Drip. Drip. The water dripped out of the tap silently.
The curtains in the room were drawn tightly, letting no light filter in. The room was relatively quiet aside from the sound coming from the turntable playing a slow tune somewhere farther away from the bedroom.
Her breathing was erratic. Her eyebrows were furrowed. Her fists were balled. She tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable.
The sound of her phone ringing disrupted the silence of the room. She ignored it and let it ring to silence. And then it came again. And then a third time.
She grabbed her phone in a huff and made to sit up, when a sharp pain tore through her stomach.
"Motherfuck," she hissed and stared down at her belly where her two-day-old gunshot wound had ruptured.
She scratched her head, trying to remember how the wound ruptured, but no matter how hard she tried, her mind was blank. She shrugged; she couldn't care less.
Her phone was ringing for the fifth time now. She took the call lazily without looking at the caller ID.
"Talk to me," she said coolly into the phone.
"Alright. I'll be there in 45." She nodded and hung up.
She walked into the bathroom, her reflection in the mirror rather unremarkable. She was a tall and slim woman, almost lanky in appearance. She had a head full of long dark hair and a face full of freckles. She wasn't the prettiest person you'd set your eyes on, but she was good-looking.
She opened the cupboard and fetched the first aid kit. She stared at the tap dripping water and put her hand under it, watching the stream flowing on her fingers. She quickly turned off the tap and opened the first aid kit.
While rummaging through it, she found that she'd run out of cotton wool. Her eyes darted to the pack of sanitary pads in the cupboard. She shrugged, disinfected a pad, threw out the bloodied bandage, and put the pad over her wound. A quick wrap of her stomach in plastic wrap followed, and she took a shower.
The air outside of the Haiyang Hotel was hot.
Han Bo-young flashed her ID at the officers in front and walked under the caution tape. A tall, thin man ran over to her as she approached the crime scene.
"Death by strangulation. Clean crime scene. Post-mortem disfigurement. She was found by a cleaning lady and had reportedly been missing for three days," Song Min-ho narrated and passed a folder to her.
She flipped through it as she walked. The photos were bizarre. The victim of the murder, Yoon-a, looking relatively tall, probably 166cm, had been forced and squished into a cupboard. Han Bo-young maintained a straight face, seemingly unfazed by the severity of the murder.
"Interesting," she nodded.
Song Min-ho furrowed his eyebrows but didn't speak.
"Do we have any suspects?" she asked, acting oblivious to his reaction.
"Yes. They've already been invited to the station for questioning. She's pretty solitary, so this was a hard find," he explained.
She handed the file back to him and grabbed a pair of gloves. With the sound of a snap, she put them on. She went into the room where the victim had been killed. Song Min-ho was very effective, and he had already recorded surface-level medical information about the victim on the ground.
She brushed her fingers on the edge of the mahogany table. Yoon-a's head had some bruising, suspected to be from a fall or a smack from a blunt weapon. There weren't any such weapons at the scene, so her head was definitely smacked on this table or another blunt surface. From the visualized position of the crime, the table was the more suitable option.
She spun around in the room, her mind visually creating scenes of how the murder took place, helping her fill gaps in the information she already had.
Han Bo-young was the best in the field. Although she was only 33 years old, she had an innate talent for solving cases. She'd spent six years in law school in the US and another three in medical school. After walking around and looking for a while, she left the room. Nothing about the scene currently interested her.
"I'll need to see the suspects at the station as soon as possible. And get forensics to attend to this quickly," she said and left.
She drove to a coffee shop. She'd come to love this coffee shop so much that she was willing to drive two miles just to get to it, even though there were many coffee shops close to the station.
"Why do we always have to drive so far?" Lee Joon-gi, a partner she had worked with for a short time before he transferred, would ask.
"It reminds me of Texas," she'd reply, to which he'd roll his eyes.
The coffee there barely tasted like anything from Texas. She only went there because their latte had a hint of something she couldn't place. A memory that had been forgotten.
Honk!
She snapped out of her thoughts and drove when the light turned green. She ordered a bagel and a latte. She had her earphones plugged in as she listened to Bob Marley's "Redemption Song."
