The sat nav took him straight there, but the blue lighting up the sky would have been guide enough. He waved his badge in any face that dared to prevent progress until he found himself in a quiet oasis of white marble and tension. His footsteps echoed as he crossed to the stairs, ignoring the milling SOCOs and the shocked uniforms trying to console a weeping, middle-aged woman who still clutched her Mr Sheen. One could always tell the importance of the victim from the seniority of the main man at the scene. This was as good as it got. “Where have you been?” snarled the Chief, wiping the sweat from his brow with an already-sodden handkerchief. No doubt the Mayor, the PM and every ‘the’ in-between had already been on the phone. “Got here as fast as I could,” he answered, his voice calm despite his anger at the dog and pony show. The three other sudden deaths he’d been assigned since he’d come on duty had done without such esteemed courtesy calls, but then they hadn’t plastered their face all over social media. She’d had one billion subscribers, so it was rumoured. The number meant nothing to him. He could count his friends on his fingers. It was good enough. Better than most. They’d left the scene as they’d found it. The empty bottles of expensive vodka and prescription drugs made the cause pretty bloody obvious. The quantity of vomit, though, that was unusual. She’d tried, failed, then tried again? His eyes scanned the huge, white room, looking for the second trigger. A rose gold iPhone lay propped against the far wall's skirting, its clear protector smashed into a smattering of plastic confetti on the thick carpet. He held the phone over her staring eyes and the screen lit up. The call log was all he needed to see: sixty-six outgoing calls to forty-one numbers made between three and four in the morning, the longest lasting ninety-three seconds, the shortest just three. He popped the phone into an evidence bag and dropped it on the bed. The Chief blocked his path as he tried to leave. “Well?” the man snapped, reserving his charm for the forthcoming press conference. “Suicide.” "Shit... You sure? Not an accident?" He shook his head, saddened by the desperate emptiness hidden by a life so publicly full. He turned to look at the still-silent phone. “No one picked up," he explained. "And no one called back.” Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay
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