Desecration by J.F. Penn

strikingly similar to the artwork that Rowan Day-Conti had shown her. At the top was printed ‘Memento Mori.’
    “Remember you will die,” whispered Jamie. Underneath was a short typed message. Forget the Lyceum.  
    “What’s the Lyceum?” Jamie asked, aware that she had seen the very word in Jenna’s diary for this coming weekend.  
    Bowen shook his head. “I don’t know. The word means school in Latin but I’ve never heard of it used in this way before, more like the description of a place or a group of people.” He paced across the office with agitation. “Look, Jenna was doing this whole thing on the side as a research project. She said it would bring us amazing press and some lucrative work if it paid off. She was well connected through her family, she was brilliant and I trusted her. She also continued to deliver all her other work to the highest standard, so I didn’t meddle. But when this arrived yesterday, I was going to ask her about the Lyceum.”
    Jamie shook her head. “Unfortunately, that’s not going to happen now. Could I see her desk?”
    “Of course. This way.”  
    Bowen led Jamie through a warren of offices that stretched surprisingly far back from the street. There was a focused atmosphere of tension and pressure, but perhaps Jenna had thrived on it. It certainly felt like the lifeblood of Michael Bowen’s world.  
    “This was where she worked,” Bowen said, indicating a slim desk by a window that looked out to a small interior courtyard. “I’ll need to ask the tech team to get access to her computer but you’re welcome to look at anything she has here in the meantime.” He looked at his watch. “I need to get back to my own work, Detective, but please, dial 113 on the phone there if you need anything else from me.”  
    Jamie nodded and he walked briskly away, his expensive shoes echoing on the parquet floor breaking the hush of the legal team working around them. She turned to the desk, which was tidy and neatly organized. She texted Missinghall to send over a tech to work with the legal firm’s IT team to pull Jenna’s data, but somehow Jamie thought that they wouldn’t find much on her official drives. If the investigation was something that Jenna was threatened over, then it was likely she would have kept her research material somewhere safe. The question was where?    
    Jamie searched the desk drawers. She pulled one open to find a stack of printed material, photocopies of newspaper reports and articles. Sitting back in the ergonomically designed office chair to sort through them, she flicked the pages to check the headlines. The assortment related to multiple cases but Jamie couldn’t see any common thread and nothing she could tie to Jenna’s death. Then towards the end of the pack she found a sheaf of articles about grave robbery, how there was evidence of recent practice with bodies stolen from funeral homes before cremation as well as dug up from graves. Jamie pulled the piece out to read in more detail, fascinated to learn that body snatching wasn’t only relegated to the past.
    One article attributed the rise in grave robbery to the demand for metals that could be extracted from the bodies and sold. In an increasingly tough financial environment, people were finding easy pickings from robbing the dead. Another headline screamed cult hysteria as bones were removed for rituals and rites in communities honoring such practices. There were marks on two more articles about newly buried bodies stolen the night before their burial. Both individuals had suffered from genetic diseases that resulted in physical deformity. A yellow letter L ending in a question mark was written in highlighter at the top of these pages.  
    Turning the papers further, Jamie came to an article on necrophilia, only made illegal in the UK in 2003 and still legal in some states of America. Her eyes widened as she read of the erotic use of corpses and found herself shaking her head with