Chapter 5

The blood-red moonlight poured into the room through the floor-to-ceiling windows like thick liquid.

Steven's body suddenly went rigid. He stood on the balcony as if his soul had been drained, his expression blank. He tilted his head back, staring fixedly at the eerie red moon in the night sky, his pupils dilated to their limit, as if he wanted to physically tear down that blood moon and brand it into the deepest part of his eyes.

After who knows how long, the blood-red tint in his pupils finally faded away like a receding tide.

Steven's eyeballs finally moved. He realized his neck was making teeth-grinding "crack crack" sounds from maintaining that rigid upward gaze for so long.

He lowered his head and checked his watch.

The hour hand had passed midnight.

"I clearly remember... it was just eleven o'clock." Steven rubbed his throbbing temples as images he'd locked deep in his memory suddenly flashed through his mind: the towering flames at the children's home, his adoptive parents' twisted faces in the accident, and the pale corpse on the cold autopsy table.

He let out a heavy breath, realizing he'd blacked out for a full hour again.

Steven habitually checked himself over using professional techniques. Sore back and legs? No. Kidney deficiency? Bullshit. Muscle weakness? Completely normal.

His physical condition showed no changes, except for that damn mental state.

He walked to the window and pushed open the glass. The blood-red color had faded, and a silver moon hung high in the sky. In the distance came the piercing sound of police sirens, mixed with women's screams and the hysterical howls of homeless people.

"Another episode." Steven gave a self-mocking smirk, forcibly suppressing the restlessness in his heart. He took off his shirt, preparing to take a hot shower to relax his tense nerves.

Just then, his phone on the nightstand started vibrating like crazy.

One in the morning.

Steven pressed the answer button. From the other end came the sharp, piercing voice of Tom, a forensic scene investigator: "Steven, stop sleeping and get your ass to the coroner's office as fast as you can!"

Tom used to be a tough detective until he got shot full of holes by thugs during an operation. One bullet nearly went through his throat, which left him with that duck-like voice.

A midnight emergency call. Steven's eyes sharpened. Most likely multiple serious homicides had occurred and the office was short-staffed.

"Fifteen minutes."

Steven hung up and turned toward the bed. He didn't reach for clothes, but instead crouched down and felt for the hidden compartment under the bed.

"Click."

He pulled out a specially modified black handgun and smoothly loaded a full magazine. Then he reached deeper into the compartment and pulled out two heavy homemade pull-wire detonators, carefully inserting them into the specially made pockets inside his suit jacket.

In this crazy city, without some "hard currency," he couldn't sleep, much less go out.

Steven's apartment was in an upper-middle-class neighborhood near downtown, with decent security. But just drive a few blocks and the scene would change dramatically.

On the left side of the street were brightly lit luxury apartments; on the right was an endless stretch of homeless tents reeking of piss. Steven gripped the steering wheel with one hand while the other rested inside his jacket, vigilantly passing through the most chaotic blocks until he saw flashing police lights ahead and finally slowed down.

Los Angeles County Coroner's Office.

As the only official forensic identification agency for the entire Los Angeles County government, this place handled all unnatural death cases from the surrounding 88 cities. Sounds impressive, but the entire office had only a few hundred people, with just 23 actual frontline coroners doing autopsies.

Keep in mind, last year they processed 9,500 autopsy cases—an average of 20 to 40 fresh bodies coming in every day.

And Steven was currently just a "small fry" in one of the five major departments of this massive organization.

As soon as he walked into the cold corridor outside the autopsy room, Steven saw Tom.

Like a drug addict, Tom was hunched over with his skeletal frame, leaning against the wall exhaustedly smoking a cheap cigarette. Because of his appearance, he'd been pressed against police car hoods and searched by uninformed patrol officers more times than he could count, making his personality increasingly withdrawn.

"What's the big case?" Steven walked over.

