Chapter 1

In all her year working homicide cases, Detective Megan Gilmore had learned that we as humans are the most cruel and sickest species on the planet, in the way that we treat each other. We just don't kill other mammals for food or to protect ourselves as our four legged friends do we kill others of our kind just for the sake of killing.

So when Doctor Savannah Edwards began her explanation of what she was able see in her initial exam of what the killer may had done to the victim's body both before and after her death, she began to fear that she was going to have to make a run for the closest bathroom outside the crime scene before her cheeseburger and fries became part of an evidence bag. To her dismay her fears suddenly began to become reality as she ran towards the apartment's front door. Trying her best to keep it down until she could make it out to the curb, so that she wouldn't destroy any possible evidence. At any worse than the attendant in the upstairs apartment's had done in his futile attempt to steal the victim's entertainment center.

As she reaches the curb where there was one of the city's trash cans, just out the door, she lost the battle with her stomach and brought up everything up. Thinking that it was all over and that there was nothing left in her stomach, she turned to head back up to her crime scene.

After Megan reentered the small apartment Doctor Edwards called her over to show her a small puncture mark located at the center of the spine, right at the base of the victims skull. If it was a puncture from a needle the killer may have injected her with a drug or a poison of some kind but she could not be sure till the toxicology test came back. The other possibility was that he may have used air which would in injected in to the body, By using a needle which only had air in the barrel and inserted in to the victim, even with help, there would be no hope for her.

Just as the sick feeling began to pass, the skull splitting headache of doing the interviews kicked into high gear. Megan was finishing up with the manager of the apartment building, when she happened to overhear the struggle that detective Fitzgerald was having with his first interview. To make matters worse she was an elderly woman who was having a hard time hearing the soft spoken new detective.

Megan started to stroll over to help him out when all of a sudden; she picked up a sound coming from the closet at the far end of the hallway. As she prepared to open the door, the only thought that was going though her mind was that this could be ether a witness or the killer himself.

Megan already had her gun pulled ready to use in the event that it was the killer. Upon tearing open the door the only thing that she saw were two big brown doe eyes looking up at her from behind a stack of blankets.

Not sure as what to do, she bent over and lifted the little girl up, turned and walked away from the crime scene and out the back hall door to avoid scaring the little girl more then she already was.

As soon as she left the building she walked over to her truck and belted the girl in to the backseat, preparing to take her to the hospital. The thought of knowing that if the killer had sex with the body of a person that he had just killed her didn't want to know what he might have done to this little girl.

As Megan was walking the little girl out of the apartment she heard a little voice from the girl asking where the man was that comes early that morning. Just then it hit Megan that she had a witness to her crime after all. As she was walking around her truck, Megan pulled out her cell and made a call to her captain in order to see if she could get a child advocate officer meet her at the hospital.

When the E.R. doctor pulled detective Gilmore out in to the hallway, he informed her that the little girl, beside a small cold, was physically alright. Although he thought she may need to see a psychologist to help with the PTSD from seeing her mother treated in that kind of manner.

After the young lady from child services finally showed up at the hospital to pick the victim's daughter and take her into their custody, detective Gilmore had the nagging feeling that there was something that she missed a the scene before she left with the little girl.

Megan figured that the crime scene tech's would already be long gone, but to her surprise, as she pulled up around the corner she spotted the flashing lights still parked out in front of the building. Looking at the around the room where the body was found detective Gilmore found a single short strand of hair laying across a shoe belonging the victim's daughter.

As the tech picked up the shoe just as she placed it in to the evidence bag Megan noticed that in the bottom of the bag there were several m ore hairs that no one would see at first glance. Moments later, one of the other technicians found a drop of white liquid on the hardwood floor in the kitchen.

After several more hours of not finding anything everyone began to pack up when Megan told them all to pack it in for the night, on his way out, the lead technician told her that she should have his report by the end of the week and with that the place went dead quiet. Deciding that there was nothing more that could be done, Megan left for home just in time to catch six hours before having to be back up in order to get up and start it all over once again.

