Now, Don't Deny Me

It's a cold evening, the kind that makes you feel as if every one of your bones is made of ice, and your blood has frozen in your veins. Although, tonight it could very well just be that my heart has frozen over, and the cold is from the inside, not the out. Her apartment number was in the report, but even after all these years I still have it memorized. 114. There was a time that I saw those numbers as often as I now see the endless blackness of my coffee at Ruby's Diner.
I walked straight there through the maze of the complex, but at the door I hesitated. I knew what waited for me on the other side, I'd read the report - seen the pictures. I also knew that the past waited for me. I could feel it like a hungry beast, ready to rip the locks off of the sealed corridors of my mind and consume me like they did when they were made.
As my hand touched the door, I could feel the madness grow deep inside of me. I wondered if it would be better for me to just turn back, let someone else take this case. Walk away, forget the past, why not? People run away from the past all the time, why should I have to open my Pandora's Box?
Can't, this is my case, and the least I can do for her is bring her justice. The door opens, a familiar scent mingled with the smell of fantasies end flows out of the room and envelops me. Breathing it in is like watching a video of my memories, all covered in blood and laced with the impossible knowledge of what was to come. In this moment, every thought is a burden, a train with three hundred cars block out everything else trying to get through.
Then my subconscious mind took over for me, this was my job, I had work to do. I took out my notebook, the narrow kind you see sticking out of a reporters back pocket (which is where I got it, after a certain annoyance wouldn't stop prying into one of my previous cases). I noted the smell - a perfume she wore every day of her life, and the smell of decay I had become so used to as of late. I thought there might be something else, hidden under the smell of roses and death, something familiar enough to be noticed, but elusive enough that I couldn't quite place it. I figured it was just something int he apartment that I didn't remember and took no note of it.
Now came the fun part, I stepped forward, through the doorway. Being a one-bedroom apartment, the room I had stepped into was basically an all-purpose room. Kitchen set aside, a tv dominating the carpeted square of living space. A couch that looked like it had run its course long before I had ever met her sat facing it. To the case, nothing in this room held anything of interest, but to me it held everything. Every single moment lost to this place returned to me, and I fell into the past...