The Case of the Soulless Sole

"Well, you see, Ms. Calmira-- and I don't ordinarily say this," began the detective as he removed the hat from his sagging-but-pointed ears, "this isn't exactly a normal case."

"What is 'normal' to you, anyway?" Misaki Calmira closed her study book, //Fifty Things You Can Learn From Pressure Points//, and at last let her topaz-tinged eyes meet his. Detective Lt. Traeger Scrimshaw, as he'd introduced himself, was a heavy-set felid, clearly in his twilight years, but just as clearly unwilling to accept that. His ash-grey suit matched both his light stripes and his darker ones, such that Misaki wondered why he wore the suit at all.

"I don't know either, but I //can// tell you that 'normal' isn't a teenage girl, cut up and looking like she fell off a tall building...in a part of town where there aren't any tall buildings. And here's the worst part: this isn't the first time it's happened, either." Scrimshaw realized that their eyes had met, and ignored their entrancing effect. Ms. Calmira looked like a lot of things to him, but none of them were things he liked. Her vulpine frame was far too thin, the sheer width of her fennec-like ears made her head look tiny by comparison, and he couldn't imagine her thick, bushy tail - shyly hidden under the skirt of her teal sun dress - would do anything but get in everybody's way.

"So you're consulting a masseur? I'm not sure if that's police procedure."

"I know what you do, and I know what you can learn. I'm not asking you to investigate the entire case. I just want you to look over one thing." The aging detective idly flicked his bobbed tail, the only trace of his old Manx lineage that he once held so proudly. "I want you to examine the victim's feet."

About half an hour later, the two arrived at a field so vast and open that Misaki could scarcely believe that they were still technically within the city limits. Only the Northern Bell's clock tower was still visible amid the summer haze. There was not much to find here; it was an empty lot, several acres in size. Despite it being in the care of a holding company, someone was evidently being paid to give the grass the occasional manicure; judging from the scent of cut grass, and the clippings adhering to Misaki's flip-flops, the landscapers had been out fairly recently. Scrimshaw had stopped next to a large, plastic tarp. "Here's the vic. A landscape technician found her here and called it in, but couldn't stay for questioning. Medical examiner's out of town, so I'm afraid you'll have to do."

"What do I do, then?" Misaki asked, uprooting one of the stakes holding the tarp in place.

The aging detective took another stake on the opposite corner of the tarp. "Like I said, I just need you to look over her feet. I've got my suspicions, but since the medical examiner's not around, I can't get a confirmation."

"A confirmation of what?"

"I better not tell you," grunted Scrimshaw. "Let's call this a blind test. You just tell me what you think's going on, and I'll let you know if you're right or not." He pulled the last stake from the tarp and folded it up. The deceased, another vulpine just a few years younger than Misaki, lay spread-eagle on her back. Her clothes, what was still intact of them, painted a picture of an addict turned flower girl. The hooded sweatshirt covering the young vixen had taken a few rips around the arms, typical of over-worn clothing, except for the very deliberate-looking tear running up the chest that revealed...not very much at all. Someone might have been trying to rip her shirt open, but had clearly given up from little progress. Her tattered blue jeans, on the other hand, had suffered far worse, having apparently been attacked with a pair of scissors, or perhaps a box-cutting knife. Her feet lay bare, bruised, sore, but not bleeding.

Misaki slipped her feet out of her flip-flops and pulled up slightly on her dress before dropping to a bare knee in the cut grass beside the unfortunate victim. "Alright, Detective, just remember, my medical license goes strictly for the //living//, okay?" She touched and prodded around the heel, the ankle, the pads up front. She stopped for a moment. "This is clearer than I usually get," she remarked as she simply gazed over the victim's feet. "Was she barefoot when you found her?"

"Yes, but we didn't have to look far for her shoes. Stiletto-heeled sandals," the detective added.

"The pressure points in her feet...there are some bruises and pressure areas here. I think she was running away from something." But of course, the operative question was, //from what?//

"That's what I was thinking, too," he confirmed, paging through his notepad. "She probably had difficulty running in those pinheels, and kicked them off."

"I wouldn't imagine that someone dressed like this girl would be wearing sandals like those, though."

"Unless she didn't have a choice," Scrimshaw clarified. "She didn't have much for personal effects, but we did figure out that she was homeless. Those were probably the only shoes she had."

"I guess I should consider myself lucky, then. I get a lot of customers that wear combat boots...they come in all messed up and need someone to work out the kinks in their arches." Misaki squeezed a bit at one of the pads in the victim's foot. "...I don't think she was running, Detective."

"What makes you say that?"

"I get a lot of military and police clients, and most of them come to me about foot pains from all the running they do in the line of duty. Long marches, chases, and all that stuff. What I'm feeling here isn't gradual wear and tear. Whatever this is, it happened all at once. Single impact."

