Please Show Some Respect to This Corpse! (Two-in-one)

Brian felt as if he had had a dream.

Scenes of memories he wanted to forget kept replaying in his mind like a movie: the flames at the children's home, his first few foster parents, their eyes wide and unseeing as they died in all kinds of accidents, and the mangled corpses laid out one after another on the dissection table.

Those images he had deliberately buried surfaced in his heart once more, just like the hallucinations that used to appear, constantly battering Brian's mind.

He had no idea how long had passed.

Brian opened his eyes in a daze.

A Blood Moon slowly faded from the depths of his pupils.

Brian rubbed his stiff neck, which was tilted upward, with some discomfort and muttered in confusion, "I think I just had a dream. I dreamed about those hallucinations that keep acting up again... and my neck is so sore."

After moving his neck around for a while, he took out his phone and checked the time, only to discover in shock that it was already past midnight.

But Brian clearly remembered that when he had just checked the time, it had only just passed eleven!

No wonder his neck felt unbearably sore.

But how had an hour suddenly passed?

Had his consciousness blacked out just now?

He went into the room, picked up the video camera he had prepared in advance, and opened the footage to watch.

There was nothing special in it.

The sky was very red, while he stood there like a wooden dummy, holding his head raised, completely motionless...

Thinking of that hallucination that often appeared, Brian frowned.

There really was something wrong with this Blood Moon that his uncle valued so much!

Brian immediately used professional methods to examine his own body.

Weak waist and legs, kidney deficiency, myasthenia...

Basically nothing had changed.

He then began to examine his surroundings.

A silver moon hung high overhead, and all around was deathly silent.

From the distant street came the muffled sirens of police cars in pursuit, mixed now and then with women's screams and men's beast-like howls.

"My body and the surrounding environment haven't changed... and there's no so-called werewolf transformation drama either."

Brian shook his head, turned around, and went back into the room.

A few streets away from his apartment were several homeless camps.

The wailing and howling outside...

He had long since gotten used to it.

"I probably had another episode just now."

Brian still felt faintly uneasy, but he could not figure out why. To avoid wearing himself down over it, he could only force himself to find a reason and comfort himself.

He prepared to take a shower and relax.

To stabilize his mental state.

He never dwelled on things he could not figure out.

Half an hour later.

After physically disposing of the footage stored in the video camera, Brian, dressed in pajamas and drinking hot milk, comfortably stretched and prepared to go to bed early today.

Ring, ring, ring~

Just then.

A rapid phone ringtone interrupted Brian's movement.

He frowned, set down the cup in his hand, took out his phone, and after seeing the caller ID, somewhat reluctantly chose to answer. "Tom, I—"

"Thank God, someone finally picked up!"

A shriveled, high-pitched voice cut Brian off. "Brian, buddy, listen, I need your help right now. Get to the Forensic Bureau as fast as you can. I'm not kidding, as fast as possible!"

Beep, beep, beep~

Looking at the disconnected call, Brian rolled his eyes.

Tom was his colleague.

However, the other man was a forensic field investigator, the kind who rode along and carried bodies. Sometimes, at murder scenes, he would also help take photos and collect traces and leftover evidence at the scene. He dealt most often with the police department's Robbery and Murder Division, the major crimes unit.

Today should have been his shift.

Most likely, multiple bodies had suddenly been discovered somewhere again, and they were short on manpower, so he had called for help.

Public order in Los Angeles was not exactly good these days.

Unexpected situations like this were fairly common.

Brian changed clothes, thought for a moment, then took a specially made pistol only the size of an ordinary person's palm from a hidden compartment under the bed. He loaded it with bullets and hid it on his body. Then he took two homemade pull-wire detonators and inserted them into the custom strip-shaped pockets on the inside of his suit before leaving the apartment.

The community he was renting in now was an upper-middle-end neighborhood with a bit of age to it.

It was close to downtown Los Angeles.

The environment looked average, and the public facilities were a little old, but overall, it was fairly clean and orderly.

There was a police station right next to it.

Patrol officers in the area made their rounds frequently too, so public safety on the nearby streets was very good.

It was a completely different world from the homeless encampments a few streets away.

The residents here were basically like Brian: ordinary backgrounds, but through their own hard work, they had decent incomes and rented their homes.

There were very, very few actual homeowners.

The reason was simple.

As more and more undocumented immigrants and homeless people gathered in this metropolis, the government, in order to control these unstable factors, had set up several homeless gathering sites a few streets away from Brian's community.

The surrounding streets were full of tents and trash, and addicts who looked like walking corpses could often be seen standing in corners, staring blankly into space.