"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery..." she muttered as she sipped on the latte, her head bobbing. Her English accent was perfectly American, contrasting starkly with her fluent Korean.
Her car stopped at the morgue. She walked into the ward, the coolness and grayness of it speaking of the building's purpose. The smell of formaldehyde always cleared Han Bo-young's head better than coffee ever could. Dr. Woo, a man who looked like he had never seen the sun, pulled back the sheet.
"She was killed upright, drained of blood, washed, and then forced into that cupboard. But we found no blood at the scene," Dr. Woo said, his voice a low deadpan. "Her hands were flayed and then the skin was stitched back on. Our killer is quite poetic."
Dr. Woo's tone and facial expression contrasted heavily with his words.
"Interesting," she nodded. "I'd expect to see a different expression than the one I've been seeing for the past five years." Han Bo-young stared at him and shrugged.
"When you see so many dead people, it doesn't matter how they died anymore. They're dead; that's all that matters to you. And I have a job; that's all that matters to me."
He passed her the file.
"You've never been exactly punctual, but you came in an hour late today," he said, changing the topic.
"I had a wardrobe malfunction, Dr. Woo," Han Bo-young muttered, her eyes scanning the file as she subconsciously hunched over. The makeshift bandage felt slightly uncomfortable.
Dr. Woo nodded, seeming to have lost any interest he may have had. Han Bo-young's eyes squinted, but she said nothing.
"Tetrodotoxin?"
"Yes, but a very rare synthetic variant. I believe he flayed her hands while she was still conscious but paralyzed," he explained. "It would have been a hell of a lot of work to stitch the skin back on if she was already dead. And the skin was stitched back on... perfectly."
Han Bo-young nodded in silence. A human body had about five liters of blood. To drain a body entirely without leaving a trace in a hotel room implied whoever killed Yoon-a spent hours on the murder. They were comfortable. Shivers ran down Han Bo-young's spine as she thought about it.
"The muscles underneath the flayed hands suggest a struggle," Dr. Woo said as the door to the ward was pushed open.
Song Min-ho had never liked the morgue. To him, it was one thing to see people get shot and killed, and another to see them discussed as lab rats. It gave him a sense of claustrophobia. Working with Han Bo-young over the past year, he'd gotten used to it.
"If you can't put yourself in the shoes of your victim, you'll never be motivated to catch the killer," Han Bo-young would say every time the sheets were pulled. Song Min-ho gave her credit; he had scarce knowledge of forensics and could only offer first aid at most.
"A struggle?" Han Bo-young leaned in closer. "How? If she was paralyzed by the toxin, the muscles shouldn't show the micro-tears of a struggle. Tetrodotoxin locks the receptors. The body stays still even if the mind is screaming."
Dr. Woo pointed a gloved finger at the base of the victim's palm. "Exactly. And yet, the muscle fibers here are ruptured as if she tried to ball her hand into a fist with enough force to snap her own tendons. It's a physiological paradox, Detective. Her brain either overrode the paralysis through sheer, raw agony, or the struggle happened before she was anesthetized completely."
Han Bo-young felt her own stomach wound throb. She imagined it, being a prisoner in your own skin, watching a stranger peel you apart like a piece of fruit.
"How do you suppose he drained the blood?" Han Bo-young whispered, her American accent slipping back in.
Dr. Woo narrowed his eyes, visibly annoyed by Han Bo-young's Americanism.
"Like I said, she was drained of the blood upright. A light noose hung her up, which explains the strangulation marks, and the blood was drained from her femoral vein," Dr. Woo noted.
She straightened up, her head spinning for a second. The latte hadn't been enough. She needed real food, or more likely, the painkillers hidden in her glove compartment.
"The hotel's CCTV?" she asked.
"Twelve minutes of static at 3:00 AM," Song Min-ho read from a file. "The security guard thought it was a glitch. By 3:12, the hall was empty."
"Twelve minutes to move a body and a portable surgical kit?" Han Bo-young let out a dry, mirthless laugh. "Our killer is a ghost. A ghost... and a fucking great doctor."
Song Min-ho nodded. He knew what it meant.