Ok, everyone, here is a little preview of a character that I’ve been working on for a little while. He’s not overly refined yet, but I think you’ll enjoy him. Especially you, yes, you.

Case Study – Part 1

There was a loud thump on the door as Cameron pushed his shoulder against the frame, making his standard dramatic entrance. Doctor Pauls leaned around him, looking over his shoulder into the chaos that had overtaken the small apartment. Cameron tilted his head towards his doctor, grinning feverishly. He had once revealed that the only time he felt in control was when he could work on a problem. The more complicated, the better. It had left his rooms at the hospital full of puzzle books.

Detective Starkton made a show of making sure everyone knew how little he wanted the two of them here. He sighed loudly and scowled as he approached them, stopping just a few feet from the two and glaring openly at Cameron, who just grinned back at him with the feverish excitement that could only be possessed by a smile child or the powerfully insane. Pauls wasn’t sure how much of that he faked.

“Detective,” he said hesitantly, “You’ve got another one for us?”

Starkton rubbed his hand through his hair and squeezed the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes tightly. “Yeah, lets see what your pet psycho can make of this one. Sister Catherine found her this morning. Coroner hasn’t determined cause of death just yet, but it looks like it’s an overdose.”

Cameron pushed off the door frame and straightened his back, standing stiffly and letting his eyes roll across the room. He tilted his head slightly to the side, listening to something only he could hear. It was a behavior that Pauls had gotten used to over the last few years of his treatment. Cameron took another deep breath and began to walk through the room, his glance trailing across every surface, nook, and cranny. It was a deliberate slow walk, one that came from counting distances and calculating volumes.

He stopped above the body and turned, looking towards the single window in the wall opposite the door. “You’re right, let me see that,” Cameron exclaimed as he moved to the far wall and bent down near the window.

“One of his ghosts has pointed out something he missed,” Pauls explained to the Detective, reading the judgemental look that had crept onto his face. “Visual and auditory hallucinations aren’t that uncommon in a patient with his level of schizophrenia, especially one with such a low-level of latent inhibition. He uses the dis-associative delusions as a filter for the information he can’t stop absorbing.”

“Yeah, you’ve said that before, Psycho needs imaginary friends to make his special brain work, right. I got it Doc.” Starkton was not a fan of psychotherapists in general, and held little respect for Pauls. He was a pragmatic man. To him, it didn’t matter how Cameron’s brain worked, only that it did, and with amazing results. Starkton was a man who cared about results. He lived in a world where bad guys were real, and any tool that helped him put them away was a valuable one.

Cameron suddenly turned back to the two of them, his grin returning to his face. Pauls had not yet become used to the amount of glee his patient seemed to express at a crime scene. “Doctor Pauls, in your estimation, how prevalent is the horny, raver sub-culture among Mother-Superiors?”

“It’s not, that I know of.”

“Then I suppose we should ask ourselves how and elderly nun ends up overdosing on MDMA inside her quarters in a cloistered nunnery.” He pointed to the corpse as he spoke, making it seem like the most obvious thing in the world. “It’s not very likely she mistook them for her arthritis pills, they are a completely different color, sweet tarts, maybe.”

Pauls and Starkton shuffled across the room to see what it was he was pointing to. There on the floor, Pauls could clearly see the little pale, purple tablets. He knelt, examining the symbol cut into their surfaces, it appeared to be some sort of bee. Pauls looked back over his shoulder and Cameron who beamed back at him.

Starkton grimaced at Cameron’s excitement. Clearly he didn’t share the young man’s love of murder. “So, case closed? The old woman popped too much X and fried her brain? Solved it already?”

“No,” Cameron chuckled, “of course not, there are plenty of questions left to answer. The two most important being, ‘Why do prostitutes want an old nun dead’ and ‘Why did they try to pin it on the Circus.’”