The Curse of Eden Square
by J. H. Zech
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 4 |
part 3
“I saw on Chirper that this is the curse of Eden Square,” Ruby said. “The reason is some locked room thing. You can’t explain how the culprit got in or out without appearing on the cameras. That means you can’t arrest any of us until you can explain that!”
Richard clicked his tongue. “Word spreads too fast these days.”
“There’s no such thing as curses. I will get to the bottom of the locked room mystery.” Dahlia looked at Numa. “Lastly, there’s you. What’s your relationship to José?”
“I told him I would report him to the authorities as a refugee.” Numa had an air of entitled arrogance as she said that, and it irked Dahlia.
“You seem to be oddly proud of that fact. You realize that you’re admitting that there was bad blood between you two?”
“Hmph. No, it proves I had no motive. Quite the opposite. Since I was the one threatening him, he would be the one who had a motive to kill me.”
“Why did you threaten him?”
“His looks annoyed me.”
Dahlia asked, “Richard, you’ve looked into the records of these people, right? What about Numa’s financial records?”
“Ah, right. José transferred some money to Numa recently.”
“And there we have it. You were blackmailing him and threatening to expose him unless he paid you.”
“That’s pure speculation! And even if that were true, my point stands. He would have motive to kill me, not the other way around.”
“But if he refused to pay you anymore, perhaps you got angry and killed him.”
“If you’re going to accuse me like that, show me the proof!”
“That’ll be all for now. Don’t skip town,” Dahlia said. “Richard, let’s go over the footage and crime scene in more detail.”
They returned to the scene and performed some site inspections. Nothing was found on the roof. There were no manholes in the square, so no way to go underground. They reviewed the footage starting from the day of the murder. José was spotted leaving two days ago, and nothing out of the ordinary happened until yesterday around midnight. A white-robed figure appeared from the bottom of the camera’s view, dragging José’s body.
“Do you think maybe the culprit flew in from above?” Richard asked. “Used a helicopter or a parachute or something?”
“That’s ridiculous. All helicopter flights are tracked, and something that loud would have had many witnesses. If they parachuted in, where did the parachute go? There’s no footage of them leaving, either.”
“I’m going to double-check the flight logs.” Richard called in for some records and found that, indeed, there were no helicopter flights in the area around midnight.
They inspected the surrounding buildings together and found no secret passageways. Richard looked up and pointed. “Wait, there’s a duct up there. Maybe the culprit crawled through there.”
They borrowed a ladder and Dahlia climbed up and attempted to crawl through the duct, but she felt the clench of metal on her waist and couldn’t go any further. The space was so narrow she couldn’t push against anything to get herself out. “I’m stuck. Can you pull me out?”
“Sure thing.” Dahlia couldn’t see Richard’s face, but she had a feeling he was snickering.
She was pulled out, nearly falling off the ladder in the process. Once down, she dusted herself off. Dahlia could feel the clumps of dust clinging to her hair. Yuck. “It definitely wasn’t the duct. I’m thin, and even I couldn’t fit through there. There’s no way José could have fit through there. And the dust proves that it wasn’t used. If someone had slid all the way through, the dust would have gone with it.”
“Where does that leave us? The chief and the mayor will be breathing down my neck, and I don’t think the excuse of calling it a curse will fly nowadays,” Richard said.
“Are you all done yet?” a woman’s voice asked.
Several of the business owners from the square had gathered.
“We’ve been trapped here all morning while the police questioned us, and we haven’t been able to open shop. The rent and employees still have to be paid.”
Richard sighed. “I’ll ask forensics if we’re clear to reopen to the public.”
A little while later, the police packed up and reopened Eden Square. The shop owners were practically humming. Customers, having been deprived of their main joy in life for a few hours, poured in to make up for lost business. Dahlia hadn’t eaten anything since the early morning, so she too gave into the mood of the crowd.
“One corn dog, please,” she said at Mike’s Hot Dogs.
“Coming right up!” Mike replied. “This one’s on the house. I appreciate you helping resolve this quickly, detective.”
“Thanks. It isn’t resolved at all yet, though.”
“Well, you’re ‘the legendary detective’ of the city. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”
Legendary detective. Dahlia didn’t particularly like the term because it made it sound as though she had some mystic power to divine mysteries rather than the more mundane truth of finding and stringing together evidence. “I’ll do my best.” She turned around to head out.
“Ah, watch your step.” Mike pointed down in front of her. A lone brick was sticking up from the path. “One person already tripped today. I hope they get around to fixing that soon.”
