Purgatory

Mom was always there. Wordlessly, invisibly, like a quiet guardian angel, supporting me on my lonely path. She never pried into my soul with questions, knowing she couldn't sustain a conversation on the dark topics that fascinated me. Mom, too, carried a heavy secret within her. Even now, as an investigator, I couldn't understand how it had come to pass that she—still a frighteningly beautiful woman, but already touched by fading—was left completely alone with a small child in this predatory city.

Contrary to the gossip, she never let another man into our house. Something broke, cracked inside her once and for all. She decided not to explore this complex, deceitful world of men any longer—she closed the door on it. She directed all her unspent energy toward me. Her son, who was the only man left in her quiet, herb-scented home.

And now, looking at Mia Rockett's broken body, I thought: her own maternal home must have been arranged very differently.

Chapter 2

The task force's vehicles hadn't even had time to turn off their engines, and the heavy wheels of the forensics trailer were just pulling onto the gravel driveway, when a shrill, vibrating scream pierced the viscous silence of the lakeside morning. The cordon hadn't yet been fully established—yellow warning tape hung precariously between the willows along the shore—when two female figures literally burst through the damp, clinging brambles to the water's edge. In small, sleepy towns, terrible news always outpaces radio waves, seeping through the cracks of closed shutters. It's as if the very walls breathe rumors.

I had no idea who they were. In the morning fog, their silhouettes seemed like blurry dark spots—two distinct shades of darkness. A middle-aged woman ran first, disheveled and out of control. She stumbled on the slippery grass, dragging the hem of an old, tattered summer coat, thrown over a greasy housecoat, through the mud. Her dyed hair showed traitorously grown-out dark roots. Her face, marred by wrinkles around her mouth and fading skin, was gray with panic—the exact color of the lake silt in which Mia had just lain.

Behind her, holding her firmly by the shoulders and almost forcibly guiding her forward, walked a second woman—much younger. From her demeanor and the stubborn turn of her head, I easily guessed the relationship. Mother and younger sister. This young woman was the complete opposite: angular, large, with a heavy jaw and dull, sun-bleached hair. She wore a severe dark cloak, buttoned all the way to the neck, as if she were afraid that without this armor, something inside her would fall apart.

“Mia! Oh my God, Mia, no!” the middle-aged woman fell to her knees in the greasy coastal mud, a few meters from the tarp.

Her scream escalated into a heart-rending, dry, barking hysteria. It was shocking—but laced with something even more bitter. A poisonous sense of guilt, which my gaze immediately registered. She howled as if trying to drown out, to shout down her own gnawing conscience. Her distorted face betrayed the panic of someone whose inner demons had suddenly materialized into a silhouette beneath the tarpaulin.

I turned my gaze to the young girl. She stood motionless, like a stone statue, ignoring her mother crawling at her feet. Not a tear, not a sigh. Her face remained closed, icy, impenetrable. She continued to grip her mother's shoulders tightly, almost to the point of white knuckles—but there was not a shred of compassion in that grip. It was the grip of a jailer afraid the prisoner would blurt out something unnecessary.

There was something frightening, unnatural, in her faded eyes, fixed on the tarpaulin.

“Serves you right. Your triumph is over,” her proud stance conveyed. She looked like a prosecutor, satisfied that the defendant had finally been silenced forever.

“You both can't be here,” I said, gently but firmly blocking the way, lifting the older woman by her elbows. “The scene is closed. Who are you?”

“I’m Nancy Rockett, this is my daughter Chloe, and over there... over there is my Mia!” the woman grabbed the lapels of my coat. “It’s him! It’s all him, I know it! The Kurd! He wouldn’t let her rest, controlled her every step, and yesterday he finally lost it! He killed her, didn’t he?!”

“Mom, shut up. Stop embarrassing us in front of the cops,” Chloe hissed in her mother’s ear. “They broke up. The Kurd got drunk at the bar last night, half the town saw him. It could have been an accident. The lake is deep, full of snags, and Mia hasn’t been herself lately. A psychopath. Always looking for a reason to cause drama. You yourself said her selfishness would drive us all to the grave. Well, she did. She drove herself.”