"Two homicides." Tom exhaled a smoke ring, his high-pitched voice echoing in the corridor. "The victims are two female neighbors who lived in houses separated by just a wooden fence. Times of death extremely close together, both killed in their own homes. The detective bureau initially determined it was the same serial killer."

Steven frowned. These cases were the most troublesome—not only requiring tedious cross-comparison of wounds but also dealing with those pushy detectives.

"By the way," Tom stubbed out his cigarette and lowered his voice, "I heard from guys in the Robbery-Homicide Division that the office is planning to set up a new department and desperately needs experienced autopsy staff."

Steven's heart stirred. He immediately thought of the "Criminal Experiment Unit" his uncle Andrew had vaguely mentioned before.

"Not sure exactly what they'll do, but the pay doubles." A flash of fervor crossed Tom's eyes. "I'm already planning to apply."

"Let's just get to work." Steven remained noncommittal.

The two pushed open the door and began dividing up tasks according to protocol. LA had weird rules: forensic scene investigators had to go to the scene with the police, but police weren't allowed to touch the bodies. So Tom now had to go to the adjacent small dark room to pull an all-nighter writing scene investigation and victim background reports, while the dirty work of temporarily collecting and describing body characteristics naturally fell to Steven.

Tom left with his files.

Steven was alone in the autopsy room.

He stood in place and took a deep breath. The air was thick with high concentrations of disinfectant and formaldehyde—a smell that would make normal people want to vomit, but it gave Steven a sick sense of calm.

He smoothly changed into protective gear, set up the recording equipment, then pulled out an unnumbered memory card from his pocket and inserted it into the camera.

"Opening the zipper."

With the harsh sound of a zipper, the body bag was opened.

Two female corpses lay side by side on the stainless steel surface. Their faces were unrecognizable, skulls severely caved in, their deaths extremely tragic—clearly they'd suffered inhuman torture before death.

"Typical blunt force trauma death." Steven leaned in to observe the terrible wounds and calmly spoke into the voice recorder. "The weapon had rough edges, wounds extremely deep. The killer should be an adult male with tremendous arm strength, in a state of extreme excitement during the crime..."

"Doesn't look premeditated, more like a crime of passion."

Just as Steven was about to further examine the defensive wounds on the victims' arms—

"Zzzt—"

The overhead fluorescent light suddenly flickered without warning.

The next second, Steven's wrist froze.

A cold, slippery hand suddenly emerged from the edge of the body bag and gripped his right hand tightly!

That definitely wasn't the temperature a living human body should have.

Steven's pupils contracted sharply. His instinct from years of walking the edge of life and death exploded instantly. He jerked his hand away, forcibly breaking free from that icy grip, while his left hand flashed into his jacket like lightning and pulled out the specially modified handgun with a "whoosh"!

He rapidly retreated, his back hitting another morgue cart behind him with a "bang."

Before he could raise the gun to aim, another change occurred.

Another pale, stiff, slender arm silently emerged from the morgue cart behind him and grabbed his crotch between his legs!

In that instant, the air in the autopsy room seemed to freeze.

Fear?

No, what Steven felt at this moment was only absurdity, and a violent rage rushing straight to his head.

"Fuck..."

The madness he'd been suppressing deep in his heart completely broke free under the stimulus of this unknown and bizarre incident.

Steven's face showed no panic. Instead, he slowly pulled back his lips, revealing a neurotic, crazed smile. He didn't use the gun to smash that hand, but instead very calmly lowered his left hand holding the gun, while his right hand reached directly into the inside pocket of his jacket.

He pulled out a heavy detonator.

His finger hooked the pull-wire fuse at the end of the detonator. His eyes coldly stared at the empty space above the operating table, his voice becoming low and hoarse from extreme excitement:

"I'm a living, breathing person—am I really gonna let a couple of corpses push me around?"

Steven suddenly tightened the wire, his knuckles turning white, threatening with extremely dangerous pressure, word by word:

"Show some respect to this body."

"Otherwise, I'll stuff both of these things down your cute little mouth right now."