5/100

Leonor disappeared on a Sunday afternoon. She had lunch with her parents and told them she would be walking home, which was about 20 minutes away. Only that she never got there. Somewhere between her old childhood neighborhood and her house, she vanished.

Weirdly, her parents weren’t the first to notice — even though she always called when she got home and that day, she didn’t.

It was her neighbor, old lady Irma, who found it weird that her neighbors cat was meowing non-stuff for 3 days.

So nobody knew she was missing until 5 days had elapsed.

The police was called, a perimeter was enforced. They searched high and low, but there was no trace of her. Eventually, searches were cancelled.

Leonor’s body was only found the next Spring, when the tick winter snow first started melting.

A group of young boys playing soccer had to go in the woods to get the ball and there it was. A blue hand. A dead hand.

The police came and found Leonor’s lifeless body under some snow and three branches. She was naked and the cold winter had preserved the bruises on her body.

She had clearly been assaulted. Beaten. Raped. Her body was telling the police the story of a murderer and rapist on the lose.

This was Tania’s first real case as an homicide detective. And it was really getting to her.

The elements had preserved the evidence of the assault in Leonor’s body, but also on her soul: under her right eye, a thin layer of ice ran along Leonor’s cheek. She had been crying. She was probably still alive when her assaulter left her destroyed. And she was crying. She died crying.

Tania turned her eyes away from Leonor’s body, disturbed by the immortality of her pain. That blue iced tear would haunt her forever; a cruel but yet effective reminder of the seriousness of the work she had chosen to do.