The Tease

I’ve seen a lot of crazy shit in this job; somehow never gets easier. First day as a detective I get called into a murder suicide. Man kills wife. Man kills self. It wasn’t the blood that got to me. It was the stench, so sour it was almost sweet. It was the way the bodies had fallen. Looked like a marionette and its puppeteer. Like somehow he'd found a way to control her even in death. All that was missing were the strings. That scene set the tone for my entire career. Case after case of someone needing control. Control over someone else. Control over animals. Control over a business. In the case of Carole Coins, it was control over mind. Or unsoundness of mind. There’s no good way to put it.

I’ll tell it best I can figure it. There’s still no definitive story of what happened that night. Police report says suicide. While true, it feels wrong to sum it up this way. Can someone kill themselves if they’re no longer really there? See, I don’t think Carole Coins existed at the time of her death. The shell of her did. The soul of her did not. I’m not talking about any sort of demon possession or ghost story bullshit either. This was an old-fashioned case of someone losing their mind completely.

Family and friend testimony confirmed that Carole seemed—was—a completely normal woman prior to the night of October 15th. She was a school teacher, math, seventh grade. She paid her taxes. Had a regular schedule of bowel movements, same as anybody. Went to bed early most nights. Used to be a singer, back in college. Nothing ever came of it. And according to the testimonies, she’d never much minded. Neighbors said she used to sing in her apartment throughout the day. No complaints. She had a wonderful voice.

The first sign that anything was wrong was when her next door neighbor, Aisha Monroe, heard a scream from Carole’s apartment, sometime around 11 p.m. I asked her what kind of scream it was. Off her look I explained that a scream could be happy, sad, surprised, scared, and so on. She elaborated that, while she couldn’t be sure, it seemed to be a scream of delight. A shriek, maybe. Like a noise you might let out when you see your favorite movie star. This got me thinking. Maybe she did. I said as much to Aisha. She laughed, thinking I was joking. Seeing I was serious, she asked if I really thought a famous movie star happened to knock on Carole’s door. I asked her if she’d heard a knock.

The neighbor that lived in the unit below Carole’s—I’ll call him Mike, though he preferred to keep anonymous—gave us the second sign of distress. Somewhere around an hour after Aisha heard Carole’s scream, Mike heard a series of thumps from above him. He explained how they were no normal thumps. He’d literally seen the ceiling move. Dust formed. Filled the air. When we tested it later, I had to stomp pretty damn hard before he indicated that it matched what had happened that night. Could be someone else, someone bigger, was in her apartment that night. Could be adrenaline.

Nearly everyone in the building reported the last of the sounds they heard. Around 1 a.m. there was another scream. Reports on the kind of scream varied. Some said it was an angry scream. Others say it was filled with terror. Definitively, this was not a scream of delight. The scream alone, Aisha said, would have been enough for her to call the police. But everything after happened so quickly that Aisha hadn’t even had the chance. There were a series of crashes, clatters, clanks. There were thuds and thumps and knocks. Someone said they thought a plane might have crashed into the building. Another said they thought the roof had caved in.

We can put together what caused the noise from the state of her apartment. The whole thing was a mess. Nothing was in the place it was meant to be. Fallen bookshelves, books scattered across the floor. Fridge open, its contents thrown about the walls, carpet, hardwood. I nearly slipped on a banana like some macabre video game. A smashed laptop. Posters torn from walls, torn to bits. The posters stuck with me. Of course, I know why now, but at the time I just remember them standing out for no reason in particular. Maybe the way they were torn. The time it must have taken.

It wasn’t until we searched her computer that I was able to build a story, however feeble. October 15th, 9 p.m. Tanya Stone teases an announcement. Internet search records prove that Carole Coins had seen this tease. Maybe she had been getting ready for bed when she saw it. Page after page of fan theories. Tanya Stone, best selling pop star in the world, what could she be up to? Carole posted on social media at 9:15 p.m. ‘OMG!!!!’. Cryptic, maybe, without the context of Tanya’s upcoming announcement. Or without the mangled posters in her apartment having been of Tanya Stone.

11 p.m. there was a scream. I hadn’t been far from off. It wasn’t a movie star Carole had seen. It was a pop star. Tanya made a surprise appearance on a popular internet show. This was the moment Carole had been waiting for. Announced a new album. It had been nearly eight years since her last album. Eight long years for people, fans, like Carole. The kicker? She’d be releasing it that night. The next morning, really. Midnight. A scream of elation. Of shock.

An hour or so later, the thumps. Frantic internet searches. ‘Download Tanya Stone’s new album’. ‘Tanya Stone website crash’. ‘Internet speed test’. The log showed refresh after refresh on the site that held Tanya’s album. What should have been a click away became hundreds, maybe thousands, of clicks away. See the way I figure it the site was overloaded with visitors, last minute announcement like that. Too much for it to handle. Downloads stopped working. Fans left angry, frustrated. Carole Coins stomped on the ground. Once. Twice. Maybe more. As hard as she possibly could. Not another person. No, I don’t think so. Adrenaline. Like I said.

And then, chaos. A plane crash. A roof falling in. We couldn’t confirm this, but here’s what I think happened. I think Carole got through. The page loaded after what felt like an endless wait. Everything seemed like it would be okay. And then, horror. The download started but went nowhere. Maybe there was a little box on the screen that said: ‘Time to download: 10,000 hours’. I think this was when Carole snapped. There could be others listening to the album right that moment. They could have finished it already. She’d be late to the party. Maybe she wouldn’t be invited to the party at all. As the download crept slowly along, Carole Coins, or the shell of her, became violent. Red is all she saw. Bookshelves turned. Banana’s flew. Laptops shattered. Fist’s flailed.

I didn’t need to see the biopsy report to know how she did it. There were claw marks, deep ones, on her face. Bruises on her cheeks and the sides of her head. All self inflicted. Knuckles were bloodied and swollen. Chunks of hair had been ripped out. She had a deep gash in the middle of her forehead. There was blood on the corner of her counter. Right by where her dead body had been found. Must’ve slammed her head into the counter. Maybe harder than she meant to. Maybe not.

It was control she needed. It was control she lost.

Perhaps not the ugliest case I’ve worked. Maybe the saddest. I wish I hadn’t read the full report on her computer history. If I hadn’t, maybe it wouldn’t still keep me up at night. The laptop had been smashed, but its hard drive was still in tact. Tanya Stone’s album was on it. Sometime between her meltdown and her death. Sometime before she smashed the laptop. Maybe after, I don’t know—I don’t think it really matters. It had downloaded. If she’d just waited. If she’d only waited.