Good evening, another day of getting to this rather late, again, but still doing my writing! I am still trying *fingers crossed* to actually stick to 10-15 minutes. . .which clearly I failed.
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Prompt: The victim is a female in her late forties. The body was found in an aeroplane. The victim has been dead for at least 2 weeks. The victim appears to have been shot in the forehead. The victim had information that would humiliate someone.
Genre: Mystery
Source: Murder Plot Generator
Time Spent: 60 minutes
Word Count: 1254
Prompt: The victim is a female in her late forties. The body was found in an aeroplane. The victim has been dead for at least 2 weeks. The victim appears to have been shot in the forehead. The victim had information that would humiliate someone.
I was not expecting to be woken up in the middle of the night by police knocking on my door, I was expecting even less being asked to come with them to a crime scene, and neither of those had anything on how puzzling the scene I found was.
Let me back up, my name is Jack Carsons, and I am a biologist by training, but my work for at least the last two decades had been working in a long-term study of odd and unusual causes of death. You may be asking yourself, ‘if I study causes of death, why was I surprised to be brought to a crime scene’. Well, my studies usually involved studying those already long dead, and work out to understand how exactly the death had happened, what could cause it to happen again, and safety measures to prevent it. I had never been summoned by the police in the middle of the night. On the rare occasion I had come to an active crime scene, it was usually a few days later to give law enforcement a better understanding of how a death had happened.
After the police had explained the request, and full of a combination of annoyance at being wakened at 2am and curiosity of what I would find, I dressed quickly and was soon in a police cruiser racing towards the airport. On the way, I had gotten an overview of what had happened. Several hours previously, an international flight had come in, and in the process of deplaning the passengers, it was discovered that one of them was dead. The victim did not have any effects or baggage on her, not even any ID, but appeared to be in her later 40’s and she had been shot in the forehead. The flight crew and multiple passengers recalled the woman boarding the plane and interacting and being engaged until some point in the middle of the flight. No one had seen her killed, or apparently, robbed. Several people had reported her seeming very nervous and uncertain and looking around as if she was expecting to see something. They were unsure how something had killed her so silently and there were apparently some irregularities about the body.
This had just about done being explained when he drove onto the tarmac and pulled up to the airplane, which had been moved some distance from the terminal while it was searched. I was motioned onboard and met the detective assigned to the case, who provided me with largely the same information the officer had, adding only that the woman seemed to be fidgeting with something in her jacked.
On seeing her, I was absolutely in shock. It wasn’t hard to see that the woman did appear to be in her mid-40’s, and there was a hole in her forehead that it made sense had caused her death. What was truly puzzling about it, however, was that with the desiccated and almost waxy appearance of the skin, cloudy eyes and several other signs besides, I would say in any other situation that the woman had been dead for about two weeks.
It was something of a relief to me when the detective agreed with me, saying that he had seen enough dead bodies in his time to make him think the body had been dead for a couple weeks. In the time since the officer had been sent to fetch me, they had managed to track down her information and a picture of her, which showed her healthy and alive, and multiple people agreed that was what she had looked like and was clearly talking to them. There had been a hushed, and whispered, call right before the flight had departed that seemed to put the already nervous woman even further on edge. No one could remember when she had stopped talking or interacting and not a single passenger could recall hearing a gunshot, or anything else that might have caused the death. The police indicated they were still taking passenger and crew statements and cross-checking information.
I put gloves on and made a careful examination of the body and my judgement that she was dead at least two weeks and a closer examination confirmed there was definitely a bullet in her skull. Strangely, there was no odor as would normally accompany a body dead so long. Even if she had been on ice before the flight, she would be fully defrosted within a few hours of the ten-hour flight and would have started to smell, and that did not explain the oddity of those reporting she was talking. There was also little evidence on the seat or surrounding area being contaminated or exposed to anything of the that would either mimic being dead for some time, or was the product of the slow putrefaction of the body.
As I tried to think through what any of this could mean and see if I could recall anything that could look like, or at least mimic, a corpse of such an age, a police officer came hurrying in to report they had finally tracked down the passenger sitting next to the woman. The man reported that she had been occasionally talking to him, and offered him snacks, throughout the flight. He mentioned that at some point, he was pretty sure about halfway through the flight, the woman became highly agitated, looking around frantically. At that midway point, shot up out of her seat and seemed to hurry off. At some point about twenty minutes later he became aware that she was back in her seat, although he had not heard her returned, and for the rest of the flight control she was still and silent. He had assumed she was sleeping.
Vaguely remembering something the police officer had mentioned driving him, that the woman was fidgeting with her pockets until the moment she was dead. After consulting with the detective, I made a careful search of her pockets and clothing. I found a small and well-hidden pocket in the living of her jacket. I carefully removed the notebook, and started to read with the detective looking over in my shoulder.
The information within detailed countless examples of the fraud and underhanded dealings of particular large company and their CEO. The information within had multiple examples and proofs for what was claimed. The odd thing was that one of the other officers, also keen on investment and costs, told us that the CEO of the company had just been promoted to that position the previous week, but the records of these misdeeds went back for years, including dates that were happening in the future.
The notebook was passed along to the FBI, when they turned up a little later, and we went ahead and had the coroners go ahead and move the body, and I was provided the information of where the coroner was, so I could get into contact with them to see if I could be of any more help. As I stepped out of the plane into the cold, dawn air and took a deep breath. I would need to get myself some coffee on my way home, and I wondered if I would ever understand what had happened, or how. It would definitely be one I would need to study in more detail, and perhaps even publish a report to analyze and try to figure out what happened. For the moment, however, it all remained a mystery.
I really hoped you enjoyed this little mystery. What are your thoughts and theories as to what happened or was going to happen next?. Let me know your thoughts and also post how you would right such a character.
Hope you enjoyed and that you are having a wonderful day and get to do, or experience, something creative.
– Jon
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