Chapter 192: “Disappearance” (4) |
(4)
Sensing that she might need to investigate at Mouster College for a while, Everly had already booked a room at a hotel near the school while planning her itinerary the night before.
After checking in, and—as was her habit—inspecting the room for any potential hazards and hanging various protective and exorcism items on the doors and windows, Everly took out her phone and sent a message to Orff.
Everly: [Do me a favor—hack into the Concord City Police Department and copy Bianca’s autopsy report for me.]
Orf replied almost instantly, as if he had been glued to his screen.
Orf: [???]
Orf: [Bianca’s dead? That suddenly? When did she die?]
[She died this afternoon.]
Orf: [Wow… I’ve got a bad feeling about the case at Mouster College. Be careful…]
With that, Orff quietly got to work.
Taking advantage of the time, Everly ate some dry rations she had brought with her to fill her stomach, then went to the bathroom for a shower.
While rubbing soap over herself, she paused when she saw her damp arm.
She remembered what Doreen had said.
Doreen had told her that yesterday, after finishing her shower and getting dressed, she had accidentally caught a faint unpleasant smell from Bianca. And today, at the scene of Bianca’s death, both Doreen and her friend had smelled a similar odor—like something decaying.
Could that smell have been the stench of a corpse?
And there was Natalie as well. What she said puzzled Everly deeply. Why did she say nothing earlier, and only speak up when news of Bianca’s death arrived—claiming that the “body had been found”? Could it be that the Bianca from before and the Bianca after death were actually two different existences…?
“Bzz—bzz!”
The phone on the sink buzzed twice, snapping Everly out of her thoughts.
Guessing it was Orff’s reply, she quickly sped up, rinsed herself off, dried her body, and put on her clothes. Then, while toweling her hair, she tapped open her phone screen.
Sure enough, in less than twenty minutes, Orff had already breached the Concord City Police Department’s firewall and sent over Bianca’s freshly completed autopsy report.
The report showed that Bianca’s cause of death was organ failure due to severe dehydration, accompanied by electrolyte imbalance and acid-base disorder—she had actually died of thirst as well!
Not only that, but a closer look at the report revealed even more disturbing details:
The forensic examiner had dissected Bianca’s body and found her stomach empty. The food residue in her intestines dated back to three days before her death. In other words, prior to dying, Bianca had not only been dehydrated but had also gone nearly three days without eating.
This likely explained why the police had asked Doreen whether Bianca had eaten or drunk anything recently.
But this raised a new question: when Doreen arrived at the scene, Bianca had only just “died,” and the body was still there. Based on what Old John had taught her, forensic examiners at a crime scene usually only conduct an external examination and secure evidence; the full autopsy is done later in the morgue.
Since Bianca’s abdomen hadn’t been opened at the time, and only the surface of the body was visible, how could the forensic team have concluded that she had been deprived of food and water before death?
Unless this wasn’t the first similar case they had encountered…
Continuing to read, Everly made another discovery.
According to the report, based on the degree of decomposition, rigor mortis, and livor mortis, Bianca’s actual time of death was about three days earlier—around 10 a.m. on February 18.
As for the injuries to her head, including those inflicted when Sara and the others beat her, all of them were determined to be postmortem wounds.
From a scientific standpoint, this was impossible. Once a person dies, they become nothing more than a body—unable to speak, breathe, or move. How could they still walk around, attend classes, eat, scroll through Chatter, and even get into conflicts with others?
Thinking back to what Natalie had said earlier—“the client has appeared, but there’s only a body, no soul”—Everly formed a hypothesis: before Bianca collapsed and died, the lively “Bianca” people had been seeing was very likely something else in disguise.
For convenience, she temporarily referred to this fake Bianca as “Monster M.”
Today was February 20, and February 18 was two days ago. In other words, while the exact timing was uncertain, at the very least, the “Bianca” people had seen over the past two days was not the real person, but Monster M.
After carefully reading Bianca’s autopsy report from beginning to end, Everly closed the document, scrolled up through her chat with Orff, and found the news links he had casually shared with her the day before.
Opening two of them, she reread the reports about Bethany, who died at the end of January, and Abby, who died on February 16.
Just like Bianca, both of them had died from prolonged deprivation of food and water—essentially, they had died of thirst.
Horror Movie Survival Rule #1: pay attention to the hints.
Three cases of female students dying of “thirst” in the same school—there had to be a connection between them.
Aside from these three cases, Everly also found two other incidents highly suspicious: one where a girl died after slipping in the bathroom, and another where a girl suddenly collapsed and died in class.
