The next week passed, and neither my transfer nor the investigation was going anywhere. Mir had been at a training conference for the last week, Muller wasn't doing anything to help, and everyone else was overworked enough as it was. I shake my head and get up. It is 6:05 pm, but instead of going home, I head to the main office. I have only been there twice before, when Mir was injured in the car accident, and the interview to get the job here in the first place.
When I walk in Camile comes over to greet me with a sad smile. "Sorry, Lily, but I can't transfer you."
"Why not? Rochester still has a shortage of CSI workers, and the CSI here will be stable without me." I ask, though that isn't 100% true.
She goes to respond then stops. She closes her mouth quickly. She looks like a poor baby deer stuck in headlights. I had seen that face on many agents before, and it only meant one thing. I turn around slowly and sigh. "Mr. Fischer, what do I have the pleasure of being ear-dropped upon?" I want to be surprised, but like I said before, men always try to get in my way when I try to leave. "I am guessing you are the reason I can't return to my hometown? There was a murder that happened right next door to where I am currently staying, and there's not any affordable housing near enough to walk to here." I stated, showing a small part of the uneasiness that I have been feeling since the attack.
"That may be, but you are still involved in the case. SNI or not. You are a key witness, even if you didn't see anything. You will be staying here till the body is found, or some other evidence that exempts you from the case. Rules are rules." He argues back without raising his voice. I have to bite my tongue so I wouldn't say that there was no body to be found. I should have never said anything about being at the scene. Then again, if they learned I had been there and that I didn't say anything, I would be under more scrutiny.
"Ok," I sigh. I am not sure if I should be angry or thankful that someone was actually taking interest in one of my almost deaths like this. "Now if you don't mind, I need to start unpacking, so I can get to my stuff. It seems like I will be here a little longer than I expected." I say as I go to walk past him.
"I suggest that you do that, Mis Lily, because you're not moving until this case is closed. We have a job to do, that includes you." He remarks. Sometimes I hate how efficient he can be, this is one of those times. I just want the trail to go cold, or one of the idiots to be found. Hopefully not the latter, or my life would be over.
I sigh and head over to Mir's house to tell her the news. She lives in a fancy apartment on the other side of work. By fancy, I mean decent, compared to where I live. Not that it really mattered to me, I could survive anywhere as long as I get good enough sleep.
She answers right away when I knock on the door. I can tell that the training conference went well. "You have no idea how good it is to get away from Muller and the boss. Then again, you won't have to deal with them soon enough." She gave me a small smile.
"Sadly for me, I won't be going anywhere till this case is solved. With you being gone, no progress has been made on it. Since there was no body, there was little to go on. Muller has been using your absences as an excuse not to do anything. Carl yelled at her yesterday, saying if she doesn't get anything done by Monday, she isn't going to get paid. The whole deviation was surprising. It looked like he really meant it." I exclaim.
We gossip for a while until it starts to get dark out. I have been getting home early since the attack. Mir understood that I didn't want to be out after dark. We said our goodbyes and agreed to share lunch tomorrow.
When Lily left I sigh with relief. I am hungry, and that was never a good thing. I am a zombi, after all. I get up and get ready for work quickly. When I get to the morgue, a tub full of deer brains is waiting for me. I eat it quickly, then get to work on the knife. There haven't been any fingerprints, so that is a bust. I start on the blood next. I have one of the witches do a revival spell, only for the blood to decay in minutes.
It takes me three tries to get any information about the person that was killed. At first, I thought it had something to do with something else on the knife, but nothing came up. I was moving on to examining the blood when Mr. Fisher came in.
"I would kindly ask that you don't distract me. This blood degrades too fast to tell much about who was killed," I said as I quickly did some tests. The blood seemed to stabilize after adding acid-citrate-dextrose anticoagulant, whatever that was, to the blood. Even so, it was still degraded at a steady pace.
After a while, I turned back to the boss. "Now all we have to do is wait and hope that the blood doesn't degrade too much before we can get the result. I didn't see anything on the knife that could cause the blood to degrade like this. I suspect that the person has very severe Hemolytic anemia. Also known as low red blood cell count. Then again, it didn't look like the knife went deep into the body at all. That's why there was so little blood at the scene."
He nodded and then looked over at the vial of blood in a bigger test tube surrounded by dry ice. It was the only way I found that could preserve the blood. "Why isn't the blood frozen yet?" He asks as he walks over to me. I look at it in surprise. The blood should have frozen by now since it was no longer in the body. The only cases that it wouldn't be...
I get up quickly and grab the vial from him. I bring out one of our older machines that still ran on magic. I briskly power it up and get to work. Carl goes to speak but I silence him with a look. 'You don't want to mess with an angry zombi, gargoyle or not.' The machine was originally used for finding out murders involving ice demons about eleven thousand years ago. That was before they went extinct in the last decade. The fact that there is still one that worked was beyond me.
The click of the original machine brought my attention back to what I was doing. I checked the results of the degrading blood. "Well she didn't have a low red blood cell count, and there was nothing mixed in with the blood," I state. I turn to the boss and hand him the papers.
"If it wasn't the blood or something in the blood then what is it?" He asks me and I smile slightly.
"I never said anything about it not being the blood. Just that whoever this was didn't have the blood disease that would cause a human's blood to degrade like that." I remark.
He looks confused for a moment then it clicks. He looks over to the old machine. "You don't think whoever was killed was human."
"I don't think the person was killed at all. Think about it, the demon guy that worked at the gas station said that the guys left without the body, yet when we got there it was gone. While humans that become demons might lie, a born one wouldn't, not about this."
"You think the body walked away. That whoever was murdered didn't die." He repeated, trying to get his mind around it. "Then why didn't they come to us?"
I nodded, thinking, as a secant click sounded. I pick up the paper and almost drop it. I read it over again many times, not sure if I read it right. I sat down slowly. "You might want to sit down for this."
Blood Test:
Species Type: Born Star Spirit
Blood Type: O-neutral
Static: Alive, in pain
Age: 24 years and 4 months
Current injuries: Error
We both stay silent for a while. I sigh and then address the situation at large. "There was an error when it came to injury, but it did state that she was in pain. Tomorrow afternoon me and Lily can check up at the hospital. See what we can find there. Regina will have to look at the archives to see what we can learn about O-neutral blood. As for the born star spirit part, I don't know. This thing is old, so maybe it didn't have the same meaning as it has today." I shrug.
"I will look at some old medical records, you could be right," Carl said without hesitation. I think we were both in too much shock to argue with each other. We both went our separate ways. I head home for some much-needed sleep.