The first thing that Megan Gilmore spotted when she arrived the next morning was a pink post-it attached to her computer screen. She knew that it was a note for her to report to her captain's office for a briefing of what her and her team found so far. This early in the investigation, all the progress that she could tell him was that so far that there was a murder. When her captain would ask a question the only thing that detective Gilmore could answer with was "No Sir", until she hit towards the end of the meeting when she told him that she and some of the CST's found a few stray short hairs in one of the shoes that belonged to the victim's daughter, but didn't belong to either mother or daughter as well as a few drops of a white fluid on the kitchen floor had also been found and that the results should be in later. Also she was waiting for the preliminary corners report later that day.

Upon returning to her desk, Megan noticed a small blue folder sitting on the edge of the computer. It was from the corner and contained the preliminary report. Upon opening the file, she could see that the pre-mortem part of the autopsy of Miss Caroline Fowler was pretty standard. But as she reached the post mortem section, her stomach began to perform summer salutes as she thought back to the crime scene the day before, and as she anticipated what Dr. Edwards suspected at the scene. When she was done reading the report made her feel like she needed to go home and take a long hot shower, not only with soap but to add bleach just to get the feeling that she had been violated by just reading about it.

Instead of helping to answer some questions, it just added to her ever growing list. So without waiting for Dr Edwards to get the final report, and to save time detective Gilmore decided to take a drive over to medical examiner's office to try and to catch her before she left.

Just her luck, Megan missed Dr Edwards by only ten minutes. There was nothing else she could do till she could talk with Dr. Edwards about the questions that had been raised while she was reading the report on the Fowler murder. Just as detective Gilmore was heading to the parking lot to leave for the night, one of the girls she worked with when she was working in the Special Victims division came running over to stop her, as she made it to the main door to the parking garage. Once the young detective finally caught her breath, she informed detective Gilmore that there was a young woman up in her office, whom was claiming that she had almost been raped by one of her This in triggered memories in Megan enough that she stopped in her in her tracks.

Hoping to find some possible information detective Gilmore went up to watch the interview from the viewing room opposite the interrogation room. She stood there listening as the young woman as she began to describe how she a woke in a tub of ice cooled water, unable to move from the drugs that he had been forced to take. Then once her skin had become the ice cold he then moved her to the bed and then he proceeded to attempted to have sex with her, until he received a call on his cell, at which point he just rushed to get back in to his clothes before he was out the door.

She went on to say as the drugs wore off; she stumbled to the door, trying to scream for help. She tripped and broke her hand on the corner of the dresser, and she hit the floor in pain.

If her night could not get any worse someone came busting thought the door. Fearing that he had come back to kill her, she frantically tried to make her way under the bed. She was half way under when she felt a hand grab her ankle and pulling her out from under the bed. She could only think this way how it was going to end till she heard a voice telling her that he was a cop and was there to help her.

After detective Gilmore had wrote up her report from the chat that she had with the hooker, she decided when there was nothing left to do for the day. Detective Gilmore decided to go home for the night. As she pulled in to her driveway, the first thing that she saw was a pair of big brown doe eyes of her four year old daughter peeking out the picture window in the front of her house.

The only way Megan knew of decompress after a long day surrounded by death all day was to spend the night hanging out with her daughter, who was so innocent and had no idea about anything but who she was going to invite to her next tea party. When Megan put Jojo to bed that night she wished that Jojo could stay that age until the end of time.

After she went to bed that night she lay there in bed trying to find a way to somehow get just a few hours of sleep before the inevitable call that there would be yet another murder somewhere in the city.

Looking over at the alarm clock on the bedside table on her husband's side of the bed she saw the little green numbers as they flashed telling her that it was mid-night. Flustered Megan flopped onto her back and when she thought that she could not take it a second more she began to drift off to sleep.

The next thing she could remember was the police siren that would not go away. As she began to awake up, she realized that the siren was really the buzzing of her alarm clock. As she rolled over to shut it off, she realized that what seemed like only a few minutes of sleep to her turned out to be six and a half hours. Rolling over and trying to get woke up, her phone fell from the headboard onto the pillow, missing her head by mere inches. Looking at the caller id, she just knew that there was yet someone else was dead. Jumping up out of bed and making it in to the bathroom just before her cell phone rang again.

This time it was detective Marshall calling to be sure that she was up, and that he was heading out for the new scene.

Megan took one of her famous three-minute showers and was just finishing up her morning rituals, when she found herself running around the house looking for her keys. Finding them under the table, she decided that she wasn't going to have easiest of days.