A slender girl was huddled by the toilet, her hands gripping the edge of the bowl as she leaned her head in.
"This should be the caller. She said she smelled a strong odor in her home," Evan Keller said, recalling the case file he had just read. "Zoe, see if you can get the door to lift its barrier. Nothing else, just let the smell through."
It wasn't a difficult task. Zoe Sawyer nodded, communicated with the door, and a few seconds later, a sickeningly sweet and rotten stench wafted out from Wren Rowan's bathroom.
To an ordinary person, it might just smell like a dead rat or some other decaying animal.
But to police officers like Evan Keller, who had worked countless cases, the smell was all too familiar.
This was unmistakably the stench of a heavily decomposed human corpse.
Once she caught a whiff of the odor, Zoe Sawyer understood why Wren Rowan had her face so close to the toilet.
'This caller is really smart,' she thought to herself.