The phrase rang with pure, concentrated envy for the woman lying motionless two meters away. An envy that doesn't subside even in the face of death. Which, perhaps, is only intensified by it.

I turned to them both, leading them away from the tarpaulin and toward the patrol car.

“Mrs. Rockett, Chloe, I need to know what Mia was doing on her last day. She's been living on her own for over a year. Why did she come to the lake in the middle of the night? Did she come to see you?”

Mother and daughter froze, exchanging a brief glance. In that momentary pause, a whole abyss of unspoken history flashed by—poisonous, long-sealed, but ready to burst forth.

“She was at home,” Chloe said quickly, blocking any attempt by her mother to open her mouth. “We called about the renovation, but she spent all day working on paperwork. Said she had a lot of work to do. And we slept that night. We didn't hear her go to the water. The lake always calmed her, you know.”

Over the years working in homicide, I've witnessed hundreds of stages of human grief. It can be quiet and devastating, or loud and explosive. But true grief always has one common denominator: it is entirely centered on the loss. A person who has lost a loved one is blind to everything else.

The appearance of Nancy and Chloe did not fit into any mourning protocol.

It was a performance. Nancy howled too loudly, too demonstratively—as if her screams weren't meant for her dead daughter, but for the invisible spectators backstage. She didn't try to touch Mia, didn't cling to the tarpaulin. She crawled around beside it, soiling her robe, as if punishing herself for something. It wasn't a lament for a loss. It was the panic of a thief afraid of being caught red-handed.

And Chloe... Chloe completely threw me off. Her posture, her whitened fingers on her mother's shoulders, didn't convey shock, but triumph. As if she'd been waiting for the play's finale, where her flamboyant sister had gotten all the applause while she'd been left with only the scraps. Now, with the Kurdain falling, there were no scraps left for anyone. And she stood over her mother like a guard, watching to make sure the defendant didn't blurt out anything unnecessary.

This shore didn't smell of grief. It reeked of a long-standing, rotten family secret.

“Okay,” I looked Chloe in the eye. “One last thing. Mia wasn’t wearing any clothes. We found her dress on the bridge. But one piece is missing. Her second shoe. There’s nothing on her left foot, and we couldn’t find her right one. Someone took the shoe.”

Mia's sister paled for a split second... Her flawless mask wavered—barely, but irrevocably, like a crack in ice that will grow wider no matter how much you try to freeze it over. Chloe swallowed convulsively.

And at that moment, the homeless man by the bridge suddenly burst into loud, guttural laughter, continuing to sway frantically to the rhythm of his thoughts. His mad laughter echoed an answer no one on this shore could yet hear. The pool from which Mia had so desperately tried to escape her entire adult life had claimed her, leaving behind not just a shoe in the black water. But her entire being.

Crooked mirrors

My childhood always smelled of dry lime, my mother's cigarettes, and cheap washing powder. When I was five, my father vanished into thin air, leaving only a slanted line on an old photograph. He gave me the red of my hair and the whiteness of my skin.

Mom didn't shed a tear. She stood for hours at the dressing table, dabbing foundation into her pale cheeks, and repeated, “Men always leave. You should grow up so that they crawl at your feet but never have the strength to leave.”

I grew up imbibing this commandment. Nature gifted me with unearthly beauty—a copper-colored waterfall of hair, porcelain skin. My mother looked at me with a pride that grew venomous with each passing year. She saw in me an improved version of herself. One with a real chance to break free.

But there was a duality to this love. My mother clung to me with a death grip—she needed me like a drowning man needs a straw. And at the same time, she hung expectations on me that made my bones crack. I had to be perfect. The best. But at the same time, I had to remain her property. She smothered me with her embrace and devalued every victory.

I never learned to cope with it. I couldn't figure out where love ends and prison begins.

And then my stepfather showed up. Sullen, smelling of gasoline. With his one-year-old daughter, Chloe. I was little, but I sensed that no one loved anyone else in this house. A marriage of convenience. He needed a roof over his head. She needed privacy from the neighbors. When he died of pancreatic cancer, my mother didn't cry. She said, “Well, here I am. I'm alone again.”

