Deer Luhan, With Love

69

Chapter 69 – In Which My Ability to Function Normally is Severely Impaired

Deer Luhan,

Oh God.

Leigh

To say that everybody was surprised to return to the hotel and find what was essentially a control centre set up in the living room (Yi had rustled up a further nineteen computers, and I was pretty certain he was the one with the idea of the computer room hideout back in Baoding now) would have been a bit of an understatement.  Suho and Sehun appeared not to notice it – the former because the first thing he did was go to check on D.O. and the latter because he vanished into his room the instant he got back, but the others crowded round the electronic gadgets (because there was more than just computers) like they’d never seen them before.

Things were taken seriously as Yi explained what each thing was for and regretfully informed us all that little progress had been made towards finding out where the girls were today, but restraint went to hell when Baekhyun spotted the specs for the graphics cards on one of the computers and started referring to it as a Holy Grail for gaming.  Amused, Yi disconnected that computer and three others of the same model so that Baekhyun and the others could play.

“Don’t you need those?” Luhan asked as Baekhyun and Chanyeol excitedly set everything up, with the help of Yi’s assistant.

Yi shook his head.  “Not until after midnight.  They’re for streaming and processing the imaging we get from the drones when we send them out.  Hang on a second.”

A member of the riot squad from the passage outside had entered unannounced, clutching several clear, sealed plastic bags.

“All the phones from the dump, sir.”

“Her domain.”  Yi pointed to me and the policewoman placed the bags containing the phones on the ground beside me, giving me a polite nod before leaving.  I wrinkled my nose, trying to suppress a cough as I wondered what I was supposed to do with them.

“Could you match up the phones with their owners?” Yi suggested.  “Once they’re all accounted for, we can send them away for the forensics to deal with.”

I nodded, but then came up short, wondering how I was supposed to identify the phones when the sealed bags clearly meant I wasn’t supposed to touch them.

“What about the phones that were found in the hotel?” I asked.

“Oh, he dealt with them earlier.”  Yi jerked a thumb over his shoulder at his assistant.  “You said there were twenty-four located in or around the hotel, and we got all of them, so I’m assuming you have the remaining twenty-three there.”

I nodded again and set about counting them.  It had been a severe disappointment that tracking the phones hadn’t amounted to anything: after checking their positions every hour for most of the afternoon, Yi had eventually dispatched two from the squadron in the passageway to go and fetch them from their locations, because it was obvious the phones had been cast aside.

It was with considerable confusion that I totalled the phones at thirty-one not once, but a grand total of five times, and I didn’t know what to make of it.  At first, I assumed that a few other stray phones had made their ways into the bags, like the ancient Nokia brick, but said brick turned out to belong to one of the missing Japanese girls when I came up with the bright idea of ringing each of the phones to see whose was whose.  I found myself faced with eight very recent models of smartphone that apparently belonged to nobody, and I couldn’t for the life of me think why somebody would want to chuck out a Galaxy S4 when I knew for a fact that it was currently the best phone on the market.