CHAPTER 11: FINDINGS & SURPRISES
“Oh boy, we’re a little bit too late.”
The CSI team was in Nicholas’ home checking out the crime scene. Rachel had, for once, decided to come along to check out the crime scene. She had an envelope with the protective custody in it, prepared by Rebecca, ready to be signed by the consenting parents of both Lionel and Nicholas, but it seemed that Nicholas is rather out of the list literally now. Rachel silently thought that she’s d better get rid of the papers for Nicholas before the family gets upset that their plan to protect him was too late.
“Where were you when this happened?” Jonathan began to question Jasper, who was sitting in the living room looking pretty shook up. His hands were trembling when Rachel got him a tall glass of milk from the kitchen.
“My parents, well, they were outstation and all, so, I, uh, I went out for a movie,” Jasper replied, his voice quivering, still unable to get over the shock of seeing his brother dead early in the morning. “You know, that new anime movie, just in case you’re asking.”
Rachel rolled her eyes, a little afraid that mentioning ‘anime’ in front of this anime fanatic head of crime lab would switch his ‘anime fanatic mechanism’ on. Lucky for her, he continued his questioning.
“What time did you leave home, Jasper, and what time did you come home?”
“Well, I left at about 11.30 p.m. and then came home at about 2, maybe 2.30 in the morning,” Jasper replied. “I’m not in trouble, am I? I don’t wanna let my parents know I wasn’t home. They’ll surely blame me for his death. They always blame me for everything…”
“Calm down, boy,” Rachel laid a hand on his shoulder. “You won’t get into trouble. Why don’t you call up somebody who you can live with and move out of here for a few days?”
“My cousin Timothy could spare me a space.”
“Good. Go and call him. We’ll take it from here.”
After seeing Jasper to the telephone, she followed Jonathan upstairs to the crime scene. Justin,who also decided to join in the investigation outside the autopsy room, was there at the bed checking out on Nicholas’ body. She looked around and checked the place out. There was no sign of any footprints, no sign of forced entry on the window, no nothing. It was exactly the same kind as Judith described it on the other crime scenes she had seen—no trace that might lead to the suspect.
“I assumed that this is where the suspect came in. There is no sign of forced entry in here though, Jon. I don’t see any broken glass or a broken door knob or a broken door, to be exact,” Rachel said as she took a picture of the open window she was standing close to. “There’s not even a strand of hair in here. No murder weapon, no blood, no nothing. This suspect of yours is good. It’s as if he knew what he was doing, like some kind of homework memorized by heart.”
“Too good, perhaps,” Justin second the motion while he was checking on the body. “There practically aren’t any footprints around here, and he had left nothing on this body, not even half a fingerprint. Well, except this slit wound on his throat, that is.”
“What can you deduce from the slit, Justin?” Jonathan asked, leaning over to check out the fat chubby dead Nicholas.
“Well, I can say that there was a little struggle going on in here, but it’s quite brief. The killer did it swift and quick, and judging by the slit wound on his throat, I’d say it’s done with a penknife. And I think he meant to use that just to let him suffer ‘coz usually the smaller the sharp object cut through the skin, the more painful it feels, yet the less it cuts. I wouldn’t say no to bet that these words on the wall was written using his own blood, but I think while the murderer was writing these words, Nicholas was still alive.”
“Slow and painful death,” Jonathan stared at the words written in bold blood and rubbed his chin. “Typical case of revenge and payback.”
“Revenge?” Rachel turned to him.
“Payback?” Justin didn’t turn around, but his tone sounded surprised.
“Sorry, forgot to tell you about this case in detail,” Jonathan apologized and while he looked for clues, he told Rachel and Justin, the indoor members of the CSI team, about the case and his and Judith’s suspicions.
“So you’re saying that this murder is all connected to one certain incident—the prank on Jeremy during the PMR celebration?” Rachel tried to confirm his words.
“Yup, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” Jonathan nodded his head.
“Looks like we’re having a really tough case,” Justin replied as he signaled one of the coroner juniors to bring in the body bag to put Nicholas in. “Like you said, it’s a chain murder case, where Cliff killed the Han siblings, then was killed by Gary which in turn could be killed by this poor fat fellow here. Whoever killed Nicholas could be the next target. How is this getting on? I mean, there is practically no head or tail for this.”
“We’re not sure yet,” Jonathan replied as he took a blood sample from the wall while Rachel took a picture of it. “We still need to find a motive for Cliff to kill the Han siblings. Jude and the rest are now at his home searching. They might come up with something sooner or later.”
“With two bad girls together and one fashion fanatic, I bet they can find something,” Rachel grinned.
“Found anything yet, guys?”
“Not yet!”
Judith, Elaine and Rebecca were at Cliff’s house trying to look for any clues that might lead to him killing the Han siblings. After Cliff’s death, his family didn’t think the place they were living was safe anymore and they have decided to move to Pulau Pinang to live with Cliff’s uncle (on his mother’s side), leaving the house pretty much empty and deserted, waiting to be sold by other people. Judith has informed the realtors of this housing estate beforehand that they are not to sell the house until they have finish raiding it. So far, they haven’t come up with anything yet.
“Hey, guys, look,” Rebecca called out of the blue, waving a thick book. “I found their school yearbook. I hope they don’t mind me taking it. There could be evidence in there.”
“Becka, we’re here in search of murder weapons, not in search of high school Prom Kings and Queens!” Elaine groaned exasperatedly at the ever jolly Rebecca who was flipping through the pages of the yearbook gleefully.
“Weird,” Judith scratched her chin. “I was sure that there has to be something in here that connects Cliff with the death of the Han siblings. Where can it be?”
“Maybe you’ve guessed it wrong,” Rebecca said as she put away the yearbook and rummaged through Cliff’s wardrobe, checking out his clothes and holding them out to the mirror attached to the wardrobe door to see. “I told you, this is a wild goose chase. If you have listened to me and give them protective custody in the first place, we could’ve avoided all this trouble.”
“Don’t push your luck, girlfriend,” Elaine called out from Cliff’s parents’ room. “Just keep searching. If Jude says there’s something here, then there’s definitely something here.”
“Thanks for the support, Elaine,” Judith sighed gratefully as she leaned against the wall, “but maybe Becka’s right. There’s nothing in here to pinpoint Cliff on anything. We’re checked everywhere, even the storeroom. There’s nothing here. Let’s go back to the crime lab and back to the drawing board.”
With that, the trio girls put away their gear and went out of the house. Judith turned around and took one last look at the house. It was a double-storey house with a small attic affixed on the middle of the roof (they’ve checked there—there was nothing). It looked pretty beautiful and quaint, almost like the houses Americans lived in which she seen in movies and in TV, and it had a garden to match. And right now, Rebecca was stopping to smell the roses planted at one side of the flower beds.
“This smells heavenly!” Rebecca complimented as she sniffed at one of the roses. “Too bad they had to go away in a hurry. These roses would look lovely in the garden of their new home in Pulau Pinang.”
“Yeah, they look pretty cool,” Elaine agreed half-heartedly (she didn’t have much interest in flowers). “And though I’m no flower expert, it doesn’t take a genius to tell that these flowers are either being fed with steroids or just plain too much manure.”
Rebecca and Judith looked carefully at the rose bush and realized that Elaine was right—the left side of the rose bush was growing much better than the right side. The flowers were bigger and the leaves were greener and they stood taller than the right side. The trio was surprised at this oddity.
“Now what could cause this kind of irregularity?” Judith asked, mostly to herself. “The family has moved out almost immediately after Cliff’s death and it’s obvious that they hadn’t even bothered to tend the garden, judging by the other drying flowers, but why is this one so fresh?”
“Beats me,” Elaine replied in a bored way as she lit a cigarette. “Let’s get out of this joint. I’m hungry and we haven’t found anything since we got here.”
Judith remained silent. She waited for a while for Elaine to take a whiff of her cigarette before taking it and took a whiff of it herself. Her eyes remained stock still on the fresh big roses and Rebecca, through experience, could see that Judith was on to something.
“I can see your thinking cap on your head, Jude,” Rebecca said as she made way for Judith. “Make your point already.”
Judith returned the cigarette back to Elaine and went down on her knees in front of the healthy rose bush. She looked real close at the soil that hid the roots and noticed a few small flies concentrating on that part of the soil. Using her plastic-gloved hands, she shooed the flies away and dug at the soil until she saw the roots. She dug a little deeper and noticed that the roots were slightly stuck onto something metallic. She then signaled her colleagues to help her root out the whole rose bush. As the three of them pulled, the roots pulled along something long and bulky. It was covered with dirt and slightly unrecognizable but when they plucked the roots off it and dusted off the dirt, they all grinned at what they have finally found.
“Looks like we’ve just found out who’s been doing a little ‘hacking’ on the Han siblings.”
“Nope. No fingerprints. Not a single one.”
Rachel and Rebecca were running fingerprint dusting on the axe they have found buried under the flower beds of Cliff’s garden and so far, they have found nothing. There was a blood reaction on the blade alright, but no fingerprints.
“It’s kinda creepy to know that those roses have been feeding a little off the blood on the axe,” Rebecca grimaced at the axe.
“It’s not uncommon,” Rachel, the ever knowing Human Library, replied. “I’ve read somewhere that a couple who was buried under their favourite apple tree actually made their apple tree grow bigger and healthier with juicier fruits because it has been feeding off the decaying body of the couple. They found out that the tree’s roots have pierced through their coffin and their bodies were nowhere to be found.”
“Eew! That is so gross!” Rebecca groaned in disgust. “Remind me not to bury myself under any kind of plants, favourite or not.”
“I kinda noticed though that this axe is abnormally smooth,” Rachel said as she ran her hands across the handle of the axe a little.
“Come to think of it, you’re right,” Rebecca agreed as she, too, ran her hand on the axe handle. “It’s as if the murderer was using…”
“Sandpaper,” Rachel said, “and I bet most of the sandpaper work was done,” she pointed at the end of the handle, “here. See this patch? If you look a little bit more closely, it’s slightly whiter than the rest of the handle.”
“You’re right! It’s like the murderer is trying to scrape of the brand of the axe!”
“If my speculations are correct,” Rachel said as she took the axe carefully to her office, “this axe came out somewhere in a catalog book on hardware from a certain hardware store. Let me see if I can find it.”
Rachel stood before her shelf of books and scanned through the books in there. One specialty of Rachel was that she can spot a book anywhere if she kept her mind on it. Even if you hid a thin magazine in the middle of a collection of thick Guinness Book of Records, she’ll find it almost instantly. So Rebecca didn’t have to wait long until Rachel took out a catalog book with the company name in bold fancy letters: JOTHAN LO’S FIXIT & CO.
“See, right here. The exact same model,” Rachel flipped the pages and pointed at one of the axes in display.
“Well then, let’s pay this Jothan Lo a visit,” Rebecca said as she carefully bagged the axe and went out with Rachel to her car. After driving about 15 minutes or so, they soon found themselves right in front of the hardware store bearing the sing like the one in the catalog.
“Yup, that’s our store’s axe alright,” a man with long bright brown hair—obviously dyed—said as he sared at the axe in the evidence plastic bag held out to him by Rebecca once they were inside the store.
“How do you know it’s yours?” Rebecca asked, just to make sure.
“Of course I know it’s mine,” the man said proudly. “My grandfather, Jothan Lo—God bless his soul—have been working on this business since he’s 16 and this business has been carried down from generation to genereation. Of course I know the ins and outs of my products and I can spot someone using my store’s nails even from 5 miles away! Besides, only our store sells these handmade axes.”
“He’s right,” Rachel replied. “These axes are handmade and made in Thailand, an records show that only your company has contacts with Thailand for these axes.”
“Smart lil’ miss detective you are,” the man complimented with a grin.
“I thought you’re Jothan Lo,” Rebecca was surprised.
“Well, yeah, I’m Jothan Lo the 3rd. My grandfather was the first Jothan Lo of the Jothan Lo’s Fixit & Co. What about it?”
“Never mind,” Rachel shoved Rebecca aside and got right down to business. “Do you remember who bought this axe? Have you kept any record of it, say about more than a week ago?”
“As a matter of fact, I have,” Jothan Lo the 3rd replied as he went to get his record book. “Not much people buy axes these days—there’s nothing here to chop anyway—so I remember quite clearly who buys my axes. Although I’m not sure why a nice lady like her would want a bulky axe like that.”
“Lady?” Both Rachel and Rebecca lit up. “Did you say a lady bought this axe?”
“Yeah,” Jothan Lo the 3rd began describing her. “She’s about my height and has long dyed burgundy hair. I couldn’t see her yes though—she was wearing sunglasses. Oh, and she was wearing a really sexy blue dress, the one used to be very famous in the Cleo magazines. She just picked the axe and paid for it without saying a word. I thought she was mute. Is there something wrong, lil’ miss detectives?”
Rachel and Rebecca have just found themselves further away from solving the case.
Saturday, April 29, 2017
CSI: Asia-Chp10
CHAPTER 10: PAST HEARTBREAKS & PRESENT HEARTACHES
Justin was about to get started with Gary’s body when Jonathan came in. Judith didn’t attempt to follow him in this time. He came in alone. Justin looked up and noticed his head of crime lab standing at the head of the bed.
“Well, aren’t you as silent as a cat,” Justin grinned, then shifted his eyes behind Jonathan. “Hey, where’s Jude? I thought she always hang out with you.”
“Not this time, Justin,” Jonathan replied. “She had to go to the post office to mail her latest manga to this comic magazine company Gempak. Just when you think you couldn’t pay her enough out of this crime lab job, she’s out there making more for herself.”
“Oh?” Justin muttered while fitting on his surgical gloves. “What’s her manga about this time?”
“Something to do with blood and gore and love at the same time. I suppose her job influenced her artwork somehow. So, how’s our ‘involuntary organ donor’ doing?”
“I found a blood clot on the back of his head, probably hit by something hard and blunt,” Justin replied as he pried on Gary’s head. “I’ll have to say that this blow is just enough to knock him out. It’s not the cause of death.”
“Obviously not,” Jonathan rolled his eyes. “We’ve found the table lamp beside the bookshelf when we did our investigation at his house, with a trace of blood on it. We’ve taken that table lamp as evidence. What do you think about the kidney removal on his back?”
“I must say that I’m impressed with this,” Justin said as he turned Gary’s body around to expose the back, revealing the insides. “This is a very clean cut and what I can make of it is that whoever did this must be a true surgeon, ‘coz these cuts are most likely done using a scalpel.”
“You serious?” Jonathan was surprised.
“Yeah, take a look at this,” Justin said as he lifted the flap of the skin and showed the cut to Jonathan. “See this? It is a very, very neat and very clean cut. Not even a kitchen knife or a penknife could make it that clean. And look at the veins where the kidney is connected. It is cut professionally smooth and clear. Only a scalpel can fit into such edges and cut it without damaging anything part of the organs inside. Why do you think Gary could be still walking—or crawling, to be correct—if this were to be done using any other sharp object? He could’ve been dead in the midway of the kidney extraction.”
“I see your point,” Jonathan rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “You know, before Gary here died, he confessed to us about murdering Cliff.”
“Serious? He confessed as in literally or…?”
“He couldn’t exactly talk, but we got a testimony from him alright. He confessed murdering Cliff and all those stuff, it’s just that he didn’t get to tell us how he did it and how did he kill the Han siblings.”
“What, you’re suspecting him of being the murderer of Lionel Han’s brothers and sister too?” Justin looked at him, surprised.
“He said he didn’t do it, but you can’t be too careful about a dying person’s words.”
“I think he’s telling the truth, because what I’ve found from the murders of the Han siblings and Cliff’s murder, they don’t tally,” Justin said. “See, the person who killed the Han siblings had to go into their room through the window to kill them, which means he had to be a good climber and all. But look at Gary’s X-rays I took covering the whole body,” Justin held up a piece of X-ray film that showed the leg, “see, these slightly irregular setting of the joint and this small fracture mend of the bone indicates that not only Gary has dislocated his knee more than once, but he has also broke his thigh bone. I’ve checked his medical records and his physician said that after undergoing intense treatment and rehabilitation, he can’t do any other games except basketball, which he’s playing now. Which means…”
“He can’t even climb a tree without a ladder, let alone a wall of a house,” Jonathan said disappointedly, remembering that at the first crime scene in Lionel Han’s home, he never found a ladder of any kind.
“Exactly, so he really didn’t kill the Hans,” Justin pointed before taking out a surgical needle and some thread. “Besides, your girlfriend has already told me that she had suspicions about Gary being the murderer of Cliff.”
“She’s not my girl…Excuse me?” Jonathan was about to protest but soon stopped short. “Did you say Judith somehow knew that Gary was the one who killed Cliff?”
“Yeah. She said that Gary somehow accidentally revealed his crime while you guys were checking out the crime scene at Alor Setar at the concert stadium. You’d better ask her on that, don’t ask me.”
“Why is it that she tells everyone what she knows and yet she withholds it from me?” Jonathan muttered, his hands on his waist in annoyance.
“Guess she’s still a little sore. It’s not easy for a girl to forget her past, you know,” Justin replied nonchalantly as he sewed the body up. His nimble hands went in and out and were moving professionally fast that within no time, Gary’s wounds were sewn up and seemed like he had never died a scratch before.
“Oh, and I guess you know so much about girls,” Jonathan waved his arms sarcastically. “I can see the way she likes to hang out with you and eating together in front of corpses, and have no care of the world about whether or not you’ll contaminate the evidence on the corpse, and I can see the way you get along with her so well sharing your food and all. You like her, don’t you? Admit it.”
