I was sick and tired of it. It was the seventh corpse I found this week. This town used to live in peace and with rarely any crime. Now nobody could understand what was going on. Seven corpses, seven different placements, seven irrelevant places far far away from each other. They weren’t able to confirm the victims’ identities. There were no phones, no ID, no fingerprints or in some situations, no face…

   

The first denunciation was on August seventh, three thirty-eight. A family went to the forest for camping. Their son got a notification on his phone at three twenty. It said: “Wanna explore the forest? Maybe more? Go to the abandoned camping houses.” He was terrified at the moment but he decided to go. I won’t go into the unnecessary details. When we got there, we saw an old wooden, abandoned house. The woods were decayed and smelly. The door was half-broken and its broken glass covered with leather. The corpse was lying on the second floor. It was designed like a crime scene. He was lying face down and his body shape was drawn with chalk around him. The objects in the room were numbered and there were photos of the mortal body hanging on the walls. After we had done the work, I held his shoulder and tried to see his face. His face was decomposed. It was definitely burned intentionally. The fire didn’t reach his neck, so it was probably a little object. Maybe the ones we use in the kitchen. I recognised something inside his mouth. When we got it out, it was an origami of a butterfly. The shocking part was, it hadn’t gotten damaged. It was probably a rare material especially designed for not getting damaged.

 

After the first denunciation (which was on Sunday) we got six more denunciations. Every day, at the same hour with the same design of the crime scene and similar notifications to people’s phones.Oh, and of course with the same butterfly origami. The first one was black, the second one was red and then green and black again. It repeated the same colour cycle. At the crime scene, I was waiting curiously for the next colour and burned place. Ah, forgot to mention that, in every corpse, there was a different place that got burned. First the whole face, then the mouth, eyes, ears, hands and fingers. I was far from the body, so I couldn’t see. A few minutes later, my partner came and said that the top of his head had gotten burned and you were able to see the skull if you looked closer. The origami was yellow. It was strange because it had been dark colours until that moment.

 

We finally identified some of the victims. They had nothing in common. NOTHING. I even searched their schools, families, and friends, whether they had been somewhere in common… No, it was a definite no. There wasn't anything, anything. I had a feeling that the last victim was so important. I really don’t know why but the brain and the yellow origami evoked something to me. Yellow…Bright? Light? Enlightened?... BRAIN. I was curious about what the murderer’s message was. Brain, enlighten… It made sense. You know, you sometimes just have a thought and it gets every piece together. When I associate the brain with the colour but especially a thought or a way of thinking, the genie was out of the bottle. Every burned place symbolised something. I wonder what… What could it be? Why were they burned? It made them lose their function… Lose their function? Oh god…It made people not able to see, not able to hear, not able to speak. It made them unresponsive. They can't react. No reaction, no deprecation, no defence…

 

Finally, I understood what he was thinking, but why? Why did he want to give that message with those people? What do they have in common? Okay, we got the main idea. What are they not reacting to? I just have to find that. We can clearly say that they hurt this man. All of them had whether in a direct way or not. He felt anger and disappointment for them. Oh lord, they have nothing in common. I just came up with a new idea. What if he had done that because people are silent to THEIR pain? Maybe they were the victims and there was no reaction, and in a way, he thought that he was stopping their pain. No, no that’s meaningless. They don’t have a common place they went to, so he has no chance to know them for the same reason. We should continue with the first idea…

 

   While I was thinking about this, my partner informed me that they found all the victims' identities. There was nothing common but there was a suspicious thing: they all had started high school in nineteen ninety eight, but their average age was around fourty two/fourty three. All of them had missing years. “Finally!” I screamed. We have found what we needed. I searched and finally got the point. They were all punished for a crime when they were under eighteen. Since they were underage, their record was sealed, so no one saw it. We found out that they were all found guilty of a robbery and the owner of the house’s blow. They were all sent to the correctional facility for young offenders. After they left the facility, all seven of them got back to their old lives. They came together once a year but never invited our killer. He recognised the situation and talked to them about it. Nobody seemed to care. Not just his friends, but his family and everyone he loved turned their back on him. He tried to be noticed, but couldn’t. They were acting like he was invisible or he never existed.

 

   I stood up and I was about to say the cliche sentence: “Let’s go and get him!” but the words were stuck into my mouth. My partner ran to me breathless. He didn’t say anything. He just showed a photo. A photo of a hanging man in a room filled with colourful origamis. He didn’t say anything. I looked at him and said: “It is over, let’s close the case.” He just nodded and went back to our office.