CSI: Asia-Chp16

CHAPTER 16: SECRETS UNVEILED

The CSI members gathered around Lionel in the questioning room, looking quite satisfied and triumphant about something. Lionel looked at them as if he had no business being in this room. Before the CSI members could say anything, Lionel had a head-start.

“Hey, what are you guys putting me in here for? We’re getting ready for the IH competition, the most important competition in all basketball history and I should be at school practicing my throws, not sitting here being questioned like a criminal!”

“Oh, don’t worry, it won’t take very long, Lionel,” Jonathan replied. “We’re all here to tell you a little story.”

“What?” Lionel looked at the head of the crime lab in disbelief. “I’ve been brought all the way here just to listen to some sort of silly 5-year-old story? What do you take me for, a kid? I have no time for this, I gotta go…”

“Patience, boy, patience,” Judith said as she and Elaine came forward to sit him back down. “Patience is virtue, you know. Didn’t your Moral teacher teach you that?”

“OK, we’ll start this story from the very beginning,” Jonathan said as he played with his gun. “It all started with a boy, who was a jock, and his 4 friends. They were like peas in a pod. They ate together, they played basketball together, they hang out together, they watch horror movies together and they even slept together when they’re having their boy slumber parties. They are practically inseparable. There are no friends closer than they were.”

“But one of the friendships ended because of a harmless prank,” Elaine continued. “It was the day when these 5 friends gathered together at the jock’s house to celebrate the end of the PMR examination. They had so much fun and had too much to drink that they decided to play a trick on the bookworm of the gang. They knew that the bookworm had a certain fear for the dark and would never sleep without the nightlights on, so they decided to put the bookworm inside the storeroom for an hour or so just to give him a small fright.”

“Somehow they forgot about that bookworm because they were having too much fun drinking and celebrating,” Rebecca said her share of the story. “The poor bookworm stayed in that dusty, dark and cold storeroom for the whole night. It was only about morning and when the gang was slightly sober that they remembered the bookworm. They rushed to his aid and found that the bookworm was so petrified and was so phobic of the dark that he suffered a minor shock. He was so afraid that they would do the same thing again to him that he decided not to hang out with them so much anymore.”

“Normal people would’ve just forgotten about the prank and continue to hang with their friends as usual,” Jonathan said, “but this bookworm didn’t. It was then that the jock found out that the bookworm had been bullied a lot by other people in his basketball team just because he was a reserve and serves no significant importance to the team, except as a punching bag. The jock’s other best friends also played along with the basketball team members. The bookworm thought that the jock and his gang were the only true friends he had, but after the prank, he realized that even friends would betray him, so he stopped being too much of a close friend anymore.”

“What the bookworm didn’t know,” Judith said as she moved closer towards Lionel, “is that there was someone who wouldn’t stand him being away from the team and wouldn’t stand letting him being bullied and pushed over. That someone decided to help him get back at all the people who had wronged him and make them pay for what they have done to the bookworm. That someone is you, Lionel. You are the knight of vengeance behind his back.”

“What…? I’m the murderer…?” Lionel laughed nervously. “You gotta be kidding me…right? You know I wouldn’t kill my best friends! They’ve been with me since the beginning of high school! I wouldn’t…”

“Oh, yes, you would,” Jonathan said as he fiddled with the safety click of the gun. “You would do anything to make Jeremy feel safe and secure and happy, even if it means killing the person who hurt him deeply.”

“You’re not making any sense! You’ve seen it for yourself! I’ve got alibis! My siblings were killed when I was downstairs with my friends in the party! I received the call from the murderer! And Cliff was murdered at Alor Setar, and I was at home for the mourning period! You were at my house interrogating me! You should’ve known better than to accuse me!”

“Yes, you didn’t kill your siblings and Cliff,” Elaine said, lighting her cigarette. “But you were the mastermind behind all this. You have provided the murder weapon and the instructions for them to do your dirty work before you eliminated them yourself. The first murder was done by Cliff, under your orders. You threatened to expose his horny affairs with the girls he picked up and you threatened to tell his parents about him making one of his girls pregnant and forcing her to abort it. I’ve been walking around your house for a while that day when we questioned you. I was smoking, remember? And I looked over your house. I saw that at the knife rack, there was one knife missing. First, I thought maybe the murderer sneaked into your home from the back door at your kitchen, but the rayon thread was a dead giveaway. And also, close body contact in a cramped party place would make people at least feel if anyone was going in or out of the house.”