“I do like her, I don’t deny that,” Justin replied as he pulled a sheet and covered the body. “I’ve always liked her since the day she joined the CSI team. But when I saw you and her hanging out so much, I kinda assumed that she wasn’t available and that she was your girlfriend, that is, until she told me about her past with you. You know, from what I heard from her, I don’t think guys are supposed to treat their girlfriends the way you did…”
“You sneaky little nosy brat!” Jonathan hissed, his eyes glaring dangerously at the coroner. “I told you a thousand times, she is not my girl—”
“You know what?” Justin turned abruptly towards his head of the crime lab with a grudging look on his face, and as he spoke, he jabbed his finger onto Jonathan’s chest. “That is exactly the kind of attitude which made you single and a loner until now and that’s exactly the kind of attitude that made Jude dump you in the first place!”
Judith had just came back from the post office and was talking with Elaine while walking down the corridor of the crime lab. She was telling Elaine excitedly about her latest manga she just mailed to Gempak and Elaine was listening just as excitedly.
“And then the boyfriend, the vampire slayer, was shocked to find out that it was his girlfriend was actually the vampire that had killed his parents, can you imagine that?”
“Serious? You actually drew that? What’s next?”
“Then the boyfriend charged towards the girlfriend and was about to stake her when…”
“Judith, come here.”
Judith looked up and saw that it was Jonathan. His face looked pretty grave and all and he seemed like in a mood for punching the lights out of someone. Not that she never saw this kind of face before. She walked towards him nonchalantly.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“What is that I heard that you have already known that Gary was the one who killed Cliff?” Jonathan asked sternly. She was used to that tone.
“Oh, so Justin told you already? Well, then I won’t have to waste my breath explaining it to you again now, should I?”
“I thought all of us agreed upon telling their opinions and suspicions, no matter how small, to me first hand before anyone else.”
“My opinions are of my own and I tell it to whomever I please first. Besides, I probably had my fingers crossed,” Judith replied, folding her arms across her chest. “You’re not the boss of me anyway, well, at least not to me.”
“Hait, hait, you never liked being bossed around anyway, since you’ve been in the streets and an outlaw for so long,” Jonathan sighed, not wanting to argue. “Then would you mind telling me how did you know Gary was Cliff’s killer, at least?”
“Because he had made a slip-up when they got to the crime scene,” Judith replied. “See, they were making much of a racket—anyone would after seeing their friend’s dead body—and I couldn’t help hearing something. You and Rebecca have already taken down Cliff’s body from the tree and were examining him on the ground, and he was already off the tree when the rest of the gundan got there.”
“Yeah, so?” Jonathan was still waiting for the punch line.
“Well, you remember them yelling and shouting and hollering really devastating things when they saw Cliff’s body, right? If you try to remember carefully, what did Gary holler about?”
“That was 4 days ago! How can I remember something so distant as that?”
“Try. Think back. Try and remember what Gary hollered.”
“Well…” Jonathan tried to think back. “I think I do remember him saying that Cliff was hanging on the tree dead…”
His words stopped. A realization came to him and what Judith was trying to tell him made sense. He snapped his fingers, “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?! He couldn’t have any idea about Cliff’s situation of death if he didn’t kill him! We’ve already taken down his body but Gary said that Cliff was hanging on the tree dead! It was impossible for him to know that if he wasn’t at the scene of the crime!” (A/N: Read Chap 5 if you don’t get it)
“See? I knew you’d get it eventually,” Judith grinned.
“Jude, can I ask you something?” Jonathan asked after a moment’s silence.
“Fire away.”
“Are you…I mean are you still sore about…”
“Oops, gotta run!” Judith said abruptly, turning around and heading towards the direction of the analysis lab. “Got lots of work to do if we want to catch the murderer quick, you know.”
Jonathan grumbled and stared grudgingly at the leaving Judith, muttering under his breath, “You are always running away.”
“Oh, and by the way,” Judith turned around to face her head of the crime lab again, “just to make you happy, I also have a suspicion that this murder might be a chain murder.”
“A chain murder?” Jonathan eyed his co-worker curiously.
“Well, you know, as in the first to start the murder would be the next to kill and the person who kill the first murderer would be the next one to be killed again, and on and so forth. ‘Coz I’ve been thinking a lot on this case while we’re at it, and I realized that Cliff was murdered by Gary who in turn was the next victim to be dead. So I figured that it was Cliff who murdered those Han siblings, which is the start of it all. You might wanna check out his house to see if he has hidden any specific murder weapon. And also I think whoever killed Gary would be the next target to be killed. OK, see you around! Ja-ne!”
“Ma…Matte! What do you mean…” Again, Jonathan’s words stopped short. Another thought came through his head after hearing Judith’s theory. He stood there all alone on the corridor, oblivious to his surroundings for a minute there, his brain working as quickly and as calmly as he could.
Soon, he found himself rushing towards Rebecca’s office and asking her to issue a license for protective custody.
“You better remember not to turn on the lights, you lil’ brat! You know what a light sleeper I am and I don’t appreciate being waken up in the middle of the night!”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever.”
Nicholas glared at his brother Jasper warningly as the boy walked out of the room. He then turned back to his Space Impact game on his handphone, pressing furiously at the control panels trying to defeat the alien aircrafts that were shooting at his aircraft. Nicholas’s parents were outstation for the weekend so his younger brother Jasper, who was obviously thinner than him, decided to go out on a late-night movie with his friends to watch a premiere about some new battle space cum romance movie anime. He always had the knack to go out at night when their parents are not around, which is always as his father was a famous surgeon and his mother was an air stewardess.
He played and played for quite a long time until when he was finally done with the last level, the numbers on his digital clock were showing 1:25 a.m. He went off and cleaned himself up before getting ready for bed. After putting on his nightclothes, he turned off the lights and climbed up his bed, hoping that this time, his brother would remember not to turn the lights on. As he dozed off to sleep, the window of his bedroom quietly opened…
Jasper came back home at about 2:30 a.m. after watching the movie anime with his friends and was humming the theme song on his way into his house. He hummed the song while he took his shower, he hummed the song while brushing his teeth and he even hummed the song while he walked into the bedroom which he and his brother shared. As he entered the room, his hand automatically reached out for the light but the stern warning of his brother earlier before he left stopped him. Either that or he had a strange feeling that he would definitely not like what he might see if he turned on the light.
“You got lucky, bro,” Jasper whispered at his brother who was lying on his stomach not moving an inch. Looking at his brother sleeping like a log on the bed, he muttered to himself, “So much for being a light-sleeper.”
So it didn’t occur to him that he would find his brother already dead the next day on the bed with his throat slit and his blood staining the bed sheet and it definitely didn’t occur to him that he would see the wall having a message on it written in his brother’s blood, saying:
Justin was about to get started with Gary’s body when Jonathan came in. Judith didn’t attempt to follow him in this time. He came in alone. Justin looked up and noticed his head of crime lab standing at the head of the bed.
“Well, aren’t you as silent as a cat,” Justin grinned, then shifted his eyes behind Jonathan. “Hey, where’s Jude? I thought she always hang out with you.”
“Not this time, Justin,” Jonathan replied. “She had to go to the post office to mail her latest manga to this comic magazine company Gempak. Just when you think you couldn’t pay her enough out of this crime lab job, she’s out there making more for herself.”
“Oh?” Justin muttered while fitting on his surgical gloves. “What’s her manga about this time?”
“Something to do with blood and gore and love at the same time. I suppose her job influenced her artwork somehow. So, how’s our ‘involuntary organ donor’ doing?”
“I found a blood clot on the back of his head, probably hit by something hard and blunt,” Justin replied as he pried on Gary’s head. “I’ll have to say that this blow is just enough to knock him out. It’s not the cause of death.”
“Obviously not,” Jonathan rolled his eyes. “We’ve found the table lamp beside the bookshelf when we did our investigation at his house, with a trace of blood on it. We’ve taken that table lamp as evidence. What do you think about the kidney removal on his back?”
“I must say that I’m impressed with this,” Justin said as he turned Gary’s body around to expose the back, revealing the insides. “This is a very clean cut and what I can make of it is that whoever did this must be a true surgeon, ‘coz these cuts are most likely done using a scalpel.”
“You serious?” Jonathan was surprised.
“Yeah, take a look at this,” Justin said as he lifted the flap of the skin and showed the cut to Jonathan. “See this? It is a very, very neat and very clean cut. Not even a kitchen knife or a penknife could make it that clean. And look at the veins where the kidney is connected. It is cut professionally smooth and clear. Only a scalpel can fit into such edges and cut it without damaging anything part of the organs inside. Why do you think Gary could be still walking—or crawling, to be correct—if this were to be done using any other sharp object? He could’ve been dead in the midway of the kidney extraction.”
“I see your point,” Jonathan rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “You know, before Gary here died, he confessed to us about murdering Cliff.”
“Serious? He confessed as in literally or…?”
“He couldn’t exactly talk, but we got a testimony from him alright. He confessed murdering Cliff and all those stuff, it’s just that he didn’t get to tell us how he did it and how did he kill the Han siblings.”
“What, you’re suspecting him of being the murderer of Lionel Han’s brothers and sister too?” Justin looked at him, surprised.
“He said he didn’t do it, but you can’t be too careful about a dying person’s words.”
“I think he’s telling the truth, because what I’ve found from the murders of the Han siblings and Cliff’s murder, they don’t tally,” Justin said. “See, the person who killed the Han siblings had to go into their room through the window to kill them, which means he had to be a good climber and all. But look at Gary’s X-rays I took covering the whole body,” Justin held up a piece of X-ray film that showed the leg, “see, these slightly irregular setting of the joint and this small fracture mend of the bone indicates that not only Gary has dislocated his knee more than once, but he has also broke his thigh bone. I’ve checked his medical records and his physician said that after undergoing intense treatment and rehabilitation, he can’t do any other games except basketball, which he’s playing now. Which means…”
“He can’t even climb a tree without a ladder, let alone a wall of a house,” Jonathan said disappointedly, remembering that at the first crime scene in Lionel Han’s home, he never found a ladder of any kind.
“Exactly, so he really didn’t kill the Hans,” Justin pointed before taking out a surgical needle and some thread. “Besides, your girlfriend has already told me that she had suspicions about Gary being the murderer of Cliff.”
“She’s not my girl…Excuse me?” Jonathan was about to protest but soon stopped short. “Did you say Judith somehow knew that Gary was the one who killed Cliff?”
“Yeah. She said that Gary somehow accidentally revealed his crime while you guys were checking out the crime scene at Alor Setar at the concert stadium. You’d better ask her on that, don’t ask me.”
“Why is it that she tells everyone what she knows and yet she withholds it from me?” Jonathan muttered, his hands on his waist in annoyance.
“Guess she’s still a little sore. It’s not easy for a girl to forget her past, you know,” Justin replied nonchalantly as he sewed the body up. His nimble hands went in and out and were moving professionally fast that within no time, Gary’s wounds were sewn up and seemed like he had never died a scratch before.
“Oh, and I guess you know so much about girls,” Jonathan waved his arms sarcastically. “I can see the way she likes to hang out with you and eating together in front of corpses, and have no care of the world about whether or not you’ll contaminate the evidence on the corpse, and I can see the way you get along with her so well sharing your food and all. You like her, don’t you? Admit it.”
“I do like her, I don’t deny that,” Justin replied as he pulled a sheet and covered the body. “I’ve always liked her since the day she joined the CSI team. But when I saw you and her hanging out so much, I kinda assumed that she wasn’t available and that she was your girlfriend, that is, until she told me about her past with you. You know, from what I heard from her, I don’t think guys are supposed to treat their girlfriends the way you did…”
“You sneaky little nosy brat!” Jonathan hissed, his eyes glaring dangerously at the coroner. “I told you a thousand times, she is not my girl—”
“You know what?” Justin turned abruptly towards his head of the crime lab with a grudging look on his face, and as he spoke, he jabbed his finger onto Jonathan’s chest. “That is exactly the kind of attitude which made you single and a loner until now and that’s exactly the kind of attitude that made Jude dump you in the first place!”
Judith had just came back from the post office and was talking with Elaine while walking down the corridor of the crime lab. She was telling Elaine excitedly about her latest manga she just mailed to Gempak and Elaine was listening just as excitedly.
“And then the boyfriend, the vampire slayer, was shocked to find out that it was his girlfriend was actually the vampire that had killed his parents, can you imagine that?”
“Serious? You actually drew that? What’s next?”
“Then the boyfriend charged towards the girlfriend and was about to stake her when…”
“Judith, come here.”
Judith looked up and saw that it was Jonathan. His face looked pretty grave and all and he seemed like in a mood for punching the lights out of someone. Not that she never saw this kind of face before. She walked towards him nonchalantly.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“What is that I heard that you have already known that Gary was the one who killed Cliff?” Jonathan asked sternly. She was used to that tone.
“Oh, so Justin told you already? Well, then I won’t have to waste my breath explaining it to you again now, should I?”
“I thought all of us agreed upon telling their opinions and suspicions, no matter how small, to me first hand before anyone else.”
“My opinions are of my own and I tell it to whomever I please first. Besides, I probably had my fingers crossed,” Judith replied, folding her arms across her chest. “You’re not the boss of me anyway, well, at least not to me.”
“Hait, hait, you never liked being bossed around anyway, since you’ve been in the streets and an outlaw for so long,” Jonathan sighed, not wanting to argue. “Then would you mind telling me how did you know Gary was Cliff’s killer, at least?”
“Because he had made a slip-up when they got to the crime scene,” Judith replied. “See, they were making much of a racket—anyone would after seeing their friend’s dead body—and I couldn’t help hearing something. You and Rebecca have already taken down Cliff’s body from the tree and were examining him on the ground, and he was already off the tree when the rest of the gundan got there.”
“Yeah, so?” Jonathan was still waiting for the punch line.
“Well, you remember them yelling and shouting and hollering really devastating things when they saw Cliff’s body, right? If you try to remember carefully, what did Gary holler about?”
“That was 4 days ago! How can I remember something so distant as that?”
“Try. Think back. Try and remember what Gary hollered.”
“Well…” Jonathan tried to think back. “I think I do remember him saying that Cliff was hanging on the tree dead…”
His words stopped. A realization came to him and what Judith was trying to tell him made sense. He snapped his fingers, “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?! He couldn’t have any idea about Cliff’s situation of death if he didn’t kill him! We’ve already taken down his body but Gary said that Cliff was hanging on the tree dead! It was impossible for him to know that if he wasn’t at the scene of the crime!” (A/N: Read Chap 5 if you don’t get it)
“See? I knew you’d get it eventually,” Judith grinned.
“Jude, can I ask you something?” Jonathan asked after a moment’s silence.
“Fire away.”
“Are you…I mean are you still sore about…”
“Oops, gotta run!” Judith said abruptly, turning around and heading towards the direction of the analysis lab. “Got lots of work to do if we want to catch the murderer quick, you know.”
Jonathan grumbled and stared grudgingly at the leaving Judith, muttering under his breath, “You are always running away.”
“Oh, and by the way,” Judith turned around to face her head of the crime lab again, “just to make you happy, I also have a suspicion that this murder might be a chain murder.”
“A chain murder?” Jonathan eyed his co-worker curiously.
“Well, you know, as in the first to start the murder would be the next to kill and the person who kill the first murderer would be the next one to be killed again, and on and so forth. ‘Coz I’ve been thinking a lot on this case while we’re at it, and I realized that Cliff was murdered by Gary who in turn was the next victim to be dead. So I figured that it was Cliff who murdered those Han siblings, which is the start of it all. You might wanna check out his house to see if he has hidden any specific murder weapon. And also I think whoever killed Gary would be the next target to be killed. OK, see you around! Ja-ne!”
“Ma…Matte! What do you mean…” Again, Jonathan’s words stopped short. Another thought came through his head after hearing Judith’s theory. He stood there all alone on the corridor, oblivious to his surroundings for a minute there, his brain working as quickly and as calmly as he could.
Soon, he found himself rushing towards Rebecca’s office and asking her to issue a license for protective custody.
“You better remember not to turn on the lights, you lil’ brat! You know what a light sleeper I am and I don’t appreciate being waken up in the middle of the night!”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever.”
Nicholas glared at his brother Jasper warningly as the boy walked out of the room. He then turned back to his Space Impact game on his handphone, pressing furiously at the control panels trying to defeat the alien aircrafts that were shooting at his aircraft. Nicholas’s parents were outstation for the weekend so his younger brother Jasper, who was obviously thinner than him, decided to go out on a late-night movie with his friends to watch a premiere about some new battle space cum romance movie anime. He always had the knack to go out at night when their parents are not around, which is always as his father was a famous surgeon and his mother was an air stewardess.
He played and played for quite a long time until when he was finally done with the last level, the numbers on his digital clock were showing 1:25 a.m. He went off and cleaned himself up before getting ready for bed. After putting on his nightclothes, he turned off the lights and climbed up his bed, hoping that this time, his brother would remember not to turn the lights on. As he dozed off to sleep, the window of his bedroom quietly opened…
Jasper came back home at about 2:30 a.m. after watching the movie anime with his friends and was humming the theme song on his way into his house. He hummed the song while he took his shower, he hummed the song while brushing his teeth and he even hummed the song while he walked into the bedroom which he and his brother shared. As he entered the room, his hand automatically reached out for the light but the stern warning of his brother earlier before he left stopped him. Either that or he had a strange feeling that he would definitely not like what he might see if he turned on the light.
“You got lucky, bro,” Jasper whispered at his brother who was lying on his stomach not moving an inch. Looking at his brother sleeping like a log on the bed, he muttered to himself, “So much for being a light-sleeper.”
