The Devil’s Investigation

Chapter 1: The Discovery of the Body
New York, 5th Avenue – 03:26 AM

The rain fell in cold, fine needles onto the asphalt. The neon lights from the buildings reflected a pale, eerie glow on the wet pavement. The wind was icy. It howled through the alleyways, carrying with it crumpled papers. Debris that had been left behind was caught in the flow of the city. A scene both familiar and surreal, like a bad dream that never ends.

Frank Calloway was accustomed to nights like this. But what he saw now was not ordinary. He was not here for a simple altercation or a petty theft. What lay before him froze him with horror.

Lilly Jones lay there, sprawled on the sidewalk. Her pale body stood out in the shadows. She was naked, and one foot barely touched the wet pavement. The scene was as macabre as it was inexplicable. The silence was heavy, the silence found only in moments when life has been suddenly ripped from someone.

Lilly was only 18 years old. And yet, she would never live again. A brilliant young woman, a student at the Christian University of New York. She had her whole life ahead of her.

But someone had decided otherwise.

Lilly’s body was cold, almost perfectly intact, without signs of a struggle. No signs of resistance. No fingerprints, no footprints in the blood, no trace of any confrontation.

An inverted cross, deeply etched into the skin of her chest, was the only striking clue of what had happened. Just below it, the message written in her own blood, the letters twisted but legible:

“Fiat Lux.”

Calloway slowly leaned in to examine the scene, his gaze precise, almost cold, scanning every detail. He had seen corpses, murders, dark cases, but something about this scene unsettled him. The total absence of physical violence, or the cryptic message left on the body. There was nothing ordinary about this case.

The rain intensified, and the flashing lights from the police cars tore through the night with a cold, bluish glow. Calloway turned his head towards a young officer approaching, looking nervous.

💬 “Chief, we have a suspect.”

The detective raised an eyebrow. The officer handed him a photo. It was an identification photograph that seemed to belong to another time. Calloway studied the image with some wariness.

Matt Adams.

A young man in his twenties, dark eyes, and a hard look, barely an adult but already marked by life. Calloway knew exactly who he was. It wasn’t hard to recognize Lilly’s name in this story. Her boyfriend.

The problem with Matt Adams was his past. He wasn’t who he claimed to be. A drug addict, a pathological liar, impulsive. He had a reputation as a bad boy, the type who is easily imagined in a murder case. But Calloway, who knew more than most, wasn’t the type to be fooled by too simple an explanation.

“A suspect who is too obvious always hides a much darker truth.” The phrase echoed in his mind like a warning. It was a principle he had learned over the years in his job.

Calloway turned the photo between his fingers.

💬 “Do we have his location?”

💬 “Yes, he lives in the neighborhood.”

The officer hesitated, as if waiting for a reaction, but Calloway merely nodded. He slipped the photo into his inner pocket, then looked again at Lilly’s body. There was nothing logical about this. The inverted cross, the message… all of it seemed like a signature, a mark left by someone calculating, someone precise.

A methodical killer.

💬 “Get ready to interrogate him.” Calloway stood up and ordered his men to start collecting evidence. But in his mind, another detail swirled: Matt Adams. He was too obvious.

He took one last look at the scene, an intuition making him furrow his brow. There was something rotten about this case. And he already knew it.