This greatly affected the mood of the wealthy.

So they began moving to the suburbs and nearby towns.

Over time, a bizarre downtown scene formed here: high-end companies, communities, and commercial streets on one side, and filthy homeless people, tents occupying street corners, and the like on the other.

It was still fine during the day.

At night, the area became a carnival of demons.

So the truly wealthy had either moved farther out or lived in detached villas, estates, or even more upscale communities with independent security patrolling day and night.

Brian cautiously drove through the most chaotic blocks before slowing down and heading toward the Medical Examiner's Office.

Half an hour later, a somewhat rundown building that looked like a factory appeared before Brian.

This was the Los Angeles headquarters of the Medical Examiner's Office.

The Medical Examiner's Office, formally known as the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's Office, was the only official forensic identification agency of the Los Angeles County government. It was responsible for death cases and forensic medical examinations throughout Los Angeles County's jurisdiction of 88 cities, and was also the largest medical examiner's office in the United States.

The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's Office was a functional department under the county government, independent of judicial organs such as the police department, investigative departments, and the courts. Compared with the police department, it was a department of equal rank.

But there were not many employees inside.

Even with all five major departments combined, there were only a few hundred people.

Among them, there were only a pitiful 23 frontline medical examiners, and their daily workload was heavy.

As for Brian, he was just an insignificant nobody in one of the five major departments of the Medical Examiner's Office.

After parking the car, Brian greeted the security guard, who was watching a late-night pay channel, then headed straight toward the autopsy room.

As the largest autopsy center in Los Angeles County, it had two large autopsy rooms and one small autopsy room.

The large autopsy rooms could conduct 11 autopsies at the same time and were mainly used for ordinary autopsies.

The small autopsy room could conduct 3 autopsies at the same time and was mainly used for external examinations of corpses, as well as autopsies of decomposed bodies and bodies with infectious diseases.

Not every dead person needed an autopsy.

There were 19,039 death cases in Los Angeles last year.

After removing the deaths that were not suspected criminal cases, the Medical Examiner's Office had handled around only 9,500 cases last year that required autopsies.

After excluding rest days and holidays, more than 20 to 40 bodies were dissected here every day.

In other words, each medical examiner's daily workload was roughly one or two corpses.

In fact, aside from the overly disgusting nature of the work, the benefits here were still very good.

In practice, if nothing happened at night, the on-duty field investigator could drive the field investigation vehicle straight home around two in the morning and sleep soundly.

If there was a case on scene, he could just drive there directly from home.

Clearly, Brian's colleague Tom was not very lucky today.

As soon as he arrived at the autopsy room, Brian saw a tall, thin, gaunt middle-aged man wearing a work cap, wearily leaning against the white wall of the corridor with his head lowered, smoking.

"Buddy, you don't look like you're in a very good mood."

Brian stepped forward and greeted him.

The tall, thin man heard the movement and turned his head, forcing a faint smile onto his haggard face. "Hey, Brian. You're here."

This man was Tom.

The guy had once been a detective with the police department. During one operation, he had been shot several times, and one of the bullets had nearly punched through his throat.

Though Tom had survived in the end, his health had deteriorated badly. He looked like an addict now, and his voice had become thin, low, and reedy.

Because of the change in his build, Tom was often stopped and checked by patrol officers whenever he went out. That made him more and more withdrawn. He usually disliked leaving home, and only because he and Brian had some topics in common in certain arts had they become a little closer.

Tom took a cigarette from his pocket, tossed it to Brian, then rubbed his sunken eye sockets.

"Today's a bit troublesome.

There are two cases in total.

The dead are two women.

They were neighbors, with only a fence separating their homes. Their times of death were about the same. Both were killed by the murderer inside their own houses, so it should be the same person responsible."

"Homicides?"

Brian understood the implication in Tom's words.

Homicide cases were very troublesome.

According to procedure, they required complicated examinations of the bodies based on the wounds.

Besides that, they also had to deal with the police department's demands and assistance. If even the slightest mistake was made, someone had to take responsibility. It was often a thankless job.

That was why, when faced with cases like this, the people at the medical examiner's office would take as long as they could to produce results. Ideally, the police would solve the case first, and then they could issue an autopsy report based on the outcome, so as to avoid taking the blame.

It was also because of this

that the police department was very unhappy with the medical examiner's office.

They had repeatedly proposed copying New York's approach and forming more "crime lab units" to split up the medical examiner's office's authority.

Of course, since that kind of proposal cost money and brought little benefit, the higher-ups had never paid it any mind.