“Thanks.” There was a red smudge near the misbehaving brick. Was this related to the case? Dahlia regrouped with Richard who was waiting outside the square entrance.
“Once you finish your hotdog, come with me to headquarters. The chief wants a briefing of what’s going on,” Richard said.
“Alright. Also, did forensics look at the smudge in one of the paths to the square?”
“Oh, you mean the one next to that one brick?”
“Yes.”
“Forensics analyzed it. It wasn’t the victim’s blood, but rather Ms. Auburn’s. That tracks with her testimony about tripping and falling.”
“No, wait, it doesn’t. She claimed that she fell back from seeing the body in the middle of the square. If that were the case, the blood would be near the tree, not in the path. She was lying to us, but why?”
Richard lowered his voice. “I might have some idea about that. I’ll tell you at headquarters.”
* * *
They arrived a few minutes later and hopped out of the blue and white SUV. Passing through the sliding glass door of an imposing concrete structure, they took the elevator and a blank white hallway to a conference room. Several police officers were gathered around a long wooden table. Richard moved to the front and pulled down a projection screen.
“Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Inspector Gim, who is in charge of the murder case of José Petro.” He gestured to Dahlia. “This is our city’s famous private detective, Dahlia Williams, and she’ll be advising us.”
“Hi.” She took an empty seat near the front.
“Here is what we know about the case and some suspicious evidence. We do not yet have enough evidence for an arrest.
“José Petro was found hanging from the tree in the center of Eden Square this morning by Ruby Auburn, an anti-police activist.” He clicked a button on a remote and projected a picture of José hanging as taken by the officers.
Grumbling traveled around the room as he said that last part.
“She called it in around 4:30 a.m. Officers arrived on the scene within ten minutes to secure the area. The cause of death was asphyxiation, and the time of death was 24-36 hours prior. Surveillance footage showed a figure in a white robe and mask hoisting the body up onto the tree around midnight.” The picture changed to a still frame of the white-robed figure.
“However, no one was caught on camera entering or exiting the square around that time. There are cameras at every entrance to the square, and we have determined that there was no underground passage, that going over the roof was impossible, and using a helicopter was also ruled out. This has created a locked room situation. The primary persons of interest are Ruby Auburn, Jeff Pioneer, Shelly Baker, and Numa Argonic.” The screen changed to a lineup of pictures of all of them.
An officer raised his hand.
Richard pointed. “Yes?”
“What was Auburn doing at the square at 4:30? That’s way before any of the businesses open.”
“She has refused to say, and the evidence is not definitive, but we have a good idea. We obtained her messaging records with her activist group’s leader, and she had agreed to do a stunt to make the police look bad, though it wasn’t specified what that stunt was. Her hand was bandaged, and she claimed this was a scratch from when she fell after seeing the body. However, it’s highly likely she was lying about that.
“We found another spot near a brick sticking out that had a smudge with her blood on it. But that’s not all we found. The smudge seemed too large to be a mere scrape from falling, and forensics showed that spray paint was mixed in.
“She was probably intending to put graffiti of some sort on the square, but on her way, she tripped on a brick sticking out and accidentally sprayed some on the path in addition to scraping her hand there. So, she made up the lie that she fell at the square to distract from the spray paint at the spot where she actually fell, hoping we wouldn’t investigate that. But it wasn’t very effective, since it was a lie made up on the spot.”
Ah, so that’s what Richard had meant earlier.
The chief with his bushy grey mustache marched into the room and banged on the table. “It’s Ruby Auburn then. Arrest her immediately!”
“You can’t conclude that,” Dahlia snapped. “The locked room still hasn’t been solved. We saw on the footage that the culprit appeared around midnight and disappeared. We caught Ruby entering through past four a.m. on camera. Are you saying she appeared out of nowhere at midnight, committed the crime, vanished, then walked through the front entrance on camera? That’s too absurd to believe. No judge would issue a warrant for that.”
The chief yelled, “What do you propose I do then, Dahlia? Mayor Fjord is going to kill me if I don’t get an arrest by tonight. We need to nab someone, even if we have to stretch it a bit.”
“There’s no need to stretch it.” Dahlia wagged her finger. “Do you know what a perfect crime is?”
“Of course. It’s something like this. An impossible locked room.”
“No, quite the opposite. Creating a locked room requires elaborate setup or trickery, no matter the method. There is no such thing as a perfect crime, but complicated crimes are actually more flawed than simple ones, because the culprit is only human. They will make mistakes. The more complicated the plan, the more potential for mistakes and unexpected situations.
