quick, removing flecks of dirt from the skin he'd revealed.

Clark blinked

stupidly, gaping like a fish and on the verge of tears.

When he answered his words were too brisk, too hard, like a man revealing emotion. "Yeah, not by blood but...yeah."

The rather obvious question suddenly struck him like an edge of shrapnel clipping him on the side of the head. "How did you know about the victim?" Kent was slower to answer this question, staring blankly at the body bag.

"The news, a few minutes ago, they mentioned something and I couldn't reach her so..." He trailed off, not noticing as the officer glanced around him in curiosity.

"Where's your car?" He asked and Clark was hasty to step forward and toward the body of his friend, abandoning Artie. Mr. Stewart turned away, knowing the task than lay ahead.

Informing the victim's husband.

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