Chapter 192: “Disappearance”: A Suspicious Autopsy Report

Chapter 192: "Disappearance": A Suspicious Autopsy Report

Anticipating that she might need to investigate at Maust College for a while, when planning her itinerary last night, Everly had booked a room in advance at a hotel adjacent to the school.

After checking in at the hotel and, as was her habit, inspecting the room for various hazards and hanging up various protective and warding charms on doors and windows, Everly took out her phone and sent a message to Orff.

Everly: [Please hack into the Concord City Police Department for me and copy Bianca's autopsy report.]

Orff, practically glued to his phone, replied instantly.

Orff: [???]

Orff: [Bianca's dead? That's so sudden—when did she die?]

[She died this afternoon.]

Orff: [Wow, I get the feeling that cases at Maust College are really dangerous. Please be careful...]

Then, tactfully, he added: [Anyway, enough small talk—I'll go grab the files for you now. I'll get back to you in a bit.]

With that, Orff quietly got to work.

Meanwhile, Everly snacked on some dried rations she'd brought to tide herself over, then took a shower in the bathroom.

As she lathered the soap, she caught sight of her wet arms and paused mid-motion.

She remembered what Doreen had said.

Doreen had told her that yesterday, while getting dressed after a shower, she'd accidentally caught a faint foul smell on Bianca. And today, at Bianca's death scene, Doreen and her friend had smelled a similar rotting stench—like something decomposing.

Could that smell be corpse odor?

And then there was Natalie—her words also left Everly deeply puzzled. Why speak up now, of all times, saying "I found the body" right when news of Bianca's death broke? Could it be that the Bianca from before and the Bianca after death were... different beings?

"Buzz! Buzz!"

Her phone on the bathroom counter vibrated twice, snapping Everly out of her thoughts.

Figuring it was Orff's reply, Everly quickly finished washing up, dried off, and changed. Then, drying her hair with a towel, she unlocked her phone.

Sure enough, in under twenty minutes, Orff had hacked through the Concord City PD's firewall and sent over Bianca's brand-new autopsy report.

The report showed that Bianca's cause of death was organ failure from severe dehydration, along with electrolyte and acid-base imbalances—she'd died of thirst!

Not only that, but a closer look at the report revealed something even more alarming:

The medical examiner had dissected Bianca's body and found her stomach empty, with leftover food in her intestines from a meal eaten three days before death. In other words, before dying, Bianca had not only been dehydrated but had also gone nearly three days without eating.

That was probably why the police had asked Doreen if Bianca had eaten or drunk anything recently.

But this also raised a new puzzle: when Doreen arrived at the scene, Bianca had only "died" moments before—her body was still right there. Based on what Old John had taught her, at a death scene, medical examiners usually only do an external exam and secure evidence; the formal autopsy wouldn't happen until the body was transported to the dissection room.

So if Bianca's belly hadn't been opened yet, and only the body's surface was examined, how could the medical examiners have concluded that Bianca had gone without food or water before death?

Unless this wasn't the first time they'd seen a case like this...

Reading further into the autopsy report, Everly found something else.

The report indicated that, based on the degree of decomposition, rigor mortis, and livor mortis, Bianca had actually died three days earlier—around 10 a.m. on February 18th.

As for the injuries to Bianca's skull, including the ones from Sara and her group's beating, they were all postmortem.

Scientifically speaking, that was impossible. A dead person is just a lump of flesh that can't speak, breathe, or move—so how could they run around, go to class, eat, post on Twatter, or even get into fights?

Then, thinking back to Natalie's earlier words—"The client showed up, but there was only a corpse, no soul"—Everly formed a theory: the lively Bianca who'd been seen before she collapsed and died was probably some other creature in disguise.

To keep things straight, she'd temporarily call this fake Bianca "Monster M."

Today was February 20th, so February 18th was two days ago. So while other timeframes couldn't be confirmed, at least for the past two days, the Bianca people saw wasn't the real one—it was Monster M.

After reading Bianca's autopsy report carefully from start to finish, Everly closed the file and scrolled up in her chat with Orff to find the news links he'd shared yesterday.

She tapped two of the links and re-read the reports on Bethany, who died in late January, and Abby, who died on February 16th.

Like Bianca, both had died of thirst after going without food and water for a long time.

Rule one of surviving a horror movie: pay attention to the signs.