It wasn’t simply because those two cases also involved deaths that made them suspicious.
In her previous life, the United States produced hundreds of horror films every year. With so many movies set in such a limited space, overlapping settings weren’t uncommon—Everly had encountered such situations before.
There were many reasons why these two cases drew her suspicion.
Suspicious Point One: The Bathroom Slip-and-Fall Death
Everly looked it up online. Since the incident, the girl’s family had only quietly claimed their daughter’s body and buried her. They hadn’t even hired a lawyer to sue the school for negligence or demand compensation—something that was frankly hard to imagine.
After all, the United States is practically a litigation capital. In a case that seems so easy to win, why wouldn’t they sue? Their daughter died after slipping in a school bathroom—wouldn’t any parent resent the school and want to make them pay dearly?
Of course, this could be explained by the possibility that the school had already reached a private settlement with the family.
Suspicious Point Two: The Condition of the Bodies
The report on the bathroom death was written by a member of the school’s news club. They had interviewed a girl who was showering nearby when Cassandra fell. According to her account, when she and her companion heard the noise and rushed over to help, Cassandra’s body felt ice-cold to the touch.
Not only that, the blood flowing from beneath Cassandra’s head was dark in color and carried a strange odor. Her arm joints were stiff, and there were purplish-red blotches on her back.
Then there was the case of the student who collapsed in class. This one was reported by outside media, and there wasn’t much description of the victim’s appearance—just a brief mention that her eyes were open, her pupils had turned pale, and her eyeballs had sunken inward.
Individually, these details might not seem unusual at first glance. But with the knowledge that Bianca had “already been dead” and emitting a corpse-like odor, a closer look at these two cases revealed similar irregularities in their bodies.
Anyone who has been in a bathroom during winter knows how humid and stuffy it can get. Cassandra had even been showering before she fell, so her body shouldn’t have been cold at all. Yet when the two girls rushed to help her, what they felt was a chilling coldness.
Moreover, the darkened blood, stiff joints, and the blotches on her back are all signs that typically appear only after a body has been dead for some time.
The same logic applied to the girl who died suddenly in class.
One to three days after death, the eyes gradually turn pale due to corneal clouding and the fading of the iris. At the same time, as bodily fluids are lost and tissues dehydrate, the eyeballs begin to shrink and sink inward. The girl’s condition at death matched this pattern exactly.
In other words, the bodies in the second and third cases had decomposed far too quickly—far beyond what would be expected under normal circumstances.
So, could she assume that those two cases were also connected to Bianca’s?
With this hypothesis in mind, Everly reopened her chat with Orff and asked him to retrieve the police files on the other four victims as well.
Orff moved fast. Within minutes, her phone received a data-heavy compressed file.
Everly transferred the files to her laptop, unzipped them, and began reviewing each one.
Sure enough, just as she had suspected, the four deaths that occurred before Bianca’s were clearly connected to her case. These five incidents were unmistakably part of a single series!
First was Bethany, whose body was discovered on January 31.
At the time, based on the room temperature and the level of decomposition, the forensic examiner estimated her time of death to be three days earlier—around the early hours of January 28.
However, this conclusion was quickly challenged. That very afternoon on January 28, Bethany had appeared in a large lecture class and had even borrowed perfume from a girl sitting in front of her!
“Yes, I’m absolutely sure it was Bethany—how could I possibly mistake her? She was the only one in our major who passed the sorority selection. So many people were secretly jealous of her!” the girl insisted firmly.
To verify her statement, the police specifically pulled the surveillance footage from the apartment building’s ground-floor entrance. Just as the girl had claimed, around noon on January 28, Bethany was seen leaving the apartment with a bag to attend classes, and returning in the evening carrying the same bag.
If Bethany had still been alive on January 28, then the only conclusion—at least from the police’s perspective at the time—was that the original autopsy must have been wrong.
Because of this, the police department replaced the forensic examiner and conducted a second examination of the body.
What was astonishing was that the new examiner reached exactly the same conclusion as the first: the cause of death was organ failure due to severe dehydration, and the time of death was the early hours of January 28.
They went on to replace the examiner two more times, and all three came to identical conclusions, leaving the officers in charge of the case deeply unsettled.
Although some experienced officers suspected that the case might involve supernatural forces, the victim was already dead, and continuing to investigate the exact cause of death didn’t seem particularly meaningful.
Worried about getting entangled in trouble—and with pressure mounting from the victim’s family—the police ultimately held an internal meeting. They decided to withhold part of the autopsy findings from the family and officially closed the case with the conclusion of “s**cide by starvation and dehydration.”