After his death, she became even more clingy, even more suffocating. She hadn't lost a husband, but a façade. And she transferred all her unspent needs onto me.

Chloe grew up a shadow. I sincerely tried to love her—taking her to the lake, weaving wreaths. But she accepted gifts with deathly coldness. Her gaze said, “I don't need your scraps.” She devalued everything I touched.

In our family, everyone played at love, but behind closed doors, everyone guarded their own shadow areas. Mom clung to me. Chloe built a fortress of silence. I could physically feel the trap.

When I bought a ticket to Chicago, it was my last attempt to save myself. To take off the mask of the "red-haired princess" and find out who I really am.

Chapter 3

It was always the same in the homicide department: a lingering trail of burnt, cheap coffee, dried road tar from the patrolmen's boots, and a heavy, persistent fear. This fear wasn't acute. It ate into the office files like the gray mold of provincial bureaucracy—the kind that remains unnoticeable but slowly consumes the paper from the inside.

The room itself matched the smells. The walls were a faded, dirty swamp shade, once a formal green, streaked where old pipes had leaked for years. The corridors were narrow, like cracks barely wide enough for two police officers to pass each other. Every other fluorescent lamp flickered, casting a sickly yellow tint on the faces of my colleagues.

In the center of the room, behind a low partition of opaque glass, huddled the "aquarium"—an open bullpen for the operations team. Four tables were pushed nose to nose, cluttered with piles of paperwork, cold coffee cups, and ashtrays heaped with cigarette butts. Computer monitors sat so close together that the officers' elbows touched while typing. You couldn't sneeze here without splashing your neighbor. You couldn't talk on the phone without half the department hearing your every word. The nickname "aquarium" stuck not because of the glass, but because the people inside swam in their own sweat, dirt, and dark imaginations, like fish in an overcrowded, long-neglected tank.

I sat at my desk, running my fingers through my hair, looking at the three fresh photos Bradley had just tossed in front of me. These weren't from the crime scene—those were gray, bleak images showing Mia lying on a tarp, curled in an unnatural position. Bradley had brought others. Photos from her life—plucked from her phone, social media, and corners we hadn't yet explored. One showed her standing on the porch of her cottage, laughing, wearing the same emerald dress we'd found on the bridge. Another was a close-up: her face, her brilliant smile, the wind catching her red hair. A third showed her sitting on the shore of the lake, barefoot, her legs dangling in the water. Alive. Mia Rockett looked out at me from those frames. Not a dead statue on a tarp—but the girl I knew. The one I didn't save.

“Ed, look at this,” Bradley said, leaning his heavy palms on the edge of my desk. He reeked of mint gum, which he was using unsuccessfully to mask the smell of his morning cigarette. “The database returned hits for three neighboring states over the past two years. Indiana, Ohio, Illinois. The exact same signature all over the place.”

I looked up. Bradley was pacing the office, gesturing wildly, as if he were already trying on the laurels of a man who'd caught a high-profile target. His enthusiasm only irritated me. He saw what he wanted to see: a neat, textbook narrative about a traveling serial killer, a case that could be sold to the press and closed with flying colors.

“See for yourself,” Bradley began, counting on his fingers. “A year ago, near Indianapolis. A female student, redhead. Found in a reservoir. Her only clothing was her underwear, her dress neatly folded on the dock. No shoes. Six months ago, Ohio. A girl with copper hair, her dress on the shore, her body in the water. The autopsy ruled it an accident—said she went swimming drunk. But three cases in two years within a five-hundred-mile radius? Too close together, Ed. We’ve got a serial killer on our hands. A maniac with an obsession for redheads, performing the same water ritual.”

Miller, who was sitting at the next table lazily sorting through reports, chuckled loudly without taking his eyes off his monitor.

“Come on, Bradley. What kind of traveling artist would target our backwater? Mia's been having affairs with half the city. From Kurd, who was screaming outside her house yesterday, to Patrick, her boss. It's just a typical domestic dispute. Her lover got carried away, threw her in the water, and tossed her dress aside to fake a suicide.”

