"I'm going upstairs," Johanne said. "If you need something from me, come find me there."

  After printing out the physical copies of the photograph I had taken of the dead woman, I followed him upstairs. I carried the prints with me and showed them to him as soon as I entered his room.

  It felt wrong—maybe even irresponsible—to show a picture of a dead body to a child. But Johanne wasn’t just any child. He was an enigma in his own right. I couldn’t say for certain where that mystery came from, but if I had to guess, I’d say it was from our mother. She had always been... different. Peculiar in a way most people couldn’t quite grasp. And Johanne had inherited that strangeness—and her sharp mind.

  I’d already told him everything Frank had told me. I hadn’t left out a single detail. I knew it was a lot for someone his age to take in, but Johanne had shown remarkable powers of deduction even when he was younger. This wasn’t the first time I’d relied on his insight, and he had never disappointed me.

  Johanne closed his eyes and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Brother, I’m sure you already know this,” he said, his tone calm but firm, “but telling a child something like that is absolutely unforgivable.”

  I flinched slightly, caught off guard. I could only offer a sheepish smile in return.

  “Well, yes. I do know that,” I admitted, scratching the back of my head.

  “It’s fine,” he said after a moment. “I’ll help you.”

  His voice carried an odd sense of certainty, like he’d already made up his mind before I even walked into the room.

  “But first,” he continued, “I need information—something that didn’t come from you. I saw you working on a crossword puzzle earlier, on the table downstairs. It came from a newspaper, right? Would you mind giving me those papers? I’d like to read them.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Those are old news,” I said. “From a few days ago.”

  “The past matters, brother,” he replied without missing a beat. “Sometimes the smallest detail buried in the news is the missing piece to a much greater evil.”

  “You sound like someone who’s waging war against some dark force,” I said, half-joking. “Still… I guess I can give you those.”

  I handed him the newspapers without further question. Johanne took them and sat down on his bed, immediately flipping through the pages with a kind of focused intensity that didn’t belong on a child’s face.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it,” I said, stepping back toward the door. “If you find anything, call me.”

  But before I could even reach for the doorknob, his voice stopped me.

  “Wait, brother.”

  I turned back around.

  “There was another case,” he said. “One you were handling before this, wasn’t there? Could you tell me more about it?”

  I paused. I knew exactly what he was referring to.

  It was the case at the bridge. A man who’d taken his own life. Debt had crushed him beyond repair.

  Thomas Richter. He died just a few days ago. According to the autopsy and the forensic reports, the time of death was only a few hours before the body was discovered floating in the river. Not even a full day had passed between death and recovery.

  “Why are you asking about that?” I asked cautiously.

  He didn’t answer with words. Instead, he turned the newspaper toward me and pointed to a specific section—another report of suicide, this one from a neighboring city.

  “June 21,” he read aloud. “A man named Reinhold Steiner was found dead in his apartment. Hung himself. The official reason for his suicide… it sounds nearly identical to the case you were working on.”

  "Let me take a look at that for a moment," I said, reaching out and taking the newspaper from Johanne's hands.

  My eyes scanned the page carefully. I read each word, letting the facts sink in.

  Reinhold Steiner, 34 years old. Found dead in his apartment. The landlady discovered his body hanging from the ceiling. Another tragic case of apparent suicide.

  The details immediately reminded me of Thomas Richter, the man who had leapt off a bridge just a few days ago. His family had told us he’d been drowning in debt. Pressured, hopeless, and desperate—he must have believed that the only escape left was to end his own life.

  Now here was Reinhold Steiner. His family had said almost the same thing—that he, too, had been overwhelmed by debt and seemed unable to go on.

  “Johanne…” I looked up from the newspaper and met his eyes. “Do you think it’s possible these two cases are connected?”

  Johanne paused for a moment, thoughtful. He didn’t answer right away.

  “As of now,” he said slowly, “without any concrete evidence, I can’t say for certain whether the two victims are connected. It’s definitely possible that there’s a link, but at the moment, we don’t have any proof. Nothing solid to base a conclusion on.”

  He looked at me, serious but calm.

  “Would you mind gathering more cases like these? If I had a few more examples to work with, I might be able to find a pattern. Or maybe not. It could still just be a coincidence, altogether.”

  He was right. There wasn’t anything directly linking the two deaths, not yet. And yes, suicides due to financial stress were tragically common. Still, something about the similarities felt... off. Too alike in timing. Too alike in motive. I couldn’t shake the thought that there might be something hidden beneath the surface.

  And then there was the dead woman—the one I’d shown Johanne earlier, whose death was wrapped in strange and unexplainable details. I didn’t know if there was a connection between her case and these two suicides, but if giving Johanne what he asked for helped bring the picture into focus, then it was worth the effort.

