Let's Kill Her (Book #1)

(ﾒ￣▽￣)︻┳═一(21)

Sejeong and I sit at the breakfast table in our room, which is covered with open books and food. I'm looking through pictures of knives and she's reading about rigor mortis. It's like a twisted version of the old couple you see in movies slipping through the newspaper and drinking coffee.

"So far, the closest thing to what I remember seeing is this," I say, pointing at a picture of a plain metal-handled knife in my book.

"A common kitchen knife?" Sejeong says, and frowns.

"Well, I can positively. It was dark. But I do remember it being silver," I say.

Sejeong's frown lingers.

"What?"

She swallows a bite of her toast. "It's just . . . I don't know how someone could have gotten a hold of a kitchen knife. Those are locked up and guarded at all times, and not even in the kitchen, in a different room altogether."

I smear butter and jam on my bread. "The night I went up against Jennie in that challenge, Kang said they were doing a search. Could that be what they were looking for?"

"That's what I was just wondering," she says, and we fall silent again, reading and eating.

Sejeong runs her finger under a few lines in her book. "You said his body was cold."

"I nod. "Not icy cold, but like when you touch someone's cold hand. Lukewarm might be more accurate. All I know is that it was noticeable."

"You had just been outside," Sejeong says, half to me and half to her book. "You were wearing your cloak - it gets pretty cold here at night, even with a cloak and even with the activity of climbing trees . . ." She looks up at me. "Can you remember if you were feeling hot or cold when you found his body?"

It's amazing to watch her consider all the factors. She's make an excellence detective. "I tend to run warm," I say. "And by the time I had gotten to him, I was running and my adrenaline was pumping. I was definitely sweating."

"So he was cold compare to you, but would you say he was warmer than the air temperature?" she asks.

I nod.

"And you touched his neck, right? Did he feel stiff at all?"

"Well . . ." I say, trying my best to recall that terrible moment and not get queasy. "I knew right away that he had no pulse, but he wasn't rock hard. Maybe a little stiff."

"What about the blood? Where was it?" Sejeong asks, and as relaxed as her expression is, I can see in her eyes that she doesn't like picturing Taehyung dead any more than I do.

He was in the shadows, so it was really just varying degrees of darkness, but I remember clearly that his chest was covered in blood, or rather his white shirt was. He was wearing his cloak, too. But I didn't see any blood on the floor. If there had been, I would have gotten it on myself when I knelt down."

She stares outside the window.

"What are you thinking?" I ask.

"A dead body loses heat at about zero point eight-three degrees Celsius an hour - that's one point five degrees Fahrenheit, if it's easier for you. That's not quickly at all. Although if a body is kept in a cold place, it will lose heat faster. But regardless, he couldn't have been newly killed when you found him or you wouldn't have noticed a temperature difference. Also, for you to feel signs of rigor mortis, even just a little, he would likely have been dead for three to eight hours," she says, and my mind spins at the implications.

"But obviously he wasn't in that hallway for hours or someone would have found him before I did," I say, following her train of thought. "Are you saying you think he was moved there sometime after he'd been killed?"