So it didn’t occur to him that he would find his brother already dead the next day on the bed with his throat slit and his blood staining the bed sheet and it definitely didn’t occur to him that he would see the wall having a message on it written in his brother’s blood, saying:
AREN’T YOU GLAD YOU DIDN’T TURN ON THE LIGHT?
CSI: Asia-Chp9
CHAPTER 9: ANOTHER CLUE IN THE BLUE
“Thank you very much.”
Jonathan took the piece of envelope given by one of the crime lab office boys with a satisfied look on his face. He had asked for a warrant to search Gary’s house after having a certain lead on the new backpack thanks to the clues given by Rebecca the fashion freak. He contacted his usual searching raid team Judith and Elaine to meet at the crime lab early so that they can go on their search. Rebecca wished to tag along too so that she could take pictures of the search raid.
The girls came as they promised they would and they all rode on Elaine’s car towards Gary’s home. On their way, Jonathan’s cell phone rang. He picked it up.
“Hello…? Uh-huh? Yeah? What? We’re on our way.”
“Who was that?” Rebecca asked.
“It’s the cops,” Jonathan replied. “It seems that the place where we’re going to raid actually turned into a crime scene.”
“I told you!” Rebecca exclaimed. “I told you we should give them protective custody! But do you listen? No~! Now look what happened!”
“Alright, alright,” Elaine grumbled, irritated. “We get the point already! Don’t try rubbing it in or anything!”
“Let’s just go there and we can do both a search and our usual CSI business,” Jonathan said authoritatively. “No point arguing. I’ve already said we’ll put this issue aside for the moment.”
When they got there, there were a few other police cars outside the house and an ambulance just leaving the house, its sirens blaring. The CSI members expected that Gary had been taken away and that they’ve just missed them. They got off the car and walked towards one of the officers who was asking questions at probably the father of Gary.
“Identification, please,” the officer, who was a Kadazan, stopped them from coming closer towards the house. They all flashed their badges at him.
“Chief Inspector Jonathan Mark David from the Crime Scene Investigation,” Jonathan said in usual formal way, “and these are my colleagues Detective Judith Lai, Elaine Majon and Rebecca Liew. One of your men called us here. What just happened here?”
“We have a crime scene here,” the officer replied. “Their eldest son, Gary Yap, was being cut open and his organ removed before he was left to die in the bath tub. He’s still alive though, lucky guy. You just missed him.”
“Which organ was he being removed of?” Judith suddenly stepped forward and asked.
“Do you have to know?” the officer asked with a disgusted look on his face before clearing his throat and replied, “Well, he got his kidneys gouged out, and the person who did it didn’t bother to sew him back up. His mother was shocked beyond words. She was so shocked, she just lost her voice altogether.”
Judith fell silent almost immediately. She dashed into the house without a word, ignoring the calls from her head of the crime lab, and stomped quickly into Gary’s room, careful not to step on anything important for investigation. She took a look inside the bathroom and saw the blood at the bottom of the tub beneath all the melting ice cubes and took one of the blood-soaked ice cubes to inspect. Her eyes then trailed all the way to the bedroom where a trail of thick-looking blood leading towards the bed was.
She did it all in silence, practically oblivious of the curious eyes of her CSI colleagues or the other officers. She was doing it so quickly, so mysteriously and so suddenly that her CSI colleagues didn’t where to continue. Finally she walked out of the house, taking the car keys abruptly from Elaine, and moved quickly towards the car, taking the driver’s seat. Jonathan told the officer to relocate the Yap family to a new place and keep this crime scene untouched so that they can do another thorough investigation before following behind Jude with the others. They all looked questioningly at their mysterious member of the team; they could never figure out what was really going on in his mind, really. As she started the car, Elaine laid a hand on hers to catch her attention.
“Jude, where exactly are we going? You’re doing that silent mysterious treatment again.”
“We have to go to the hospital quick and ask as much questions as we can before we lose Gary,” Judith replied, her eyes fixed to the road.
“And why is that?” Rebecca asked.
“Because he was attacked using another urban legend I read from one of Rach’s books—about a flight attendant being tricked by a couple of Japanese locals who were really organ thieves and got him really drunk before they removed his kidneys alive while he was unconscious. And judging by the blood in the tub and all the other blood on the carpet of his room, I’ll say he won’t be alive much longer, even with medical help.”
Jonathan, Judith, Elaine and Rebecca walked as quickly as they could down the corridor of the hospital where Gary was admitted. Jonathan asked for Gary’s room from the receptionist nurse and he was soon led by a superior-looking—maybe the head nurse—to the ICU centre. At upon reaching the ICU centre, the CSI members were told to wait outside Ward 321 while the head nurse walked into the ward and informed the doctor who was checking on Gary about their arrival. The doctor came out of the ward and shook hands with Jonathan.
“Good morning, Chief Inspector. I’m Dr. Tan,” the doctor introduced himself as he reached out to the girls to shake their hand. “I suppose you’re here for this boy’s case.”
“We sure are,” Jonathan replied. “What’s his condition, Dr. Tan?”
“Not too good,” Dr. Tan replied doubtfully. “We don’t think he’ll be able to survive through tonight. We have informed his parents of being ready for this coming. He’s been left in that bath tub for too long and his cut open back has been exposed for too long. Germs have infected it and he’s going down pretty quick. So if you have anything you want to ask him, make it quick, ‘coz his family is coming in later.”
The team nodded and made their way quietly into the ward and towards the bed where Gary was lying in. the doctor was right—he didn’t look too good and by the sight of it, one small nudge could make him fall into the pits of death. They had to move in quick.
“Gary? Gary, wake up,” Rebecca touched Gary lightly on the shoulder, taking him out of his slumber. Gary stirred a little and his eyes seemed to recognize the team.
“Sorry to wake you, slugger, but we have some important questions for you,” Jonathan said. “Do you think you can talk, maybe just a little?”
Gary moved his head a little side by side, indicating that he couldn’t. Elaine stepped up to him and said, “Here, this is my palm. Just tap once for ‘Yes’ and twice for ‘No’. We’ll get the picture.”
“The backpack you showed me that day when I sent you home from the concert,” Elaine started. “Is it really yours?”
There was no response from him. Judith could see from his eyes that he was hesitating.
“Tell the truth, Gary. No one is going to get you now. Is it really your backpack?”
A quivering hand from Gary reached out and tapped Elaine’s palm. Two taps. It was a ‘No’.
“It belonged to someone else, isn’t it? Someone from your group of friends?” Rebecca asked.
One tap. A ‘Yes’.
“Is it still in your home?” Jonathan asked.
Yes.
“Did you kill your friend Cliff?” Judith asked.
A hesitant ‘Yes’.
“Using Jeremy’s army knife?”
Yes.
“Did you commit the other murder too, the one on Lionel’s brothers and sister?” Elaine asked.
An immediate ‘No’.
“Is it? Are you really telling the truth about not killing Lionel’s siblings?” Jonathan looked at Gary skeptically.
Yes.
“Someone told you to murder Cliff, didn’t he?” Judith asked.
Yes.
Judith walked closer towards Gary and removed his breathing mask a little, bringing her face closer towards his mouth, “You can tell me who ordered you to kill. No one is going to get you. Tell me, who told you to kill Cliff?”
“Jude, his parents are here,” Elaine called out. Judith looked up and saw Gary’s parents talking to Dr. Tan and looking very devastated indeed.
“But, Mark David, he’s almost going to tell me. We’re having a real suspect here,” Judith said indignantly. “He’s about to tell me. He’s…”
“Jude, let it go,” Jonathan pulled her away and replaced the breathing mask over Gary’s mouth. “We need to think of his family out there. Don’t make him worse as it is.”
Judith knew what he meant. As much as she wanted to know who the real suspect to this crime was, she had to respect the family’s wishes to have their last words with him. Reluctantly, she moved away from the bed and followed her team out of the ward. As she walked out last from the ward, someone grabbed her sleeve. It was Gary’s little brother, looking at her with watery eyes.
“You’re a police, right? Have you caught the bad guy who hurt my brother?”
“No, not yet, sweetie,” Judith replied. “But we will. I promise.”
“And when you do,” the father suddenly voiced out determinedly, “don’t arrest him. You hear me? Don’t arrest him.”
She knew what Gary’s father meant.
Shoot at sight.
The CSI team was at Gary’s house again, doing a thorough search as written in their job description. They searched everywhere in Gary’s room to find the whereabouts of the backpack he claimed he had kept, but Jonathan found it instead dumped inside the dark tool shed in the backyard. He passed it to another fellow CSI to be brought to the crime lab for Rachel to analyze.
“There’s no sign of a break-in here,” Elaine said as she checked the perimeters. “The lock of the door wasn’t broken, the front door is a-OK and none of the windows showed any signs of forced entry. It seems as if the murderer knew his way in the house.”
“Just like the way the murderer knew his way into Lionel’s house,” Jonathan said. “I wonder how he knew how to get in without alerting the household…”
As if answering his question, his hand accidentally hit something hollow in the wall inside Gary’s closet. He tapped it for a few times and realized that it was making a lot of hollow sounds in it. He touched and felt the wall until his hand felt a small handle on it. He gestured for Judith to turn on the closet light and noticed that there was a seam on the wall that formed a small door. He gave it a little shove and the door opened outward.
“Speak of the devil, look at this, girls,” Jonathan said as he called for the girls to look at what he had found. Judith was the first to check it out—she always had a knack of being interested in new things. The other girls followed suite, turning on their torch lights at the process. The hallway was pretty dark and the walls which were made out of wood seriously needed a makeover, judging by the mould that has collected on it. The floor was pretty sandy and all as they went deeper and deeper into the dark passageway. When they finally came to the end of their dark ‘trip’, which was another door, Jonathan opened it and they soon realized that they were standing in the middle of a large wine cellar.
“Woah! Look at all these wine bottles!” Elaine exclaimed as she eyed greedily at all the wine bottles stashed into their racks. Judith took one and looked at the label.
“Wow, a 1970 Burgundy! Very good year, I reckon. I remember drinking this when I was Primary 6. Who’s got a cork opener?”
“Now’s not the time to start intoxicating yourself, you bakasaru!” Jonathan said sternly as he snatched the bottle away from Judith. “We got a case to solve here!”
“Hey, I found our way out!” Rebecca hollered, pointing at a short staircase that went upwards. The team walked towards the staircase and walked up. When they opened the door above, they found themselves staring at the tool shed just a few feet in front of them.
“Guess we know how our murderer got in,” Jonathan concluded before his cell phone rang. He answered it and looked pretty grave.
“Who was it, Mark David?” Judith asked after he hung up the phone.
“It was Justin. He had heard wind about Gary and had just received news that Gary has been officially dead. He’s requested the hospital to send him the body for autopsy. We gotta be there. And that means no eating in front of a corpse again, Jude!”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Judith replied, crossing her fingers behind her back.
“Thank you very much.”
Jonathan took the piece of envelope given by one of the crime lab office boys with a satisfied look on his face. He had asked for a warrant to search Gary’s house after having a certain lead on the new backpack thanks to the clues given by Rebecca the fashion freak. He contacted his usual searching raid team Judith and Elaine to meet at the crime lab early so that they can go on their search. Rebecca wished to tag along too so that she could take pictures of the search raid.
The girls came as they promised they would and they all rode on Elaine’s car towards Gary’s home. On their way, Jonathan’s cell phone rang. He picked it up.
“Hello…? Uh-huh? Yeah? What? We’re on our way.”
“Who was that?” Rebecca asked.
“It’s the cops,” Jonathan replied. “It seems that the place where we’re going to raid actually turned into a crime scene.”
“I told you!” Rebecca exclaimed. “I told you we should give them protective custody! But do you listen? No~! Now look what happened!”
“Alright, alright,” Elaine grumbled, irritated. “We get the point already! Don’t try rubbing it in or anything!”
“Let’s just go there and we can do both a search and our usual CSI business,” Jonathan said authoritatively. “No point arguing. I’ve already said we’ll put this issue aside for the moment.”
When they got there, there were a few other police cars outside the house and an ambulance just leaving the house, its sirens blaring. The CSI members expected that Gary had been taken away and that they’ve just missed them. They got off the car and walked towards one of the officers who was asking questions at probably the father of Gary.
“Identification, please,” the officer, who was a Kadazan, stopped them from coming closer towards the house. They all flashed their badges at him.
“Chief Inspector Jonathan Mark David from the Crime Scene Investigation,” Jonathan said in usual formal way, “and these are my colleagues Detective Judith Lai, Elaine Majon and Rebecca Liew. One of your men called us here. What just happened here?”
“We have a crime scene here,” the officer replied. “Their eldest son, Gary Yap, was being cut open and his organ removed before he was left to die in the bath tub. He’s still alive though, lucky guy. You just missed him.”
“Which organ was he being removed of?” Judith suddenly stepped forward and asked.
“Do you have to know?” the officer asked with a disgusted look on his face before clearing his throat and replied, “Well, he got his kidneys gouged out, and the person who did it didn’t bother to sew him back up. His mother was shocked beyond words. She was so shocked, she just lost her voice altogether.”
Judith fell silent almost immediately. She dashed into the house without a word, ignoring the calls from her head of the crime lab, and stomped quickly into Gary’s room, careful not to step on anything important for investigation. She took a look inside the bathroom and saw the blood at the bottom of the tub beneath all the melting ice cubes and took one of the blood-soaked ice cubes to inspect. Her eyes then trailed all the way to the bedroom where a trail of thick-looking blood leading towards the bed was.
She did it all in silence, practically oblivious of the curious eyes of her CSI colleagues or the other officers. She was doing it so quickly, so mysteriously and so suddenly that her CSI colleagues didn’t where to continue. Finally she walked out of the house, taking the car keys abruptly from Elaine, and moved quickly towards the car, taking the driver’s seat. Jonathan told the officer to relocate the Yap family to a new place and keep this crime scene untouched so that they can do another thorough investigation before following behind Jude with the others. They all looked questioningly at their mysterious member of the team; they could never figure out what was really going on in his mind, really. As she started the car, Elaine laid a hand on hers to catch her attention.
“Jude, where exactly are we going? You’re doing that silent mysterious treatment again.”
“We have to go to the hospital quick and ask as much questions as we can before we lose Gary,” Judith replied, her eyes fixed to the road.
“And why is that?” Rebecca asked.
“Because he was attacked using another urban legend I read from one of Rach’s books—about a flight attendant being tricked by a couple of Japanese locals who were really organ thieves and got him really drunk before they removed his kidneys alive while he was unconscious. And judging by the blood in the tub and all the other blood on the carpet of his room, I’ll say he won’t be alive much longer, even with medical help.”
Jonathan, Judith, Elaine and Rebecca walked as quickly as they could down the corridor of the hospital where Gary was admitted. Jonathan asked for Gary’s room from the receptionist nurse and he was soon led by a superior-looking—maybe the head nurse—to the ICU centre. At upon reaching the ICU centre, the CSI members were told to wait outside Ward 321 while the head nurse walked into the ward and informed the doctor who was checking on Gary about their arrival. The doctor came out of the ward and shook hands with Jonathan.
“Good morning, Chief Inspector. I’m Dr. Tan,” the doctor introduced himself as he reached out to the girls to shake their hand. “I suppose you’re here for this boy’s case.”
“We sure are,” Jonathan replied. “What’s his condition, Dr. Tan?”
“Not too good,” Dr. Tan replied doubtfully. “We don’t think he’ll be able to survive through tonight. We have informed his parents of being ready for this coming. He’s been left in that bath tub for too long and his cut open back has been exposed for too long. Germs have infected it and he’s going down pretty quick. So if you have anything you want to ask him, make it quick, ‘coz his family is coming in later.”
The team nodded and made their way quietly into the ward and towards the bed where Gary was lying in. the doctor was right—he didn’t look too good and by the sight of it, one small nudge could make him fall into the pits of death. They had to move in quick.
“Gary? Gary, wake up,” Rebecca touched Gary lightly on the shoulder, taking him out of his slumber. Gary stirred a little and his eyes seemed to recognize the team.
“Sorry to wake you, slugger, but we have some important questions for you,” Jonathan said. “Do you think you can talk, maybe just a little?”
Gary moved his head a little side by side, indicating that he couldn’t. Elaine stepped up to him and said, “Here, this is my palm. Just tap once for ‘Yes’ and twice for ‘No’. We’ll get the picture.”
“The backpack you showed me that day when I sent you home from the concert,” Elaine started. “Is it really yours?”
There was no response from him. Judith could see from his eyes that he was hesitating.
“Tell the truth, Gary. No one is going to get you now. Is it really your backpack?”
A quivering hand from Gary reached out and tapped Elaine’s palm. Two taps. It was a ‘No’.
“It belonged to someone else, isn’t it? Someone from your group of friends?” Rebecca asked.
One tap. A ‘Yes’.
“Is it still in your home?” Jonathan asked.
Yes.
“Did you kill your friend Cliff?” Judith asked.
A hesitant ‘Yes’.
“Using Jeremy’s army knife?”
Yes.
“Did you commit the other murder too, the one on Lionel’s brothers and sister?” Elaine asked.
An immediate ‘No’.
“Is it? Are you really telling the truth about not killing Lionel’s siblings?” Jonathan looked at Gary skeptically.
Yes.
“Someone told you to murder Cliff, didn’t he?” Judith asked.
Yes.
Judith walked closer towards Gary and removed his breathing mask a little, bringing her face closer towards his mouth, “You can tell me who ordered you to kill. No one is going to get you. Tell me, who told you to kill Cliff?”
“Jude, his parents are here,” Elaine called out. Judith looked up and saw Gary’s parents talking to Dr. Tan and looking very devastated indeed.