“Rayon clothes are way out of season and besides being a jock, your friend Nicholas told us that you were a fashion freak, never missing a single chance to try out the latest fashion trend,” Rebecca gave her deduction on the case. “Part of the rayon thread was covered with tiny particles left from moth balls, and moth balls only come from putting things in the storeroom for too long, which means that you have been into rayon clothes for a while and once the trend was over, you stashed it into the storeroom.”

“You gave Cliff the rayon shirt to distract us from the investigation and also gave the knife to Cliff the day before the party, and you went to the nearest hardware store—namely the Jothan Lo’s Fixit & Co—dress as a woman to buy a new and sharpened axe and gave that to Cliff too,” Justin said. “You ordered him to enter the house through the window of your siblings’ room because of his ability to climb and ordered him to commit the murders and make the phone call. And at the state of the guests’ confusion, Cliff came to the party late pretending to be unaware of the murder, just like you told him to be. And before the murder, you ordered Cliff to sandpaper the brand of the axe so that we won’t find out where it came from.”

“This is insane. Why would I want to kill my own brothers and sister?” Lionel asked. Jonathan could see that he was pretending to be innocent and calm about all these accusations.

“Because after the prank, you tried to find out why he stopped being your friend so much, and it turned out that besides your basketball team members, your siblings have been also giving him a hard time,” Jonathan said. “You found out about Jeremy’s job as a part-time night tuition teacher and your siblings being part of his class, and they treated him more like a sucker than a teacher because they knew about the prank you and your friends did to him and his phobia of the dark. You couldn’t let that go unpunished, could you?”

“Then you tell me, how did I kill Cliff? You knew I wasn’t with them at the concert where he was murdered! I was at home mourning!” Lionel was still indignant about letting the cat out of the bag.

“That, my friend,” Rachel said, “was done by another of your friend Gary. You ordered Gary to get rid of Cliff to silence him and also punish him for pulling the prank on Jeremy. You threatened to tell on Gary about him being in a teenage correctional institute that he had kept secret from his high-classed girlfriend and ordered him to finish Cliff off. You gave him the murder weapon and the gloves so that he won’t get his prints on and gave him the rope and that special backpack so that he could hide the blood-stained clothes and a piece of his gut inside to be later passed to you. You also gave him instructions on how to kill him and how to hang him on the tree and all. But he made just a few simple mistakes.”

“He lost the murder weapon you gave him,” Judith said. “He got it confiscated by the teacher because he was showing it off to his ERT friends and his girlfriend and the teacher thought that knife was too dangerous and not suitable for cooking. He was afraid that if he didn’t finish the job, he’ll be in big trouble of exposure of his darkest secrets. So he had to go to get something new, something that is worth to be a weapon. He got Jeremy’s army knife when he went to his house to borrow his homework. After doing the murder as you ordered and after hiding the evidence and everything, he made another mistake. When he and the gang came over to check out where Cliff is, Gary accidentally exposed his crime by saying that he was ‘hanging at the tree dead’. That was a dead giveaway (A/N: If you don’t remember that go to Chap 5 and Chap 11 and take a look) because if he didn’t commit the crime he wouldn’t have known Cliff hung on the tree.”

“You found out about him using Jeremy’s army knife and that got you more powered to kill him, so you used a more wicked urban legend to ruin his life—by using the kidney removal legend,” Justin said, “just to make him suffer a more horrible fate than death. You and your gang have been in his house for a slumber party before and you’re the only one who knew very well the ins and outs of his house because you’ve been planning this for a while. And this time you ordered Nicholas to do it because you knew he was the only person that studies in Science Stream and his father was a surgeon and that you knew he also had a dark secret to keep—he once went to the hospital when he was a kid to look for his father to give him his lunch and was curious about the breathing support machine in one of the ICU wards. He played with it and accidentally turned off the machine in the process. Needless to say, the patient almost got killed.”

“You threatened to tell that to his father and forced him to commit the murder,” Elaine said. “As usual, you prepared the murder weapon and the instructions, told him about the secret door in the wine cellar and he did the dirty work. Finally the rest of the murders, you did it with your own two hands. Seeing that your attempt to murder your friends using them as guinea pigs to carry on your plans worked, you finally decided to try it yourself. You used all kinds of urban legends you watched in the horror movies on those guys who wronged Jeremy and made them pay.”

“First you killed Nicholas using the urban legend about not turning light on because you knew that he shared the room with his younger brother and he hated it when the brother comes in and turned the lights on without checking if he was asleep or not,” Rebecca deduced. “Then you killed the twins Derek and Desmond with the urban legend about the headlights, Kevin with the hallway death urban legend, Terry with the dog urban legend, etc, etc…You were really good. You’ve done exactly what a horror movie would do and you could’ve left us baffled forever and get away with it.”

