Cases Uncovered

27 | Five Orange Pips

"The moon does not mourn over the dead. What it does is shine light on the truth."

- Shinichi Kudo

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Chapter 27:
Five Orange Pips

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ZANE

"What do you mean by 'he'? That calligraphy is beautiful!" I said, admiring the elegant script.

"Could still be a she, but the police can identify it better," she replied, carefully slipping the contents back into the red envelope. "The smell convinced me my hunch was right."

She brought it closer to me, and I caught the scent of an expensive men's cologne.

"Whoever sent that might be an admirer," I suggested, raising an eyebrow.

"What about my phone?" she asked. We started walking again, and she stopped as we reached her room.

"I couldn't open it because of the PIN," I replied, feeling a bit awkward. I still didn't know her birthday.

After sealing the envelope in a clear plastic bag and removing her gloves, she handed me back my phone. With a quick tap, she unlocked it using her fingerprint, revealing the same photos from the envelope.

"Let's go!" Raine said urgently.

"Wait, let's change first. We might get in trouble—"

"Okay!" She shut her bedroom door swiftly. Feeling the urgency, I hurried to my room and changed out of my uniform.

࿐ ࿔*:･ﾟ

"It still needs to be examined by the experts."

From a plain brown door on our left, George emerged. Aware that we weren't allowed inside their offices, we waited in the second-floor waiting area.

We had been sitting there for almost half an hour before he returned to us.

"Maybe it'll take a while—" he continued, but the door cut him off with a sudden opening.

"Alright, let them in here," said the newcomer. It was the guard from our first case with Raine.

They guided us inside, where we saw several police officers at their stations, absorbed in their work.

We continued down the corridor until we reached a door on the left, marked "Interview Room." It looked just like those rooms I'd seen on TV shows where suspects are interrogated.

"Why are we here?" I whispered to Raine.

"They probably found something," she whispered back, nodding towards a police officer inside wearing a vest with a badge and his last name, Lee, displayed prominently. He was focused on his laptop, seated in one of three chairs in the room.

My eyes shifted to the same memory stick from the envelope, now plugged into his laptop.

"Just in case the stick has any virus, we used a specialized computer," the police officer said. "Take a look at what we found."

The computer screen flickered with an encrypted MS Word file, its text blazing in crimson red at an oversized font of 80, stark against the pitch-black backdrop.

Do I have your attention now?

"That's the only thing inside the folder on the memory stick they gave you," he added. "The only file."