"That sounds pretty consistent with the cause of death," he said with a nod as he folded his arms.

"If she was running from something, she can't have been running for very long."

Scrimshaw flipped a few pages in his police-issue notebook. "What's your opinion, then?"

"She definitely landed from a great height. Probably right on her feet."

He took note of this, then with a little "hmph," closed the notebook and put it back into his suit pocket. "That leaves us with the obvious problem, then. Obviously she fell pretty far, but there's nothing to fall //from// around here. The nearest building is a few hundred meters out."

"Yeah, I doubt the wind around here is quite strong enough to carry someone this far, even if they jumped from the Northern Bell tower."

"Maybe they didn't jump from anywhere."

"What?"

A strange humming noise only then became audible. Misaki listened with her oversized ears, tilting her head to figure out where it was coming from, but it sounded like it was coming from everywhere. It grew louder, until a small swarm of unusual shapes came over the horizon. They weren't helicopters, or insects, or a chorus of hang-gliding nasal flautists.

Scrimshaw had to raise his voice to make himself audible over the humming. "Damn! What are they doing here?"

"What are these things?" Misaki shouted. The shapes, at least ten of them, had the form of four-leafed clovers with rotors occupying each leaf. Dangling from their cores were motorized winches with strong-looking claws...and they were now just a hundred meters away from the two investigators.

"I don't know who's flying them, but I bet they're our murder weapon!" Scrimshaw quickly drew a snub-nosed revolver from his coat, took aim, and squeezed the trigger. His shot flew wide of the mark, as the flying clovers continued on their course. They were now just feet away. He pulled the trigger four more times, exhausting his weapon, and only succeeded in four more misses. One of the flyers briefly hovered about twenty feet above the two of them, then with a bang as loud as Scrimshaw's gun, its dangling claw spread open and began hurtling towards Misaki. He quickly stepped in front of her, knocking her over, but catching the claw with his broad back. The flyer started tugging, revving its rotors up far past hovering speed, trying to pull Traeger airborne. When one flyer wasn't enough, another fired its claw, and then another. The detective wrestled out of his suit jacket, pulling loose from a couple of the claws, but yet more fired at him and latched on his arms and legs. Five flyers were enough to lift his chunky frame clear off the ground. "Misaki! Run! Get to the car and call for backup!"

She did not need encouraging. Misaki Calmira turned tail and bolted for the nearby road, or at least, the direction she thought it would be. Direction didn't matter right now, as long as she was moving. Without her flip-flops, she could move a bit faster, but the ground was uneven, making a full-bore sprint unwise. The humming noises weren't getting any more distant. A thought occured to Misaki, that what she was experiencing now was likely how the victim had died...and just as she finished this thought, another claw burst forth with the same loud crack, embedding itself in the ground just behind her bare foot. Another crack, another claw, and this one landed just ahead of her. The tow cable snagged her leg, and Misaki fell forward into the dry grass. The next crack, followed by another claw, was on the mark, snagging Misaki's left ankle. Two more claws quickly snatched her arms, and as the humming increased in pitch, the flying clovers lifted her into the air.

As she left terra firma, the young masseur's heart pounded, and she felt her stomach rolling over. She started struggling, ripping part of her summer dress to escape from the clutching metal hands, but this did not let her loose from the other flyers. More claws fired at her, but their grip was loose, and she was now hanging upside-down as her altitude increased. She frantically turned her head, but could not find the ground. The city appeared on her horizon, but it was facing the wrong way around, and quickly disappearing from view. Suddenly, all of the claws released their grip with a mechanical //kachunk//, and everything around Misaki seemed to slow to a halt.

They say that, when one's life is in danger, their life flashes before their eyes, as if to offer them some closure by means of a hyper-speed retrospective. For Misaki, no such thing happened. The humming noises were gone, and in their place was the sound of an opera that she'd heard as a kit. She heard nothing but the tenor voice of its protagonist, as he lamented in a language unfamiliar to her, about feuding families, love and loss, the nature of romance, and the futility of life. As she approached the earth, head-first, at seemingly only inches per second, she finally understood the words. //For love of a rival, I forsake my own. But to hold dear my kin as well, I must forsake my love. I accept that I cannot take both sides, and in this futility, I choose neither.// Accepting her fate, Misaki closed her eyes and let herself go, until all was silent around her.

The following week, two more dead bodies were recovered from the empty lot on the edge of Mustelopolis city limits. One was identified as a retired police detective, Lt. Traeger Scrimshaw. The other did not have identification, but was described as a vulpine female in her early thirties, wearing a torn summer dress and missing any sort of footwear. The nature of the tears, coupled with the grass stains on her legs, seemed to indicate that she may have been homeless and living on the empty lot. Due to the medical examiner's present absence, autopsies would have to wait several days. And by then, the trail would have run cold.