Chapter Four:
The Safe
Catherine
Catherine kneels next to the child looking at the innocence in her face and wonders who could have done such an awful thing to such a sweet child. She couldn't have been two years younger than her own daughter. Her heart aches for her and her family whoever they are. The coroner arrives and goes to the body laying face down on the floor. He does his thing always the same as the last one he processed.
He finishes up and releases her to Catherine's skillful hands. She prints her cold fingers. She had been dead for quite a while. She rolls her over and looks at her bruised face and still nothing to tell how or what she died of. Her clothes were perfect, other than a few wrinkles from being flat on the floor for so long. Otherwise her clothes were undisturbed. She took a few tape lifts hoping to find maybe some evidence of what happened to her.
Her mind was full of unanswerable questions as she looks over her perfectly clean body covered in the crimson blood on her right shoulder. It wasn't even the shape or consistency of a bullet wound and yet she couldn't think of anything else that could do something similar and so violently quick. She figures whoever did this to her got her through her back and pierced all the way to the front as the wounds seem similar but slightly bigger on her back.
However, something just wasn't adding up. If she was running away why wasn't she running out the door? Why would she have been pointed to the parlor? She gets up and pulls out her black light. She sees the trace of blood leading from up stairs to down and over headed toward the parlor. No signs of struggle and no indication that she was doing anything else than a quick walk down the stairs and over to the parlor. She walks over to the wooden doors she seems to be pointed to and appears to have wanted to get to for whatever reason. She goes in there to find various specialized items and articles. She photographs the room and the jars around the room not yet putting together the puzzle in her head. Everything seems foreign to her. Herbs and roots she never even heard before. The first thing she found was Truffles. Not even the chocolate yummy kind but the pricey mushroom that is such a delicacy in parts of the world. She peruses the aisle carefully observing the contents in each thing. There were strange rocks and minerals and suddenly it became painfully obvious this was definitely an occult shop.
"Warrick?" Catherine calls and gets no answer. Her phone rings the familiar jingle of some angry chick song she picked out on line and answers it with a very alert sound of her first name.
"Well, I'm at the shop, there's a dead girl in the foyer, one of the shop owners across the street called it in," she stats to her fellow criminologist.
"Well, that's the thing Grissom, the girl looks untouched. Not even a scrape on her. She's got a bruise on her face, but that could just be from falling to the wooden floor…" her attention was finally caught to something.
"Hey, Grissom, I got to go," she clicks her phone shut and walks over to the far wall to where a stack of envelops sits. She opens them up carefully from the side. She doesn't risk the glued on seal determined to send it to DNA later for evidence. She carefully examines the names and goes through them each of them had three thousand dollar checks in them. All from months ago and none of them opened endorsed or even deposited.
"Who doesn't deposit their checks?" she wonders softly to herself. Placing the white envelops in a sealed baggie and walks behind the counter.
There an old cash register sat. She had never seen anything like this still in use. Most of the ones she saw were just for display purposes only. She opens the cash drawer and it was full of nothing other than one-hundred dollar bills.
"Wow someone's making it big," she wonders. And it still doesn't sit right with her the fact that this building was supposed to be empty.She knew one thingfor certain. No one would keep this large amount of money in the drawers without a safe, soshe quickly searches around for the safe.
Walking around the shop, she was now doubting they even needed one. The girl had been dead for at least three days with the smell of rot and decay in the room. Catherine though was used to the smell of death and never let it get to her much. She walks around toying with the wall before finding a loose wall panel. She pulls it to find a lever. Well, she figures what's a lever worth if you don't pull it. So naturally shepulls itand the far wall starts to swivel. She runs to catch it as it turns her to a completely different room. A dark and dank room that smells of must and dust and she couldn't describe all the odors which intrude her nose.
She walks around shooting pictures thinking no one would ever believe this. It was like walking backwards through time itself. There was Civil War swords Revolutionary things even the Declaration of Independence and she thought for a moment if this was the real thing what Declarationwas on display. She did not even try to explain that. Samurai armor and English knight armor and horse gear. Grenades helmets and machine gun riffles. It was like a collection of war artifacts.
Browsing through the endless war time trinkets she discovers the door to the safe. It wasn't as she expected it to be. She was expecting something more modern. Although, she doesn't know why she was surprised at the old school safe, everything else was vintage so it should have only figured the safe would have been the same.
She opens it up to astonished tofind hundreds of thousands of bars of gold and silver.
"Oh, my goodness," she backs out of it before snapping her picture still perplexed to how they acquired all this stuff. It was like she raided Fort Knox or something. She enters the safe investigating the gold and silver bricks confused and perplexed on their origins. Her concentration was focused on the gold. Maybe too focused as thevault's door slams shut locking her inside. She runs to the doorpounding andscreaming, butit was of little use.
To Be Continued...