“But, Mark David, he’s almost going to tell me. We’re having a real suspect here,” Judith said indignantly. “He’s about to tell me. He’s…”
“Jude, let it go,” Jonathan pulled her away and replaced the breathing mask over Gary’s mouth. “We need to think of his family out there. Don’t make him worse as it is.”
Judith knew what he meant. As much as she wanted to know who the real suspect to this crime was, she had to respect the family’s wishes to have their last words with him. Reluctantly, she moved away from the bed and followed her team out of the ward. As she walked out last from the ward, someone grabbed her sleeve. It was Gary’s little brother, looking at her with watery eyes.
“You’re a police, right? Have you caught the bad guy who hurt my brother?”
“No, not yet, sweetie,” Judith replied. “But we will. I promise.”
“And when you do,” the father suddenly voiced out determinedly, “don’t arrest him. You hear me? Don’t arrest him.”
She knew what Gary’s father meant.
Shoot at sight.
The CSI team was at Gary’s house again, doing a thorough search as written in their job description. They searched everywhere in Gary’s room to find the whereabouts of the backpack he claimed he had kept, but Jonathan found it instead dumped inside the dark tool shed in the backyard. He passed it to another fellow CSI to be brought to the crime lab for Rachel to analyze.
“There’s no sign of a break-in here,” Elaine said as she checked the perimeters. “The lock of the door wasn’t broken, the front door is a-OK and none of the windows showed any signs of forced entry. It seems as if the murderer knew his way in the house.”
“Just like the way the murderer knew his way into Lionel’s house,” Jonathan said. “I wonder how he knew how to get in without alerting the household…”
As if answering his question, his hand accidentally hit something hollow in the wall inside Gary’s closet. He tapped it for a few times and realized that it was making a lot of hollow sounds in it. He touched and felt the wall until his hand felt a small handle on it. He gestured for Judith to turn on the closet light and noticed that there was a seam on the wall that formed a small door. He gave it a little shove and the door opened outward.
“Speak of the devil, look at this, girls,” Jonathan said as he called for the girls to look at what he had found. Judith was the first to check it out—she always had a knack of being interested in new things. The other girls followed suite, turning on their torch lights at the process. The hallway was pretty dark and the walls which were made out of wood seriously needed a makeover, judging by the mould that has collected on it. The floor was pretty sandy and all as they went deeper and deeper into the dark passageway. When they finally came to the end of their dark ‘trip’, which was another door, Jonathan opened it and they soon realized that they were standing in the middle of a large wine cellar.
“Woah! Look at all these wine bottles!” Elaine exclaimed as she eyed greedily at all the wine bottles stashed into their racks. Judith took one and looked at the label.
“Wow, a 1970 Burgundy! Very good year, I reckon. I remember drinking this when I was Primary 6. Who’s got a cork opener?”
“Now’s not the time to start intoxicating yourself, you bakasaru!” Jonathan said sternly as he snatched the bottle away from Judith. “We got a case to solve here!”
“Hey, I found our way out!” Rebecca hollered, pointing at a short staircase that went upwards. The team walked towards the staircase and walked up. When they opened the door above, they found themselves staring at the tool shed just a few feet in front of them.
“Guess we know how our murderer got in,” Jonathan concluded before his cell phone rang. He answered it and looked pretty grave.
“Who was it, Mark David?” Judith asked after he hung up the phone.
“It was Justin. He had heard wind about Gary and had just received news that Gary has been officially dead. He’s requested the hospital to send him the body for autopsy. We gotta be there. And that means no eating in front of a corpse again, Jude!”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Judith replied, crossing her fingers behind her back.
CSI: Asia-Chp8
CHAPTER 8: THE ANSWER TO A RIDDLE
“I suggest we give them protective custody.”
“No, I suggest not!”
After the long hours of interrogation and alibi confirmation, the remaining survivors of Lionel’s friends Gary, Jeremy and Nicholas were allowed to go home. The CSI team was in the recreational room discussing about the option of giving them protective custody. Rachel and Rebecca were for the motion and Judith and Elaine were against the motion. Justin was left in the background trying to pacify both sides. Only Jonathan was seated quietly at one end of the table listening to both sides bickering at each other.
“You gotta be crazy to let those kids go under protective custody!” Judith argued. “They are all suspects and we cannot just simply let them be reinstated to other homes. What if one of them decides to strike again and we have no idea who the target is next? We’re risking a life here!”
“Girls, there’s no need to fight…” Justin tried to calm the girls down.
“Well, if we don’t separate them and put them under protective custody, they might all end up being dead!” Rachel rebutted. “Our main priority is to protect the person that might be in danger of being the next target!”
“You can talk it out in a peaceful way…”
“But they are suspects, not next targets! At least I don’t believe they’re so!” Elaine argued.
“There’s always some truth in everything…”
“Well, what makes you think that they won’t be the next target? You tell me!” Rebecca said.
“Come on, you girls are friends…”
“SHUT UP, JUSTIN!!!” the girls yelled in unison at Justin who had been butting in their bickering since just now. Justin shrank away and out of the recreational room, quickening his pace towards the autopsy room. The girls glared venomously at Justin until he was completely out of sight before they continued on with their ‘debate’. Jonathan sighed at upon seeing this calamity and cleared his throat to get their attention.
“Girls, girls, girls, we are not going to go anywhere if we continue to argue like this,” Jonathan said as soon as he was sure that he had everyone’s attention. “There are humans’ lives at stake here and we’re not going to solve it just by bickering about protective custody.”
“Then what do you suggest we do, boss?” Elaine said sarcastically. “Are we in or out with this protective custody business? ‘Coz we got a psycho criminal out there to bust.”
“Well, Rach, Becka,” Jonathan turned to the girls who were for the motion, “I agree that the remaining friends of Lionel could be in danger and should be protected and all,” then turned to the girls against the motion, “but you, Jude and Elaine, have a point too, that they are all our suspects. Besides I, for one, think that it’s not only them being in danger of another murder, but the rest of the basketball team as well, judging by the interrogation and the statement from Nicholas. We can’t put all the team members under protective custody, and we sure cannot afford relocating our suspects and risk the other people too.”
“And your point is?” Judith asked with her hands on her hips.
“The point is,” Jonathan gave her an authoritative look, “we’ll keep on a lookout. We’ll put the protective custody on hold for a while and see what happens. We’ll request the department to deploy some men to watch over the suspects’/victims’ places and see if there is anything suspicious going on before we decide on the custody thing. We don’t want to do anything rash in these circumstances, got it?”
“Fine, whatever,” the girls, after staring at the head of the CSI skeptically, finally came to a reluctant agreement before they dispersed to do their other investigation on the case. Rebecca stayed behind for a moment to gather the mugs they have been drinking. She has a tendency for household cleanliness and she rarely let others do the work—not even the janitor who comes to clean the offices.
“You’re doing this for Jude, aren’t you?” Rebecca suddenly asked.
“What?” Jonathan turned to her with a surprised look on his face.
“Come on now, Jon, don’t play games with me. I know a person who is still sore about the past when I see one. Now, you’re doing this for Jude, aren’t you? You yourself think that those kids should get protective custody, don’t you? I know your mind is with us, but you’re trying to make Jude feel happy after the time in college…”
“Whatever my decision is, it has nothing to do with personal issues,” Jonathan replied as he glared venomously at Rebecca. “I’m the head of the crime lab and I call the shots, and I say we put the protective custody thing on hold for a while until the situation says otherwise.”
Rebecca stared back at Jonathan long and hard before she finally let out a sigh and shrugged, “OK, Jon. Like you said, you’re the boss. You call the shots.”
“Becka, what do you know about the backpack Gary brought to the concert that night?” Jonathan suddenly asked her after a momentary silence. Rebecca was about to leave the room when he asked that question.
“Only that it is the limited edition, most exclusive backpack of the century which has become the latest teen craze in the world!” Rebecca said enthusiastically. “I tell you, that backpack is absolutely fantastic and it is the latest creation by Polo Sports. The design and sewing and the textile to make this backpack is simply out of this world. Only 1000 items sold worldwide! My boyfriend was lucky to buy it in Vancouver and he got it just for me!”
“Do you have it with you?”
“Yes, of course,” Rebecca replied, then noticed the look on Jonathan’s face before she continued, “I reckon you want me to bring it to you so that you can have a look-see?”
“Absolutely.”
A few minutes later, Rebecca came back into the recreational room with a backpack held in her hand. She handed it to Jonathan and gave him a don’t-ruin-it warning look. Jonathan nodded and inspected the backpack. It was a rich canvas colour with a few dark brown here and there, especially on the straps and on the bottom of the backpack. He opened the backpack and took a look inside. He could see some of Rebecca’s personal things in there with some files and a whole lot of paper.
“Well, I can see that it looks more or less a normal backpack,” Jonathan said as he finished inspecting the backpack and handed it to Rebecca. “Nothing much special in here.”
“Wait,” Rebecca said as she emptied her backpack of its contents. “This is the cool part.”
As Jonathan watched, she reached down towards the bottom of her backpack and pulled something. Jonathan thought he heard a sound of a zip opening and peered into the backpack. Rebecca beamed as she showed him the bottom of the backpack opened to reveal more empty space in it. Jonathan looked back at Rebecca questioningly.
“I didn’t know that there’s extra space in the bottom of this backpack.”
“Ah, now that’s the beauty of it,” Rebecca said as she demonstrated the way she slipped the excess opening flap into an invisible pouch on the back of the backpack. “You see, the designers made the back of the backpack a wee bit thicker so that they can fit the pouch in to keep this excess flap, and the colour makes the pouch invisible so that those who are very appearance-conscious won’t have to worry about the ugly pouch protruding and stuff. In fact, the design made it not protruding. And the wonderful thing is, the sewing of this extra space of the backpack is done so perfectly and so professionally from the outside that you wouldn’t even notice that there is this extra space existing on this backpack…”
Her words were stopped short when Jonathan held up his hand abruptly. He took the backpack and looked into it real carefully. He felt for the pouch and slowly pulled out the excess flap. He fingered the zip that was in the bottom of the backpack and eyed at the sewing and the handy work. When he looked up at Rebecca, her face showed that she had more or less figured out what he was trying to do.
“I think,” Jonathan rubbed his chin thoughtfully as his lips slowly creased into a small grin, “we need to issue a search warrant.”
While the CSI team carried on with their late hours at the office, the whole housing estate of Taman Sungai where Gary lived was silent as everyone has tucked in quietly into their beds and slipping into their peaceful slumber. Only some houses were still lit in the dead of the night, and that includes Gary’s room.
Inside Gary’s room, his radio was on, playing the song ‘Numb’ by Linkin Park. He had just come home from clubbing with a few of his long-time-no-see primary school friends and he smelt seriously of cigarette smoke and alcohol. He took a whiff of himself and wrinkled his nose.
“Phew! I seriously need a shower, or Mom’s gonna kick my ass for this,” Gary muttered to himself as he moved towards the bathroom. He turned on the water faucet and let the water run while he undressed himself off his dirty, smelly clothes.
He was so engrossed in doing his own thing and listening to the music that he didn’t hear a small creak coming from behind him. He didn’t hear someone creeping from behind him and he didn’t even hear the perpetrator taking his table lamp from his table. Only when he turned around wanting to prepare a clean set of clothing he saw something blurry coming towards his face and knocking him out cold…
Gary groaned and slowly stirred. His aching head throbbed as he tried to recall where he was and what just happened. Everything had happened way too fast—he remembered something hitting his head but couldn’t remember who aimed that thing on his head. He looked around and found himself in the bathroom. How long had he been out? How long had he been unconscious? Judging by the light streaming into his bathroom through the window, he reckoned that it could have been a very long time.
That’s when he realized that his whole body was popping goose bumps and he was feeling extremely cold. He looked down and saw that he was in the bath tub filled with ice. He took one absentmindedly and stared at it for a while, realizing that it was real ice cubes. He wasn’t dreaming; he was actually in a tub filled with ice cubes and he was completely naked. What happened? He was about to take a shower last night and found himself like this. What was going on?
As he slowly tried to get up, he felt a really sharp pain in his abdomen. It was as if he was being stabbed or somewhat. He crawled painfully out of the bath tub and moved slowly towards the cordless phone he had on his bed. The pain was increasing and getting unbearable and he felt as if he wanted to throw up. He had to get a doctor and quick. He couldn’t stand the pain. When he was getting closer towards the phone, his mother came in unannounced, her face looking quite displeased.
“Young man, you’re getting late for school! Now get your butt off bed and—”
Her angry words were immediately cut short and a bloodcurdling scream escaped her lips.
She was staring at her son bleeding with a half-opened bloody back that exposed his spinal cord.
“I suggest we give them protective custody.”
“No, I suggest not!”
After the long hours of interrogation and alibi confirmation, the remaining survivors of Lionel’s friends Gary, Jeremy and Nicholas were allowed to go home. The CSI team was in the recreational room discussing about the option of giving them protective custody. Rachel and Rebecca were for the motion and Judith and Elaine were against the motion. Justin was left in the background trying to pacify both sides. Only Jonathan was seated quietly at one end of the table listening to both sides bickering at each other.
“You gotta be crazy to let those kids go under protective custody!” Judith argued. “They are all suspects and we cannot just simply let them be reinstated to other homes. What if one of them decides to strike again and we have no idea who the target is next? We’re risking a life here!”
“Girls, there’s no need to fight…” Justin tried to calm the girls down.
“Well, if we don’t separate them and put them under protective custody, they might all end up being dead!” Rachel rebutted. “Our main priority is to protect the person that might be in danger of being the next target!”
“You can talk it out in a peaceful way…”
“But they are suspects, not next targets! At least I don’t believe they’re so!” Elaine argued.
“There’s always some truth in everything…”
“Well, what makes you think that they won’t be the next target? You tell me!” Rebecca said.
“Come on, you girls are friends…”
“SHUT UP, JUSTIN!!!” the girls yelled in unison at Justin who had been butting in their bickering since just now. Justin shrank away and out of the recreational room, quickening his pace towards the autopsy room. The girls glared venomously at Justin until he was completely out of sight before they continued on with their ‘debate’. Jonathan sighed at upon seeing this calamity and cleared his throat to get their attention.
“Girls, girls, girls, we are not going to go anywhere if we continue to argue like this,” Jonathan said as soon as he was sure that he had everyone’s attention. “There are humans’ lives at stake here and we’re not going to solve it just by bickering about protective custody.”
“Then what do you suggest we do, boss?” Elaine said sarcastically. “Are we in or out with this protective custody business? ‘Coz we got a psycho criminal out there to bust.”
“Well, Rach, Becka,” Jonathan turned to the girls who were for the motion, “I agree that the remaining friends of Lionel could be in danger and should be protected and all,” then turned to the girls against the motion, “but you, Jude and Elaine, have a point too, that they are all our suspects. Besides I, for one, think that it’s not only them being in danger of another murder, but the rest of the basketball team as well, judging by the interrogation and the statement from Nicholas. We can’t put all the team members under protective custody, and we sure cannot afford relocating our suspects and risk the other people too.”
“And your point is?” Judith asked with her hands on her hips.
“The point is,” Jonathan gave her an authoritative look, “we’ll keep on a lookout. We’ll put the protective custody on hold for a while and see what happens. We’ll request the department to deploy some men to watch over the suspects’/victims’ places and see if there is anything suspicious going on before we decide on the custody thing. We don’t want to do anything rash in these circumstances, got it?”
“Fine, whatever,” the girls, after staring at the head of the CSI skeptically, finally came to a reluctant agreement before they dispersed to do their other investigation on the case. Rebecca stayed behind for a moment to gather the mugs they have been drinking. She has a tendency for household cleanliness and she rarely let others do the work—not even the janitor who comes to clean the offices.
“You’re doing this for Jude, aren’t you?” Rebecca suddenly asked.
“What?” Jonathan turned to her with a surprised look on his face.
“Come on now, Jon, don’t play games with me. I know a person who is still sore about the past when I see one. Now, you’re doing this for Jude, aren’t you? You yourself think that those kids should get protective custody, don’t you? I know your mind is with us, but you’re trying to make Jude feel happy after the time in college…”
“Whatever my decision is, it has nothing to do with personal issues,” Jonathan replied as he glared venomously at Rebecca. “I’m the head of the crime lab and I call the shots, and I say we put the protective custody thing on hold for a while until the situation says otherwise.”
Rebecca stared back at Jonathan long and hard before she finally let out a sigh and shrugged, “OK, Jon. Like you said, you’re the boss. You call the shots.”
“Becka, what do you know about the backpack Gary brought to the concert that night?” Jonathan suddenly asked her after a momentary silence. Rebecca was about to leave the room when he asked that question.
“Only that it is the limited edition, most exclusive backpack of the century which has become the latest teen craze in the world!” Rebecca said enthusiastically. “I tell you, that backpack is absolutely fantastic and it is the latest creation by Polo Sports. The design and sewing and the textile to make this backpack is simply out of this world. Only 1000 items sold worldwide! My boyfriend was lucky to buy it in Vancouver and he got it just for me!”
“Do you have it with you?”
“Yes, of course,” Rebecca replied, then noticed the look on Jonathan’s face before she continued, “I reckon you want me to bring it to you so that you can have a look-see?”
“Absolutely.”
A few minutes later, Rebecca came back into the recreational room with a backpack held in her hand. She handed it to Jonathan and gave him a don’t-ruin-it warning look. Jonathan nodded and inspected the backpack. It was a rich canvas colour with a few dark brown here and there, especially on the straps and on the bottom of the backpack. He opened the backpack and took a look inside. He could see some of Rebecca’s personal things in there with some files and a whole lot of paper.
