– Fuck, man! Oh, no… no, no, no. It cannot be. Please let me be wrong. 

– What is it? – said Chris in a rather urgent way, raising his right eyebrow.

– We are dealing with a 1–day psychosis. He wanted to kill. He did kill. But just for 24 hours.

What good came from understanding the crime? Understanding, she thought, is a bag of crap if you can´t do anything else with the information. This is the closest to a perfect crime she had got. How can someone clearly establish like this that they do not want to be caught? What can they state this and really get away with it?

Thursday – 3:21pm

Chris got a call from his Director. Urgent and important – he knew.

Only a few hours later, the case would already start being called The Last Call by the media. He did the usual after getting a call from the Director: he rang Sophie. Those calls were as fast as they could be. Each said “yeah, ok” to the other as no more was needed for them to know what they had to do and where they had to go.

An almost nothing of minutes later, both were passing through the main heavy wooden door into the high-ceiled and wide corridor of the Office´s building. The cold walls sent out, mistakenly every time, a chill to Sophie´s neck. She never bothered trying to understand whether that was excitement, nervousness or spirits whispering hidden details of the crimes they were about to uncover. What would be the point of finding out what the chill means? Let this be the one unanswered question of my life, no understanding needed to spoil the mystery.

They rushed into the Meeting Room where the Director and one more person were waiting for them. Chris had managed to quickly grab a cup of coffee that seemed to be from a used mug – Sophie could swear there was lipstick stained there. That was one of Chris´s best traits: he was fast and could easily surprise in every situation. He would act, no thinking, just guts. It was beautiful to see him in action.

Chris blinked to his partner, the best one he could have. Sophie was bright, strikingly intelligent and her detective skills outsmarted everyone in that Office altogether. He looked forward to the day in which he would report to her.

They all sat down so that Sophie and Chris could learn the details of why they were called in. Four people (3 dead and 1 yet missing) had been reported and they were expecting the number to grow by the end of the day. It all started early in the dawn of that cold October 11^th.

Sophie´s spirits were whispering she should not have any hopes for the missing one as he was dead as well. She wet her lips and minimally shook her head. The spirits backed off a bit, giving her room to start connecting the dots and look for patterns. How can bodies appear inside completely burnt and impossible-to-identify cars? Is there any hidden meaning in cutting the top part of each finger or is it just a basic “I am stealing their identity away” kind of thing?

7:48pm

Two others had been found dead. One, the same one, was still missing.

9:17pm

– Fuck, man! Oh, no… no, no, no. It cannot be. Please let me be wrong.

– What is it? – said Chris in a rather urgent way, raising his right eyebrow.

– We are dealing with a 1–day psychosis. He wanted to kill. He did kill. But just for 24 hours.

The Director got up from his Director´s chair and approached Sophie in a careful way as not to spook her. Those “I-have-the-answer” moments, he had learnt early in his career, may never be treated lightly. Sophie had given all the signs of reaching one of those moments: eyes locked away far from the Meeting Room. She was talking only to herself , begging to be wrong (and this announced it had to be terrible, cruel, inventive killing) and was not moving. In those split seconds that revealed an insight the Director had never, in his 32 years of work, seen a person move while getting it.

He then carefully laid his hand on Sophie´s shoulder, still wordless, waiting for her to come back to the Meeting Room. She sighed and blinked. There, she was almost entirely back with them. She stared into his eyes, rubbed her own eyes with her left hand (and the Director noticed a mermaid band-aid in her ring finger) and she sighed again.

• We are dealing with a fucking taxi app user. The killer must have created a fake profile, selected to pay every ride in cash, used a burning phone, burnt and cut all evidences and that is it. Every ride, a kill. – stated Sophie with a heavy, hoarse voice. We may actually never find him, guys.
• The cheap motherfucker… He was fucking hitchhiking. – Chris tried humouring the group in a bad, bad timing. No one even smiled.

Looking to the ground, pensive and absorbed, Sophie left the meeting room alternating her right foot with the left one in a slow, robotic walk towards the nothingness of pure understanding brought to her.

Someone´s 24-hour pleasure had turned into Sophie´s lifetime dread. Maybe that was the end goal? – she finally heard the spirits clearly speak.