Intro. "We find it like this."
Scanning the villa's lavish interior with her sharp brown and blue eyes, Luna washes away the pungent scent of death clinging to her palate with the acridritic smoke of her cigarette. The forensic dog in front of her kneels next to the corpse, adjusts her huge round glasses, and continues her examination in deadly silence. It's that time of night when not even Los Fangeles forensics feel up to making dark jokes about the deceased.
With a smoking cigarette pressed between her lips and her hands stuffed into her pockets, Sergeant Luna Connell assesses the corpse from a respectable distance. The dead middle-aged cat lies in a grotesque pose — its arms and legs scattered unnaturally between a bookshelf and a pot of exotic blood-red flowers. Luna has seen similar figures many times before — both in mugshots of suicide victims jumping from tall buildings, and in the g