The next day, Woohyun was back at the area where the murdered girl had been found. To be more precise, he was standing in front of 63 Nightdale Drive, the house where the girl had supposedly live with her mother and older sister. If the agents wanted to solve the case quickly, they needed to start interviewing the people closest to her ASAP.

According to the profile the intelligence unit had given them, the girl's name was- or had been- Jung Ara. 5"4 with a petite, dainty build, she had been a young girl of only sixteen years old, studying at the local high school in her neighbourhood. Her father was dead and her mother ran the household as a working single parent. A normal student with no apparent family issues or financial problems... Had the killer simply chosen Jung Ara as his victim at random? Or was there something deeper that the seemingly-innocent girl had been involved with?

Woohyun contemplated these questions in his head as Sunggyu stepped beside him. The brunet reached out and pressed the doorbell. He stood back on the doorstep, patiently waiting for it to be answered. All the while, Sunggyu said nothing to his equally-as-quiet partner.

It had been going on like that since their dispute the other day. Sunggyu would give Woohyun the cold shoulder, only speaking in the occasional curt sentence. Woohyun, in turn, would reply with absolutely nothing at all. Although if he was being truthful with himself, it felt quite- how could he put it- strange  to him. Not having Sunggyu talk to him, reprimand him, or even look in his direction... Yes, it was strange. The silence filled his ears with a foreign sensation. Woohyun wasn't sure if he liked it or not.

After a minute of waiting, Sunggyu pressed the bell again. Ding dong, it chirped loudly, making their presence known to the people inside. But after another few minutes had passed with nobody answering the door, it was evident that the owners were not present in their house.

"Looks like we'll have to try again later." Sunggyu turned around. Without waiting for his companion, he began walking towards the sidewalk curb, where he had parked his car earlier. "Let's head over to her school next. Maybe her teachers and classmates can fill in the blanks for us."

Woohyun glanced briefly at the motionless door. He supposed Sunggyu was right. Seeing as there wasn't any time to waste, they couldn't afford to stand around and wait for the girl's mother to appear. He mirrored his partner's actions and walked down the front steps. When he neared the awaiting vehicle, however, Woohyun noticed that Sunggyu had pulled out his phone and was talking to someone in a brisk, no-nonsense manner.

"- done already? That was fast. I didn't expect you to have it finished until this evening, at the earliest. No, I'm not complaining. Not right now, we still have something to do. Thanks. We'll see you in a few hours."

Ending the phone call, the older male shoved his phone back into his pocket.

"That was Dongwoo," he answered Woohyun's unasked question. Sunggyu avoided looking directly at his companion's face, choosing instead to glance at the spot beside his ear. "He said he's finished with the autopsy. Once we're done with our business at the school, we can head back to HQ and see what he-" He broke off in mid-sentence and frowned into the distance.

"Luhan?"

Woohyun automatically glanced over his shoulder. There, wearing a grey hoodie and with earphones plugged in, was the familiar figure of their new friend. Woohyun raise a brow at the sight. So he hadn't been kidding when he'd said he would see them if they ever dropped by.

Mouth stretched into a grin, Luhan raised his hand in a greeting. "Yo," he beamed. Taking out his earbuds, he approached the pair of detectives like they were his old friends. "Fancy meeting you here. What are you guys doing back so soon?"

Woohyun answered him in a slightly bored voice. "We're investigating. Did you forget about the dead body you saw yesterday already?"

Ignoring his partner's less-than-friendly tone, Sunggyu nodded in the direction of Ara's house. "We had business to attend to. But what about you? What are you  doing wandering around again?"

Luhan flashed him another grin. "I live here, remember? My house is down that street." He pointed towards the end of the road they were on, where another row of houses could be seen. "And I'm just out for another walk. Whenever I have stuff to think about, I usually come outside for a bit. Helps to clear the mind."

"Aren't you worried about being robbed or something? This is a dangerous area, after all," Sunggyu replied with a hint of sarcasm.

"Oh, right. That." Luhan sheepishly scratched the back of his head. "Well, it is  dangerous around here. You don't know how many of my friends have been mugged, or even beaten up by the local gangs. But I figured after our, err, encounter yesterday, I was just overreacting. Besides, I'm a big boy. I can take care of myself."

Sunggyu snorted, but not in an unkind way. "I'm sure you can."

"Mhmm." The cheery-looking man tilted his head to one side. "By the way, you guys never introduced yourselves after we met. You know my name, but I don't know yours. Don't you think that's a little unfair?"

"What kind of advantage does knowing your name give us?" Sunggyu asked, but complied anyways. "If you must know, my name is Kim Sunggyu. This here is my partner, Nam Woohyun."

Woohyun lifted his gaze to meet Luhan's. "Pleasure."

Luhan didn't seem to notice the disinterest in Woohyun's tone. Either that, or he was doing a really good job of hiding it. "No, the pleasure's all mine. Nice to finally meet you two. And you already know who I am," he laughed.

At that moment, a loud ringing noise sounded in the air. Luhan, without skipping a beat, reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a cellphone. "Sorry," he said, crinkling his brow. With quick, nimble fingers, he read the text message that had been sent to his mobile.

"Oh, crap. I completely forgot I had to meet with my sister today."