“Well, I can see that it looks more or less a normal backpack,” Jonathan said as he finished inspecting the backpack and handed it to Rebecca. “Nothing much special in here.”
“Wait,” Rebecca said as she emptied her backpack of its contents. “This is the cool part.”
As Jonathan watched, she reached down towards the bottom of her backpack and pulled something. Jonathan thought he heard a sound of a zip opening and peered into the backpack. Rebecca beamed as she showed him the bottom of the backpack opened to reveal more empty space in it. Jonathan looked back at Rebecca questioningly.
“I didn’t know that there’s extra space in the bottom of this backpack.”
“Ah, now that’s the beauty of it,” Rebecca said as she demonstrated the way she slipped the excess opening flap into an invisible pouch on the back of the backpack. “You see, the designers made the back of the backpack a wee bit thicker so that they can fit the pouch in to keep this excess flap, and the colour makes the pouch invisible so that those who are very appearance-conscious won’t have to worry about the ugly pouch protruding and stuff. In fact, the design made it not protruding. And the wonderful thing is, the sewing of this extra space of the backpack is done so perfectly and so professionally from the outside that you wouldn’t even notice that there is this extra space existing on this backpack…”
Her words were stopped short when Jonathan held up his hand abruptly. He took the backpack and looked into it real carefully. He felt for the pouch and slowly pulled out the excess flap. He fingered the zip that was in the bottom of the backpack and eyed at the sewing and the handy work. When he looked up at Rebecca, her face showed that she had more or less figured out what he was trying to do.
“I think,” Jonathan rubbed his chin thoughtfully as his lips slowly creased into a small grin, “we need to issue a search warrant.”
While the CSI team carried on with their late hours at the office, the whole housing estate of Taman Sungai where Gary lived was silent as everyone has tucked in quietly into their beds and slipping into their peaceful slumber. Only some houses were still lit in the dead of the night, and that includes Gary’s room.
Inside Gary’s room, his radio was on, playing the song ‘Numb’ by Linkin Park. He had just come home from clubbing with a few of his long-time-no-see primary school friends and he smelt seriously of cigarette smoke and alcohol. He took a whiff of himself and wrinkled his nose.
“Phew! I seriously need a shower, or Mom’s gonna kick my ass for this,” Gary muttered to himself as he moved towards the bathroom. He turned on the water faucet and let the water run while he undressed himself off his dirty, smelly clothes.
He was so engrossed in doing his own thing and listening to the music that he didn’t hear a small creak coming from behind him. He didn’t hear someone creeping from behind him and he didn’t even hear the perpetrator taking his table lamp from his table. Only when he turned around wanting to prepare a clean set of clothing he saw something blurry coming towards his face and knocking him out cold…
Gary groaned and slowly stirred. His aching head throbbed as he tried to recall where he was and what just happened. Everything had happened way too fast—he remembered something hitting his head but couldn’t remember who aimed that thing on his head. He looked around and found himself in the bathroom. How long had he been out? How long had he been unconscious? Judging by the light streaming into his bathroom through the window, he reckoned that it could have been a very long time.
That’s when he realized that his whole body was popping goose bumps and he was feeling extremely cold. He looked down and saw that he was in the bath tub filled with ice. He took one absentmindedly and stared at it for a while, realizing that it was real ice cubes. He wasn’t dreaming; he was actually in a tub filled with ice cubes and he was completely naked. What happened? He was about to take a shower last night and found himself like this. What was going on?
As he slowly tried to get up, he felt a really sharp pain in his abdomen. It was as if he was being stabbed or somewhat. He crawled painfully out of the bath tub and moved slowly towards the cordless phone he had on his bed. The pain was increasing and getting unbearable and he felt as if he wanted to throw up. He had to get a doctor and quick. He couldn’t stand the pain. When he was getting closer towards the phone, his mother came in unannounced, her face looking quite displeased.
“Young man, you’re getting late for school! Now get your butt off bed and—”
Her angry words were immediately cut short and a bloodcurdling scream escaped her lips.
She was staring at her son bleeding with a half-opened bloody back that exposed his spinal cord.
CSI: Asia-Chp7
CHAPTER 7: INTERROGATION OF SUSPECTS
Jeremy was seated in front of Jonathan and Rachel looking confused. He was barely awake that morning when his mother told him that Jonathan and Rachel has come to arrest him for suspected murder, and he was dragged to the crime lab without even having a chance to eat the waffles his mother made for breakfast. Inside the air-conditioned room, the atmosphere was tense.
“Hey, what exactly am I doing here, officer?” Jeremy asked as he looked around him. “If you’re accusing me of murder, I think you got the wrong guy.”
“Oh? Are you sure?” Jonathan asked. “Evidence doesn’t lie like humans do, you know?”
So saying, he slid the plastic bag that contained the army knife in front of Jeremy and a picture of Cliff’s body in front of him. Jeremy let out a moan of disgust and horror at upon seeing the picture of his dead friend and looked away, unable to bear the sight of it. Rachel took the picture away but the knife remained.
“Now tell me, Jeremy,” Jonathan started his questioning. “Where were you exactly during the death of your friend Cliff Chang? Were you really in the toilet taking a leak like you claimed to be at when my co-worker questioned you?”
“I’ve told your co-worker, I went to the toilet in the middle of the concert. I only realized that Cliff has ditched us after the concert! I didn’t kill Cliff! He’s my best friend, how could I kill him?”
“Jeremy, is this your army knife?” Rachel asked as she pointed at the knife in the basket.
“So what if it is?” Jeremy replied.
“Yes or no, Jeremy. Is that your knife?” Jonathan asked.
“Yes, that’s my knife. How did that get here?”
“How would you say that this is your knife?”
“See this little marker highlighted there?” Jeremy said as he pointed at the knife handle. Sure enough, there was a diamond-shaped sign on the handle. It looked pretty old, but it was still there alright. “This is how I know that this knife is mine. I had to keep track of my own knife because there had been a lot of theft in my club. Oh, my club is…”
“We know,” Jonathan said. “I’ve checked your records. You are pretty much a studious person that a jock. You entered the Chess Club, the Literature Club and besides being in the basketball team, you’re also the only one among your gundam to be a member of the Scouts Club. What are you, a Brownie?”
“Somewhat,” Jeremy replied. “How did my knife get here? I’ve been looking for it everywhere.”
“That’s what we like to ask you, sonny boy. We found it under the Perodua Rusa which belonged to your friend Cliff. Now how did it get there? You tell me, Jeremy.”
“What?! Are you trying to tell me that I killed Cliff? That’s ridiculous! I lost that knife the day before the concert and I just simply can’t find it. And now it so happened to turn out in Cliff’s car and you’re suddenly accusing me of killing him?! I can sue you for false accusation! My uncle’s a lawyer and he’ll sue the socks off you!” Jeremy exclaimed in disbelief and anger, well a timid sort of anger, that is.
“Yes, yes, well, I’m sure he will,” Jonathan replied nonchalantly as his hand reached dangerously towards the gun hidden in his coat. “But I bet I’m going to win the case when the jury finds out that you killed Cliff out of revenge, you know, the prank they played on you during the end of PMR celebration.”
“Wha…?” Jeremy’s eyes widened as he seemed to remember that fateful day. He looked sideways awkwardly, “That…That was a long time ago…”
“Really? But not long enough to suppress the hate inside you, does it?” Jonathan asked, satisfied to see that he had caught Jeremy’s sensitive spot. “You hate them pulling the prank on you so much that you are willing to kill them for revenge, right? That’ll show them for leaving you in that dark storeroom for hours.”
“This is crazy! I wouldn’t kill anyone just because of a measly prank! We were young, and I don’t hold grudges like some people do!” Jeremy exclaimed. “And even if I did kill anyone, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to hide something so conspicuous like my own knife! And like you said, I’m afraid of the dark and that place is pretty dark. I wouldn’t go out there to kill him even if my life depends on it.”
“Then where were you really?” Rachel folded her arms across her chest. “I find it hard to believe that you have just left the place to take a leak. Judging by the ticket of your concert I got from my co-worker, your seats are quite far away, leaving you plenty of time to get out of there, commit the murder and squeeze through the crowd to come back to your seats.”
“Like I said, I went to the toilet. If you don’t believe me, you can call my old primary classmate Yong Chung Wee; we came across each other in the toilet and talked for a while before we left to find our seat. And if you still don’t believe me,” Jeremy banged his palm on the table, just to make his timid self look tough, “I’ll be seeing you in court.”
“Huh? Me? Murder? You gotta be shitting me!”
It was Gary being questioned at another room by Judith and Elaine and, as our CSI members expected, he went into a state of denial. Judith leaned towards Gary and said, “Are you sure? I’ve heard from your past that you were pretty cool in handling cars and you used to take a part-time job at your granduncle’s car repairs shop. Someone as smart as you could’ve easily know where to hide a murder weapon in the last place no one would even think of looking—right under the car at a very specific inconspicuous spot like the exhaust pipe.”
“So what if I knew the ins and outs of a car?” Gary said. “That doesn’t mean I’m a murderer!”
“Oh? But from what I heard, you have paid a visit to Jeremy’s house the day before the concert to borrow his homework because you didn’t finish yours,” Elaine said as she lit a cigarette and took a whiff of it. “He had come back from his scouting trip but hadn’t exactly had the time to put away all his scouting equipment and your busybody attitude ran through all his scouting stuff. You could’ve swiped away his army knife without him looking. After all, we did find the murder weapon under the car and it’s evident that the army knife belonged to Jeremy.”
“Besides,” Judith continued as she took the cigarette from Elaine’s mouth and took a whiff of it herself, “you told my friend here that you’ve ran off to buy neon lights for the gang, and the only way to get those neon lights was to go outside. What do you say to that?”
“Look, there were so many people who might have seen me buying the neon lights,” Gary said. “And the neon light seller was an old pal of mine. He’ll tell you that I’ve bought the lights from him. Besides, you got no prints on the knife that shows that it was me, didn’t you? And you got no prints on the car that has my name on it and no one saw me going to the spot where Cliff was making out. I only realized he was gone after the concert. If I have bought the lights before I killed Cliff, someone would’ve noticed me like a human neon walking with shining neon lights in my pockets and if I bought the lights after I killed Cliff, anyone would’ve seen me with blood all over my clothes. Now isn’t that a silly thing for me to do?”
“You were carrying a backpack with you,” Elaine pointed out. “Your friends saw you leaving the concert and coming back with the backpack all the time. You told me when I was sending you guys home that you used it to carry food supplies. You could’ve hidden something else in there, something that is a non-food item.”
“Maybe I was a little overprotective about my bag,” Gary waved her accusation away. “Who wouldn’t if it is the newest backpack in the century and also with only 1000 items sold worldwide? You would be protective about it too! Besides I’ve opened the backpack for you to see, haven’t I? It’s pretty much half-empty of its food.”
“You’re good,” Judith complemented, smirking as she folded her arms across her chest. “Considering the fact that you have been doing quite a time in the teenage correctional institute for mugging a shopkeeper and attempt to stab him so that he wouldn’t have a chance to call the police.”
“Hey, that was a long time ago and I don’t appreciate you bringing it up!” Gary growled, looking offended. “I’ve did my time and it wasn’t easy for me to start anew here! Besides, mystery movies have always been my second love. I watch it all the time. Now if you’ll excuse me, I got a date with my girlfriend Luciana in about 10 minutes…”
“Woah, wait!” Elaine stopped him short. “Did you say your girlfriend is Luciana Lo, the daughter of one of the most influential female politician and a child prodigy in music?”
“Yeah. She’s been pretty cool in her violin and piano and all, and filthy rich too,” Gary replied proudly. “It’s not easy for me to tackle her and if she ever finds out I’ve been in the institution and here being questioned by you cops, everything will down into the drains! I’ve already been embarrassed enough for being confiscated of the knife I brought for ERT class in front of her.”
“You’re in ERT? I thought you’re in Form 4 and KH isn’t supposed to be in your subject anymore,” Judith lit up.
“Yeah, well, in our school, no matter what grade are you in, KH is still part of the syllabus. And I took ERT just to be with Luciana. Lionel borrowed me a knife because we’re required to bring our own knife for that day and I don’t have one—my family doesn’t cook; we just eat microwave-heated food or fast food. So I was being a show-off, but the teacher didn’t have to confiscate it.”
“Tough school, tough life. It gets old,” Judith muttered.
“So can I go now?”
At another room, Rebecca and Justin were interrogating the fat and jolly Nicholas. Justin had not much work to do in his coroner business, so he’d like to try out the interrogation. So far, among the three people being questioned, Nicholas looked the most relaxed. It was as if none of this really bothered him.
“You look awfully jolly for some one who just lost his best friend in a gruesome murder,” Justin eyed at him suspiciously.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong, officer,” Nicholas said. “I’m feeling very bad about all this, really, I do. But the problem is I was brought up to look at the bright side of life by my parents. So whenever something bad happens, I always keep a good mind in my head that at least it didn’t happen to me.”
“Of course it didn’t happen to you, and you’re glad of that,” Rebecca said. “That’s because you’re the one who committed the murder. Murders, if you include Lionel’s brothers and sister.”
“Me? Murder my friends? Now that’s simply impossible,” Nicholas laughed. “Why would I want to kill my friend? I have nothing against him, lest have anything against Lionel’s siblings. Or even Cliff for that matter.”
“Gee, I’m not so sure,” Rebecca said in a mock tone. “Maybe you can tell us, judging by the far away seat you and your friends got from the concert and enough time to sneak off to disembowel Cliff and come back just in time to meet your friends who came back from the toilet and from neon light-shopping respectively.”
“Look, all I can say is that I have nothing against them or have a grudge on anyone of them and I wouldn’t get so cracked up to kill them even if I do have a grudge on them. Like I said, I see things on the bright side. Even if they did do me wrong, I would always believe that they will get what they deserve and that it would hurt them more than it would hurt me later. Besides, even if I want to kill them, I couldn’t. Look at me,” Nicholas held out his hands and showed his large body to them. “I’m like a sumo player! I stand out like a sore thumb! The only reason that the coach chose me to be part of the basketball team is because I serve as the best human wall to block the opponents. I would’ve left evidence everywhere!”
“You got a point there,” Justin said. “The pressure on those wounds on the victims looked like they’ve done by someone who is of a medium-sized person trying to force it in.”
“Anyway, if they ever have anything against me,” Nicholas continued, “I know just the thing to counter them—I know loads of their secrets. Well, majority of it were Jeremy, Gary and Cliff, that is.”
“What secrets? Well, that is, if you don’t mind telling me,” Rebecca asked, loving a gossip or two.
“Well, don’t tell anyone, will you?” Nicholas said as he brought himself closer towards the two CSI officers. “We swore never to tell a soul and all. Our Cliff here, well, you officers know he had a habit of picking up girls just like he did that night. Like your boss said, he had been hanging with a girl too many, ‘coz there’s once he knocked up a girl so hard, he got her pregnant. Phew! I gotta tell you, that girl was so frustrated that she really took the liberty of finding his whereabouts and almost caused a riot. If it weren’t for Cliff having his own bank account and stored enough bucks for himself, his parents would’ve found out about that and he wouldn’t have the chance to persuade her to get rid of the baby.”
“Cliff paid the girl to abort the baby? That’s too cruel!” Justin exclaimed, speaking for Rebecca who also had the same idea herself.
“The girl was only too happy to do it. She came from a very strict family and keeping the baby was not an option,” Nicholas said nonchalantly. “Jeremy, on the other hand, besides having a serious fear of the dark, was always the victim of almost everyone in the basketball team.”
“I’m sure you guys know it already,” Rebecca noted.
“Oh, we know. But Lionel doesn’t know that. He only knows about Gary’s secret and Cliff’s. He also doesn’t even know that Jeremy was actually a part-time night tuition teacher and had helped his siblings with their studies, and he doesn’t know that they were giving him a hard time during lessons. They practically treat him like crap. That’s Jeremy’s dark secret.”
“How do you know all this?”
“He doesn’t talk much about it, that Jeremy,” Nicholas shrugged. “Lionel’s siblings told me about it in one of our sleepovers at Lionel’s house ‘coz they always like to convey things to the big, fat jolly guy. And about that basketball team bullying thing, well, let’s just say that after the prank, we found it easier for us to pick on Jeremy, so we’re sort of into it with the rest of the team.”
“He’s your best friend! How could you do this to him? That’s not fair!” It was Rebecca’s turn to exclaim.
“Hey, like I said, always look on the bright side. He’s getting it, not me. If he dares to even peep about it, we’ll have to expose that dark secret to Lionel.”
“Why didn’t he want Lionel to know about this?” Justin asked.
“Oh, some crap about not wanting to break up the friendship or something. I kinda think that Lionel favours Jeremy more than us, and that’s not too good for someone who had sworn in the beginning of high school that we’ll be equal in friendship forever. He was afraid that he would ruin our relationship if he ever knew that we’ve been bullying the geek, so.”
“You said Gary also had a secret. What is it?” Justin asked, and Nicholas told him immediately about Gary being in the correctional institute for stealing and attempted murder on the shopkeeper. Rebecca rubbed her chin thoughtfully.
“What about Lionel? Doesn’t he have a secret or something?”
“Only that he’s a slave for fashion and wouldn’t miss any kind of newest trend or something. Not that anyone in the whole school doesn’t know about it,” Nicholas waved his hands sarcastically.
“And what’s your dark secret?” Justin asked, bringing him back to reality. He could see that the jolly Nicholas immediately slowed down and was looking pretty nervous. Justin asked again in a different way, “What’s your dark secret, Nicholas? You’ve told everything to us about your friends, why can’t you tell us yours?”
