Detective Anthony Gray had seen his fair share of death, but this one felt different. The apartment was still, unnervingly so — as though the air itself had paused to listen. The hum of the old refrigerator, the soft groan of pipes inside the walls, even the faint rattle of the blinds — everything sounded too alive for a place that had just hosted death. Then again, this was quite an old apartment, north of Clare View Point.
Gray stood in the doorway of the small bathroom, gloved hands hanging loosely at his sides, his sharp eyes scanning every inch of the space. What a mess, he thought.
The bathtub still had the dead man in it, but the faint pink swirl staining the porcelain told a story no bleach could erase. The water had been drained, but not fast enough — the ring along the edge marked where blood had sat before disappearing down the drain.
He didn't look at it long. He'd learned that the trick to surviving this line of work wasn't the love for it— its detachment of the personal.
He crouched, careful not to disturb the wet tile near the tub. A single, partial footprint rested at the foot — faint, but visible in the damp. A man's shoe. Narrow sole, expensive. Probably leather. Looks like a size nine, maybe ten.
"The forensics team is on their way," Officer Maddox said from behind him, voice muffled through his mask.
"Good," Gray murmured, half-distracted. "Tell them not to touch the drain until I've had a look."
Maddox nodded, disappearing into the hall.
Gray took another slow step forward. The faucet above the tub was rusted, streaked with reddish-brown oxidation that almost disguised the remnants of blood. He noted that — corrosion could mask evidence, but it also meant neglect. Whoever lived here didn't care much for comfort. Can't swob a finger-print from that. Tsk
The smell of bleach hung thick in the air. Too strong, too deliberate. Someone had scrubbed, but not well enough. The human nose always noticed what chemicals couldn't hide — that faint, metallic ghost underneath. Gray's gaze drifted toward the trash bin beside the sink. Empty. No liner.
That bothered him.
A killer who cleans always removes what matters. Trash bags meant DNA, fingerprints, fibers. The absence of a bin lining was louder than any bloodstain.
''Maddox, check the trash for any bath trash liners,'' he speaks loudly to Max who is in the next room.
He jotted that down in his notebook: Missing bin liner. Possible transport for evidence disposal.
As he wrote, his eyes caught something on the counter — a single glass jar, half-filled with water. Inside, a sunflower, wilted and heavy-headed, drooping toward the counter like it had given up on sunlight altogether. Gray tilted his head, studying it. Everything else in the apartment felt cold and utilitarian — but this… this was almost tender. Strange.
A calling card, maybe? He'd seen stranger things. People liked to leave signatures when they thought they were smarter than everyone else. Some killers chose poetry. Some chose patterns. Some chose flowers.
He leaned closer. The stem was cleanly cut. Fresh. Whoever had placed it there had done so with intent. A small note of irony crossed his mind; a flower of light left in a room of death. Why a sunflower? There were no sunflower fields near the northern part of the town.
He added another note:
Sunflower in a glass jar. Unnatural placement. Possible symbolic element.
Then he straightened, glancing around.
The rest of the apartment was half-packed — boxes against the wall, a suitcase half-zipped on the table, a coffee cup gone cold beside it. Whoever had lived here had been ready to go.
"Any ID?" he called out.
Maddox appeared again, shaking his head. "No wallet, no license. The neighbors said the tenant paid cash, kept to himself. Moved in about a month ago."
"Name?"
"Seth Karlsson. That's the name on the lease."
Gray repeated it quietly. "Seth Karlsson."
The name felt strange on his tongue.
He walked through the apartment slowly, taking in the details — the sparse furniture, the clean lines, the emptiness. The man who lived here had been organized, meticulous. Nothing about the place screamed chaos. This wasn't a crime of passion. It was execution, followed by calculation. Did Seth Karlsson deliberately rent this apartment under his name? Why didn't he use a different name? Does he want a chase?
And yet — the sunflower. That one detail didn't fit.
Gray lingered on it as he paced. He'd been on homicide long enough to know patterns when he saw them, and the pattern here whispered contradiction. The bleach and the cleanup spoke of detachment. The flower spoke of something else — sentiment.
