The apartment was silent, as though it had lost the ability to speak.

The apartment was silent, as though it had lost the ability to speak. The only sound was a faint moan drifting from an old kitchen pipe, like the last breath of a dying patient abandoned in a forgotten corner. The smell of decay mingled with the scent of death — that heavy odor recognized all too well by the memory of every police officer and every city. At the threshold of the main room, the body lay stretched across the wooden floor in a posture that defied the order of life itself, as if it had chosen to fall not in surrender, but in protest against some obscure truth left unspoken before its final breath faded away.

[From our novel: The Secret of the Corpse]