  “Alright,” I said with a nod. “How far back do you want me to search? How much information are you looking for?”

  “I want anything that’s happened this year,” he said without hesitation. “Focus specifically on this year. Suicides. Sudden deaths. Strange patterns.”

  Before I could reply, my phone began to ring.

  I pulled it out of my pocket and stepped out of the room to answer it, checking the screen as I did.

  It was Frank.

  I answered immediately.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Markus,” Frank said on the other end. “Sorry to bother you during your break, but do you think you could come in for a bit?”

  I frowned. “What’s going on?”

  “Do you remember Klaus Berger? The man whose wife reported him missing about a month ago?”

  I did remember the case, vaguely. It hadn’t been assigned to me, so I hadn’t given it much thought at the time.

  “Well,” Frank continued, “we just found him.”

  There was a silence on my end of the line, so Frank kept talking.

  “He was discovered in his old house… in the attic. He’d been stabbed—knife straight through the stomach.”

  “…What?” The word barely escaped my lips.

  “His body’s already starting to decompose,” Frank said grimly. “From the looks of it, he’s been dead for weeks—possibly even before the missing persons report was filed. We’re trying to determine whether it was foul play or something else, but we don’t have anyone on hand with the right kind of experience.”

  He paused, and then added, “Which is why we need you.”

  I didn’t even know why, but a strange chill ran down my spine. My hands were trembling before I even realized it.

  And the next thing I knew, I was already on the road, heading back to the city.

  -————-　■　-————-

  Hours had passed. Night had already fallen by the time I arrived at the place where the body had been discovered.

  “Oh, you’re here, Markus,” said Frank.

  He stood with a group of officers, all in the middle of their investigation. A couple of them were over near the porch, speaking softly to a woman whose face was buried in her hands — the victim’s wife, crying, inconsolable.

  “Where’s the victim?” I asked immediately.

  Frank closed his eyes for a moment, exhaling like someone who had already walked through the scene more times than he wanted to. Then he said, “Follow me.”

  We stepped away from the front room and made our way through a dimly lit hallway, the wooden floor creaking under our feet. Soon, we arrived at the room where the dead body lay. The chalk outline was already drawn around it, pale and ghostly against the floor. The stench of decay hung heavy in the air — not fresh death, but the kind that had settled into the walls.

  The weapon, the very thing that had ended this man’s life, was still lodged in his stomach. It hadn't been removed yet.

  Something immediately caught my eye.

  “His hands… they're gripping the weapon,” I murmured as I kneeled beside the corpse. “And it’s pointed straight into his abdomen.”

  Frank squatted next to me. “You thinking suicide?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer right away.

  “I mean,” he continued, “I do. Honestly, I do. But here’s the thing — why would someone choose to end their life like this? It’s painful. It’s not quick. It’s not clean. People who think about suicide… they usually go for methods that are fast, right? This doesn’t look like that.”

  He let that sit for a moment, waiting for my thoughts.

  “Maybe you can figure out if there was some kind of foul play,” he added.

  I didn’t respond immediately. Instead, I leaned closer to the body, inspecting everything I could. My father used to tell me that the phrase “dead men tell no tales” wasn’t entirely true. As a detective himself, he believed the opposite. That a dead body could reveal more than any living witness ever could. Forensics could uncover stories far beyond what words or confessions could convey.

  And yet, nothing here seemed out of place — not overtly.

  No signs of restraint and no bruising that suggested a struggle. No ligature marks. The man, Klaus Berger, had a knife driven into his own stomach, and his hands gripped it in a way that was... strange. Awkward. The way someone uncoordinated — or impaired — might hold something heavy.

  I stood up.

  “I want to see the kitchen,” I said as I stood up, my mind turning over the details, then decided to move into the kitchen. Perhaps I could find something there.

  “Nothing’s been changed here, has it?” I asked Frank as I stepped inside the kitchen.

  “Nothing has been touched,” Frank assured me. “We took photos, that’s all.”

  When we entered the kitchen, I scanned the space quickly. The very first thing that jumped out at me was a shattered liquor bottle on the tiled floor. Above the sink, the cupboard was partially open. One of the knives was missing from the wooden holder — and the whole holder was lying on its side, as if it had been knocked over.

  Despite the neglect, there was something strangely neat about the place. The surfaces were clean and the utensils were neatly arranged. Only the dust gave it away — a thin film of it covering every surface, even the broken glass. This house hadn’t been cleaned in a while.

  Frank had told me earlier that this was Berger’s old home. He hadn’t lived here recently, but the place was still in decent shape. The kind of shape someone maintains when they’re trying to sell a house. That explained the “For Sale” sign out front. He must’ve come by regularly to clean — until, of course, he didn’t.

