"It's over", said the paramedic, "we've lost him"
He and his co-workers packed their things and left quietly. James Brady was lying on the floor, eyes closed, his lips forever frozen into a terrified twist. James was dead.
Mark was quiet. Everyone around him was crying. As they were half-praying, half-screaming, incoherently, for this horror to end, he stayed silent. He looked exhausted and disabused, almost jaded. This whole thing felt like an awful déjà vu. It' wasn't as if it were the first time he was faced with such a situation. There had been Wren Lenear and Lucy Hellington, just the prior month. And Jenna... Jenna. The name resonated in his head, again and again. Jenna. His girlfriend. Or ex, to be more accurate. When the person's not there anymore, does she count as your ex ? He wasn't sure about that. It wasn't as if they had willingly separated, after all. And now, there was James. He was the fourth. And he wouldn't be the last. Mark couldn't help but know, deep inside him, that this tragedy, which felt like a never-ending episode of Criminal Minds, wouldn't stop as long as the culprit would be on the loose. And he had the feeling that it wasn't about to change anytime soon. Indeed, the police was far away from finding him.
The chief of the local police, in charge of the investigation, was a fat man in his fifties who seemed kind of bored by his job and slightly bumbling. He bore an incredible resemblance with the Chief Wiggum from The Simpsons. He had come countless times to interrogate students, teachers and parents. But he couldn't find a single clue, a single thing that would give an indication on who the killer was. They said they had an alternative solution but Mark knew they weren't going anywhere. The victims had all died either from suffocation or from head injury but the assassin must, in all likelihood, have worn gloves because there wasn't any fingerprint on the corpses. There was only one thing they were pretty sure of: the killer must probably be one of the students because Jenna's body had been found with an item of clothing that was part of the school's uniform and it wasn't hers. They had tested it but there was so many different DNA samples on it that they couldn't determine whose it was. Also, she was in a part of the library where only students could go with a special card. However, record of swipe cards used during the day weren't kept so this couldn't give any clue. It was getting more and more hopeless everyday.
That evening, at the minute he got back from school, Mark went straight to his room without giving a look to his mother. He vaguely heard the Police Chief come in and talk to her about an experiment that was to take place the following week and about cameras being set around the city, most likely caused by the robberies that had occurred in the neightbourhood lately, but it didn't really matter to him. She didn't even come to check on him as he pretended to be sick. He noticed that she had brought home another boyfriend of hers. Not wanting to listen to a thing that they would do, he turned his music as loud as he could and locked the door until the end of the weekend, opening only to eat and go to the bathroom, no matter if it seemed weird. It wasn't as if his mother cared, anyway.643Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡb2tsW4pFzg
