There are others in the room—technicians, scouring for clues, but the detective might as well be alone with the dead woman. What happened to you? The detective’s eyes comb the woman’s body for answers. Hanging there, still and blank-faced she looks weightless…

Why did someone do this to you? And most importantly—who hated you enough to kill?

The detective walks a full circle around the victim, eyes never leaving the body. She nearly steps in a small puddle of blood before the assistant stops her.

Kneeling, she examines the coin-shaped blot on the marble floor, glancing back up at the victim.

The victim wears a long white dress, nearly see-through. No shoes. Her toenails are painted hot-pink.

The detective cannot say for certain until the medical examiner arrives, but she doesn’t think the victim died by hanging.

“What are you thinking?” the assistant asks, mustering some fortitude despite his sickly pallor.

“Well, I can’t say for sure. But I don’t see much injury around the ligature. No scratch marks … and she doesn’t appear to have clawed at the noose. If someone strung you up like that, you’d fight like hell, wouldn’t you?”

The assistant’s face turns ashier.

“Maybe the victim put herself up there,” he squeaks.

The detective shakes her head, slowly considering.

“Not a chance,” she says, finally.

“Well, how do you know?”

The detective lifts an arm, points a latex finger at the back of the victim’s head. “Can’t see it too clearly from here, but she suffered from a head injury there on the back of her skull. The blood on the floor probably came from her, but this isn’t where she was hit. A wound like that … it would have caused a whole lot of mess, and I don’t think the victim hit herself in the back of the head before hanging, do you? And how did she get herself up there? There’s no stool or chair nearby…” The detective is talking at him, but she’s mostly talking it through with herself.

She motions for one of the technicians and points at the blood on the floor.

Later, as the body is cut down and removed, the detective roams the halls of the mansion, room by room, taking it all in. She has had no luck finding a weapon.

A blow like that would have come from something hard… and from someone with a fast swing, she thinks inquisitively.

The detective imagines the perpetrator, lifting something heavy over the victim’s head. She sees the weight of the blow, the whale-like moan someone might make after sustaining a sudden brain injury of that nature.