Woohyun nodded. "Better go before she gets mad," he said, but quite frankly, he didn't really care whether Luhan was late for his family date or not.

"Too late for that," Luhan groaned. "I'll see you two later! Since we seem to have a habit of bumping into each other, I have a feeling we'll meet again sometime."

Sunggyu sighed, but gave him a little smile anyways. "Be safe, alright? If this neighbourhood is as dangerous as you described it, we won't be around to help if someone attacks you."

"Shouldn't I  be saying that to you?"  chuckled Luhan. "After all, you guys are the ones chasing after a potentially psychotic murderer."

Raising a brow, Woohyun watched their interaction from the side. He looked at Sunggyu's face and saw that he still had the friendly smile on his lips. Woohyun couldn't help but feel the slightest bit bemused by his partner's expression. In all the years they had known each other, he had never once seen Sunggyu make such a warm face before.

'Even in high school, did he ever smile...?' Woohyun thought back to their younger days. Yes, he had known Kim Sunggyu since their early high school years, but that didn't mean they had been friends back then. More like acquaintances. Actually, they had been assigned together as lab partners in a few science courses, but since that particular subject had never been Woohyun's strong point, he'd rarely ever attended those classes.

The bottom line was, Sunggyu was smiling. And Woohyun didn't know what was more irritating: the fact that it was aimed towards Luhan, or the fact that he was even bothered by it at all.

--------

"This is not  a nice guy you're after, you two."

After finishing with their business at Jung Ara's school, Woohyun and Sunggyu were once again back at the CSI headquarters. They were now in Examination Room Four, where Jang Dongwoo, a member of the forensics division, was explaining the girl's post-mortem report.

Woohyun glanced down at the table. The body of the murdered girl lay there, motionless and stripped for the agents to see. It was enough to make any person with morals feel horrified, and maybe a little ashamed, as well. Ashamed, because they too were a part of the human race that was willing to inflict this kind of damage to other people. "Not a nice guy, huh? You don't say, Dongwoo."

The pathologist continued. "What's strange about this girl's death is the way she was treated afterwards. Look at these cuts." He gestured at the lacerations littering Jung Ara's corpse. "I'll get into the details later, but she was killed approximately forty-eight hours ago. When you found her, it was twenty. But judging by the scabbing process of her wounds, the killer made these cuts afterwards, probably thirty minutes to an hour before you arrived on scene."

'So I was right about the timing.' Woohyun narrowed his eyes. He visually followed one particularly long scar, tracing it from the corpse's hipbone to her shoulder. An idea began forming in his head... Were they random cuts, placed in no real order on her body, or did they have some sort of meaning, like a pattern from a dark occult group? The inspector made a mental note to find out.

Sunggyu, too, frowned at the body. "So the killer must have returned to the alley around the same time we left HQ. Dammit... If only we had left an hour earlier..."

Pulling off his rubber gloves, Dongwoo sent the frustrated agent a sympathetic smile. "Hey, don't beat yourself up. You couldn't have known that." He walked over to a different table, one laden with files and typed reports rather than a once-living human being. The forensics agent picked up the first report in the pile, then rejoined the other two men in the room.

"Here, this is the paper copy of the autopsy." Dongwoo handed the stapled sheets to Sunggyu, who immediately began rifling through them. "Don't bother with that, Sunggyu. I'll just tell you now what happened to the girl.

"She was a sixteen year old female, as you know," Dongwoo continued. "A common target for ual predators. At first, when I heard she'd been found in an alleyway, I thought it was obvious enough- a typical case of and murder combined, with a pinch of sadistic impulses in the form of these cuts."

"That's what we thought, as well. There have been too many serial rapists-slash-killers around lately."

The pathologist acknowledged Sunggyu's comment with a nod. "But it seems that's not the case here. See, when we later examined her body, there was nothing to indicate that she'd been ually harassed. She wasn't , you two. She wasn't even touched inappropriately."

"Are you sure?" Woohyun voiced. He cast another look at the victim's shell. It was hard to believe, with her being such an easy target, that the killer had not forced any ual acts upon her. Yet, from the intense crosses of scars on her body, a part of Woohyun knew that Dongwoo was speaking the truth. "The killer did nothing ual with her?"

The forensics agent laughed. He seemed relieved to ease some of the tension away from the foreboding atmosphere. "Yes, I'm sure. I don't have an honours degree in criminal pathology for nothing, you know."

"I see... So she died by asphyxiation..." Despite Dongwoo having told him not to, Sunggyu was reading the report he'd been given. "She was choked to death? I know the chances of this are slim, but did you find any fingerprints?"

"Sorry, but no." Grimacing, Dongwoo shook his head. "All we found were faint imprints around her neck. My bet is that the killer wore rubber gloves while strangling her, making absolute certain he wouldn't leave any clues behind. He's a careful one, whoever he- or she- is." 

"That's the worst type." Woohyun couldn't help but glance at the dead girl's corpse once again. She would have been a pretty little thing in life, this Jung Ara, but the deep cuts on her body made her seem like an ugly, grotesque sort of creature. "It's always the clever, cautious ones who win at this game."

[A/N]  I have never been more motivated to finish a story before ;w; Hopefully I actually DO finish writing this, and don't just leave it to collect dust in the corner. Your love gives me the strength to keep writing! /Namu hearts/ Enjoy the next update! ♥