(There’s something unsettling about stories that begin too quietly. This one does.
What you’re about to read isn’t just a mystery, it’s a trail of choices, half-truths, and things better left undiscovered.
If you stay long enough, you might solve it…..or worse, understand it. Either way, you’re part of it now. Ep:01 of 08)

Episode 1 – The Spontaneous Generation

The body was found at 11:47 PM.

Between a champagne tower and a live band that hadn’t stopped playing.

That detail bothered Joy more than anything else. Someone was dead in the corridor and forty feet away people were still clinking glasses and laughing at each other’s jokes.

The Victim, Nadia Ferreira, twenty-six, was slumped against the wall near the east end of the hotel corridor. Gold dress. One heel on, one heel off. She looked like someone who had sat down for a moment and never got back up. There was something almost peaceful about it, which made it worse somehow.

Joy crouched beside her and looked without touching. He had learned early in his career that the first sixty minutes at a scene were the most honest. Before the theories started. Before everyone began talking.

A man in a suit leaned over Joy’s shoulder almost immediately.

“Probably a heart attack.” he said,

Joy didn’t respond….

“I’m a doctor….” he insisted

Joy didn’t look up, “Were you her doctor?” he asked

“Well….no, but…” the doctor replied

“Then Step back…” Joy interuppted

Johns appeared from the other end of the corridor slightly out of breath, holding a small piece of finger sandwich from the party inside. He looked at the body. He looked at the sandwich. He quietly placed it on a passing waiter’s tray and came and stood beside Joy.

“Her neck” Johns said softly. “Look at the bruising.”

Joy had already seen it. Two faint marks, one on each side of the neck, placed with an almost unsettling precision. Someone had pressed both thumbs in, hard enough and long enough to stop everything.

“Not a heart attack.” Joy stated

“Music’s still going,” Johns said, glancing toward the ballroom.

“Anniversary gala of the Ferreira Foundation. Apparently they raised a lot of money tonight. Nobody wants to stop the party.”

Johns looked at him. “Who found her?”

“Cloakroom girl. Nineteen years old, name is Priya. She’s outside.”

Priya was outside and she was shaking. She had found Nadia by accident, seen the heel first, then the rest of her, and stood there frozen for almost a full minute before the scream came out. She remembered the band had switched to a slow sad song right at that moment. The kind that plays in the background of a scene in a film when something is ending.

“Which song?” Johns asked, pen ready.

Priya thought very hard. “That Shah Rukh Khan one. The sad one….”

Johns wrote in his notebook: “which sad SRK song, ask later.“

Joy was watching the guests through the glass doors of the lobby while Johns spoke to Priya. A hundred people in expensive clothes, shifting and murmuring and stealing glances toward the corridor. Somewhere in that room was a person who had used their thumbs on a young woman’s neck with enough calmness to leave perfectly placed marks. “No Anger, No Panic…..” said Joy.

The hotel had the smell of old money. Flowers that cost more than most people’s grocery bills. Cologne that had probably been passed down like property. Joy had grown up in a two room flat in the north end of the city. He had spent his entire career walking into rooms that were not built for people like him.

He had stopped wanting to belong. It kept him honest.

He gathered what he needed from the scene.

The marks were bilateral, placed above a specific muscle in the neck. Joy had read enough forensic literature to know that pressing in exactly or somewhere that spot causes unconsciousness in under ten seconds and death shortly after. It requires either medical knowledge or this kind of obsessive curiosity that leads a person to look these things up.

He filed that away.

The thing that kept pulling at him was the mascara.

It had run down one cheek but the other cheek was clean and dry. Nadia had wiped one side herself. Which meant she had a moment….She had seen the person coming toward her, had enough time to reach up and wipe her face, but not enough time or not enough will to run or call out….

You only stay still when you recognize the person walking toward you.

You only wipe your face when you don’t want them to see you crying.

Joy called the forensic at 1 AM from the now empty corridor.

“I need the reports quickly,” he said. “And check under her fingernails.”

After the call he stood alone for a while. The champagne tower had been carefully taken apart. The band had finally stopped. The corridor was just a corridor again, quiet and well lit and completely ordinary.

Joy couldn’t get Nadia out of his mind…….He thought about a young woman who had composed herself in her final seconds. Who had refused to look afraid in front of whoever was coming for her….

He liked her already.

That was always the problem with this job.

Joy pulled out the guest list on his way to the car. Two hundred and fourteen names.

Sleepless nights begins….. he thought to himself….

Rightly so……the night had already started making the puzzle even more complex…not too far, the second victim’s name had been written….

(The answer is always in the details no one bothered to question. Next Friday we find out which one….)