From the Case Files of Anne Grassman #1

The room was stark, empty, and sterile. Like some hospital room that had not been used yet. Only this room was in a house that seemed to her to be all together familiar, like something she had in a dream or maybe a nightmare.

In fact, the whole house was that way, empty. Completely new inside. The fresh paint on the walls still smelled rank and the carpets odors wrinkled her nose. It was as if the house had sprung to life over night. The deed said the house had been there nearly 200 years.

It was always these cases the FBI called her to investigate. The cases where there were little, if any, clues. She had just arrived on scene from halfway around the world. Apparently, one more crime couldn't wait until she was done with another before calling upon her to find the perpetrator.

Anne Grassman was glad of it, sometimes. Like now, she absolutely hated the tropics, the heat, the unbearable humidity that left a person gasping for air. She also hated solving crimes when the victim was still left lying around. Suffocation, fitting, she thought, for a muggy and suffocating town. And she got called back to her home, in London. Safe, good ole' London.

London wasn't where she grew up, or was born. Nobody knew who she was before she was 16. In fact, no records exist and she had no memory of it. They found her, the FBI did, sitting in the middle of an open field, sobbing. She clearly remembers that day, and every day since. Before that day there is not a single memory. Who was she before then? Nobody knew. She was found in California, in a tiny sea coast town, and without a clue who she was or how she got there. It was as if the universe pulled her from thin air, and decided in a cruel twist of fate, to leave her in the middle of a strawberry field, without a past.

It was this emptiness, this desire to know her past, that fueled her to become a private investigator.

And the many years since that day, she had become world renown, well, at least to the FBI and governments in several countries.

She let out a long sigh.

A man wearing a dark uniform entered the room, "Find something, Ma'am?"

She despised that word "ma'am." She wasn't that old, merely in her late 20's, and yet professionals
and government officials treated her like she was some kind of 60 year-old matriarch they couldn't go up against. Something like The Queen.

""Nothing yet," she replied." How long until they bring in the luminal and remove the carpets?"

"They'll do that this evening, Ma'am." His quick muffled reply came as he shuffled out of the room, camera in hand.

She came back to her recollection. This house, it was as if she had lived here, it felt so familiar. Like some waking nightmare. And now it sat empty. Apparently, it was owned by a wealthy American family, who simply vanished. Just a week ago they lived here, all of them. She tried to picture it, this house, filled with two kids, their dog, the fish bowl in the corner, their lazy, preppy, self-indulgent mother and poker-up-the-ass father.

The report said that they had lived in the home for nearly ten years. The kids had been born in this town. They also owned a home in California. The report said that it also was clean, sterile, and stark. Not even a trace of dog hair, or a ring from an over watered potted plant. The drains were void of anything, even soap scum. The inside of the house looked pristine, unused, and as if it had been built only days ago.

It all boiled down to the flashbacks she was having as she entered this place. She almost felt as if she could see exactly where the furniture had been. She carefully walked through the house avoiding the vacancies where the kitchen table had sat, where the coffee table was. And that bedroom. She saw it, not as it was now, but as a little girl's room. Pink fluffy bedding, bunnies painted on the walls. A poster of unicorns behind the door. She shook her head. No, her imagination was just running rampant.

As she came back downstairs, an agent was waiting for her. "What can you make of this ma'am?"

She surveyed the kitchen as he rambled on about the place. "...and the red Chinese food container on the window sill..."

Wait, what? She swung around to look at it. There it was, the only clue. Inside there was an assortment of pink nail polishes, flower decals, and other implements. On the bottom was a tiny note.

She handled the container cautiously with her gloved hands, careful not to smudge prints.

Days later, Anne was still working over the reports. The luminal processing had not revealed a scene, the whole interior of the house glowed as if the entire thing had been washed with a careful layer of blood; an even layer of eerie green on all surfaces. Not even a millimeter of its interior did not glow with the same eerie luminescence.

Those pictures were an eerie sight. Under the carpet, the old oak floors even had a glow to them.

Down the drains, into the attic, under the baseboards, through the basement, all the outside walkways, and even the garage was an eerie shade of green in an even layer.

She looked down at the only items left at the scene. It all boiled down to the note, the bottles of nail polish, and the red satin Chinese food take out container left on the window sill.

She looked at the note. At first, they thought it was nothing, just a blank piece of paper. Then, after being treated to a forensics lab, it revealed two clues. There was a message that said, "We're safe, you can come home now." And a set of fingerprints that belonged to her.

The bizarre thing was those fingerprints. She had been in Brazil for 6 months on a case involving a politician who had been smothered. And the family had lived in that house and even been seen living there two weeks before their disappearance, which was a month before she arrived on the scene.

Inside the container they found DNA on the nail clippers that matched hers with undeniable proof.

It was eerie. Too eerie. The flashback had been getting stronger since the investigation, while the clues had been getting weaker and weaker and leading to more and more dead ends.

Aside from its location, the home in California had revealed nothing that the house in London did not.

Aside from their locations and layouts, the interiors were identical. Stark, empty rooms with fresh paint and fresh carpets over old oak floors. The luminal revealed the same creepy outcome. There was an identical black satin Chinese food container on the kitchen window sill, with the same contents and the same note and nail clippings, with her finger prints on everything.

She walked through that house yesterday, imagining the twins who played in its hallways and the stuffy husband whose face haunted her dreams. And the teenager's room all in pink with bunnies in unicorns. The creepy memories haunted her every waking moment she was in that house.

The only fresh clues were the freshly laid sod and freshly paved pathways. They had been replaced more recently than the family had disappeared. So the team was dispatched for first thing this morning, in three hours, to excavate the property.

She felt something cold wrap around her neck and its tightening grip made her gasp for air. "I've finally got you, now my revenge on your family is complete, you couldn't hide from me forever, Anne Greenman or shall I say Angela Goldburge."

Her world went black and she heard the distant muffled sounds of a scuffle. And the far away voices of the tack team.

She awoke days later to the steady beeping of the hospital equipment with the Chief of Justice sitting by her side. "Good work, Anne......"