The Wedding Project 💍

'The Sound of Silence' (Part Two)

Charles led them to the bride's hotel suite on the other side of the corridor. It was smaller than the parents' one, but still luxurious and comfortable, a dream drowned in pink and white. A light breeze came in through the balcony window which was only tilted, making the white curtain blow slightly. Even though the afternoon sun was shining almost straight into this room, the blowing curtains gave the room an almost spooky feeling.

The body on the floor did not help with this image at all.

Harris put on a pair of latex gloves and shut the door behind him, after ordering Charles to not let anyone else in here. Gordon already approached the lifeless body of the young girl in the wedding dress. Now that he didn't have to hide it anymore, he scoffed openly. "If anyone had done this at my wedding... how much pain and suffering they would have spared me."

"Focus!" Harris reprimanded him softly, but it was more of a habit. He himself didn't like this at all. He had never been married, never had had any children on his own, and still this was getting to him. The bride looked beautiful in this dress, young and full of hope. Being killed like this on her own wedding day, just a few hours after speaking the vow, was cruel to no end. Whatever her father said about her, it wasn't true for someone. The person who had done this must have hated her guts.

Gordon started to record his observations on his phone as he inspected the corpse. He stated the facts he observed neutrally and without any emotion as if they were entries in a phone book. "Female, Asian. Early twenties - according to witnesses she is supposed to be 22 years old. Body was identified by the hotel staff as Anna Gilmour."

She was lying on her stomach. When Gordon carefully turned her around, Harris could finally see the entire bestiality of her death. Her eyes were open wide, her pretty face frozen in a mask of pain and suffering. Gordon coldly continued to record: "Body found with a large piece of cloth stuffed in her mouth. Probably to muzzle her screams during the actual murder." He frowned as he looked at the wadded cloth that was peeking out between the lips of the dead girl. "What is this?"

"It's a napkin," Harris answered grimly. "They had them on the tables downstairs where they had lunch. The murderer must have taken one to use here."

For a moment Gordon looked at him with his pondering face, probably wondering about the same question as Harris did. If the murderer used a napkin from the hotel to muzzle their victim, was this really a planned murder? Or was this an improvisation on their part?

"Cause of death?" he then asked his partner. "What do you think?"

Gordon cautiously turned the head of the body a little more to the side and pointed towards the neck. From this angle it was pretty apparent. The skin of the bride from down the neck was dark blue, almost violet, like someone had beaten her for hours and hours. It went down her left side of the body, spread over her upper torso, leaving a pattern on her skin that could as well have been a bizarrely large birthmark. At the neck, at the center of this blue coloring, there was something else, tiny and barely visible. It almost looked like the sting of a bee.

Harris nodded slowly. "We should look for a syringe then. I don't expect the murderer to hold onto it if they are the least bit clever."

"Will do," Gordon confirmed and continued to record. "Judging by the discoloration and the pattern that it spread out through the body, the victim was injected with some sort of acidly substance, leading to internal and subdermal bleeding. The injection happened to her neck, near the artery. The substance spread into the upper body, causing more damage. Without further autopsy it is hard to say, but the cause of death looks like multiple organ failure due to poison injection."

The look of agony on the bride's face matched the matter-of-fact description by his younger colleague, Harris thought. Someone had really hated her guts. To die like this must have been painful in ways that he didn't even dare to consider. Her lips around the cloth stuffed in her mouth showed this, too - part of them looked like she was biting on her gag to ease the pain, the other part looked like she tried to scream as hard as she could, but had not been able to. He shivered, tried his hardest not to imagine what she must have felt at this moment.