CSI: Asia-Chp4

CHAPTER 4: HANGING ON A "THREAD"

“Woah! Now that is what I call a human ‘lap chong (a Hakka dialect for waxed seasoned pork intestines)’!”

They are at the crime scene after receiving the call from the police department to come down and check the place. The first thing Judith said when she got off the car and saw Cliff’s body hanging from the tree was that, which sent their other member to join the investigation, Rebecca, into peals of laughter.

Jonathan’s eyebrow twitched in annoyance, his cool finally lost after dealing with the food-obsessed CSI agent. He couldn’t believe that she could be able to think of food at a time like this, and in front of a corpse at that. “URUSAI! DAMARE! ENOUGH!!!!! Stop talking about food, you demented, greedy, fat, bakasaru!” he snarled, glaring at Judith, his right hand dropping lower to where he wore his Beretta M92Fs pistol on his left side.

“Hey, it was only a comment,” Judith replied, pretending to look hurt for a second or two before laughing crazily like a maniac and rushing off towards Rebecca who was taking pictures. Besides being an all-star in the Physics of weapons, she has a knack of taking pictures, which would later contribute to the investigation of all the CSI crew.

“Besides, I’m fatter than her,” Elaine remarked, blowing smoke out from her cigarette before putting it out. Obviously our wannabe bad girl had her pumped her lungs once too many of Marlboro smokes.

Jonathan looked in disbelief at the obviously smaller-sized Elaine and decided that he’d rather not know what she was talking about. Growling in frustration at the two ridiculous girls he got for co-workers, his phone rang, and he picked it up, yelling “WHAT?!?!?!”

“I guess that means I should book you some time on the shooting range then,” said the quiet voice of Thomas Chung, Jonathan’s good friend and SWAT Team Leader. He was used enough to Jonathan’s sudden outburst of temper. “Remember, Soul of Ice, Soul of Ice (his codename for ‘Remain calm’), and if you shout at me again I’ll come up to your floor and kick your ass again.”

“Yeah, well, sorry,” Jonathan cooled down and apologized. “It’s just that I have lunatics for CSI co-workers instead of normal decent people. So what’s up?”

“You’re not much of a normal, decent guy yourself anyway. Just be thankful that you have Rebecca, Rachel and Justin as much more sane people in your team,” Thomas chuckled. “Anyway, I was going to invite you out to dinner with a few members of the team; the guys missed you.”

“Wonder why,” Jonathan muttered, shooting death glares at the girls (who, unfortunately, were immune to such childish things). “I’m at a crime scene under a really gruesome case, just like in Scream. We found a guy hung up from a tree with his guts sticking out of his body. Seriously dead that guy.”

“Oh, you mean like a human ‘lap chong’,” Thomas replied, chuckling, as Jon fumed silently. “Anyway, Aaron, Leslie, and a few of us were going to go out for dinner, and then we were going to see that new movie, ‘Fulltime Killer’. Mainly so that we could make fun at the movie cops’ stupidity and so Aaron can complain about how they’re showing snipers in a bad light. Well, I’ll be going. See you on Saturday at the range?”

“Yeah. Ten-four,” Jonathan responded, terminating the call. He turned around see Rebecca and the girls going about their work, though still giggling about ‘lap chong’. He made a personal note to confiscate all chocolate bars from Judith while popping in a blueberry Mentos sweet into his mouth.
Now that’s a total contradiction for someone who didn’t like eating in front of a corpse.

As Jonathan came close to the body, he saw the dark-rimmed glasses that was dangling on his left ear, he recognized the guy as Cliff Chang he remembered seeing in the picture of the basketball team. He was a very unsightly thing to see and definitely not a sight for sore eyes. He was hung upside-down through his legs and his guts were dangling out of his open stomach, the blood and stomach juice dripping out of them and onto the roof of the car. He had his fingers pretty close to the car and there were a few scraping marks on it mixed with his own blood and all that gore, which explained the girl’s testimony of the scraping sounds she heard earlier before discovering the body. His eyes were wide open and so was his mouth, probably trying to ask for help, only that his throat was slit. Rebecca moved around taking pictures of the body from every angle and the car.

“Woah, looks like this guy is seriously disemboweled beyond recognition,” Rebecca said in her good-natured way as she took another picture of Cliff’s horribly gutted body. “It really reminds me of Jack the Ripper.”

“Did you say Jack the Ripper?” Judith asked as she turned to Rebecca with a surprised look on her face.

“Yeah, I did. What? Have you got something?”

“No, no, not yet,” Judith replied, turning back to the place she was investigating, which was where the girl said Cliff had went to take his leak. Elaine noticed the sudden change of her humourous attitude and walked towards her, carrying the numbering tags with her.

“You got something in your mind, I know it,” Elaine said as she laid the tags wherever she thought could be relevant evidence or wherever Judith was pointing. “What have you got?”

“I just can’t help thinking that this case has something familiar with it,” Judith replied, taking blood samples from the trail of dragged blood on the earth. “Murders during the Hungry Ghost Festival, fictional characters, mauling kids in their rooms and call the brother, hanging bodies and disemboweling them like some sort of ritual…they’re just simply all too familiar. I just can’t put my finger into it.”

“Do you suspect a copycat on the loose?” Elaine asked as she gathered some samples of urine she found at a small corner of a dense bush.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Judith said. “Maybe I should ask Rachel or Justin, or maybe both. They do have an idea on fictitious characters. I’ve been on the streets too long that I never had a chance to really sit down and enjoy a great movie or a good book.”

“Go figures,” Elaine grinned. “Are you in for a swig or two later after work?”

“Sure. Top Ten or Carlsberg or Black Dog or just plain cocktail?”

“Maybe a dose of everything.”