“But you have made one simple mistake with Gerald though,” Jonathan pointed out, “because you were so angry with this guy that you ate a part of him right at the spot.”

“I…ate Gerald?” Lionel widened his eyes. “What do you mean I ate a part of Gerald? You make me sound like a cannibal or something.”

“Hannibal Lector,” Justin said. “Does that ring a bell? Besides copying the movie patterns of Urban Legends and H2O, you were also copying a small portion of the movie Hannibal. In the movie Hannibal Lector killed his victims and ate them. You took a portion of the body from every victim you killed or ordered to kill and ate them out of anger and out of vengeance. You ate them because you hated them so much that you just want them to dissolve and be gone or probably even consume their soul in you just like that.”

“But Gerald had done something to Jeremy you were so angry of him doing,” Rachel continued. “He did something to Jeremy you swore you’ll never do again—he locked him in the sports room and left him there for the whole night. When the janitor came to clean the sports room, he was shocked to see Jeremy curled at one corner mumbling to himself and barely being able to get a grip on reality. He had to stay at home for one month straight and receive personal therapy. You were so mad at Gerald that you killed him using the other babysitter urban legend and waited until he bled to death before sitting beside his body and ate one of his hacked arms raw.”

“We found your DNA from the drool that dripped on the left hacked arm of Gerald,” Justin said as he took out a transparent plastic paper showing DNA codes and a picture of Gerald’s body on the floor with the hacked left arm circled. You can hide your evidence and your murder weapon and everything, but you cannot hide your DNA. You can’t even deny it. Looks like you’re pretty much a sloppy eater when it comes to rage, huh?”

“You were so angry and so pissed off at Gerald for locking Jeremy in that dark sports room that it went up to your head in those steam and heat to think straight anymore,” Judith concluded. “You wanted to consume his soul there and then and make him pay for what he had done to Jeremy,” Judith leaned closer towards Lionel and stared at him straight in the eyes and said in a low voice, “You have a crush on him, don’t you? That’s your dark secret—you’re in love with Jeremy.”

“What…? Are you mad? I’m not gay! What the heck are you thinking?” Lionel’s face twisted in some sort of a half-shocked-half-denial look and was going pale. The rest of the CSI members were shocked too; they had no idea she could think of something such as absurd as that.

“Don’t lie to me,” Judith said as she fished out a picture and tossed it in front of Lionel. Everyone lowered their bodies to take a look because they had never thought there would be new evidence. Only Rachel wasn’t surprised to see it because she had been shown that picture before. They, except Rachel, were shocked to see that it was a picture of Lionel and Jeremy together pretty much naked with only a bed sheet over their lower part of the body and that Lionel was actually kissing Jeremy on the cheek. It looked as if they were posing in a private photo studio or something. Lionel looked really pale indeed.

“Admit it, Lionel,” Judith said, putting her hands on her hips. “You were having a crush on Jeremy and you were so in love with him that you would do anything for him, even if it means destroying the people that hurt him. When you and your family went to Subang Jaya that evening, I’ve snuck into your home and I’ve found this in your mini-briefcase in your closet. It came with a receipt which led me to your cousin’s photo studio downtown. He told me that you and Jeremy were just fooling around and took this picture for fun, but you have your own agenda. You wanted to take that picture because you always wanted to be this close with Jeremy without him suspecting anything. Lucky for you he didn’t.”

Lionel looked down at the picture and took it slowly, putting it close to his chest, his face looking defeated and down. No one tried to stop him. Judith laid her hand on his shoulder and said kindly, “I know you have strong feelings for Jeremy, and I understand deeply how it feels to love someone so deeply and when that someone you love gets hurt you might feel helpless for not trying to help him. I understand how it feels when you are willing to do anything to make him happy and secure, but killing is not the way. The more you hate and kill the people that hurt your Jeremy, the more serious the hate would become because there would always be someone else to hurt him again. You can protect him whatever way you can, but this is not the way.”

As she spoke, she slipped her hand into Lionel’s jacket and took out a small bottle of sleeping pills. That was something else the other CSI members didn’t expect to see, not even Rachel. Lionel again was taken aback by Judith’s knowledge of the pills in his jacket pocket. Judith shook her head and sighed, saying, “I knew you would do this. After making sure that everyone was eliminated and that no one will ever harm Jeremy again, you’re thinking of committing suicide to punish yourself for pulling the first prank, aren’t you? It’s not worth it, Lionel, it’s not worth it.”

Finally, Lionel buried his head in his arms and slumped over onto the table, sobbing, “They hurt Jeremy. They hurt him so badly. So bad that he didn’t want…to be with us…or with me anymore…I couldn’t stand him being away…I love him…I love him…so…much…”