scrapped karasu she lay there on the bed still in her street clothes too tired to undress or change the air was cold and moist like a refrigerator and the furnace was on the blink again she missed him he always kept her warm on nights like these but he could not cope with how focused she was on this case, she had not made it easy on either of them each of the victims' hearts had been removed with surgical precision and replaced with an ornately drawn anatomist's diagram of a heart inside a little zippered sandwich bag before being closed up and left near where thy had been taken postmortem showed no signs of a struggle and the little leaks from the department to the press and the ensuing write-ups and tv updates had spawned a couple of sloppy half-assed copycats who had been caught before they could take more than one or two victims one problem, there was nothing that linked any of the victims and as she dug deeper she had found that this was not the first such outbreak of these killings in the archives she found fragments of reports that evinced the exact circumstances and the thing that made her cringe was that in nearly every case, the detective in charge had suffered a breakdown of sorts and either died or disappeared a picture from 1915 a teenage boy from the slums, fifth victim in the cycle preceded by wealthy middle-aged socialite with a phenomenal cocaine habit and followed by a whole family discovered in their ranch on the edge of town by concerned neighbours who had seen the doomed patriarch one day earlier playing cards in the neighborhood tavern with an odd-looking foursome. the hearts neatly removed an illustration of a human heart sealed in wax and placed in the cavity the wounds neatly sutured shut the notes in the archives and the bits of the file had been kept by a clerk and not the detective on the case in his notes, he said that the detective's behaviour had "become more baffling as time passed" "he keeps talking about something he called the 'Long_Count' and 'feeding the gods so they will bring back the sun when the time comes' i must admit, i don't know if i am more afraid of the good detective or the things he is saying" a search of the records revealed that the detective hung himself in the property room just after making what he thought was a huge break in the case the clerk dug into the particulars of the case on his own time until falling victim to the 1918 influenza pandemic she shivered as she tried to shut the images out of her head eventually, fitfully, sleep came down 010621 what's it to you? who go blather from