One: Meanings 

What is Death's true meaning?  If the halting of key human biological processes can be said to have any real reason.   What is the true significance of the cessation of the great Me?  What price entropy's victory?  An end to human electrochemical activity and tiny bundle of clenched anxieties?  An abrupt shift from the vibrant singing of alive, to most certainly and incontrovertibly not.
What remains of life when the body ceases function?  Are all that's left quantum shadows, drifting on the wind between the here and not here long after the body that sustained the Me is inoperative?   Where's the substance?  Are the dead only delusions in our dreams?  Do blessed souls truly find some everlasting Nirvana or Heaven for their conscientiousness and good deeds?   Do the less virtuous go from their tiny frightened little something back to the big dark nothing, or somewhere far, far worse?  Yeah, and why does it have to be me who always hears them?
Newly promoted Detective Sergeant Paul Calvin was pondering all these questions while holding his scene of crime team at bay with a single upraised index finger.  Pausing for thought was always a good idea while taking a first look around at newly dead victims.  Another hard to solve case in a list of dozens of case files on his desk.  From serial burglaries and street thefts through uncooperative witnesses to this one.  The freshest gangland casualty.  It carried all the hallmarks.  
A security guard had heard a shot and bustled around outside the old Ashmead Road warehouse.   At a safe distance of course.  Then waited ten minutes for all the perps to scatter before calling for police assistance.  After another half an hour, an unarmed two man response team had arrived and spent an unhappy hour keeping rats almost the size of Terriers at bay, exhausting their pepper sprays until the Coroner, Detective Sergeant Paul Calvin and his scene of crime circus could arrive.
The still oozing corpse, half her face a bloody crater, gave him his usual jolt to the stomach.  Then professional detachment took over, stepping back from the emotional edge. Staring as dispassionately as he could at the body lying face down on dusty concrete.  Female.  Mixed heritage and pale anaemic skin.  Electric pink dyed cornrow hair down the right side of the scalp, telling him she was a member of the Sandlanders.  One of the outlaw tribes who made a living, if that was what it could be called, scavenging and dealing in the SevernPort refugee area.  Twenty-five malnourished kilos wringing wet, if that.  Reddish brown blotches on inside of neck, both sides, from repeated and badly applied pressure injections.  So, a serial abuser then.  So young, but then they all are. 
Entrance wound in nape of neck, execution style.  A puckered red circle ringed with speckled black powder burns and blood spots.  Now drying blood caked light brown dreadlocks and neck hair into blackened lumps.  Victim had been kneeling, blood marks and dust scrapes on knees from abrupt contact with cracked concrete warehouse floor.  Wrists roughly tied together behind her back with anonymous grey duct tape.  No visible muzzle bruising, so point blank but not contact.  Cheap but stylishly grungy denim jeans studded with chain and cheap studs, belt still fastened, so no immediate evidence of sexual assault.  Another one for the autopsy's more detailed intrusions.
Usual voiding of bowels and bladder at time of death staining the cloth.  Customary rich and foetid ammoniac stink of unwashed body.  Spray of brains and cerebrospinal fluid partially hidden in a stickily still spreading puddle of blood.  Remaining eye disturbingly wide open, dilated pupil staring emptily at the dusty ground. Cracked lips shrunk from badly bleached teeth.  Poorly made up face muddy with her last dried tears.  Just another dumb kid.
Weapon of choice looked like a medium calibre handgun or small bore shotgun from the wound.  Although he wouldn't know for certain until his forensic mavens had finished picking over this corpse for clues.
Not that old, maybe fourteen, maybe as old as sixteen, no more.  Nose and lip piercings with crude blue ink gang initiation tattoos on what was left of her face and neck.   From what he could tell, just another one of so many lost children from the travellers ghetto to the south of town.  Probably the disused Industrial Estate or 'displaced persons area' of SevernPort between Avonmouth docks and Severn Beach where Uniform only went armed or in full tactical.  A rats nest of the unwanted that made the notorious Sink look like a genteel care home for the elderly.  A place where much happened, but little got told.  Even surveillance drone cover had been withdrawn. 
He could hear her tiny quantum shadow whimpering in the back of his head as it began to fade.  All she had ever been in her last seconds before the gunshot ripped through her head and took her from alive to not.  A small packet of poorly defined misery / shame / self pity about to be erased from existence.  Her fading essence couldn't even tell him her name.
Paul stared around for other clues, footprints that weren't Police issue footwear.  Cartridge casings, roach ends, injector tabs, lost jewellery.  Discarded anything that might give him a clue, a lead, anything.  