“A woman doesn't fold her dress, Miller!” Bradley snapped, pointing aggressively at the photo. “And a killer doesn't take home just one shoe as a souvenir. Mia's left foot is bare. We never found her right shoe. That girl in Ohio also lost one sneaker. That's a signature move. He takes shoes.”

I listened silently to their bickering, a dull irritation building within me. My intuition remained silent. All those files from neighboring states, the neat lines of reports, and the theories about a serial killer seemed too convenient. Too neatly tailored for a police mind that desperately searches for understandable patterns where there may be none.

A maniac is an external threat. A classic, textbook evil. You can track him, map him, and put out a warrant. But what I had smelled that morning on the lakeshore had nothing to do with a wandering monster. It smelled of stagnant, domestic rot. A sin that had been brewing for years within this quiet town—hidden behind the snow-white picket fences, behind the pristine facades, beneath the masks of welcoming smiles.

And in that scent, I began to see faces. Nancy, with her deep guilt slipping through her theatrical wails. Chloe, with her icy crown. And others I hadn't yet seen but could already sense—standing behind the scenes of this theater, waiting their turn to step into the light.

“There's no hard data from the database yet, Ed,” Bradley said, dropping his voice as he noticed my silence. “These are just working hypotheses. Requests have been sent, but it'll take another two days to dig through the Indiana archives. We need a starting point. If it's a serial offender, we're wasting time.”

“We're not wasting any time,” I said, slowly rising from my chair and adjusting my starched shirt collar—the very barrier that kept my inner chaos in check. “We'll start with the tangible. Bradley, keep pestering the analysts about the redheads. Miller, find an alibi for Mia's ex for last night—specifically from ten to two.”

I picked up a blank notebook from the table and slipped it into my coat pocket. A list was already forming inside my head. I didn't know all the names yet, but I could feel them—the way you feel someone's heavy gaze on the back of your neck in the dark.

Invisible attraction

I was never an option for her.

At school, she'd pass me by, occasionally tossing out a casual, “Hi, Eddie,” before moving on to her own group, her own life, and those who could laugh louder than me. I would stand against the wall, clutching a folder of notebooks, watching her red hair flash among the backs of strangers. She didn't wait for an answer. She knew I wouldn't give one.

But she noticed me. And back then, that was enough.

I didn't understand why she did it. Later, when I became a detective, the realization clicked: Mia was intuitively seeking safe havens. Places where she didn't need to be dazzling. Where she could simply exist. I was that place for her. Not a friend, not a lovesick boy she could tease—simply a quiet corner where no one forced her to smile.

Sometimes she would sit next to me in the library. She wouldn't speak; she just leafed through magazines or pretended to read. I would catch the scent of her perfume and freeze. Not from fear, but from sheer sensory overload—she was too close, too loud, making it likely she would hear my heart pounding.

She never heard. Or she pretended not to.

One day, just before graduation, she caught me in the stairwell. I was sitting on the windowsill, staring out into the courtyard. She walked over, stood opposite me, and leaned her shoulder against the frame. She remained silent for a long moment, then said, “You're the only one who's never wanted anything from me, Eddie. Never even tried. You know, it's... weird. But nice.”

I couldn't find a single thing to say. She smiled sadly, just the corner of her lips twitching, and left. I remained on the sill, staring at the spot where her palm had rested. A faint, invisible imprint remained there. I didn't erase it until graduation.

We crossed paths many times later. In a city the size of a dinner plate, it's impossible not to. But each encounter was like dancing in a minefield: a glance across the street held a second too long, a nod given too quickly, a feigned lack of awareness. She belonged to her world, where people smiled and took their coffee to go. I belonged to mine, where people kept silent and studied each other's hands.

I could be proud of who I've become. I have a badge, a service weapon, and the legal right to ask questions ordinary people dare not utter. I've seen horrors that would have made her hair stand on end. I've caught murderers and solved cases that filled the newspapers. I'm respected in police circles; I'm one of them.