  The dust on the floor told me that no one had cleaned it in at least a month. Probably right around the time Berger was reported missing. That broken bottle hadn’t been swept up. Nothing had. It was as if everything had been left to stagnate after the moment of death.

  “Looks like the dust matches the timeline,” I muttered. “If he disappeared a month ago, and the place hasn’t been cleaned since... this all lines up.”

  I turned back toward the kitchen counter, studying the drawer that had been left open and the cupboard door slightly ajar. Signs of someone rummaging. Sloppy. Not premeditated. More like someone in a state of panic, or... intoxication.

  If someone had come here to murder Berger, they wouldn’t have chosen a knife from this house — not unless they were desperate. They’d bring their own weapon. Unless… the person using it had no plan at all. Or unless the victim himself had been the one to retrieve it.

  The mess in the kitchen, the fallen knife holder, the half-open drawers — it suggested Berger was looking for something. And the empty bottle... that part painted the picture. He had been drinking. Probably heavily. That would also explain the awkward way the knife was held — hands shaking, struggling to maintain grip.

  There was no sign of forced entry. No broken locks, no kicked-in door. The body had been discovered by his wife, who still had a working key. She let herself in and found the body — no sign that anyone had come or gone before that. And the house was still, untouched by panic or violence. No overturned furniture. No blood trail. No struggle.

  If someone had murdered Berger and staged the suicide, they did it flawlessly. But that would mean they also anticipated every forensic detail. Even the dust? Unlikely.

  No — this didn’t look like a murder. It didn’t feel like one.

  It felt like a man alone, drinking heavily, spiraling into despair. A man rummaging through drawers in a daze, grabbing a kitchen knife, and doing something no rational person would. Suicide, yes — but not a peaceful one. A chaotic, messy act done in an altered state of mind.

  The knife, the mess, the dust, the lack of forced entry — it all added up to one conclusion.

  Klaus Berger took his own life.

  I looked down at his body one last time.

  “A staged suicide?” I repeated Frank’s earlier words. “No… It wasn’t staged.”

  I straightened my back and exhaled, quietly.

  “This was real.”

  -————-　■　-————-

  Frank handed me a cup of coffee. The paper cup was warm in my hand, and thin streams of steam drifted lazily into the cool night air.

  “Good work,” he said.

  But I didn’t feel like I’d done anything that could honestly be called ‘good work.’ What I had offered was, at best, speculation. I hadn’t proven anything. I had no solid evidence. Just a theory stitched together from fragments and impressions.

  Still, I brought the coffee up to my lips. It was hot — not scalding, but sharp enough to jolt my senses. It wasn’t unpleasant.

  “That’s the second suicide case you’ve cracked this month,” Frank said as he took a sip from his own cup. “I still can’t believe how many people would actually take that step.”

  I gave a small shrug, watching the steam curl from my cup.

  “Well,” I said, “people carry different burdens. Some of them heavier than others. And when those burdens get too much... they look for a way out.”

  Frank gave a tired sigh. “We still haven’t even wrapped up the case with the mysterious woman, and now we’ve got this on our hands.”

  He paused, looking off into the darkness just beyond the porch light.

  “And it doesn’t look like there’s any family that’s going to claim her. I’m starting to think she might’ve been a foreigner. That would explain why we’ve got zero data on her. No ID. No history. No digital footprint. Nothing.”

  The woman. That case had been hanging over our heads for days.

  Then, something clicked in my mind.

  Johanne.

  He had asked me just the other day if I could pull up all the records we had on suicide cases. I hadn’t thought much of it at the time. Honestly, I still didn’t know why he wanted them. But Johanne was the type of person who could look at a broken mirror and see the full picture in it. He had a way of solving puzzles that most people wouldn’t even recognize as puzzles to begin with.

  If anyone could make sense of this pattern — assuming there was one — it would be him. Maybe it was time I started digging, just in case.

  “Oh yeah,” Frank said suddenly, snapping me out of my thoughts. “We found this book wedged between the couch cushions. Looks like he’d been reading it while drinking.”

  He handed it to me.

  It was a small hardcover, bound in red. There was no artwork, no author’s name, nothing on the back. Just the title, stamped in black:

  Die Dramatiker — The Playwright.

  I flipped it open.

  The pages were clean, unmarked. No notes scribbled in the margins, no dog-eared corners. The contents appeared to be a story — something about time travel, from what I could gather in a quick skim. I couldn’t make out much more than that, and frankly, it didn’t seem relevant to anything. Just a book. A strange choice of reading for someone on the verge of suicide, maybe, but still... just a book.

  I closed the cover gently and stared at the title again.

  “Die Dramatiker,” I murmured to myself.

  It meant nothing to me at the time.

  But in hindsight, maybe I should’ve paid more attention.