“Hey, Erika, so nice to hear from you. What’s up?” the next day morning, while Caroline was on her shift at Xianshi Inn, she received a phone call from the SFPD forensics lab technician: “Does the SFPD have any updates on Dr. Nguyen?”
“This is why I called.” Erika sounded more concerned and serious than she’d ever been: “You know that your friend Jason found a hand in a garbage container near that movie set?”
“Yeah, tell me about it, we might lose a big fat regular paycheck over that.”
“And I’m losing my shit right here.” Erika said with a trembling voice: “Since there were no visible identifiable traits and heavily decomposed, we ran a DNA match against our database. It matched with Dr. Nguyen’s.”
“Fuck...”
“Yeah! Fuck! No one knows what the fuck happened! ” Erika almost shouted at her phone: “The detectives and captain are running the theory that she might have been murdered. The lab video logs are being looked at as well - I gotta ask, do you and your friend Jason know anything? You are our paranormal consultants, and I noticed that you saw something in the video logs - are you available to talk?”
“Yeah… well...” Caroline was a bit ambushed by this question and could not find the answer on the spot: “Actually it’s a bit… complicated to explain.”
“Well, that’s good I have all day. ” Erika said: “I’m on my way to you. ”
“Wait… what? You coming over to the inn?”
“Yeah, you guys gave us your contact information, remember?” a door shutting sound just came from Erika’s side: “I’m here, where are you?”
“Oh… oh, just come in the front door and you’ll see me.”
The next moment, Caroline saw the young forensic technician with a T-shirt that had a cute Shiba-Inu drawing on it, a pair of light blue jeans and a grey canvas backpack got off a rideshare car and rushed towards the inn.
And very visibly, there were traces of black smoke, circling around Erika’s head and shoulders.
“Hey, Erika. Where have you been?” Caroline hesitated for a while, and then went to the entrance to welcome Erika inn. And to her surprise, as Erika approached and stepped into the premise of the inn, the black smoke surrounding her seemed to have been washed away by an invisible force. “Oh my, Boss, very considerate.” Caroline whispered to herself.
“What’s that? Did you say something?” Erika seemed to be very relieved when she saw Caroline and straight up went ahead and greeted her with a hug.
“No, I’m just happy to see you.” Caroline gently patted on Erika’s back.
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“Super nice place of work here. Maybe it’s me but even the air smells fresher.” Erika took a look around the lounge : “And super clean! Really stands out among the rest of the inn on the street, or even San Jose!”
“Thanks! Our Boss does the cleaning himself. He is cheap as hell but he’s really particular about cleanliness and the food.” Caroline looked at Erika closely and tried to make sure there was no residual black smoke around her.
“Hmm, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing… you just… looked really tired.”
“Yeah, I know.” Erika sighed and followed Caroline to the back of the reception’s desk, “I’ve been pulling a whole week of late nights. You know that corpse you and Jason dug up from the Prime Royals Hotel? We just pulled it out again and we’re doing analysis on it. If not for the discovery of Dr. Nguyen’s hand, I’d be still working on it.”
“And you’re … dealing with it extremely well.” Caroline sat down with Erika: “How are you feeling?”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s okay. I’m doing good, it’s not like we’re that close anyway. I’ve only been her mentee for, like what, six months?” Erika chuckles nervously, “Alright, alright, enough about me. Do you know anything? You and your friend were there the other day and I felt that you guys know much more than you’re letting on - and nobody could see what the hell happened in the lab video logs. If you know anything, please share with me...”
“Hold on, hold on. You were saying that the SFPD just pulled out that body and is doing analysis on it?” Caroline stopped Erika’s spiralling questions: “What are you doing with it?”
“Ah! Yes, I almost forgot.” Erika laughed nervously again: “Yeah, so this week, the lawyers representing the owner of the hotel started rushing us on the examination of the body - they’re trying to claim that the body is a historical artifact, which should belong to the owner upon discovery and urged us to give it back. So we’ve been trying our hardest to get as much intel from it as possible.”
“That’s … a bad idea. Aren’t you worried… ” Caroline wanted to ask Erika how she felt about this again, but quickly changed course: “... nevermind. What have you found?”
“Yeah, pretty gnarly details!” Erika became a bit excited now that the topic was about the corpse from the Prime Royals Hotel: “You remember the crack on the body’s head? The one where the two sides are uneven? Guess what caused it.”
“Heavy blow to the head? Or cut from a huge sword?”
“No, no. It so messed up, so fucking messed up.” Erika’s left hand kept tapping the table while she spoke: “So since we cannot just cut open the body, we had to run an ultrasound scan on the corpse to see what’s inside, alright? And what we found, was that there are other cracks throughout the whole body. But the thing is, the bones on the sides of the crack are not heavily damaged. Meaning that the cracks are not produced by blunt force impact...”
“The body was cut open.”
“Yes, and worse. The unevenness? It’s not one body. It’s two bodies. Two bodies cut in half and kinda held together with chains.” Erika almost screamed when she said “chains”: “How fucked up is that!? You just can’t make something like that up!”