Hesitantly, Nicholas leaned even closer to the officers and, with a lower voice, he whispered his secret to them. After he finished, Justin was the first to react.
“What were you thinking?? You could’ve gotten someone killed!”
“Hey, I was a kid! How was I supposed to know how it works?! My dad could but I had to find out about it after my brain was capable enough to understand it!” Nicholas said fearfully.
“Now that’s something we’ve never expect,” Rebecca muttered, turning off the tape recorder that was on the table recording their interrogation session all this while.
Jeremy was seated in front of Jonathan and Rachel looking confused. He was barely awake that morning when his mother told him that Jonathan and Rachel has come to arrest him for suspected murder, and he was dragged to the crime lab without even having a chance to eat the waffles his mother made for breakfast. Inside the air-conditioned room, the atmosphere was tense.
“Hey, what exactly am I doing here, officer?” Jeremy asked as he looked around him. “If you’re accusing me of murder, I think you got the wrong guy.”
“Oh? Are you sure?” Jonathan asked. “Evidence doesn’t lie like humans do, you know?”
So saying, he slid the plastic bag that contained the army knife in front of Jeremy and a picture of Cliff’s body in front of him. Jeremy let out a moan of disgust and horror at upon seeing the picture of his dead friend and looked away, unable to bear the sight of it. Rachel took the picture away but the knife remained.
“Now tell me, Jeremy,” Jonathan started his questioning. “Where were you exactly during the death of your friend Cliff Chang? Were you really in the toilet taking a leak like you claimed to be at when my co-worker questioned you?”
“I’ve told your co-worker, I went to the toilet in the middle of the concert. I only realized that Cliff has ditched us after the concert! I didn’t kill Cliff! He’s my best friend, how could I kill him?”
“Jeremy, is this your army knife?” Rachel asked as she pointed at the knife in the basket.
“So what if it is?” Jeremy replied.
“Yes or no, Jeremy. Is that your knife?” Jonathan asked.
“Yes, that’s my knife. How did that get here?”
“How would you say that this is your knife?”
“See this little marker highlighted there?” Jeremy said as he pointed at the knife handle. Sure enough, there was a diamond-shaped sign on the handle. It looked pretty old, but it was still there alright. “This is how I know that this knife is mine. I had to keep track of my own knife because there had been a lot of theft in my club. Oh, my club is…”
“We know,” Jonathan said. “I’ve checked your records. You are pretty much a studious person that a jock. You entered the Chess Club, the Literature Club and besides being in the basketball team, you’re also the only one among your gundam to be a member of the Scouts Club. What are you, a Brownie?”
“Somewhat,” Jeremy replied. “How did my knife get here? I’ve been looking for it everywhere.”
“That’s what we like to ask you, sonny boy. We found it under the Perodua Rusa which belonged to your friend Cliff. Now how did it get there? You tell me, Jeremy.”
“What?! Are you trying to tell me that I killed Cliff? That’s ridiculous! I lost that knife the day before the concert and I just simply can’t find it. And now it so happened to turn out in Cliff’s car and you’re suddenly accusing me of killing him?! I can sue you for false accusation! My uncle’s a lawyer and he’ll sue the socks off you!” Jeremy exclaimed in disbelief and anger, well a timid sort of anger, that is.
“Yes, yes, well, I’m sure he will,” Jonathan replied nonchalantly as his hand reached dangerously towards the gun hidden in his coat. “But I bet I’m going to win the case when the jury finds out that you killed Cliff out of revenge, you know, the prank they played on you during the end of PMR celebration.”
“Wha…?” Jeremy’s eyes widened as he seemed to remember that fateful day. He looked sideways awkwardly, “That…That was a long time ago…”
“Really? But not long enough to suppress the hate inside you, does it?” Jonathan asked, satisfied to see that he had caught Jeremy’s sensitive spot. “You hate them pulling the prank on you so much that you are willing to kill them for revenge, right? That’ll show them for leaving you in that dark storeroom for hours.”
“This is crazy! I wouldn’t kill anyone just because of a measly prank! We were young, and I don’t hold grudges like some people do!” Jeremy exclaimed. “And even if I did kill anyone, I wouldn’t be stupid enough to hide something so conspicuous like my own knife! And like you said, I’m afraid of the dark and that place is pretty dark. I wouldn’t go out there to kill him even if my life depends on it.”
“Then where were you really?” Rachel folded her arms across her chest. “I find it hard to believe that you have just left the place to take a leak. Judging by the ticket of your concert I got from my co-worker, your seats are quite far away, leaving you plenty of time to get out of there, commit the murder and squeeze through the crowd to come back to your seats.”
“Like I said, I went to the toilet. If you don’t believe me, you can call my old primary classmate Yong Chung Wee; we came across each other in the toilet and talked for a while before we left to find our seat. And if you still don’t believe me,” Jeremy banged his palm on the table, just to make his timid self look tough, “I’ll be seeing you in court.”
“Huh? Me? Murder? You gotta be shitting me!”
It was Gary being questioned at another room by Judith and Elaine and, as our CSI members expected, he went into a state of denial. Judith leaned towards Gary and said, “Are you sure? I’ve heard from your past that you were pretty cool in handling cars and you used to take a part-time job at your granduncle’s car repairs shop. Someone as smart as you could’ve easily know where to hide a murder weapon in the last place no one would even think of looking—right under the car at a very specific inconspicuous spot like the exhaust pipe.”
“So what if I knew the ins and outs of a car?” Gary said. “That doesn’t mean I’m a murderer!”
“Oh? But from what I heard, you have paid a visit to Jeremy’s house the day before the concert to borrow his homework because you didn’t finish yours,” Elaine said as she lit a cigarette and took a whiff of it. “He had come back from his scouting trip but hadn’t exactly had the time to put away all his scouting equipment and your busybody attitude ran through all his scouting stuff. You could’ve swiped away his army knife without him looking. After all, we did find the murder weapon under the car and it’s evident that the army knife belonged to Jeremy.”
“Besides,” Judith continued as she took the cigarette from Elaine’s mouth and took a whiff of it herself, “you told my friend here that you’ve ran off to buy neon lights for the gang, and the only way to get those neon lights was to go outside. What do you say to that?”
“Look, there were so many people who might have seen me buying the neon lights,” Gary said. “And the neon light seller was an old pal of mine. He’ll tell you that I’ve bought the lights from him. Besides, you got no prints on the knife that shows that it was me, didn’t you? And you got no prints on the car that has my name on it and no one saw me going to the spot where Cliff was making out. I only realized he was gone after the concert. If I have bought the lights before I killed Cliff, someone would’ve noticed me like a human neon walking with shining neon lights in my pockets and if I bought the lights after I killed Cliff, anyone would’ve seen me with blood all over my clothes. Now isn’t that a silly thing for me to do?”
“You were carrying a backpack with you,” Elaine pointed out. “Your friends saw you leaving the concert and coming back with the backpack all the time. You told me when I was sending you guys home that you used it to carry food supplies. You could’ve hidden something else in there, something that is a non-food item.”
“Maybe I was a little overprotective about my bag,” Gary waved her accusation away. “Who wouldn’t if it is the newest backpack in the century and also with only 1000 items sold worldwide? You would be protective about it too! Besides I’ve opened the backpack for you to see, haven’t I? It’s pretty much half-empty of its food.”
“You’re good,” Judith complemented, smirking as she folded her arms across her chest. “Considering the fact that you have been doing quite a time in the teenage correctional institute for mugging a shopkeeper and attempt to stab him so that he wouldn’t have a chance to call the police.”
“Hey, that was a long time ago and I don’t appreciate you bringing it up!” Gary growled, looking offended. “I’ve did my time and it wasn’t easy for me to start anew here! Besides, mystery movies have always been my second love. I watch it all the time. Now if you’ll excuse me, I got a date with my girlfriend Luciana in about 10 minutes…”
“Woah, wait!” Elaine stopped him short. “Did you say your girlfriend is Luciana Lo, the daughter of one of the most influential female politician and a child prodigy in music?”
“Yeah. She’s been pretty cool in her violin and piano and all, and filthy rich too,” Gary replied proudly. “It’s not easy for me to tackle her and if she ever finds out I’ve been in the institution and here being questioned by you cops, everything will down into the drains! I’ve already been embarrassed enough for being confiscated of the knife I brought for ERT class in front of her.”
“You’re in ERT? I thought you’re in Form 4 and KH isn’t supposed to be in your subject anymore,” Judith lit up.
“Yeah, well, in our school, no matter what grade are you in, KH is still part of the syllabus. And I took ERT just to be with Luciana. Lionel borrowed me a knife because we’re required to bring our own knife for that day and I don’t have one—my family doesn’t cook; we just eat microwave-heated food or fast food. So I was being a show-off, but the teacher didn’t have to confiscate it.”
“Tough school, tough life. It gets old,” Judith muttered.
“So can I go now?”
At another room, Rebecca and Justin were interrogating the fat and jolly Nicholas. Justin had not much work to do in his coroner business, so he’d like to try out the interrogation. So far, among the three people being questioned, Nicholas looked the most relaxed. It was as if none of this really bothered him.
“You look awfully jolly for some one who just lost his best friend in a gruesome murder,” Justin eyed at him suspiciously.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong, officer,” Nicholas said. “I’m feeling very bad about all this, really, I do. But the problem is I was brought up to look at the bright side of life by my parents. So whenever something bad happens, I always keep a good mind in my head that at least it didn’t happen to me.”
“Of course it didn’t happen to you, and you’re glad of that,” Rebecca said. “That’s because you’re the one who committed the murder. Murders, if you include Lionel’s brothers and sister.”
“Me? Murder my friends? Now that’s simply impossible,” Nicholas laughed. “Why would I want to kill my friend? I have nothing against him, lest have anything against Lionel’s siblings. Or even Cliff for that matter.”
“Gee, I’m not so sure,” Rebecca said in a mock tone. “Maybe you can tell us, judging by the far away seat you and your friends got from the concert and enough time to sneak off to disembowel Cliff and come back just in time to meet your friends who came back from the toilet and from neon light-shopping respectively.”
“Look, all I can say is that I have nothing against them or have a grudge on anyone of them and I wouldn’t get so cracked up to kill them even if I do have a grudge on them. Like I said, I see things on the bright side. Even if they did do me wrong, I would always believe that they will get what they deserve and that it would hurt them more than it would hurt me later. Besides, even if I want to kill them, I couldn’t. Look at me,” Nicholas held out his hands and showed his large body to them. “I’m like a sumo player! I stand out like a sore thumb! The only reason that the coach chose me to be part of the basketball team is because I serve as the best human wall to block the opponents. I would’ve left evidence everywhere!”
“You got a point there,” Justin said. “The pressure on those wounds on the victims looked like they’ve done by someone who is of a medium-sized person trying to force it in.”
“Anyway, if they ever have anything against me,” Nicholas continued, “I know just the thing to counter them—I know loads of their secrets. Well, majority of it were Jeremy, Gary and Cliff, that is.”
“What secrets? Well, that is, if you don’t mind telling me,” Rebecca asked, loving a gossip or two.
“Well, don’t tell anyone, will you?” Nicholas said as he brought himself closer towards the two CSI officers. “We swore never to tell a soul and all. Our Cliff here, well, you officers know he had a habit of picking up girls just like he did that night. Like your boss said, he had been hanging with a girl too many, ‘coz there’s once he knocked up a girl so hard, he got her pregnant. Phew! I gotta tell you, that girl was so frustrated that she really took the liberty of finding his whereabouts and almost caused a riot. If it weren’t for Cliff having his own bank account and stored enough bucks for himself, his parents would’ve found out about that and he wouldn’t have the chance to persuade her to get rid of the baby.”
“Cliff paid the girl to abort the baby? That’s too cruel!” Justin exclaimed, speaking for Rebecca who also had the same idea herself.
“The girl was only too happy to do it. She came from a very strict family and keeping the baby was not an option,” Nicholas said nonchalantly. “Jeremy, on the other hand, besides having a serious fear of the dark, was always the victim of almost everyone in the basketball team.”
“I’m sure you guys know it already,” Rebecca noted.
“Oh, we know. But Lionel doesn’t know that. He only knows about Gary’s secret and Cliff’s. He also doesn’t even know that Jeremy was actually a part-time night tuition teacher and had helped his siblings with their studies, and he doesn’t know that they were giving him a hard time during lessons. They practically treat him like crap. That’s Jeremy’s dark secret.”
“How do you know all this?”
“He doesn’t talk much about it, that Jeremy,” Nicholas shrugged. “Lionel’s siblings told me about it in one of our sleepovers at Lionel’s house ‘coz they always like to convey things to the big, fat jolly guy. And about that basketball team bullying thing, well, let’s just say that after the prank, we found it easier for us to pick on Jeremy, so we’re sort of into it with the rest of the team.”
“He’s your best friend! How could you do this to him? That’s not fair!” It was Rebecca’s turn to exclaim.
“Hey, like I said, always look on the bright side. He’s getting it, not me. If he dares to even peep about it, we’ll have to expose that dark secret to Lionel.”
“Why didn’t he want Lionel to know about this?” Justin asked.
“Oh, some crap about not wanting to break up the friendship or something. I kinda think that Lionel favours Jeremy more than us, and that’s not too good for someone who had sworn in the beginning of high school that we’ll be equal in friendship forever. He was afraid that he would ruin our relationship if he ever knew that we’ve been bullying the geek, so.”
“You said Gary also had a secret. What is it?” Justin asked, and Nicholas told him immediately about Gary being in the correctional institute for stealing and attempted murder on the shopkeeper. Rebecca rubbed her chin thoughtfully.
“What about Lionel? Doesn’t he have a secret or something?”
“Only that he’s a slave for fashion and wouldn’t miss any kind of newest trend or something. Not that anyone in the whole school doesn’t know about it,” Nicholas waved his hands sarcastically.
“And what’s your dark secret?” Justin asked, bringing him back to reality. He could see that the jolly Nicholas immediately slowed down and was looking pretty nervous. Justin asked again in a different way, “What’s your dark secret, Nicholas? You’ve told everything to us about your friends, why can’t you tell us yours?”
Hesitantly, Nicholas leaned even closer to the officers and, with a lower voice, he whispered his secret to them. After he finished, Justin was the first to react.
“What were you thinking?? You could’ve gotten someone killed!”
“Hey, I was a kid! How was I supposed to know how it works?! My dad could but I had to find out about it after my brain was capable enough to understand it!” Nicholas said fearfully.
“Now that’s something we’ve never expect,” Rebecca muttered, turning off the tape recorder that was on the table recording their interrogation session all this while.
CSI: Asia-Chp6
CHAPTER 6: EVERY MYSTERY HAS A CLUE
Rachel and Elaine are walking around the car they were supposed to inspect: Cliff’s car. It has been a while since Rachel had been on a decent investigation. All she did was sit around in the office room checking on pictures taken, filing reports, providing book information to her co-workers, sketching patterns of crime scenes and how it took place on huge pieces of paper, with a little help from Rebecca, that is and also doing things not even an office boy could stand doing. She was mostly inside, not outside and this was one of those days when the co-worker had to find for her something to do to get her out of the office and into the fresh air outside.
Not that inspecting a stinky Perodua Rusa that was stained with blood and gut juice on the roof was much of a fresh air job, but it’s better than nothing.
“I’ve heard that you’ve given the kids the Q zone while you were sending them home last night,” Rachel said while she dusted the bonnet of the car for any footprints or fingerprints.
“Yeah, I did,” Elaine replied while checking inside the boot of the car, which was not much.
“So what did they have to say?”
“Well, I’ve did quite a Q zone on them. All of them said that they were together throughout the whole concert, except Jeremy who went off to take a leak and Gary who wanted to buy some of those neon lights for the guys. They all lost track of time of how long they’ve been away.”
“So you have two suspects that might have taken off to kill that Cliff guy,” Rachel said as she took a look on the still blood-stained car roof.
“They’re all suspects here, Rach,” Elaine said while climbing into the Perodua to check on the floors of the car. “Could be Gary, could be Jeremy, or could be even Nicholas who might have sneaked off to do the killing while his gang went off to do their business. We’re still a few evidences short here.”
“What else have you got from your Q zone?”
“Well, I asked them about their relationship with Lionel, just as Jon and I planned to do, and as expected, 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. Except Jeremy, that is. Ever since that prank during the end of PMR celebration, he spent a considerable less time with them.”
“Prank? What prank?” Rachel asked from her front seat.
“Turned out that our Jeremy here had a phobia for the dark. The guys knew about it and decided to give him a little scare or some sort. They tricked Jeremy into going inside Lionel’s storeroom and they locked him in, leaving him there in the dark and forgot about him. It was only when they have done celebrating that they remembered he was still in the storeroom. He was practically in there for hours and when they took him out, he suffered a minor shock. He never went to any of his parties since.”
“Now that’s one bad way of pulling someone’s leg,” Rachel replied. “Do you think that could be his motive to kill his friends, that Jeremy?”
“We do have a suspicion that he would be the murderer,” Elaine replied. “But we can’t go jumping into conclusions yet. It’s not CSI professional-like. Besides, the gang was not the only one who likes to take him for a dummy.”
“Who else would want to pick on him?”
“Almost everyone in the basketball team. Like Lionel said, he was more of a geek than a true basketball player, ‘coz he studies more than he plays. He’s always a reserve, and you know what usually happens to reserves.”
“Tell me about it,” Rachel snorted as she remembered her high school years of being a bookworm of the century than being the jock of the year. “I’m pretty much clean here. Just a few CDs and cassettes and a whole lot of jock junk in here. He even has condoms in here just in case. And I mean ‘just in case’; he had it written on the wrapper. What have you got?”