He thought of the countless times he'd walked into rooms like this. There was always something personal left behind, even when the killer didn't mean to. Some small echo of who they were.
Maybe the flower wasn't a calling card. Maybe it was a sign of repetition, that the killer would do it again. Or it was pure clumsiness.
He didn't know which disturbed him more.
Later, he stood by the window, staring out at the rain-streaked street below. The lights of Clare View Point shimmered in puddles, soft and distorted. A tired town, wrapped in its own melancholy.
He'd been stationed here for three years now — long enough to know the locals by name, long enough to know when the quiet wasn't natural. This case was going to disturb the stillness, he could feel it.
Maddox returned with an evidence bag. Inside it, a folded napkin.
"Found this under the coffee cup," he said.
Gray frowned, taking the bag.
Scrawled across the napkin, in neat handwriting, was an address:
Clare View Motel — Room 219.
No name. No explanation. He turned it over — nothing.
"Someone was planning a meeting," Maddox said.
"Or a getaway," Gray replied.
He pocketed the bag. The name Seth Karlsson echoed again in his mind. He didn't like the sound of it — too clean, too deliberate. A false name, probably. People like that always left their lies folded neatly behind them.
"Get a team to the motel," he said. "Room 219. Tell them to check for signs of occupancy in the last forty-eight hours. And send someone to canvas the surrounding area — any witnesses, surveillance footage, whatever you can find."
Maddox nodded and left.
Gray stayed behind.
He walked back into the bathroom one last time, gloved hand brushing against the cold edge of the tub. He stared into it, not at what was gone, but at what lingered — that faint pink trace in the drain, like the room itself refused to forget. The man laid with his head against the rusty faucet, his feet meeting the drain that was stained of a pink hue.
He thought about the sunflower again.
Maybe it meant something to the victim. Maybe it meant something to the killer. Either way, flowers didn't belong here. Not in death, well, not in this specific scenario.
He could already imagine the headlines. Killer in Clare View?. The press here weren't well known for their extravagant names for killers, but then again, this town didn't really get killers or crime for that matter. It was quite mundane.
By the time the forensics team arrived, the night had deepened into that restless hour between midnight and morning. Gray stood outside the apartment, lighting a cigarette he didn't really want, watching smoke drift upward into the mist. He was trying to quit.
The neighbors huddled near the stairwell, whispering. Faces pale, eyes wide. He caught snippets — "quiet guy," "never caused trouble," "paid on time."
It was always the quiet ones. He flicked ash into the puddle and turned back to the door. The sunflower still bothered him. It didn't feel random.
He'd seen killers use symbols before — not to brag, but to feel understood. A token, a message, something to make sense of what they'd done. But there was a softness to this one that unsettled him. A tenderness that didn't belong to a mind at peace. Maybe it wasn't arrogance. Maybe it was longing. And that, Gray knew, was far more dangerous.
Because killers who killed for pride could be predicted. But killers who killed for love — those were the ones who lingered. Those were the ones who came back.
He returned to his car, rain slicking his coat, and sat for a moment before turning the key. His notebook lay open on the passenger seat, pages filled with scribbles.
He wrote one last line before driving away:
The flower isn't a decoration. It's a confession.
The engine hummed to life, and the car rolled into the empty street. Clare View Point was sleeping again, but Gray knew sleep never lasted long in towns like this. He'd seen it before — the way darkness settled in quietly, like mold beneath paint. It started small: a bathtub, a name, a flower. Then it spread. As he drove past an open field on the edge of town, the headlights caught on the swaying grass gently in the wind — thousands of dull green blades turning toward the rain, not the sun.
He slowed the car. Something about it made him uneasy.
He couldn't help but think: maybe the flower wasn't the killer's mark at all. Maybe it was the victim's last attempt to remind the world of something human — before the darkness took everything else. Or maybe it was both.
He drove on, smoke curling from his cigarette, mind turning over the name again and again.
Seth Karlsson.
Whoever he was, Gray was sure of one thing — he hadn't vanished. Not really. Men like that didn't disappear. They waited. And somewhere out there, under the same bruised sky, the killer who left a sunflower was watching the town that would soon start whispering his name.