The bleak rain beat the cobble streets of Heinbrook in the quiet night. Only the town drunk stumbling through the haze of pouring rain and a lone pedestrian, coat drawn tight, to keep the night company. It was a typical quiet night within the bustling port town... then a scream to pierce the veil of rain.
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The scene was brutal. Thin tendrils of blood snaked into the rushing streams of rain water that ran into the town’s sewers. They seemed like alien appendages flowing from the mutilated women that lay in the darkness of the cold, brick alley. A host of officers blocked the entrance to the alley, and were the only barrier to the gut wrenching crime. It was all that Atticus Ward could make out as his small horse-drawn buggy pulled into the scene.
Pulling down the front of his bowler hat to block the sun’s early rays, he lazily lit a cigarette and pulled out the pocket watch in his coat pocket. 7:25. He thought to himself, it must of been hours that the poor girl had laid there. He took a long drag from the cigarette hanging between his lips before holding up his badge and shoving past the crowd of officers, and soon regretting it. He flinched at the sight of the young women that lay nude and mutilated on the street before composing himself with a grimace, nothing could have prepared him for the gruesome sight.
The women lay completely exposed in the basic sense of the words, but her body was clothed by long, red ribbons of open flesh as countless cuts weeping tears of blood. Her body was shredded in the cleanest way once could shred a human body. Every piece of flesh remaining attached, yet every piece seemed to be hanging by the smallest of strings. It seemed that if even a hair touched her, the precarious human shape would fall apart into a mound of indiscernible meat. Then Atticus noticed the strange absence of mass in some places, and realized that the many of the organs that had kept this women alive had been removed. He nearly hurled.
It was easily the worst scene he had been privy to in is time as a detective in the sleeping port town of Heinbrook. His usual cases consisted of the occasional bout of violence from the various gangs that pushed and shoved for real estate on the wharf. Heinbrook may be small, but it was just south of New York. That factor alone made it a popular stay for the smaller gangs that got pushed out by the big players in the big city. It was close enough to get business from the city, but small enough to be tolerated by the New Yorkers.
The scene in front of him now was obviously not caused by the petty street gangs that ran the docks... it was too brutal. It was not a warning to any other gangs, the location was too obscure, and the fact that it was a woman that lay there in near tatters made it even harder to decipher. Atticus simply could not think of the motive, this was the work of a cold-hearted killer, a psychopath. No one that felt an ounce of remorse could have so thoroughly butchered another human being.
“Seen anything like it before, detective?” A young deputy said, shaking Atticus from his stupor of thought.
Atticus just shook his head at the sight of it, letting out a puff of smoke, but then it caught his eye... just a faint glint. Kneeling down, he pulled a blood soaked, silver card from under the girl’s mutilated left leg and stared in bewilderment. On the silver card, in stark black letters, it read, Opscuro.
