Chapter 167 CHAPTER 167
Murder? Follow us
The lead detective stepped forward with the brisk authority of someone who has tile shoes and the patience to handle distraught crowds. He asked Tessa to step back, his voice even but not unkind. She complied, and as she moved, a woman in the crowd broke down. The sound was a raw, animal grief that held the entire scene as an answer to a question nobody knew how to ask.
A forensic officer found something small and shiny near Chloe’s hand and bagged it carefully. Tessa watched the procedure like one watches a play unfold when already knowing the ending. The police asked for CCTV footage from local shops. They took statements from those who had been closest. Someone mentioned a name—Chloe’s ex, an argument overheard the night before, an anonymous text threatening to reveal something if money wasn’t paid. The detectives listened, made notes, and then turned the focus to a white sedan that had been seen leaving the area. They planned to follow up.
A rumor, like a live coal, was already moving through the crowd: Chloe had been blackmailing people. She had information. She’d pushed someone too far. Tessa’s stomach dropped at the memory of last week’s whispers, of Chloe’s mocking laughter and the camera flash drive she’d waved like a glove. It surfaced from her the recollection of Chloe’s last taunt about not being afraid of consequences. Tessa had tried to dismiss it as bravado. Now the bravado was ash on the sidewalk.
An officer asked Tessa for her details. She gave them, voice flat. They mentioned she was Mr. Ares’ soon to be baby mama, the same woman who had been at his party in the past. The detective’s eyes flicked then to Ares. He did not flinch. Instead, he said he would make himself available.
The media arrived as if they had been invited to tea. Their cameras lifted like mechanical birds. A microphone thrust toward Ares. He shifted, his control slipping just for a blink as a reporter’s question nicked him: “Sir, can you tell us your relationship to the victim?” Ares’ jaw tightened. His answer was short and carefully neutral; he did not give them the scandalous morsel they all wanted. He did not feed the machine.
Around the scene, neighbors and onlookers offered their own versions of Chloe—a vivacious friend, a gossip with a sharp tongue, a woman who’d been trying to carve her place into the city with too much daring. Some who had loved her wept openly; some who had feared her whispered about her enemies; some who had once been on the receiving end of her teasing looked away quickly. The city murmured as if it were conspiring to forget but could not.
The detectives requested to check Ares’ residence’s CCTV feeds. Phones were collected to check communications. Bright lensed forensics staff knelt by the place where the body had lain and combed for fibers. A coroner arrived and set up a small, clinical perimeter, his face impassive as he prepared the paperwork and the delicate, brutal task of certifying death.
Tessa found herself learning things she never wished to know: the shorthand of death, the bureaucratic choreography that turns lives into case numbers and checklists. It was a cold, procedural world that insisted on being thorough even when people wanted only to rattle with fury or grief.
Ares approached Tessa as the crowd thinned, the detectives having wrapped up the initial accounts, and he said simply, “Stay off the platforms. Let the police do their work. Don’t talk to the press.” His voice held an edge that suggested both concern and the ineffable exhaustion of a man who had been through this exact crucible of attention before. He did not ask if she wanted to know what had happened. He did not offer comfort. He offered management.
The sun climbed higher, and the police closed the civilian access to the scene. A stretcher slid under the tarpaulin and carried the body away. Officers took down statements. Technicians pried away CCTV footage from the nearest corner shop, the little grainy camera that would be played back frame by frame as an attempt to catch a shadow, a license plate, a fleeting face.
The news vans circled the block like vultures. Social media would surge, and within hours, a thousand versions of what “really happened” would be doing the rounds.
Tessa stood watching as Chloe’s life, brutal and finite, faded from the pavement into the sterile hum of a coroner’s van. Her hands trembled, and she realized she was alone with the knowledge that a whisper Chloe had once used to frighten people into silence had perhaps been the same thing that now made her another line on a police report. The thought of being reduced to a file made her throat ache.
The detectives closed the cordon. They asked everyone who might be involved to report to the precinct. They assigned case numbers. They promised urgent follow ups. They warned that nothing would be released until the family was notified. They gave Tessa a card with a detective’s name on it and a phone number that would become a talisman she would call and call and call.
As the crowd dispersed, the street receded into a quieter hum, but the heaviness lingered like smoke. Ares walked away without looking back, as if he could not bear the sight or as if he was already arranging plans that had nothing to do with words.
Tessa watched him go, a question rising that would not release its teeth: who had been so cowed or so ruthless as to silence Chloe? And what had Chloe known about Lila’s secret, about Ares’ past, about anything anybody feared would become public?
Detectives set up a temporary command post at the edge of the cordon, neighbors were asked to check their doorbells for footage, and the morning that had begun like any other dissolved into a slow, meticulous process of finding a truth a gunshot had strewn into fragments. The city, for once, was not idle gossip but witness. The police moved like they had a map of a new catastrophe to follow, their footsteps precise, their questions sharp.
Tessa stayed through the formalities until the detectives asked her to come to the station to give a fuller statement. She walked slowly, the weight of the morning folding into her like a stone. Behind her, the scene was being cleared, tape rolled, the coroner’s van tiredly dragging away the finals of what had been a life. The street, newly emptied, looked innocuous—sunlit, ordinary, cruelly indifferent.
She walked to the car that would take her to the police station, hands wrapped around the strap of her bag as if the motion of clutching would tether her to something real.
Behind the closed windows of the car, the city moved on, but a line of blue tape and a memory of a body on the pavement would linger in her mind. Questions multiplied, and no answers were ready to be given. The investigation had beg
un, and the rest would, painfully, follow.