Once he learned that these were two homicide cases, Brian put on a mask of pain.

For this kind of autopsy, each body corresponded to one case number.

The person handling each step could not be changed lightly.

Although Brian was not a real medical examiner, he was now responsible for temporarily collecting these two bodies, and the follow-up work would also be handled by him together with the assigned medical examiner.

Of course, the medical examiner was only responsible for describing the injuries and normal organs, recording them and drawing the autopsy sketch, and extracting related samples such as organs and blood.

As for the hard labor of dissecting and photographing the bodies, that would be carried out by Brian under the medical examiner's guidance.

Afterward, running around the various departments of the medical examiner's office for handoffs would also fall to Brian, the poor bastard.

The entire process was extremely tedious.

Tom also knew he had dumped a mess on Brian, and apology showed on his face. "I heard that a new department seems to be getting established recently. They're really short on experienced autopsy technicians. Just treat it as getting familiar with the work."

Brian's heart stirred when he heard that.

A new department?

Could it be the "crime lab unit" Uncle Billy had mentioned?

He lit the cigarette and said as if casually, "What new department?"

Tom shook his head. "The news came from a former colleague of mine in the Robbery and Murder Division. I don't know the details either, but the pay and benefits are definitely better than what marginal figures like us get at the medical examiner's office. I'll probably sign up when the time comes."

Seeing this, Brian could only give up on trying to fish for more information.

When the cigarette was finished, the two of them got busy.

Tom's work mainly involved preparing the crime scene investigation report and the report on the victims' information.

This was actually a very bizarre thing.

Because under normal circumstances, these were supposed to be handled by the detectives in charge of the homicide case, and the police department also had dedicated crime scene investigators for examining the scene.

The bizarre part was right here.

According to Los Angeles regulations, at a homicide scene, the medical examiner's scene investigator and the police had to conduct the crime scene investigation together.

At the same time, the police scene investigators could only be responsible for examining the scene outside of the body itself. They had no authority to conduct an on-scene examination of the corpse.

Examining a corpse could only be handled by a field investigator from the Medical Examiner's Office.

So when could the Detective Bureau take over the investigation?

They had to wait until daybreak, when the medical examiner on duty had reviewed the scene investigation report provided by the medical examiner's field investigator, along with the victim information report, confirmed that it was a homicide, issued a written forensic report, and handed it over to the Detective Bureau.

Only then could they officially take over the investigation.

In short, it was very tedious.

Brian's job tonight was temporary body collection and describing the corpses' characteristics.

Before Brian arrived, Tom had already prepared the report materials, so after bringing Brian over to the two body transport carts, he retreated into the small room next door and buried himself in writing the report.

Looking at the two bodies wrapped in body bags.

Brian took a deep breath of air thick with the smell of disinfectant and formalin, changed his clothes, turned on the recording equipment, inserted an unnumbered card, and prepared to start work.

Clatter—

As the chains were pulled open.

Two female corpses with faces smashed beyond recognition and miserable deaths appeared before Brian.

Although Brian was a slacker, in more than two years he had handled over a thousand corpses, and after seeing and hearing so much, he still had a basic eye for this kind of thing.

These were very obvious fatal injuries caused by a blunt object.

The killer was most likely a very strong man, and at the time he should have been in an extremely excited state, beating both victims' cheekbones until they caved in.

"A bit like a crime of passion."

Brian gave them a few numb glances, then walked toward the corpse on the right, preparing to make a simple record.

Just then.

The incandescent light in the morgue flickered slightly.

Brian instinctively looked up, only to find everything as usual. Just as he was about to continue his work, an icy sensation suddenly wrapped around his right hand, the one close to the body cart.

Someone grabbed my right hand!!!

Brian's heart jolted. Almost by instinct, he broke free of that icy grip, drew his pistol, and jerked backward, only to slam into the other body cart.

The next moment.

That same bone-chilling sensation appeared on another part of Brian's body.

Brian abruptly lowered his head and saw a pale, stiff, slender arm unceremoniously grabbing the area where his work pants formed a triangular seam, leaving him almost numb.

Fuck you!

I'm a living, breathing man. Am I really going to let a corpse bully me?

A surge of anger welled up in him.

One unknown incident after another.

Not only did they fail to scare Brian, they instead unleashed the emotions he had suppressed for far too long.

A crazed smile spread across his face. He pulled out the detonators on him, grabbed the fuse, and grinned widely. "This corpse, please show some respect, or I'll stuff these full into your cute little mouth."

Counties and counties are both mentioned in papers, but the mainstream translation uses county. I'm just used to writing county here.