Sylum Teaser!

I will say this … you will see this story during Advent.

Something was hinky.  

Not the best description for it, but hinky seemed to fit.

I had no idea what a ‘trash run’ might actually entail that night but Warrick had chuckled when he got the ‘trick roll’ at Striperama.

It was going to be a boring shift.

Catherine at least made a joke out of it by tossing a coin, but both assignments were likely to suck.

It’s not all murders, shootings, and muggings in Vegas.

No, really.

It’s not.

But Flamingo and Koval was a weird place to find a spool of entrails left in a neat little puddle of blood under a street light, where just about anyone could find it, including the local vermin.

The cop waiting for my arrival, was a green as they come, and just as green at the gills too.  

Sure, I let him go throw up down the street away from what I was sent to assess.  At least he wouldn’t hurl all over my shoes or my evidence. But if a little bit of gore could get to him so early in his career, maybe he’d build a stronger stomach by the time he reached veteran status.

So, the question then, was why the hell someone might go to the trouble of leaving me such nicely arranged innards?  

I snapped a few general shots of the immediate area, checking camera settings for the weird light, and started putting out some markers for getting relative context later on.

If I didn’t know any better, at least judging by the smell that came on strong even over the damp and seriously gross aromas of a part of Las Vegas that was frequented by too many drunks looking for a convenient bathroom, the entrails were dog rather than human.  Canines have a digestive system like a sewer. It’s not hard to miss.

Yet something still felt hinky.

Before I started gathering anything, let alone bagging and tagging, I did a walk around, wondering if there was anything else out of the ordinary.

It’s Vegas. 

Some nights, nothing is ordinary.

People don’t come here looking for ordinary.

But then again they don’t expect to fall over entrails while they’re trying to find where they left their car.

There were some tire tracks, but it had been raining.  

Hard to tell when exactly those had been made. 

It was humid and the air was misting but not badly enough to drench everything.

Then over by the fire hydrant I found an evidence bag with a styrofoam cup inside.

And things got a lot hinkier.

I thought for a fleeting second that someone else had been to this scene before me.  Which made no sense.

Or something else had happened here recently and some clumsy fool had left evidence lying around.  But that didn’t make any sense either.

The tape used to seal the bag wasn’t the right color.

The seal itself had no one’s initials on it.

But the cup had certainly been gathered by someone, for some reason.

Had I stumbled onto some mock crime scene for cosplayers or something?

I could still hear the cop retching up his lunch, and I made a note to ask him how long he’d been guarding this street corner, and if he’d seen anything weird.

Well, weirder than normal in Las Vegas.

I was about to stand up and start processing when a shadow fell over me from behind.

And the lights went out before I could do anything to stop it.

Now available in the Archive