AnOther Alice: A Novel (Undergoing Editing)

Chapter 06

At ten-thirty in the morning, Detective Kimura was down at the precinct sitting at his desk, multitasking while eating breakfast. He looked beside his monitor at an opened envelope from forensics. It had been dropped on his mountain of files an hour ago, and had the results from the Stewart case.

As expected, the majority of fingerprints on Adelaide's body were a mix of her own and Gabriel's. People at the wrong place, wrong time, usually wound up leaving their DNA on the scene. But that wasn't what gave Kimura pause. What mystified the veteran detective the most was the skin tissue samples found under Adelaide's nails. Gabriel was ruled out quickly since he wasn't a match, but when they finally got a hit, the DNA profile belonged to no other than their own victim.

She had no scratch marks anywhere on her body, which meant it was an impossibility that she'd clawed her own flesh without leaving some mark on her. Yet the evidence spoke for itself. The lab techs even ran the tests twice, before sending it to another lab to be tested again after the initial results, if only to rule out a glitch in the system. It came back the same—even from a different forensic lab.

Until Gabriel Brennan woke up from his coma to make a statement and give further context, the investigation was at a standstill. Along with his partner Penelope McCullen, he had interviewed Adelaide's co-workers, friends from school, teachers, all the way down to Adelaide's parents, Robert and Helen Stewart, both of whom also vehemently denied that Gabriel was capable of such a heinous crime. Since Gabriel's fingerprints weren't even on the murder weapon, Kimura himself was beginning to think there might be more to the case.

Feeling somewhat at a loss, Kimura took a brief mental pause on the Stewart case to go through their missing person database. Having narrowed down the aspects of his search, within minutes, photos of Asian women flooded the screen. All in their early to mid-twenties. After a while, he leaned back in the office chair and tried to rub away and oncoming migraine. Kimura thought about who he was looking for: a heart-shaped face, light brown hair, a beauty mark under the left eye.

Seconds passed before he decided to take another go at it, only this time, he began spelling a specific word, his own family surname. Moments after he typed out the word KIMURA into the search bar, a hand suddenly plopped on his shoulder from behind.

"Jesus Christ!" Kimura said, so startled he accidentally squirted ketchup from his breakfast sandwich onto the desk.

"Sorry Ren I didn't mean to frighten you," McCullen said, taking out a red flash drive from her pocket and showing it to him as he wiped up the sauce. He noticed the drive, along with the bags under McCullen's usually energized eyes. "But I need you to watch this clip."

"What's this about?" said Kimura. "I thought we looked over all the video evidence?"

McCullen advanced towards his computer, ignoring Kimura's confused face as she wheeled his desk chair over to the side. "This one's different," she said, plugging in the drive. "Believe me, it's going be the game changer we were looking for."

When the icon for the USB appeared on the desktop, McCullen clicked on the file, followed by the folder bearing today's date. When it finally opened, there was a MP4 file she double-clicked on.

Kimura took up his espresso, only getting a few sips out of the Styrofoam cup before McCullen turned to look at him, eyeing his cup.

"I'd advise you put down the coffee, sir," she said, turning back to look at the monitor as the video opened up. "With what you're about to see next, you might drop it and scald yourself. Again."

That was one time, and you were the one driving, Kimura thought, smirking to himself. They don't call you Pepper for nothing. Your words carry a burn, but it's from a good place.