A sense of duty

"Just as that park officer said, there haven't been any reports of large carnivores around the crime scene for years. I found twenty-three common carnivorous species in total, and the biggest was only a raccoon."

Nick took the cup of instant noodles Hancock handed him and wolfed them down.

"So our killer probably isn't Raccoon Bert, right?" Hancock joked. "Raccoon Bert" was a Canadian cartoon produced in the 1980s that had once enjoyed widespread popularity.

"The good news is, we may have identified our victim. A female student at the art college went out for a run this morning and still hasn't returned. Her roommate reported her missing this afternoon. The information had barely entered the database before it matched the lab's fingerprint results."

At that, Nick slurped down the noodles in a few mouthfuls, barely tasting them, and hurried to his feet. "Then what are we waiting for? Let's go see her roommate."

The women's dormitory at Portland Art College was a three-story, gabled brownstone nestled among numerous cherry trees.

Unfortunately, it was already late summer, so there was no chance of seeing beautiful women and flowers vying for splendor. Still, the lively female students laughing and horsing around campus, brimming with youthful energy, were enough to leave Hancock perfectly satisfied.

"You should've pushed me a little harder back then. If I'd known college life was this wonderful, even if I couldn't get into the state university, I could've tried somewhere else."

His partner's words nearly made Nick roll his eyes.

As an ordinary person with neither power nor connections, getting into the middling-ranked Portland State University on his grades alone had been no easy feat for Nick himself. He really couldn't carry a hopeless student like Hancock along with him.

Although dormitory management at American University wasn't particularly strict, the two detectives dutifully waited outside after contacting the person who had filed the report, to avoid any trouble.

Every so often, a bold girl approached the youthful-looking Nick and volunteered to add him on AIM, MSN, or Facebook.

It had only been a year since the first iPhone's release, and Android had only just been born. Smartphones were still nowhere near as widespread as they had been in Nick's previous life.

Young Americans still relied primarily on computers or mobile webpages to socialize online.

AIM and MSN offered functions roughly similar to QQ, but among trend-conscious college students and young people, Facebook, a social platform similar to Qzone, had rapidly risen to become the mainstream choice.

Watching Nick politely turn down three young college women who approached him in less than ten minutes, Hancock still looked a little sour, despite long being used to it.

"I can't even imagine how popular you were in college."

"It really wasn't as extreme as you're imagining. I wasn't in a fraternity, so my social circle was always pretty small," Nick said truthfully.

Although it wasn't as exaggerated as Western films and television made it seem, students who dutifully focused on their studies really were excluded by the "mainstream" on American campuses.

If he hadn't kept up combat training since childhood and developed the ability to beat people up without leaving visible injuries-

A bastard like Nick, who hadn't joined the football team in high school or a fraternity in college, yet still managed to steal away both the high school cheerleading captain and the college sorority president, would long since have become a target for bullying.

Before long, a petite, pretty Latina arrived. The worried girl hurriedly began telling the two detectives about her missing roommate as soon as she saw them.

"She went out for a run at seven thirty this morning, but normally she's back within an hour at most. That really worried me. When she still hadn't shown up by noon, I notified campus police.

"Do you know what exactly happened to Selvi?"

Rather than answer, Nick took out his phone and showed her the photograph of the iPod. "Do you recognize this?"

"That's Selvi's iPod. She usually wears earphones and listens to music while she runs, and she likes turning the volume up really loud. I warned her that it was bad for her hearing, but she didn't seem to care much.

"Oh God, have you found her? What happened to her?"

"Uh..." Nick certainly couldn't tell her outright that her roommate was now a pile of body parts, and that they still hadn't even found her head.

Judging by the location of this women's dormitory, the site where the remains had been found was just about the distance someone could cover in half an hour of jogging along the trail.

In other words, he could even use that to estimate that the victim had been attacked at around eight in the morning. By the time another hiker called the police more than two hours later, all that remained of a living person was scattered pieces of her body, evenly distributed over several hundred meters deep in the woods.

What kind of beast could do something like that? Nick couldn't help thinking of his earlier encounter.

If he had been an ordinary, unarmed person when he encountered that monster that could turn into a beast, would he have met the same end?

And what kind of monster was that other thing, the one that could turn into an old witch with a zombie face?

Nick found that sort of monster a little more frightening. Imagine having a romantic moment with a beautiful woman one day, whispering sweet nothings beneath the moonlight, only for her to suddenly turn into something like that at the height of passion. Wouldn't that scare him into psychological impotence?

Seeing Nick fall silent, Hancock had no idea his partner's thoughts had already wandered far afield. Assuming he was carefully weighing his words, Hancock simply took over.

"Sorry, the case is still under investigation, so we can't disclose the details at the moment. Can you describe what she was wearing this morning?"

"Black leggings, a red athletic jacket, and pink Nikes. Oh, right, I have a photo on my iPhone. Selvi always wears that when she goes for her morning run."

Coming back to his senses, Nick looked at the phone screen the girl held out. It showed a photo of her with the victim. Both wore sweet smiles, brimming with the youth and vitality peculiar to girls their age.

"Selvi Oster. Her identity's confirmed. A local, nineteen years old, studying sculpture at the art college. I can hardly believe she's the victim we saw this morning."

In the detectives' office, Hancock looked at the driver's license information on his monitor and finally let out a long sigh. "At least we've made some progress. I hope she died quickly enough that she didn't suffer too much."

Then he checked the time and looked over at Nick, who was still bent over his desk, busy working. "It's about time to clock out. You're not planning to pull an all-nighter, are you? They haven't even settled jurisdiction yet."

"Go home and get some rest. I'm going to look into the victim's relationships. You'd better visit the forensics team again first thing tomorrow and see whether they've got any results on that footprint we found at the scene. I feel like it could be a breakthrough."

Nick's eyes remained fixed on his computer screen, which displayed the victim's Facebook profile.

According to the professional textbooks, one of the greatest taboos for a detective was forming too close an emotional bond with a victim. It could lead to disastrous consequences.

In his previous life, Nick had heard similar things from former comrades who had become police officers after leaving the military, but that didn't mean investigators had to abandon empathy entirely.

Looking at the victim's radiant smile on her profile, he felt an inexplicable urge rise within him. A sense of duty to uncover the truth and bring the killer to justice welled up naturally.