The walls close in now. The room has become my closet has become my cracked hollow casket has become my epitaph to a doomed existence. I can feel what has transpired here, not the murder, that's obvious by the outline and the bloodstains surrounding the covered hapless body. No, I can FEEL the hatred and fear that led up to the murder. I can see the struggle and feel like vomiting as I see the last spasm of life fighting for breath. My name is Marlon, and I'm one of those psychic detectives you see on television from time to time. One of those psychic detectives people mock, one of those psychic detectives people say are fake, and one of those psychic detectives that the real police call in when they can't solve a crime, or as in this case, a series of crimes. The voice haunts me. It rings in my head until the pain cause double vision and the tremors devour my stomach. It's not the voice of the killer, or even the voice of the doomed. It's the voice of the emotion that caused the crime in the first place. It is the voice of the scared little child that is trapped inside the psycho that did this. 'Here I was..I've killed before and I'm gonna' kill again...come get some...' It screeches, taunting me. My world is a vessel to nowhere, I am empty and hollow and waiting to be boarded by the people that played out this sad violent act. I'm like a big rusty smelly tub full of Seagull crap and Albatross crap, a tug full of empty containers all transporting the same old futile cargo with trumped up illegal documentation: all transporting me back to nowhere. I'm a token burnt offering to humanity, an eclipse of time in flesh, an errant thirty-five year old mis-hap that just keeps mis-happening and mis-happening and mis-happening...my mind is the only portal I have left to close. Close it psychic investigator. Just let it close because you're trying to hard because you want to prevent this from happening again. Get rid of your own voice and find the one in this room that is full of bitter memories, full of pimps of promises of joy never found, the voice of a tortured scared kid who turned into a monster with a shot or a hit here to hide the pain, sexual perversions over there to run from suffering, but there is no escape, why lie? There never was. And then I hear it, the voice of the middle aged man this girl let in the room because he looked so harmless and small. He'd always been harmless and small, and the harmless and small man that brought the Bibles wasn't going to hurt anyone so she let him in like they all did because Bible salesmen are good people and especially ones wearing white neck collars that way a hundred and thirty pounds with spectacles. They all let him in because as mother and father had said as they beat him over and over again with that bible, that big black bible, God's word is LAW and LAW will prevail and WOMEN are evil for baby boy like EVE in the beginning. And the middle aged man learned what damage a bible could do, especially one loaded with an iron weight. Then I saw his face and his beard and his beady eyes and his granny glasses as he reared back to crush her skull with the bible...
My eyes popped open and I jumped, startling the officer watching me with the dubious look on his face.
"It's a Bible salesman!" I said. He sent a man to the neighbor's house as I closed my eys and searched for more but there was nothing else. I was glad because I wasn't sure if I could take anymore.
"It checks out!" The officer said, surprised. "There was a damned door to door book salesman around this morning."
We had a lead.