Chapter one

Selena March groaned when she heard the strange annoying sound coming from her desk next to her bed. "Morning already?" She mumbled half asleep, subconsciously reaching out her hand towards her desk to stop the alarm. She pressed the alarm but the ringing persisted, annoying her. The ringing stopped and she smiled in satisfaction and turned her body to get more comfortable and go back to sleep.

Just as she was about to drift off to her sweet sleep, the ringing started again and it was annoying her. She sat up angrily, getting ready to pick up the blasted piece of crap called an alarm clock but stopped, her hand mid way between her body and the alarm that wasn't ringing. Her eyes landed on her cell phone that was next to the alarm, ringing loudly. It was then that she glanced at the time on her clock.

02:16

"Hello?" Selena said answering her phone while trying her best to be polite to Owen Matter. He was her boss after all.

"Detective March, there is a fresh crime scene here for you. Nice and ready for you to come and sniff it out." Owen said with a tone she pinned as interest and disgust. Selena frowned.

"Can't this wait until I am actually awake or during my shift later on today?" Selena asked stifling a yawn.

"No." The reply was so sudden and unexpected. He usually nodded and put it off her sometimes. She loved her job but she was too tired to actually get exited about what would get Owen Matter so jacked up in all his years of experience.

"Forty-five minutes March. I will send you the address." And he hang up. His words were final. Before Selena could even get the short conversation to the back of her mind, her phone vibrated with a text. The address. Judging by the distance she had to cover, she knew it would take forty-two minutes to get there. She bounced off her bed and headed straight to her front door, grabbing a mint from her stash on the table and her favourite brown leather jacket.

It took her exactly forty-two minutes to get to the address Owen had sent her. She got out of the taxi and paid the driver, her eyes not leaving the large two storey house with telltale signs of the place being a crime scene. The police cars with sirens off to avoid attention, the light yellow tape written ‘CRIME SCENE, DO NOT CROSS’, all the lights in the house being abnormally bright due to the beams they used and the ambulance outside.

She pocketed her hands and started walking towards her new case. The paramedics and the cops outside nodded in greeting as she passed by them and she nodded back in acknowledgement. The front door swang open and her co-worker and partner walked out. Darral Cooper was his name.

"Selena! " Darral said excitedly when he saw his partner. His eyes red and his brown hair in a mess. She smiled knowing that it meant that he was also woken up by their inconsiderate boss.

"Nice pajamas and bed hair." Selena said when she reached him. He rolled his eyes and gave her a pointed look. She looked down at herself and realised that she was in her pink bunny vest and shorts under her jacket, her brown hair was a messy bird nest.

"Do not say a word, Cooper." She said warningly when she saw him grinning.

"I like it anyway. There's no point in denying just how beautiful my girlfriend is." Darral said with a teasing smile.

"I am pretty sure you mean girl friend. Emphasis on the space in-between the two words." She said walking past him into the house. Sometimes, Darral didn't seem to get the clear message she was usually telling him. "We are nothing more than friends, Darral Cooper!" Her mind screamed at the man following her.

She stopped in her tracks when she saw her fifty one year old boss, Owen in the living room. He tossed her two pairs of latex gloves that she caught easily and pointed towards the stairs with his head and turned back to the other cop he was speaking to. Owen didn't have to say anything because she understood his message loudly and clearly. He had said "The two of you should get up there and do what you do."

She looked around the room, taking note of small details that she thought were necessary, like the unnecessarily thick ceiling.

She tossed one pair of gloves to Darral without looking back and started towards the stairs. She knew he would follow her. The place was spotless and even as she put on her gloves, she wondered if there was even a case to begin with. At the top of the stairs, she went to the far end of the hall while Darral opened one of the doors and walked into it. That was how they worked, in silent communication and sync, so much so that they never accepted other people to switch or join them.

Selena squatted at the end of the hallway by the wall where there was a fluffy door mat and ran her hand through it. Smooth, no lump or irregularities meaning it was either still new or never used. She moved it and smiled at her finding. A tiny key hole.

Typical rich people. She thought. They either had a secret something behind a painting or behind a book shelf or under their floor boards. The owner of the house fell under the last category, thus explaining the thick ceiling. She pulled at one of the boards but it didn't budge. Pushing it didn't work out either so she shrugged and stood up. She got out the gun that she kept in her favourite jacket and aimed at the spot the key was supposed to go in.

A touch on her shoulder made her turn around. Darral stood there with a small key in his hand and amusement on his face. "Your gun is not always a solution, March."

She rolled her eyes and took the key from his hand. She jammed the key into its hole and twisted it. It made a pop sound and sprang up on it's own. Inside the little hidden box were magazines, cut outs and some pictures. Selena removed the pictures and Darral squatted next to her and took out the magazines.