Three female students at the same school, all dying of "thirst" one after another—there had to be a connection.

Besides these three, Everly also found the other two cases—the girl who died from a fall in the bathroom and the girl who dropped dead in class—just as suspicious.

Not just because those cases involved deaths, though.

In her past life, America churned out hundreds of horror movies every year. America was only so big, and with that many movies, sometimes horror film locations would "overlap." Everly had run into coincidences like that before.

There were several reasons these two cases made her suspicious.

Suspicion one: the bathroom fall death case. Everly had looked it up online and found that since the incident, the family had just quietly taken their daughter's body and buried her—without even hiring a lawyer to sue the school for "negligent management" and demand compensation. That was really hard to believe.

America was a suing-happy country! A case like that was practically a guaranteed win—why wouldn't they go for it? If your daughter slipped and died in a school bathroom, wouldn't you hate the school and want to bleed it dry?

Of course, this could be explained away by "the school and the parents reached a private settlement."

Now for suspicion two: the condition of the bodies in both cases.

The bathroom death case report was written by members of the school's News Club. The club members had interviewed the girl who'd been showering nearby when Cassandra fell. According to her, when she and her friend heard someone fall and rushed over to help Cassandra up, what they touched was ice-cold.

Plus, the blood under Cassandra's head was dark and had a weird, foul smell. Her arm joints were stiff, and she had purplish-red patches on her back.

As for the classroom death case, that one was covered by outside media. There wasn't much detail on the dead girl's appearance—just a brief note that her eyes were open, with pale pupils and sunken eyeballs.

These two bodies' conditions were easy to miss without looking closely. But with Bianca's case as a precedent—"already dead, reeking of corpse smell"—a closer look at those two deaths showed their bodies were off too.

Anyone who's been in a winter bathroom knows how humid and stuffy it gets. Plus, before she fell, Cassandra had been showering—there's no way her body should've been cold. Yet when the two girls ran over to help her, she was freezing to the touch.

Also, the dark blood, stiff joints, and patches on her back were all signs of a body that'd been lying around for a while.

The same logic applied to the girl who dropped dead in class.

One to three days after death, the corneas cloud over and the irises lose color, so the eyeballs gradually turn white. At the same time, as fluids are lost and tissues dehydrate, the eyeballs gradually sink and cave in. The dead girl's condition fit this pattern perfectly.

In other words, the bodies in the second and third cases had decomposed way too fast—far beyond what a normal corpse should show.

So could she assume those two deaths were also connected to Bianca's case?

With that theory in mind, Everly reopened her chat with Orff and asked him to pull the PD's files on all four victims for her too.

Orff was fast. A few minutes later, her phone got a hefty compressed file.

Everly transferred the files to her laptop and unzipped them, going through each one.

Sure enough, just as she'd guessed, the four deaths before Bianca's were clearly linked to hers. These five were unmistakably the work of a serial killer!

First up was Bethany's body, found on January 31st.

At the time, the coroner, based on the indoor temperature and the degree of decomposition, put the time of death at three days earlier—the early morning of January 28th.

But that conclusion didn't hold up for long, because on the afternoon of January 28th, Bethany had shown up to a big lecture and even borrowed perfume from a girl in the front row!

"Yes, I'm absolutely certain that was Bethany. How could I mistake her? She was the only one in our major who passed the sorority's initiation—countless people secretly envied her!" the girl insisted.

To verify her claim, the cops pulled the surveillance footage from the building's ground-floor entrance and found that, just as the girl had said, around noon on January 28th, Bethany had left the apartment with her backpack to attend class and came back with it that evening.

Since Bethany was clearly alive on the 28th, the coroner's report had to be wrong—at least, that's what the cops figured back then.

To that end, the precinct brought in a new coroner to re-examine the body.

Surprisingly, the new coroner's findings were identical to the previous one's—the cause of death was organ failure from severe dehydration, with the time of death set at the early morning of January 28th.

After three different coroners all came back with the same result, the detectives on the case were spooked, calling it flat-out weird.

Although some more experienced officers suspected the case might involve supernatural forces, since the victim was already dead, there seemed little point in digging further into the cause.

Afraid of stirring up trouble and with the family breathing down their necks, the precinct eventually held a brief internal meeting and decided to withhold part of the autopsy findings from the family, closing the case with the conclusion of "self-imposed starvation and dehydration leading to suicide."