Donghae leaned back in his reclining office chair and sighed. The coffee from that morning was still on his table although it was already lukewarm. He threw the coffee away and asked Henry to make him another cup because he simply couldn’t handle it if he didn’t have his daily caffeine.

Sipping a mouthful of the delicious freshly-made liquid, Donghae began going through the reports and analysis the lab had sent to him. The results were about the same as Jessica’s case last time, except that she had been strangled to death instead of being poisoned to death this time. Nothing incriminating could be found on her because the culprit had used bleach again. Donghae was starting to feel sick to his stomach just thinking about it so he quickly switched his focus and thought about other things.

He was pretty sure that something like this had happened before a few years ago, but he couldn’t remember exactly. Donghae put aside the reports and switched on his computer monitor, double-clicking on the Archives folder to show him all the cases dating back to several years ago.

He was right. There had been so many cases of murders before that he simply sighed just looking at the long list. He couldn’t possibly go through all of them to find out if there were any other cases similar to this so he decided that two brains were better than one, especially if the other brain also had supercomputer skills as well.

He summoned Kyuhyun to his office. As always, Kyuhyun immediately knew how to go about finding a way to get Donghae the things he needed. He typed a few commands on Donghae’s keyboard and immediately the list of hundreds of cases was immediately shortened to a list of only five or six cases.

Donghae whistled. “You’re a freaking genius.”

“I know,” the younger smirked, handing the keyboard back to the inspector. “Now the list only has record for cases which involved bleach.”

“Some of them date back to nearly five years ago.”

“They’re not local, though,” Kyuhyun pointed out on the monitor. “Look; two in Osan, one in Suwon and three in Anyang. If they were all committed by the same person, then he or she seems to be moving north. Because he or she is striking here now.”

“Seoul,” Donghae muttered, thinking hard. “But the last case was at least two years ago. Why would the culprit strike again only now?”

“Perhaps he got into trouble before?” Kyuhyun offered, raising his brows. “Or maybe he thought the police were hot on his trails and he decided to lay low for a while. We’re talking about a professional here, Inspector Lee.”

“Hmm, I get what you mean.”

Donghae was silent for a while.

“One of the cases happened in Suwon before, right? I can ask Leeteuk hyung about it, then. Do you think the victims were just random unfortunate girls, or is there a pattern that we haven’t seen?”

Kyuhyun brought out each case on the screen and began going through the details one by one.

“I think the victims were random. The girls’ ages range from twenty till thirty-odd, their occupations were all different; heck, not even all of them were Koreans,” Kyuhyun said, checking the screen.

“No?”

“One was a Chinese tourist.”

Donghae sat up, interested. “Did you just say Chinese?”

Kyuhyun’s eyes lit up in realization and he met Donghae’s expectant gaze. “I see what you mean.”

The inspector smiled. “I think I should call Chief Han about a long overdue warrant for arrest right now.”

* * *

Hyukjae just couldn’t sit still. He wasn’t able to get that familiar silhouette out of his mind. Even sleeping through the meeting Donghae held just now (Donghae certainly did not approve of it, which explains why he was currently working OT in the office (it’s not like he was working anyway)) could not render him a clearer picture. He knew very well he’d seen that man somewhere before, and he was damned that he simply couldn’t remember anything about him.

He slumped onto his desk in defeat. What on earth was he doing here, anyway? Oh, right, he had detention.

He peeked at the pile of work dumped onto his desk that evening before Donghae left. Perhaps he should at least try to sort them all out to kill some time. It wasn’t like anyone was around fo