The first picture was a class photo of teenagers probably in highschool. A frowning boy in the background was circled. The next was a picture from a news paper dated thirteen years ago. A minister was making a speech and behind him was his family; a woman, two boys and one younger girl. One of the boys was circled_ and it was the same one from the first picture. She kept looking at all the pictures which the same person circled. Whether it was a middle school picture or college picture or baby photo or a photo with him as an adult, whether he was in the background of the photo or the main person in the picture or just happened to be passing by when the photo was taken, he was circled.

She looked at the cutouts and they were also of the same person. She frowned. If the situation was what she was thinking, then she did not want to see the victim anymore.

"Sheesh, stalker much?" Darral said besides her. She looked at him and he was looking at the magazines. Each of them had the same person as the front page.

"She must have had it bad for this Asriel Parker guy. Every page where they actually show the full story that is on the cover is missing." Darral added while tossing the magazine aside and picking up a cutout with a frown. "What do you make of this, March?"

Selena handed him the pictures and stood up. "I have a feeling I know why Owen woke us up at an odd hour but I have to see the victim to be certain." She answered while walking towards another one of the doors.

The room only had a neatly spread bed and a small lamp stand without a lamp but she looked around anyway.

"Selena, I think you would like to see this." Darral called out. Selena followed his voice out of the room. He was standing by one of the opened doors with a look she couldn't completely place and it made her all the more curious.

"What_" her sentence was cut short when she saw the scene. Gruesome, grotesque or scary were not even good enough words to describe what she was looking at.

There was a woman in a tattered blue robe, seated upright in the middle of the room on a red chair. Her face had excess red lipstick and excess eyeshadow that made it look like she was crying. Her head was completely shaved bold and she had no eyebrows. On the left side of her head was an entry point of a bullet and the right side had a slightly larger hole; the exit wound. And none of that was strange.

The strange things was the fact that there was no blood anywhere on the woman or on the floor, no hair strands anywhere and the room was too freakishly clean for it to have such in it. Even the bed was made nicely and clothes were folded neatly on it.

"Talk about blowing her brains out." Darral said referring to the bullet holes in the side of her head. "So March, is this what you were looking for to confirm what you were thinking?"

Darral was already in the room and kneeling in front of the dead woman. Selena held her breath when he lifted her night dress in search of the last part they both knew would be there. Her stomach had an ugly red burn in the shape of the number six.

"Yes," she said releasing her breath "-. the Parker girl killer was here." Her words tasted bitter in her mouth because she hoped that it had no connection to the other five women they had heard of.

For the past three years, there were five other similar deaths of women. All of them were in tattered night dresses with holes in their hairless heads and ugly red burns on their abdomens numbering them from 1 to 5. All of them were in freakishly clean rooms. Of course their similarities only meant that it was done by the same psychotic person.

More like psychotic creature of the darkness. Selena thought bitterly. She, Owen, Darral and Andrew; another co-worker had searched the entire building for clues even if they knew that they wouldn't find anything there. The security footage was also tampered with and was only showing an annoying cartoon marathon about a rat's club house. She just wasn't sure if the rat's name was Mikey or Micah but she was sure that the rat was not supposed to be that big or even have a pet dog to begin with.

They were at the police station with frowns on and seated in silence. Darral and Andrew had left Selena with Owen some hours ago. It was the first time that Selena had been to the famous Parker girl killer's crime scene. She had only read reports about it in their files. The most annoying thing was that there was never any evidence _EVER!_

The last similarity was that the women always had magazines, pictures and cutouts of Asriel Parker. Why him? And why were those things always found in hidden drawers or safes or rooms? Were they all coincidentally obsessed with him or were those things all planted in their houses?

"From now on, you and your partner Darral will be incharge of the Parker girl killer case. I expect a lot from you two." Owen said as he sat down infront of her. The last five pairs of detectives that worked on the case had completely failed to actually come up with anything to lead them to the killer. In fact, they had just declared the case unsolvable when a new murder occurred each time. Coincidence? Selena didn't think so.

"Who was the first contact with the victim and called the cops?" Selena asked Owen who was stopping a cup of coffee to wake himself up. She knew the answer to her question, she just wanted to be sure. 

"Asriel Parker. Even in the last five cases." Owen answered. "Darral and Andrew left to interview him since he is our only lead currently."

Selena yawned and stretched herself. The analogue wall clock read that it was already six AM. She had slept at midnight filling in paperwork for the last case she had solved and was woken up at two AM. Her frown was a clear indication that she was rethinking just how joyful being a murder detective was. With cases like those, she was surprised that she hadn't lost her mind yet.

"Hey March, go home and rest. We'll need you back this evening at six to go through older case files and watch the recorded interogation." Owen said. She looked at him and he was smiling at her. She couldn't help but smile back. Owen was like a father to her, when he wasn't being his grouchy self of coarse.

"Thanks Owen, I will do just that." She said standing up. He nodded at her and she picked up her jacket and left to call a taxi. There was so much on her mind and she wanted to do some more Investigations on her own but she needed a little bit of rest first.