A very dark room, raw but not untidy. A dusty month-old newspaper has been found under his bed. No notes on it.

 
Amidst his clothes in the wardrobe, a travel guide of Venezuela, Father’s homeland.

 
At the foot of his bedside table, his diary.

Some pages are missing, probably ripped off, but those remaining suggest that the priest had secret meetings with the deceased Seth Warner, during which Father Blanco gave the journalist information about a highly classified matter we have not details about, details presumably written on the ripped pages mentioned above.

Forensics found, in a hidden compartment of the diary, a piece of paper with the following sentence written on (sentence which is now in the hands of our Intelligence): 

7:3 9:4 14:1 amen

 
The bed was untidy, a clue indicating that Blanco was sleeping before he went out the Church, entered the car and, still a hypothesis, killed himself.

 
Two other strange elements are the presumed disappearance of a small strongbox that used to be on Father Blanco’s bedside table (according to the housekeeper’s testimony) and the absence of any sign of breaking on the door.

The only one who owns the room keys, besides Father Blanco and the housekeeper, is Father Donovan, who is, however, above suspicion, given his good terms with Blanco and the other priests and the total lack of any motive.

det. Jason Minardi

As for the case of Seth Warner, who, according to recent information, probably knew the priest, many questions are still unsolved. There are no reasons to think that Father Blanco was depressed or somehow distressed. Moreover, the colleagues and the faithful of his Church describe him as a sensitive, careful and always helpful person.

Only an item has probably been moved: a souvenir of no intrinsic value found near a clean circular portion of the dusty dashboard, portion that, having the same size of the item, seems to be its former location.

Anyway, it is surely to discard the hypothesis that the item has been used to commit the presumptive suicide.

Forensics’ analysis show the deceased’s fingerprints only. We thus might suppose he wrote the note himself.

More questions than answers arise round that word, and the random disposition of each phrase suggests a total lack of criteria and order in that research. Still, the term “father” seems to indicate an investigation more than a simple research, or, to better match the victim’s journalistic vocabulary, an enquiry about someone or something. This evidence, along with the facts and the sequence of events happened after the victim’s death, brought me to a deepest analysis of the note contents, whose peculiarities might suggest a link to the strange circumstances of the presumptive suicide.

Waiting to find the mentioned individual, I focused on those four letters as if they were parts of the same word. What follows is the first result of my web research:

The -cide suffix describes killing. Homicide (Latin homo = human) means to kill a person. Suicide is built on the Latin sui (= of oneself). Originally -cide meant to cut. For centuries killing was mostly accomplished with a sword or knife.

Jason Minardi

The door of the victim’s house was open, no signs of breaking were on the lock, nothing had been stolen. The journalist’s notes were in their places and there were no signs of scuffle on the corpse nor in the apartment. The scene of the crime seems to be the living room, where bloodstains, clumsily covered by several layers of polish, have been found. An early ballistic test suggests the possibility that the victim killed himself with a firearm, possibility supported by the gun powder found on the armchair. Although the probabilities that the victim committed suicide are more than 90%, no signals of depression or emotional imbalances were found. No drugs, alcohol or cigarettes. Moreover, marks of four different shoes have been found; two of them marked more than once the floor leading from the door to the living room. An accurate analysis of the apartment and the furniture and the total absence of any phoning devices suggest the profile of an isolated and unemotional personality, a pragmatic person of fixed habits. According to the autopsy the corpse has been moved only some hours after the decease, and despite the high probabilities that it’s about suicide, the foremost question concerns the reason why someone moved the corpse and tried to hide the evidences away from the crime scene.

Det. Jason Minardi.