Tuesday September 8, 2026 [8/8 +31]
Chicago, United States of America
Matthew McBride carefully entered the crime scene, plastic bags on his feet and latex gloves on his hands. Once past the threshold of the apartment door, he saw what had transpired just four hours earlier.
Blood… so much blood…
Sprawled across the apartment floor were two young people, a man and a woman. Judging by the college-branded T-shirts, they were likely students, possibly a couple. The woman was shot in the forehead; the man, in the temple. In the dead young man’s hand was a pistol flecked in dark, dried blood.
Matthew really was not supposed to be there–he was a gumshoe reporter, after all, not a crime scene investigator. But Matthew had a knack for getting into places where he should not be. It was what made him a great reporter.
A couple of weeks ago his boss, Perry Easton, gave him this new assignment to find out what was going on with the murder-suicides that were currently plaguing Chicago. While investigating his first case, he started flirting with a homicide detective in her late-thirties and ended up sleeping with her. This led to her arranging clandestine visits to crime scenes where a murder-suicide took place.
In the past couple of weeks, Matthew had seen his share of gruesome tableaus. He had visited three crime scenes before this one. The first was a very unfortunate domestic violence case involving an alcoholic mother murdering her cheating husband. The second case involved a lesbian couple who died over a spat about their financial troubles. The third case was a police officer who accidentally shot a teenage shoplifter while confronting him in front of a bodega. The cop shot himself in the head immediately after the teenager died to avoid the Coma Imprisonment.
The rule seemed to be that the murderer could shoot himself dead within about a second of killing his victim. This gave no time for hesitation. As soon as the murder was committed, the suicide had to happen immediately thereafter.
Matthew stared at the attractive–and dead–young couple in front of him. They were lying in the living room of the small apartment. The place was quite clean for a student’s living quarters. Textbooks were tidily stacked on the coffee table, notebooks with neat handwriting open beside them. The kitchen was clean with all the dishes washed and stacked in a drying rack.
Matthew frowned. This doesn’t look right at all…
A hand smacked on Matthew’s butt. “Hey hotshot, getting a good eyeful?”
Matthew turned around. The detective he was banging was there smirking at him.
“Yeah, just looking around… Marcy, does this look right to you? These kids… they looked like they were living a pretty normal student life before this happened. There’s no mess… no signs of violence.”
Detective Marcy shrugged her shoulders. “Hey, whatever. Girl cheats on guy, guy buys a gun at a pawn shop. Lord knows firearms are dirt cheap since this Coma thing hit us. Bang, bang, yet another murder-suicide.”
Matthew scanned the apartment again. There were little yellow markers indicating points of interest. One was taped to a wall beside what looked like a bullet hole.
“Marcy… that bullet hole. How did that get there? Did it… go through a, um, head and then hit that wall?”
Marcy shook her head. “That’s the damned thing about this particular case. The bullets that killed these nice young people are accounted for there… and there.” She pointed to two other spots on the opposing wall stained with brains and blood.
“That bullet there, that was a miss,” she said.
Matthew rubbed his chin. “So, did this guy shoot to miss in order to scare her, and then hit the target after?”
“Maybe. Must’ve been like that.”
Matthew shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would he shoot the opposite wall? If he really wanted to scare her, he would’ve shot the wall nearby where she was standing… right here.”
Marcy shrugged. She does that a lot… like she doesn’t give a fuck, Matthew thought.
Matthew ran his hands through his hair. He did not like this one bit. The evidence seemed cut-and-dried that this was just another murder-suicide, but his reporter-sense was tingling.
It did not make sense. Two young, good-looking, and apparently studious kids get killed in the middle of the day. A bullet hole that was an apparent miss was sunk into a wall nowhere near the female victim.
Matthew knew what he had to do now. He had to talk to everyone who knew these kids–Shaun Warman and Brianne Eagleton.
He had to find out if these kids were the type of people to end up in this bloody mess.