Meanwhile, Rebecca and Jonathan were still checking out the car and the body. Another member from the crime lab has come and loosen the knot that lead to the hanging of Cliff and they all lowered the body slowly onto the ground. As Rebecca did her share of investigating the boy, she wound the loose end of the red ribbon around her neck so that she wouldn’t get it dirty or in contact with the body.

“Have you ever considered taking that ribbon off?” Jonathan asked. From the first day Rebecca was assigned to his lab to work, he had seen her with that ribbon. Nothing could convince her to take it off. To her, it was her life and soul, a promise she swore never to break.

“Nope, unless I’m taking a bath,” Rebecca replied. “I’ve already promised that I will never take off until the day Cyril and I have spoken our vows at the church altar. So there. Hello, what do we have here? Hey, Jon, I think you should take a look at this.”

Jonathan lowered himself to see where she was pointing at. It was Cliff’s slit throat. The cut wasn’t too deep, but it was lethal enough if left bleeding for too long. He asked, “What about it? My torchlight is running out of batteries, I can’t really see what you’re at.”

“Here, use my torchlight,” Rebecca said as she handed him her torchlight. “Point it at his throat. Do you see this? This is no cut an ordinary knife would do. The pressure is a bit too strong for an ordinary knife and look, the slit skin has jagged patterns on it.”

“Well, I’ll be darned,” Jonathan said as he took a closer look at the jagged ends of the slit skin on Cliff’s jugular. He recognized that kind of jagged patterns. “You’re right. It is no ordinary knife. If I’m not mistaken, this is an army knife. Only used by soldiers of the war.”

“Now why would you want to kill someone using an army knife instead of a regular sharp knife or a penknife, to be kinder?” Rebecca asked herself as she zoomed in the camera to take a picture of that jagged ends.

“Becka, if you want to kill, you wouldn’t be kind now, would you?”

“Hmm, you’re right. I wouldn’t. In fact, I’d be extra evil! Nya ha ha ha ha ha~!” Rebecca simply just can’t get enough out of making a joke in a serious, tense situation.

“If I have to face the lunacy of you girls one more time, I’m gonna break down,” Jonathan groaned.

“Sounds like you need a woman,” Rebecca said, and before Jonathan could protest she poked his chest and said, “I mean it. You need a girl and fast. Hey, Jon, look. Guess our murderer was pretty careful in his disemboweling business. The girl told us that she had kept her eyes and ears closed all the time and waited until the sound stopped, which means she probably didn’t see the murderer climbing up to the roof of the car to tear ol’ Cliff’s guts out.”

“Yet there are no marks that indicated that the murderer climbed up the roof of the car to kill Cliff,” Jonathan sadi as he took a look at the roof of the car. “He really is good and seriously doesn’t want to get caught. Looks like this case is gonna be slightly tougher than I thought.”

“Oh my…God!!! Cliff?! Cliff!!! CLIFF!!!”

The CSI team turned around at the sound of the boys screaming in horror and disbelief. Jonathan shone the torchlight at the boys and saw that it was the rest of Lionel’s basketball gundam: the thick-lipped Gary, the glassy-eyed Jeremy and the big and fat Nicholas. The other CSI members tried to keep the frantic gundam away from the crime scene. They were all hollering and yelling, demanding to know what had happened to their best friend. Jonathan walked to them.

“Calm down, boys, calm down. There’s nothing to panic about.”

“Are you crazy?!” Gary said in disbelief. “It’s Cliff we’re talking about!! He’s dead! He’s hanging at the tree dead!!! Who could’ve done such a thing?!”

“We’re working on it, boys. And if you don’t calm down a little, you’ll disrupt our work and I will have to shoot you,” Jonathan said in an abnormally calm voice. Judith recognized that kind of voice.
“Better do as he said,” Judith called from her spot. “He means business.”

The boys had no choice but to lean on something so as not to fall weak all over looking at their friend who was on the floor being examined by Rebecca and Judith who had just came back from her evidence-collecting.
“Well, I can see that you guys must be a great friend of Cliff, and also a great friend to Lionel Han,” Jonathan said as he put his hands on his hips. He turned to Gary and pointed, “Yes, I remember you. I saw you leaving the party quite shook up. What are you guys doing here coming to the crime scene?”

“We came to look for the car. Cliff wasn’t with us when the concert ended, so we guessed that he had ditched us again to hang out with some girl,” Nicholas replied.

“He always did that. It gets old. We catch him in the act sometimes, just to suck the fun out of him and punish him for ditching us,” Gary said. “He always liked to choose this kind of place to ‘do it in’ with the girls. We came here to find the car and try to catch him in the act again just for the fun of it.”

“Well, unfortunately your Cliff here has hung out with a girl too many,” Jonathan replied. “I believe we’ll be meeting each other soon enough. Elaine, would you mind giving these kids a ride back home? I’m sure after seeing this case in the news, their parents might be worried about them.”

“Can I give them the Q zone?” Elaine asked. This was a sort of secret language only these CSI members share—what she meant was that ‘Could she question the kids on the way?’ Jonathan understood the question.

“Knock yourself out. Card me out the R sets A.S.A.P,” Jonathan replied with a thumbs up. What he meant was ‘Send me the results of your questioning A.S.A.P.’

“Well, I think we ought to send this Cliff boy back for our dear ol’ Justin to poke and prod on,” Rebecca said as she put away her camera. “I’m pretty much done here.”

“We might need the car too,” Judith said. “I have a feeling that there’s something important in the car. Get someone to check it thoroughly.”

“Rach and Elaine can do it,” Rebecca suggested.

“Elaine would be OK, but why Rach?” Judith asked, surprised.

“Just to give her something to do and get her out of those boring books and the office once in a while. It helps for her to do a real case instead of sitting there becoming only our encyclopedia.”

“Good point.”