“Goodness!” Elaine groaned. “Did he actually write that?? Well, I’m clean here too. There’s nothing in the boot but a basketball, a pair of basketball shoes, some dumbbells, an empty water bottle and smelly old socks and also some Playboy magazines. The things kids stash in their cars these days!”
“While you were still looking for the suspects, we have a head-start on how the victims were killed,” Rachel said.
“You do? How?”
“Well, Jude had a hunch on urban legends and…” Rachel told Elaine everything about their find from the book and also her theory on the murderer using horror movies to kill people. Elaine lit up at that theory.
“Did you say murder through horror movies?”
“Yeah, I did. Why?”
“That confirms my suspicion on the suspects, that’s all,” Elaine said, remembering the horror movie VCD-s in Lionel’s home. She stole a look at the ever studious Rachel and asked, “Err, Rach. I was wondering…since you’re so smart and studious and more into books than the real life case itself, why don’t you become an English professor instead? I see you got potential, you know.”
“I did think of taking that job,” Rachel replied as she looked at the roof of the car to see if she had missed out anything. “But I didn’t think it was worth it anymore.”
“Why?” Elaine was surprised. “You got the smarts and you got the look. You are so suitable to be professor!”
“Hmm…That was what my parents said as far as I could remember. It was a pretty tough life back then. I love to study, but all that interest and knowledge has gone down to sheer competition. I study for fun, not for competition. I study for interest, not for survival of the fittest. But throughout my life, it’s just study to be the best, study to be No.1, study to be outstanding…” Rachel let out a sigh before continuing, “I didn’t study just to get into the best primary school, the best high school, the best college and the best university and end up in the best work place having the best career. That is too predictable. I study to enjoy the knowledge and enjoy life, no matter how unpredictable it might be.”
“So you chose forensics?” Elaine concluded the discussion. Rachel nodded.
“At least it’s pretty unpredictable. You can always try to guess who the real murderer is but you always get unexpected results for it.”
“I don’t get it…” Elaine looked around the car, befuddled. “What does Jude means by having some clue in the car?”
“Jude asked for this car to be inspected?” Rachel looked at the car in disbelief. “There’s nothing here to bag except all these masculine junk! There’s no footprints, no fingerprints, no strands of hair, no fiber from clothing, no nothing! Her and her so-called sixth sense is always playing games with her.”
“And to think that she usually go under cars and stealing away mechanical parts—” Elaine stopped abruptly as she realized what Judith wanted her to check. She immediately went on her back and wriggled her way underneath the car. Judith has taught her before how to look under cars and see which mechanical parts are still working or not and how much it could worth in the market to be worth stealing. She ran her hands inside the compartments and soon found herself touching something cold. Slowly, with her nimble fingers, she pulled the thing she just touched which was crammed into the gap between the exhaust pipe and the frame of the car and marveled at the thing she had just found.
“Jude, I seriously owe you a glass of Martini.”
Jonathan was at the shooting range with his old friend Thomas as promised. They greeted each other and stood in their own compartments, waiting for the targets to be lowered. Thomas took out his gun and turned his head towards his old friend, asking, “So, how did life in the crime lab go?”
“Not too good,” Jonathan replied. “I’m still surrounded by idiots and maniacs. And I got this one from one of those maniacs.”
Thomas looked at the plastic bag that was handed to him. It was an army knife, with a jagged blade stained with blood and a little bit of black oily stuff on it. He took and looked closely at it, then asked, “Where did you get this knife? I haven’t seen this knife since my scouting days.”
“Jude said that she had a hunch that the murder weapon might be hidden in the car, so we had Elaine and Rachel had the car inspected. Elaine found this knife under the car wedged between the exhaust pipe and the car frame. That lil’ ol’ bakasaru was actually right. I figured that the murderer could be having a family member who was an ex-army and…”
“Woah, woah, wait, Jon,” Thomas stopped his rambling a moment. “Have you forgotten the safety and standard procedure? The army and the government would never allow you to bring home any weapon after you’ve done your services in the war. It’s simply not done. Unless you’re a cop, which is what you are, or you’re a licensed buyer, you’re not supposed to have a weapon at home at all. Besides, see this?” Thomas pointed at a tiny symbol on the knife just near the handle, “That’s a company trademark. It’s just a typical scout knife.”
“Darn! I’m getting a little weak on this guessing thing,” Jonathan sighed and put the plastic bag away before loading his gun. “I should’ve noticed that trademark. It’s just so small.”
“You never miss out anything as small as that. Seems like you’ve lost your focus due to that ‘bakasaru’ of yours.”
Jonathan glared grudgingly at Thomas and put on his ear protection before he started firing at the target board. He shot all the bullets with such gusto that he had finished them before Thomas got to shoot his third bullet. As the target board came closer, there were a couple of shots that strayed to the shoulder of the target, but most of them were hit right at the middle and right on the bull’s eye. Thomas looked at it in revered admiration.
“Nice shot, Jon. Just like old times.”
“Unlike you, I never lose my focus,” Jonathan replied before reloading for another round.
Rachel and Elaine are walking around the car they were supposed to inspect: Cliff’s car. It has been a while since Rachel had been on a decent investigation. All she did was sit around in the office room checking on pictures taken, filing reports, providing book information to her co-workers, sketching patterns of crime scenes and how it took place on huge pieces of paper, with a little help from Rebecca, that is and also doing things not even an office boy could stand doing. She was mostly inside, not outside and this was one of those days when the co-worker had to find for her something to do to get her out of the office and into the fresh air outside.
Not that inspecting a stinky Perodua Rusa that was stained with blood and gut juice on the roof was much of a fresh air job, but it’s better than nothing.
“I’ve heard that you’ve given the kids the Q zone while you were sending them home last night,” Rachel said while she dusted the bonnet of the car for any footprints or fingerprints.
“Yeah, I did,” Elaine replied while checking inside the boot of the car, which was not much.
“So what did they have to say?”
“Well, I’ve did quite a Q zone on them. All of them said that they were together throughout the whole concert, except Jeremy who went off to take a leak and Gary who wanted to buy some of those neon lights for the guys. They all lost track of time of how long they’ve been away.”
“So you have two suspects that might have taken off to kill that Cliff guy,” Rachel said as she took a look on the still blood-stained car roof.
“They’re all suspects here, Rach,” Elaine said while climbing into the Perodua to check on the floors of the car. “Could be Gary, could be Jeremy, or could be even Nicholas who might have sneaked off to do the killing while his gang went off to do their business. We’re still a few evidences short here.”
“What else have you got from your Q zone?”
“Well, I asked them about their relationship with Lionel, just as Jon and I planned to do, and as expected, 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. Except Jeremy, that is. Ever since that prank during the end of PMR celebration, he spent a considerable less time with them.”
“Prank? What prank?” Rachel asked from her front seat.
“Turned out that our Jeremy here had a phobia for the dark. The guys knew about it and decided to give him a little scare or some sort. They tricked Jeremy into going inside Lionel’s storeroom and they locked him in, leaving him there in the dark and forgot about him. It was only when they have done celebrating that they remembered he was still in the storeroom. He was practically in there for hours and when they took him out, he suffered a minor shock. He never went to any of his parties since.”
“Now that’s one bad way of pulling someone’s leg,” Rachel replied. “Do you think that could be his motive to kill his friends, that Jeremy?”
“We do have a suspicion that he would be the murderer,” Elaine replied. “But we can’t go jumping into conclusions yet. It’s not CSI professional-like. Besides, the gang was not the only one who likes to take him for a dummy.”
“Who else would want to pick on him?”
“Almost everyone in the basketball team. Like Lionel said, he was more of a geek than a true basketball player, ‘coz he studies more than he plays. He’s always a reserve, and you know what usually happens to reserves.”
“Tell me about it,” Rachel snorted as she remembered her high school years of being a bookworm of the century than being the jock of the year. “I’m pretty much clean here. Just a few CDs and cassettes and a whole lot of jock junk in here. He even has condoms in here just in case. And I mean ‘just in case’; he had it written on the wrapper. What have you got?”
“Goodness!” Elaine groaned. “Did he actually write that?? Well, I’m clean here too. There’s nothing in the boot but a basketball, a pair of basketball shoes, some dumbbells, an empty water bottle and smelly old socks and also some Playboy magazines. The things kids stash in their cars these days!”
“While you were still looking for the suspects, we have a head-start on how the victims were killed,” Rachel said.
“You do? How?”
“Well, Jude had a hunch on urban legends and…” Rachel told Elaine everything about their find from the book and also her theory on the murderer using horror movies to kill people. Elaine lit up at that theory.
“Did you say murder through horror movies?”
“Yeah, I did. Why?”
“That confirms my suspicion on the suspects, that’s all,” Elaine said, remembering the horror movie VCD-s in Lionel’s home. She stole a look at the ever studious Rachel and asked, “Err, Rach. I was wondering…since you’re so smart and studious and more into books than the real life case itself, why don’t you become an English professor instead? I see you got potential, you know.”
“I did think of taking that job,” Rachel replied as she looked at the roof of the car to see if she had missed out anything. “But I didn’t think it was worth it anymore.”
“Why?” Elaine was surprised. “You got the smarts and you got the look. You are so suitable to be professor!”
“Hmm…That was what my parents said as far as I could remember. It was a pretty tough life back then. I love to study, but all that interest and knowledge has gone down to sheer competition. I study for fun, not for competition. I study for interest, not for survival of the fittest. But throughout my life, it’s just study to be the best, study to be No.1, study to be outstanding…” Rachel let out a sigh before continuing, “I didn’t study just to get into the best primary school, the best high school, the best college and the best university and end up in the best work place having the best career. That is too predictable. I study to enjoy the knowledge and enjoy life, no matter how unpredictable it might be.”
“So you chose forensics?” Elaine concluded the discussion. Rachel nodded.
“At least it’s pretty unpredictable. You can always try to guess who the real murderer is but you always get unexpected results for it.”
“I don’t get it…” Elaine looked around the car, befuddled. “What does Jude means by having some clue in the car?”
“Jude asked for this car to be inspected?” Rachel looked at the car in disbelief. “There’s nothing here to bag except all these masculine junk! There’s no footprints, no fingerprints, no strands of hair, no fiber from clothing, no nothing! Her and her so-called sixth sense is always playing games with her.”
“And to think that she usually go under cars and stealing away mechanical parts—” Elaine stopped abruptly as she realized what Judith wanted her to check. She immediately went on her back and wriggled her way underneath the car. Judith has taught her before how to look under cars and see which mechanical parts are still working or not and how much it could worth in the market to be worth stealing. She ran her hands inside the compartments and soon found herself touching something cold. Slowly, with her nimble fingers, she pulled the thing she just touched which was crammed into the gap between the exhaust pipe and the frame of the car and marveled at the thing she had just found.
“Jude, I seriously owe you a glass of Martini.”
Jonathan was at the shooting range with his old friend Thomas as promised. They greeted each other and stood in their own compartments, waiting for the targets to be lowered. Thomas took out his gun and turned his head towards his old friend, asking, “So, how did life in the crime lab go?”
“Not too good,” Jonathan replied. “I’m still surrounded by idiots and maniacs. And I got this one from one of those maniacs.”
Thomas looked at the plastic bag that was handed to him. It was an army knife, with a jagged blade stained with blood and a little bit of black oily stuff on it. He took and looked closely at it, then asked, “Where did you get this knife? I haven’t seen this knife since my scouting days.”
“Jude said that she had a hunch that the murder weapon might be hidden in the car, so we had Elaine and Rachel had the car inspected. Elaine found this knife under the car wedged between the exhaust pipe and the car frame. That lil’ ol’ bakasaru was actually right. I figured that the murderer could be having a family member who was an ex-army and…”
“Woah, woah, wait, Jon,” Thomas stopped his rambling a moment. “Have you forgotten the safety and standard procedure? The army and the government would never allow you to bring home any weapon after you’ve done your services in the war. It’s simply not done. Unless you’re a cop, which is what you are, or you’re a licensed buyer, you’re not supposed to have a weapon at home at all. Besides, see this?” Thomas pointed at a tiny symbol on the knife just near the handle, “That’s a company trademark. It’s just a typical scout knife.”
“Darn! I’m getting a little weak on this guessing thing,” Jonathan sighed and put the plastic bag away before loading his gun. “I should’ve noticed that trademark. It’s just so small.”
“You never miss out anything as small as that. Seems like you’ve lost your focus due to that ‘bakasaru’ of yours.”
Jonathan glared grudgingly at Thomas and put on his ear protection before he started firing at the target board. He shot all the bullets with such gusto that he had finished them before Thomas got to shoot his third bullet. As the target board came closer, there were a couple of shots that strayed to the shoulder of the target, but most of them were hit right at the middle and right on the bull’s eye. Thomas looked at it in revered admiration.
“Nice shot, Jon. Just like old times.”
“Unlike you, I never lose my focus,” Jonathan replied before reloading for another round.
CSI: Asia-Chp5
CHAPTER 5: MURDER PATTERNS REVEALED
Justin was with the body of Cliff in the autopsy room, examining it like he did with Lionel Han’s siblings. This time, Judith was there to watch too besides our head of the crime lab, Jonathan. At first Jonathan didn’t want her around the corpse but after she promised profusely that she wouldn’t eat a thing in front of him and the corpse, he reluctantly allowed her to enter the autopsy room.
“You’re right, Jon,” Justin said as he looked into the jagged patterns on Cliff’s jugular. “It is done by an army knife. The pressure was pretty hard too, judging by the sliced veins and the slightly marked neck bones, the ruined trachea and the voice box. He practically couldn’t say a single word without choking in his own blood and having them filling up his lungs. If this disembowelment didn’t take place, he could’ve died just by that slit throat alone.”
“Only that he didn’t die by the slit throat, did he?” Jonathan asked.
“Nope, it was the disembowelment that killed him. The slit wound was much older than the gut wound,” Justin said as he pointed from the throat to the guts. “His nails are covered with his own blood as he scraped that roof of the car while the murderer tried to hang him upside-down from the tree. Besides, if he was disemboweled before he was hung up there, you would’ve found trails of blood mixed together with his gut juice on the ground where he was dragged towards the car and not just only on the roof of the car.”
“That’s true,” Judith replied as she recalled that there was a long trail of dragged blood on the earth. She had taken it to analysis and it was confirmed that it was Cliff’s blood and nothing else. “Could we be looking for someone who is an ex-army or has a family member who was an ex-army?”
“The latter. I’ve already have a few young suspects and I’m trying to figure out who could’ve done it. Well, if the throat slit didn’t kill him, the disembowelment would,” Jonathan said. “If the disembowelment doesn’t kill him too, I don’t what else would.”
“High cholesterol, maybe?” Justin suggested jokingly. “’Coz I seem to find some of his dinner here: steak, French fries, potato chips, hot dog, hard-boiled eggs…pretty lot of oil and fat for that, don’t you think?” He then turned to Judith with a grin on his face and said, “This food reminds me that I haven’t had my dinner. Would you mind passing me a slice of pizza from the box there, Jude?”
Judith looked at Jonathan with a It’s-not-my-fault look on her face as she took out a slice of pizza from the Pizza Hut box and passed it to Justin, stealing a bite of sausage. Jonathan groaned in disgust at Justin took a bite out of the pizza and replaced it back into the box.
“You guys are so disgusting!!!” Jonathan exclaimed, looking at the chewing Judith and Justin in disbelief and horror. “How could you guys stomach such food in front of a corpse who just had his guts pulled out of his body?! Eww~!!”
“That is part of doctor training, you know,” Justin replied in an as-a-matter-of-fact way. “We are all trained to strengthen our guts by eating in front of a corpse during meals during our junior years. Not much people could handle it though. I remember my first meal in front of a pickled corpse: chicken rice with sunny-side up eggs.”
“Well, I guess that explains that, but what about you?” Jonathan turned to Judith who was licking her fingers off the cheese she got from touching the pizza.
“Oh, that’s easy,” Judith replied proudly. “Being on the streets and in the wrong side of the law gives me plenty of time to strengthen my guts. Why, when I was in high school, I actually wolfed down a drumstick while watching pictures of accident victims being squashed flat on their stomachs and their entrails dragged along the road during an awareness campaign. And do you remember the ABC I ate while watching the biology team dissecting a frog during our college open day, or was it a toad?”
“A toad,” Jonathan replied, going blue. “How can I forget?”
“By the way, guys, the way you told me about the position this Cliff was in when he died was pretty familiar,” Justin said, tapping his chin.
“You too? I also think it’s familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger in it,” Judith replied.
“Well, if I’m not mistaken, this sounds a lot like the movie Urban Legends where this guy got hung up on the tree by the neck. Of course he wasn’t disemboweled like Cliff here. That would be Jack the Ripper’s work.”
“Are you telling me that this murderer is actually killing these people by following the pattern of horror movies?” Jonathan asked in disbelief. “Just like the murders in Scream and all?”
“Well, Scream could be one of them, but judging by the way Cliff was murdered and the way you described the murder of the Han siblings, the murderer is more of the pattern of Urban Legends,” Justin replied as he tried to recall the movie he watched. “Urban Legends is a movie about this girl who was caught in a web of murder where the murderer used urban legends to kill her victims. Her friends were killed one by one—first it was her high school classmate who was killed by the murderer in the back seat, then it was her roommate who was killed in the room without her knowledge because she remembered not to turn on the lights and not catch her naked with a guy, and a whole lot more using all kinds of urban legends. In the end it turned out that it was the heroine’s best friend who did all the killings because the heroine and her high school classmate have killed her boyfriend using the headlight urban legend.”
“Did the murderer die in the end?”