Or who the victim turned out to be.  He already had an idea who was behind the killing.  One of the local untouchables.  This was 'King' Vic s turf, and Paul knew where that particular sociopath would be at this time of day.  Holding court with his sycophants and servants down at the St Lucia club in St Pauls, a Quasi-legal drinking establishment in one of the older parts of the city.  Making sure he was seen a long way from here.  Establishing an alibi.  Not that he was ever here anyway.  Vic was a hands off kind of guy.  He had 'people'.  People who paid off favours, obtained credit, scored their daily pleasure for 'odd jobs' like this killing.
The scene of crime team watched impassively as the pilot jacket wearing Paul took a wide circle around the cooling body.  The Uniforms watching him, or more accurately what he was looking at very carefully.  All of Western Division knew about Pauls conviction rate, and the ambitious both envied and wanted to emulate him.  Although having a fifth of their brain destroyed and rebuilt might not be a price they're willing to pay.  Paul reflected idly as he picked up the fringes of their envious little thought fragments. 
After a few long seconds, he stilled the anger that always rose in his soul and walked back to the scene of crime team, giving them the nod to get going. 
The preliminary eCoroners report was already burning into his ePhones memory, the human Coroner reading off the remote data from the Drone feeds.  The only things that would take time was toxicology.  Everything else could be scanned remotely.  
Paul stood back to make a call.  Someone picked up almost instantly.  "Jed?"  He said.
"Who wants him?"  Paul immediately recognised the drawling, defiant tone which meant Jed had company of the 'wrong' sort. 
"An old mate.  Needs something good."
"Cool with it.  Watcha got?"  Jed's tone relaxed.  That was their code for 'I can't talk right now'.
"'Kay.  Next Tuesday?"  Another code.  Two hours, see you then.
"Slap it."  Delivered with a chuckle.  Gang slang for 'Of course'.
"Hike it.  Chill babe."  Paul said.  More code.  Safe house up in the 'burbs.  Jed knew the one. 
Turning back to the waiting scene of crime crew, he said.  "Okay.  All yours."  The photo drones buzzed over and began taking holographic coverage.  Already identifying the bloody little shot impacts and stray projectile fragments scattered across the stained floor, small items highlighted by low powered lasers from the little discs underside, scanned and logged ready for recovery.  Another had finished spectrographic tox scans on body fluids.  It was amazing what these little whirring discs could do.  
After the drones had finished, the orange and white band coveralled Scene of Crime team moved in to meticulously retrieve the identified samples for further analysis.  
Uniform had already flipped the one witness statement to his ePhone, for all the good it was.  No descriptions that would stand up in court, and a quick background check on the security guard flagged up a not guilty verdict on an unspecified sex offence charge.  Paul grimaced.  Even though it was probably for taking an ill advised public piss on a lads night out, there was no sense letting some gleeful defence brief chew the poor sod to bits on the witness stand.  Even if he had been found not guilty, the mere insinuation in front of a cyber jury would be enough to undermine the guards credibility.  Real evidence had to come from elsewhere.
Images flipped into his inbox, including a 3D reconstruction of the projectile.  Poorly made, crudely rifled slug.  Home made gun, then.  Another dead end.  Those things could be churned out by anyone with basic metalworking skills and enough nous to use machine tools.  Failing that, the specs might have been downloaded to a dodgy 3D replicator from the DarkNet and spun out as a cheap one off.  A favour done to pay off a drug debt.  Maybe.
No doubt the weapon in question was already rusting in pieces, sinking slowly into estuary mud.  Somewhere between here and whatever human sewer the hitters lived.  Because that's where they always lived.  Back streets, sink estates, and all the sly little corners of seen-better-times suburbia.  Killers, amoral takers of life.  The footsoldiers of gangland enforcement.
The media myth of the well heeled hit man was, at least every time he'd seen it, a myth.  The truth was that the real face of evil was a low grade banality.  The desperate or simply unscrupulous in pursuit of short term gain and a cheap fix.  Sure, there were the gang bodyguards and 'enforcers' who would happily break legs or even dispose of rivals if told, but nothing like a murder incorporated or guns for hire.  Real life ain't like the vids.  It's more complicated.
Fortunately the real hard men, and occasionally women, were few, and did more threatening than killing.  Normally another gang would pay off another by disposing of the stupid or simply unlucky.  Never outside the known and trusted inner circles.  Too many intelligence stings and undercover EuroPols to snag the unwary.
Just the gang members.  Loyalty was everything, and no-one refused or grassed on pain of exile, beatings, death, or sometimes all three.  The chief currency was favours, and whatever largesse pack leaders cared to dish out.  You could bet your life it was never credit or anything the Revenue could track.  Reputation and barter were king in the low rent district.  When you didn't have anything, favours were all you had to trade.  Everything else could be stolen.
Which is where we come in.  Even the thought wore a badge.