Page 7 of Autopsy of a Fairytale

It took them less than ten minutes to reach the morgue, and by the time they had donned the protective gear, Lina Thum was ready to start.

“Will you stay for the autopsy, or are you only here to collect the evidence?” She asked, but when Garrett’s face paled, she turned her attention to Bel.

“I might stay,” Bel answered, “unless something else comes up. The lack of evidence at the scene bothers me.”

“Everything about yesterday bothers me,” Lina humphed before securing her mask and goggles in place.

Thum spent the next half hour photographing and x-raying the body and aiding the detectives as they collected and bagged all the remaining pieces of furniture drilled into Brett’s corpse. Without the carvings encasing him, the gaping wound appeared even more gruesome, and as Lina pulled the petals from his chest cavity, she cursed.

“It’s a heart.” She held it forward for Garrett and Bel to examine. “They created a beautiful heart of roses to replace his organ.”

“You didn’t find his actual heart inside the furniture’s base, did you?” Bel asked, the realization that they were still missing an organ dawning on her.

“No,” Lina answered, carefully bagging the petals. “We did not locate it.”

“Do you think the killer took it?” Garrett asked, and even though Bel couldn’t see his lips below his mask, she knew they were grimacing.

“It’s possible—” Bel started, but a shrill ring interrupted her train of thought.

“Be right back.” Garrett left the exam room, the ringing phone in tow, and Bel turned back to the autopsy.

“Why take the heart?” Lina asked Bel, her voice laced with horror. “Why leave roses in its place? Lumen never struck me as the flower type, so what do they mean?”

“I don’t know.” The knot in Bel’s stomach returned with a vengeance. “I—”

“Bel?” Garrett’s head popped through the door. “The security company received the warrant for Lumen’s Customs’ stored footage. They just sent it over for us to examine.”

“Lumen disabled the cameras himself?”Garrett replayed the last few minutes of the security footage, but the images didn’t change. 11:00 a.m. on Saturday, Brett Lumen walked downstairs into his workshop and turned off his security system. It was the final entry stored before Violet found his body on Monday.

“He didn’t receive any phone calls Saturday morning,” Garrett continued, “so it doesn’t appear he was threatened into turning them off. No one shows up on the exterior cameras, either.”

“He doesn’t display signs of duress,” Bel agreed. “That doesn’t mean he wasn’t coerced, but based on his movements, he seems at ease.”

“Lina estimated the time of death to be sometime on Sunday, and this confirms he was still alive Saturday morning. We should check if he had a showing scheduled after he shut off the cameras. If he met someone, it could give us the last person who saw him alive. I assumed the killer disabled the security, but it appears Lumen didn’t want a record of who he was meeting.”

“Or it could have been a date.” Bel shrugged, and Garrett glanced at her as if she had just admitted she believed in bigfoot.

“All I meant was there are other reasons someone might turn off the cameras in their private home and business,” she explained. “We can’t assume either event is connected, even if the coincidence is convenient.”

Garrett conceded with a nod and started scrolling back through the footage, but the only anomaly was Lumen turning off the surveillance himself. Days rewound into weeks, and each ticking second followed a predictable timeline. Lumen was a creature of habit, making him an easy target to track. Violet appeared often, her presence the only other consistency besides Brett’s. Her outfits varied in design but never color, and her bubbly personality sharply contrasted with the ever-present black. The footage seemed to confirm her statement. Brett Lumen was particular, but the two appeared to work in genuine harmony.

“I recognize some of the people,” Garrett said after an hour of constant scanning. Bel’s eyes burned from staring at the screen, and she welcomed the break as she glanced at her partner. “His sales records should confirm his clients’ names and dates so we can match them to the footage, but tourists and casual viewers will be harder to identify.”

“None of the strangers have shown up more than twice, though,” Bel pointed out. “The regulars are either locals or clients, and as much as it sickens me to say this, I suspect our killer is local. Bajka isn’t the smallest town, but word travels fast.” She had to fight to keep her face straight as Emily’s insinuations about her and Garrett played in her memory. “The residents would notice a stranger staying beyond their welcome. Whoever did this studied Brett, and no one was the wiser. This crime was painfully specific, and I’m having a hard time picturing an outsider with this intense of a motive.”

Garrett cursed softly and opened his mouth to reply, but Sheriff Griffin strode up behind them, silencing his comment.

“I just got off the phone with Lumen’s lawyer and executor of his will,” the Sheriff said by way of greeting. “He has no next of kin. Both his parents and grandparents passed away. He was unmarried and an only child. We hoped his will would point us to any remaining family, but it didn’t. It did reveal something interesting, though. Brett left everything to his assistant, Violet.”

“Everything?” the partners asked in unison.

“His business, his money, his building, and his car. All of it,” Sheriff Griffin answered. “Seems she was the closest thing he had to family.”

“Inheriting a fortune like that is a powerful motive,” Bel said, her gaze shifting quickly to Garrett. “She also had the perfect opportunity to observe Brett without raising suspicion.”

“There is no way Violet posed him, though,” Garrett argued. “You and Lina possess ten times her muscle mass, and you both struggled to dismantle the chandelier.”

“She could have had help,” Sheriff Griffin added, voicing the possibility they had discussed yesterday. “Possibly even hired someone.”

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