“Well, at first it looked like she was dead, but at the end of the movie, she actually survived and was studying in another college talking about urban legends with her new classmates,” Justin shrugged. “It’s pretty freaky, ‘coz she was thrown out of a building and thrown out of the car into a deep lake. There’s no way a normal human could survive that.”
“What about murders during ghost festivals? Is there any movie that is connected to people killing during a ghost festival?” Judith asked.
“As a matter of fact, there is one movie called ‘H2O: Halloween 20 Years Later’. It’s about this mass murderer who escaped from the mental asylum and walks around wearing a mask like this other movie’s murderer Jason in ‘Friday the 13th’ looking for his sister so that he could kill her. She was an unfinished job because he had killed everyone in the family when he was 5 or 6 years old except the sister, whom he missed out. And the funny thing is the psychopath—Mike Myers is his name—came to kill her during Halloween. When he killed his family, it was on a Halloween night, so I guess it was some sort of a ritual for him.”
“And this whole month of August is the Hungry Ghost Festival, a Chinese version of Halloween!” Judith exclaimed. “There’s another movie our copycat has been doing! He’s following the movie patterns of Urban Legends and H2O!”
“Woah, woah, woah, wait a cotton-pickin’ minute here!” Jonathan tried to get all this info in his head. “Let me get this straight, Jude. You’re trying to tell me that we’re looking for a murderer who is a copycat and a movie buff?”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you,” Judith said as she stole another sausage from Justin’s pizza and dashed out of the autopsy room. Jonathan was surprised at her sudden reaction. He chased after her.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“To meet our Human Library,” Judith replied, quickening her pace and hoping that Rachel hasn’t gone to check out the car with Elaine yet.
“You want me to check on urban legends?”
Rachel was in her office room looking over the pictures taken by Rebecca earlier, lucky for Judith, and she was quite surprised to know that someone was asking her about something that was not connected to forensics.
“Yeah, I wanna know if there are any famous urban legends that are still existing till today,” Judith said, looking quite breathless. Jonathan was in the office too, wanting to see what bright ideas have spawned in his food-obsessed, suicidal co-worker.
“Well, I had this book for light reading,” Rachel replied as she took out a book as thick as the latest version of the Oxford dictionary and as big as an encyclopedia and plopped onto the table. “Maybe there is something for you to see about.”
“You call that ‘light’?” Jonathan wrinkled his nose at the book. ‘Light reading’ is definitely an understatement.
Rachel ignored his comment. She had always loved to read, regardless the thickness of the book. She flipped a few pages of the book entitled ‘Mysterious Mysteries’ and looked for the page on ‘Urban Legends’. She smiled, signifying that she had found it. She ran her fingers through the page and read it out loud:
“An urban legend is where a story which was claimed to be true is passed down from one person to another and as the more people the story was passed down, the more bigger the story goes and the more extravagant the details of the story is. For example, a story about an elderly woman choking on a bagel when passed down from one person to another might result to a story where the elderly woman was choking because there was a finger baked together with the bagel by the baker who lost it while cutting the dough’ or something like that.”
“What about urban legends? Are there any stories in there that might be considered an urban legend?” Judith asked as she flipped through the pages herself.
“There’s a lot I must say, but here’s a few that’s pretty good,” Rachel ran her finger through the book and read it out loud, “‘A young lady is alone in her apartment. She goes to bed with her dog on the floor beside her. In the middle of the night, she is woken up by a strange sound. She is alarmed, but reaches down to the dog which licked her hand. She was reassured and went back to bed. In the morning she found her dog hung in the shower and writings in blood on the wall saying Humans can lick too.’
“‘A woman was driving home from visiting her friend and noticed that a car was following her all the way. Try as she might, she couldn’t lose him. When she reached home, she honked for her husband and he came out to see what the matter was. When he demanded the man to tell him why he was following his wife, he said that he noticed a man’s head bob down in her back seat, and when the husband checked the back seat, he saw a deranged man sitting on the floor of the car with a knife in his hand.’
“‘Two roommates were staying back at school during the holidays. One went out on a date and the other one hit the hay before she came back. Later that night she was awakened by a gurgling and scratching sound outside the hallway door. Frightened, she locked the door and hid under the covers until morning. When she finally opened the door and ventured outside, she found the body of her roommate, her throat slit and bleeding to death in the hallway while clawing at the door.’”
“Oh, here’s another one,” Judith said as she took charge of the reading. “‘A male flight attendant was stopping over Japan and went to a local bar where he was greeted warmly by a couple and drank sake and chit-chatted. The next morning, he woke up and found himself in a bath tub full of ice and aches in his stomach. He managed to climb out of the tub and called the police, telling him everything he remembered about the couple. The police told him to go back to the tub and stay there until the ambulance arrived; both of his kidneys were removed.’ Ouch! That’s gotta hurt!”
“This one is about our two murders,” Jonathan said as he pointed at two urban legends in a page. “This one said that the babysitter received a laughing phone call after tucking the children to sleep a few minutes later. ‘The call repeated a few times and she decided to ask the police to trace the call. After the laughing came again, she hung up and the police called her immediately to tell her to get out of the house quickly—the calls were coming from the upstairs extension, where the murderer already murdered the children’, pretty much like Lionel’s case. And this one is on Cliff’s murder—‘A boy tried to trick a girl into “making out” with him but failed, so he sent the angry girl home instead. When the car ran out of gas, he came out of the car and walked towards the nearest gas station. She waited for nearly 2 hours but he didn’t come, and there were scratching sounds on the roof of the car. When she came out of the car to break off the ‘branch’, she found the boy hanging upside-down with his throat slit.’ OK, that’s freaky.”
“Here’s one urban legend that says one of a juvenile gang’s traditions was to drive with their headlights off and kill the first person to signal their headlights at them to warn them,” Rachel said. “And there’s another where to be a gang member they must hide under the car and wait until the owner of the car arrives before slashing their ankles and stealing a shoe. The things teenagers would do to feel belonged.”
“This is serious,” Jonathan said. “We have a copycat guy who is out there killing people and trying to make it look like he was a star of some horror movie. I’ve heard about TV influence, but this is too much!”
“Way too much. It’s like this guy is trying to symbolize something to his or her victims,” Judith said.
“He. It’s a ‘he’,” Jonathan corrected.
“How’d you know it’s a ‘he’?” Rachel asked as she closed her book.
“I told Jude I got a lead in this case, and I sure have a hunch who’s the murderer,” Jonathan said. “Now who’s in for the latest Kreko? Another new episode on Genzomaden Saiyuki: Reload is up!”
Judith and Rachel looked at each other tiredly. They should’ve seen this coming.
Justin was with the body of Cliff in the autopsy room, examining it like he did with Lionel Han’s siblings. This time, Judith was there to watch too besides our head of the crime lab, Jonathan. At first Jonathan didn’t want her around the corpse but after she promised profusely that she wouldn’t eat a thing in front of him and the corpse, he reluctantly allowed her to enter the autopsy room.
“You’re right, Jon,” Justin said as he looked into the jagged patterns on Cliff’s jugular. “It is done by an army knife. The pressure was pretty hard too, judging by the sliced veins and the slightly marked neck bones, the ruined trachea and the voice box. He practically couldn’t say a single word without choking in his own blood and having them filling up his lungs. If this disembowelment didn’t take place, he could’ve died just by that slit throat alone.”
“Only that he didn’t die by the slit throat, did he?” Jonathan asked.
“Nope, it was the disembowelment that killed him. The slit wound was much older than the gut wound,” Justin said as he pointed from the throat to the guts. “His nails are covered with his own blood as he scraped that roof of the car while the murderer tried to hang him upside-down from the tree. Besides, if he was disemboweled before he was hung up there, you would’ve found trails of blood mixed together with his gut juice on the ground where he was dragged towards the car and not just only on the roof of the car.”
“That’s true,” Judith replied as she recalled that there was a long trail of dragged blood on the earth. She had taken it to analysis and it was confirmed that it was Cliff’s blood and nothing else. “Could we be looking for someone who is an ex-army or has a family member who was an ex-army?”
“The latter. I’ve already have a few young suspects and I’m trying to figure out who could’ve done it. Well, if the throat slit didn’t kill him, the disembowelment would,” Jonathan said. “If the disembowelment doesn’t kill him too, I don’t what else would.”
“High cholesterol, maybe?” Justin suggested jokingly. “’Coz I seem to find some of his dinner here: steak, French fries, potato chips, hot dog, hard-boiled eggs…pretty lot of oil and fat for that, don’t you think?” He then turned to Judith with a grin on his face and said, “This food reminds me that I haven’t had my dinner. Would you mind passing me a slice of pizza from the box there, Jude?”
Judith looked at Jonathan with a It’s-not-my-fault look on her face as she took out a slice of pizza from the Pizza Hut box and passed it to Justin, stealing a bite of sausage. Jonathan groaned in disgust at Justin took a bite out of the pizza and replaced it back into the box.
“You guys are so disgusting!!!” Jonathan exclaimed, looking at the chewing Judith and Justin in disbelief and horror. “How could you guys stomach such food in front of a corpse who just had his guts pulled out of his body?! Eww~!!”
“That is part of doctor training, you know,” Justin replied in an as-a-matter-of-fact way. “We are all trained to strengthen our guts by eating in front of a corpse during meals during our junior years. Not much people could handle it though. I remember my first meal in front of a pickled corpse: chicken rice with sunny-side up eggs.”
“Well, I guess that explains that, but what about you?” Jonathan turned to Judith who was licking her fingers off the cheese she got from touching the pizza.
“Oh, that’s easy,” Judith replied proudly. “Being on the streets and in the wrong side of the law gives me plenty of time to strengthen my guts. Why, when I was in high school, I actually wolfed down a drumstick while watching pictures of accident victims being squashed flat on their stomachs and their entrails dragged along the road during an awareness campaign. And do you remember the ABC I ate while watching the biology team dissecting a frog during our college open day, or was it a toad?”
“A toad,” Jonathan replied, going blue. “How can I forget?”
“By the way, guys, the way you told me about the position this Cliff was in when he died was pretty familiar,” Justin said, tapping his chin.
“You too? I also think it’s familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger in it,” Judith replied.
“Well, if I’m not mistaken, this sounds a lot like the movie Urban Legends where this guy got hung up on the tree by the neck. Of course he wasn’t disemboweled like Cliff here. That would be Jack the Ripper’s work.”
“Are you telling me that this murderer is actually killing these people by following the pattern of horror movies?” Jonathan asked in disbelief. “Just like the murders in Scream and all?”
“Well, Scream could be one of them, but judging by the way Cliff was murdered and the way you described the murder of the Han siblings, the murderer is more of the pattern of Urban Legends,” Justin replied as he tried to recall the movie he watched. “Urban Legends is a movie about this girl who was caught in a web of murder where the murderer used urban legends to kill her victims. Her friends were killed one by one—first it was her high school classmate who was killed by the murderer in the back seat, then it was her roommate who was killed in the room without her knowledge because she remembered not to turn on the lights and not catch her naked with a guy, and a whole lot more using all kinds of urban legends. In the end it turned out that it was the heroine’s best friend who did all the killings because the heroine and her high school classmate have killed her boyfriend using the headlight urban legend.”
“Did the murderer die in the end?”
“Well, at first it looked like she was dead, but at the end of the movie, she actually survived and was studying in another college talking about urban legends with her new classmates,” Justin shrugged. “It’s pretty freaky, ‘coz she was thrown out of a building and thrown out of the car into a deep lake. There’s no way a normal human could survive that.”
“What about murders during ghost festivals? Is there any movie that is connected to people killing during a ghost festival?” Judith asked.
“As a matter of fact, there is one movie called ‘H2O: Halloween 20 Years Later’. It’s about this mass murderer who escaped from the mental asylum and walks around wearing a mask like this other movie’s murderer Jason in ‘Friday the 13th’ looking for his sister so that he could kill her. She was an unfinished job because he had killed everyone in the family when he was 5 or 6 years old except the sister, whom he missed out. And the funny thing is the psychopath—Mike Myers is his name—came to kill her during Halloween. When he killed his family, it was on a Halloween night, so I guess it was some sort of a ritual for him.”
“And this whole month of August is the Hungry Ghost Festival, a Chinese version of Halloween!” Judith exclaimed. “There’s another movie our copycat has been doing! He’s following the movie patterns of Urban Legends and H2O!”
“Woah, woah, woah, wait a cotton-pickin’ minute here!” Jonathan tried to get all this info in his head. “Let me get this straight, Jude. You’re trying to tell me that we’re looking for a murderer who is a copycat and a movie buff?”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you,” Judith said as she stole another sausage from Justin’s pizza and dashed out of the autopsy room. Jonathan was surprised at her sudden reaction. He chased after her.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“To meet our Human Library,” Judith replied, quickening her pace and hoping that Rachel hasn’t gone to check out the car with Elaine yet.
“You want me to check on urban legends?”
Rachel was in her office room looking over the pictures taken by Rebecca earlier, lucky for Judith, and she was quite surprised to know that someone was asking her about something that was not connected to forensics.
“Yeah, I wanna know if there are any famous urban legends that are still existing till today,” Judith said, looking quite breathless. Jonathan was in the office too, wanting to see what bright ideas have spawned in his food-obsessed, suicidal co-worker.
“Well, I had this book for light reading,” Rachel replied as she took out a book as thick as the latest version of the Oxford dictionary and as big as an encyclopedia and plopped onto the table. “Maybe there is something for you to see about.”
“You call that ‘light’?” Jonathan wrinkled his nose at the book. ‘Light reading’ is definitely an understatement.
Rachel ignored his comment. She had always loved to read, regardless the thickness of the book. She flipped a few pages of the book entitled ‘Mysterious Mysteries’ and looked for the page on ‘Urban Legends’. She smiled, signifying that she had found it. She ran her fingers through the page and read it out loud:
“An urban legend is where a story which was claimed to be true is passed down from one person to another and as the more people the story was passed down, the more bigger the story goes and the more extravagant the details of the story is. For example, a story about an elderly woman choking on a bagel when passed down from one person to another might result to a story where the elderly woman was choking because there was a finger baked together with the bagel by the baker who lost it while cutting the dough’ or something like that.”
“What about urban legends? Are there any stories in there that might be considered an urban legend?” Judith asked as she flipped through the pages herself.
“There’s a lot I must say, but here’s a few that’s pretty good,” Rachel ran her finger through the book and read it out loud, “‘A young lady is alone in her apartment. She goes to bed with her dog on the floor beside her. In the middle of the night, she is woken up by a strange sound. She is alarmed, but reaches down to the dog which licked her hand. She was reassured and went back to bed. In the morning she found her dog hung in the shower and writings in blood on the wall saying Humans can lick too.’
“‘A woman was driving home from visiting her friend and noticed that a car was following her all the way. Try as she might, she couldn’t lose him. When she reached home, she honked for her husband and he came out to see what the matter was. When he demanded the man to tell him why he was following his wife, he said that he noticed a man’s head bob down in her back seat, and when the husband checked the back seat, he saw a deranged man sitting on the floor of the car with a knife in his hand.’
“‘Two roommates were staying back at school during the holidays. One went out on a date and the other one hit the hay before she came back. Later that night she was awakened by a gurgling and scratching sound outside the hallway door. Frightened, she locked the door and hid under the covers until morning. When she finally opened the door and ventured outside, she found the body of her roommate, her throat slit and bleeding to death in the hallway while clawing at the door.’”
“Oh, here’s another one,” Judith said as she took charge of the reading. “‘A male flight attendant was stopping over Japan and went to a local bar where he was greeted warmly by a couple and drank sake and chit-chatted. The next morning, he woke up and found himself in a bath tub full of ice and aches in his stomach. He managed to climb out of the tub and called the police, telling him everything he remembered about the couple. The police told him to go back to the tub and stay there until the ambulance arrived; both of his kidneys were removed.’ Ouch! That’s gotta hurt!”
“This one is about our two murders,” Jonathan said as he pointed at two urban legends in a page. “This one said that the babysitter received a laughing phone call after tucking the children to sleep a few minutes later. ‘The call repeated a few times and she decided to ask the police to trace the call. After the laughing came again, she hung up and the police called her immediately to tell her to get out of the house quickly—the calls were coming from the upstairs extension, where the murderer already murdered the children’, pretty much like Lionel’s case. And this one is on Cliff’s murder—‘A boy tried to trick a girl into “making out” with him but failed, so he sent the angry girl home instead. When the car ran out of gas, he came out of the car and walked towards the nearest gas station. She waited for nearly 2 hours but he didn’t come, and there were scratching sounds on the roof of the car. When she came out of the car to break off the ‘branch’, she found the boy hanging upside-down with his throat slit.’ OK, that’s freaky.”
“Here’s one urban legend that says one of a juvenile gang’s traditions was to drive with their headlights off and kill the first person to signal their headlights at them to warn them,” Rachel said. “And there’s another where to be a gang member they must hide under the car and wait until the owner of the car arrives before slashing their ankles and stealing a shoe. The things teenagers would do to feel belonged.”
“This is serious,” Jonathan said. “We have a copycat guy who is out there killing people and trying to make it look like he was a star of some horror movie. I’ve heard about TV influence, but this is too much!”
“Way too much. It’s like this guy is trying to symbolize something to his or her victims,” Judith said.
“He. It’s a ‘he’,” Jonathan corrected.
“How’d you know it’s a ‘he’?” Rachel asked as she closed her book.
“I told Jude I got a lead in this case, and I sure have a hunch who’s the murderer,” Jonathan said. “Now who’s in for the latest Kreko? Another new episode on Genzomaden Saiyuki: Reload is up!”
Judith and Rachel looked at each other tiredly. They should’ve seen this coming.
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