But looking at her, I understood that none of it mattered. Not the badge, not the weapon, not the closed files. Because I still couldn't do what she did effortlessly. Approach someone. Smile. Say something simple and unburdened by emotion. Offer a hand first.

I am a master at reading other people's faces, but I have never learned to reveal my own. Her world remained behind glass—thick, bulletproof glass. I could look, record, and remember, but I could never break through to her.

She was the light. And I spent my entire life learning to look away from the light, lest I go blind. But now that it's gone, I see only darkness.

And my own guilt. Quiet, unobvious, hidden behind perfectly stacked magazines and the impeccable, sterile order of empty rooms.

But that doesn't make it any less heavy.

* * *

There was a sharp knock on my office door before I could even lift my marker. Michael poked his head through the crack, looking pale with dark circles under his eyes, but holding himself steady. He was an intern, but he'd already learned how to keep from falling apart after his first major autopsy. He held a gray folder with the preliminary findings sticking out.

“Ed, I have the data on Mia,” he said, closing the door firmly behind him. “The full report will take a few days. I want to double-check every detail, take my time. But the primary conclusions are here.”

I nodded, pushing aside my blank notebook. Michael sat opposite me, opened the folder, and scanned the top sheet, though I could tell he already knew the contents by heart.

“The cause of death was drowning,” he began. “Water in the lungs, a textbook presentation. She didn't lose consciousness instantly. She struggled. For a long time.”

“How long?” I asked, feeling a cold knot tighten in my stomach.

“It's hard to say for sure without histology,” Michael said, shaking his head. “But it looks like it lasted several minutes. Maybe more. She fought to the end, Ed. To the very end.”

I visualized it instantly: Mia, gasping for air, clutching at the empty darkness, desperately trying to escape the icy embrace of the lake. The image hung before my eyes like a still from a cruel, unedited film.

“What about the trauma?” I asked, forcing my voice to remain perfectly level.

“The bruises on her neck and wrists occurred during her lifetime,” Michael said, turning the page. “They appeared before she entered the water. The wound on her temple matches that timeline, too. She took that blow while she was still alive.”

“From what kind of object?”

“I can't say for certain yet. Something heavy with a dull, flat edge. Not a knife, not a hammer—more like a heavy metal structural component. A bolt, a sharp corner, part of a metal framework. There are traces of rust along the edges of the laceration. I'll send it for microscopy, but that will take time.”

Michael paused, gathering his thoughts.

“The scratches on her body are chaotic and jagged. It looks like she fought her attacker off. Human nails could leave such marks if the struggle was frantic. But there’s a nuance... the edges of some scratches are too clean, as if they weren’t made by fingernails, but by jagged metal or splintered wood. Perhaps an object was used against her, or she fell and struck something in the water,” Michael frowned, tapping his pen. “There’s dirt, silt, and microscopic wood particles under her nails. There’s almost no human epithelium. There are isolated cells, but they could be random—transferred from contact prior to immersion. If she did scratch her attacker, the lake water might have washed the evidence away. Or he was wearing gloves. Or...”

He fell silent, his pen hovering over the clipboard.

“Or?” I prompted.

“Or there was no attacker at all. But I’m not ready to make that claim yet,” Michael said, looking at me with tired, clear eyes. “Too many variables. Water destroys evidence, as you know. I need time. A few days. I’ll analyze every inch of her body, every fiber of fabric. If there’s anything foreign there, I’ll find it. Then we’ll know for certain: whether someone was out there on the bridge, or if she was entirely alone.”

“Do it,” I nodded. “Whatever it takes. Don't rush the analysis. I need the absolute truth, not a rushed report for the prosecutor.”

Michael nodded, gathered his papers, and left, leaving me alone with a blank whiteboard and heavy thoughts. Drowning. A desperate struggle to the end. A ruptured temple. And almost no physical trace of another human presence.

I sat motionless, staring at the empty white surface, my mind demanding structure.

The suicide theory came first. It always comes first in these cases—convenient, clean, requiring no manhunt. A fragile young woman, panic attacks, the history her mother had mentioned. A dark night, a deserted lake, absolute isolation. A single step into the water, and it's over. An ending that requires mourning, not an investigation.