Snippet #2513616

It had to be a Monday night. Great. She hadn't wanted any calls from the field office at all, let alone this one, but Huda Abu-Orabi had to deal with what she got, and this particular Monday, what she'd gotten was a call for four bodies found within less than a two block radius of each other. And as if that wasn't bad enough, the responsible parties had taken great care to leave each body along the banks of one of the waste-filled canals dividing Asteria into smaller districts and neighborhoods -- this particular canal snaking its way through the Downs.

Huda gritted her teeth and stamped her feet against the ground littered with slowly decomposing rubbish from the slums looming dangerously over the thoroughly polluted canal. She glanced at her phone, the device nearly slipping from her moist, clammy palm. Yellow lights flicked on in some of the windows -- many of them missing screens or blinds or both -- before flickering out. It was already eight in the evening, close to dusk, and the humidity was stifling. Huda looked back at the mangled body hanging by the ankles over the pedestrian walkway, the last of the four waiting to be taken down, and forcibly swallowed the bile rising in her throat.

"Pretty gruesome, huh?" The crime scene technician with the messy purple hair winked.

Huda gave him a disgusted look. "Shut up."

The Avorian's wings had been sawed off in what appeared to have been hacking motions. Her blood coated the rest of her body, though it had already dried. Huda hated summer in Asteria. Fucking heat only made the humidity ten times worse than it already was. She coughed, and brought her hand to her mouth and nose again. "Can we please hurry this up? We're done with the fucking photographs. How long does it take you people to get a fucking van already?" Huda looked over her shoulder, the cloth of her hijab all but soaked wherever it made contact with her skin.

And where the fuck was her new partner. Hell if Huda was going to miss Monday night primetime by herself.