“The closest thing to a perfect crime would be stabbing someone in an alley with a knife that can be bought anywhere, wearing gloves, walking away, and then burning the evidence. The mystery that we see here is so elaborately staged that, if we proceed methodically, we are sure to find the mistakes they made and exploit them.”
“Hmph. So, you’ve already solved it?” the chief asked.
Dahlia replied, “Not quite. But I have some pertinent questions that, if we find the right evidence, can be answered and illuminate the truth.” She stood up and joined Richard at the front.
“First, why was it 24-36 hours between José’s death and when the killer hung him in the square? And I think the key to that lies in the answer to the second question. Why did the killer have to create a locked room scenario at all?”
An officer said, “It’s the curse of Eden Square. The killer wants to mimic the legend, but the cameras were installed five years ago.”
“I agree,” Dahlia said. The officer seemed pleased with herself that a famous detective had agreed. “So, the killer was committed to recreating the legend to the point they were willing to do it on camera. But, to get away with it, they needed this locked room setup. But why didn’t they do it immediately after killing José the previous night? It’s likely that whatever trick they used required that time gap, and we need to investigate why.”
“Fine. I’ll send my men out to the field again,” the chief said. “But if you don’t get any results from your investigation by five, I’m arresting Ruby. Meeting dismissed.”
The officers trickled out of the room, leaving only Dahlia and Richard.
“What’s your next move?” he asked.
“The brand on José’s tongue was the same as the original murders. But the killer can’t be over a hundred years old. We need to do some research on the older cases. Let’s go to the archives.”
* * *
Dahlia and Richard hauled five dusty bins from the shelves of a dark concrete basement into a small room with a desk and began combing through the files.
In 1920, the curse’s first victim was a Black man named Emery Johnson. At the time, this was not considered a serial murder because there would be no more victims for a long time.
In 1942, a Solradian man named Junpei Yamada. The police had thought it was possible it was the same killer, but two cases over twenty years apart weren’t enough to call it a serial case. And this was during the war against Solradia, so there was little incentive to look too hard into it.
In 1961, a Centrosian woman suspected of harboring radical ideologies named Lanfei Ming. At this point, the police highly suspected serial murder and tried to solve the case but failed, and it went cold.
In 1979, a man named Darren Hillvy, whom the file noted only as a “sexual deviant.” The brand was consistent with the previous three murders, so it was still part of the serial case, but the killer had to be eighty years old by then. After initial investigation went nowhere, the public’s unfavorable view of Darren and the fact that the culprit would likely die soon after being sentenced even if caught, caused the case to be abandoned.
In 2002, an Arabian man named Yusef Salid. The police had made a strong effort at this point, but it noted the uncertainty of how this could be a serial case if the culprit was almost certainly dead by then. An internal investigation to see if it was a police officer who had leaked the brand found no evidence of a leak.
“What do you think?” Richard asked.
“Even if we went with the absurd conclusion that every murder before this one was done by the same person, and mind you, that culprit would have been at least in their late nineties by 2002, it’s impossible for that culprit to have committed this crime. And no, it definitely wasn’t a ghost.”
“But how do you explain then that the police didn’t find evidence of a leak of the brand?”
“I don’t think it was a leak by the police. If it were, it would have spread far and wide by now. There is some possibility that has not been investigated yet.”
“Which is?”
Dahlia shrugged. “I don’t know yet. Regardless of what the method was, I am going on the assumption that this killer is different from the one a century ago and that the information regarding the seal was somehow found by the new killer. That is the only possible way for this to have happened.
“But now comes the difficult part about the locked room. The killer wanted to imitate the serial murders, but to preserve the pattern of having each murder at the square while the cameras were there, they needed the locked room.”
Richard groaned: “This is making my head hurt. This ghost pulled off an appearing and disappearing act like some magician. Maybe that’s who we need to consult.”
“A magician?” Something clicked in Dahlia’s head, and her thoughts raced ahead. The motive for the murder. Why was José killed and displayed 24-36 hours later? The smudge of blood on the path. The grand unveiling in front of the camera. But wait, the last act hadn’t finished.
“Richard, call up the chief and the persons of interest now. We need to stop the destruction of evidence.”
“What’s this about?”
“Hurry!” she yelled.
“Alright. You’ve got that twinkle in your eye. I’ll believe in that.” He smiled. Richard called the chief.
* * *
Copyright © 2026 by J. H. Zech
