CHAPTER NINE
Carpet of Blue Death
Naomi Kimishima
"Come on, come on! How much farther?"
Maria Torres's agitated scowl cuts through the midnight sky. The helicopter's blades are in a whirl, fighting to get itself to Mexico.
"I don't know!" Bathed in the dim light coming from the moon, Ian Holden, just as agitated, replies. "I've never flown a chopper to Mexico!"
"We're already in Mexican airspace," Naomi speaks up. "Now to find Rosalia."
"And how do we do that?" Holden snarls. "We don't have a clue where she is!"
"We have to think," says Naomi, struggling to get her foggy mind to work. She hasn't slept for the past twenty hours at least, and even her agile forensics mind cannot fight against the urgent scream of the blades. "How about showing people her picture?"
"Are you kidding me?" Holden howls. "Do you know how many villages there are?"
"Fine, Agent," Naomi scowls. "Do you happen to have a better plan?"
Maria, who sits in the copilot's seat, suddenly jerks her green eyes wide and points into the distance. "Hey! What's that?"
In the distance, and even in the dark night, a flash of color can be seen fluttering in the wind.
"Something flying," says Holden softly, breaking his argument with Naomi. "Are those... butterflies?"
It happens to be that at this very moment, the first edges of the sun creeps across the mountain horizons, bring the light of a new day to the world. It illuminates the orange color of the Monarch butterflies as they light up a trail across the sky, carving a golden path into the otherwise boring landscape.
"Wow," Maria breathes. "It's like a golden river flowing through the sky..."
"Danaus plexippus," Naomi whispers, being scientific again.
"Danaus?" Holden echoes, not sharing Naomi's knowledge. "What's that?"
"Monarch butterflies," she clarifies. "This must be their migration route. They can be seen every year in this season... beautiful."
Maria's tanned face turns into an intense color as the full blast of the sun hits her skin. "Monarchs..." she whispers, mind reflecting back to things from far before...
"Monarchs only stay in America until the end of the summer," CR-S01's voice whispered, declaring the blatant truth. "At the end of the summer, the Monarch butterfly... they head south to find Asclepias to feed to larvae. Look at the picture. Monarch butterflies."
Maria looked at the picture in her gloved hand, sliding the thumb back to see the Monarch resting on a flower at Rosalia's knees. CR-S01 crept closer, and said the undeniable truth.
"Yes. She's in Mexico."
"The butterflies!" Maria cries, eyes not straying from the golden path. "Hey, buddy! Follow those butterflies!"
"What's with you?" Holden yells. "We can't just jump around at random!"
"It's not random!" Maria shouts back, Naomi frowning behind her. "There was a Monarch in Rosalia's photo! It's the same time of year, too! We can follow them!"
"Huh," Holden sighs. "Worth a shot."
"Right," Naomi echoes. "Agent, follow the trail of butterflies!"
Gone are the chopper's clacking sounds. Gone are the mysterious paths across the sky. All that's left is a meadow, a beautiful one, with rolling hills covered with flowers of bright spectrums of color: red, yellow, orange... Ian Holden lands the helicopter in the field, careful to not disturb the flowers.
"Over there," he calls, pointing a finger towards a patch of flowers. "Someone's over there!"
Not wasting any time, Maria jumps out of the helicopter, landing shin-deep in the flowers. Taking off immediately towards where Holden had indicated, Maria can make out the figures of someone – a girl – lying in the flowers... but...
The flowers surrounding her... are blue.
"Rose...!"
Maria comes to a stop just at the borderline of the blue flowers, as if respecting the young girl's territory, but one look at her tells her that something is wrong.
From behind her, Naomi and Holden catch up, coming to a stop just behind Maria, eyes dropping down at the girl. They can tell from Maria's stiff body and silence that the girl is indeed who they were looking for.
"So, that's her..." Naomi sighs. Years of forensics experience has taught her things, especially when it comes to identifying those who are alive from those who are dead.
"Yeah..." Maria chokes out.
Untouched by the world, a girl is laid to rest upon a bed of once-red flowers. Her name is Rosalia Rossellini. She sleeps forever… but she is very much alive.
Monarch butterflies pay their final respects to the sleeping, dead-but-alive girl. Today they will flutter among her blue blooms, her final resting place, but tomorrow they leave for America.
Today they find peace and refuge among her cerulean blankets, blissfully unaware of the deadly virus they hold within the golden pollen that dusts their wings as they fly by.
Rosalia will never wake again. She deserves that much, for even the dead deserve to rest. But one part of Rosalia will never be content.
The Rosalia Virus, a deadly pathogen that lies within her blood, still seeks revenge on a world Rosalia herself experienced so little of.
Tomorrow… begins death.
"She's turned into adipocere!" Holden whispers.
Much of Rosalia is buried under the flowers, but she still wears the pink and white dress she had worn the day she died: Maria can recognize them from the visions she had seen of her. White hair laying down as a blanket to rest upon, hands folded upon her stomach in a final resting place, eyes closed in peace. Rosalia had never been buried, but surely, yes, she is gone, and dead.
"Damn..." Maria swallows, through her tears. "You've grown so big... I didn't recognize you..."
"What can we do?" Holden yells. "We can't get a blood sample from her!"
"Agent Holden," Naomi cuts in. "Please take Maria and search the facility."
"What're you going to do...?"
"I'll examine her," she says shortly, unsure if she is happy or not to use her experience. "I might be able to learn something."
"H-Hold on!" Maria cries. "We... we can't get a serum, can we? It's impossible like this! Then..."
"Then what?" Naomi says sharply, striding closer to Maria. "Are you going to wait for the world to end? Move. You're in my way."
The sky may be blue, and the Monarch butterflies may dance among the beautiful blue blooms, but soon Mexico will be swept over with the pandemic storming up in the north. Maria's scowl turns into a softer, reformed expression. Naomi strides past her instead, heading towards Rosalia. "I have my own way to hear her voice. Just like you," Naomi continues.
Maria's eyes widen, and she gasps in surprise. Then, she collects herself. "I… I'll leave Rose in your hands."
"Yes." Naomi replies gently. Then, as Agent Holden and Maria leave, she turns to look down at the mysterious girl in the blue flower field, "You're Rosalia? I've been looking for you for a while." Naomi sighs, gearing up for another poetic speech. "I wonder… when did people begin to mourn each others' deaths? It's funny. Everyone has to die someday."
Then, just as she expected, the cell phone clenched in Naomi's hand begins to ring. An eerie pink and purple mist drifts out, encasing Naomi's hand in the magenta light.
Naomi hesitantly raises the phone to her ear, not sure whether she wants to hear this girl's last words. What had she spoken in the last few seconds of her life, before her flame had been extinguished by the dark power of whatever that had killed her? But it is her duty to discover the victim's true story, and so, she slowly flips open the cell phone and raises it to her ears.
"Beginning…" The word comes out through the small speakers in a whisper, almost too faint to be heard.
Naomi slowly lowers the phone, returning it to her pocket. Faintly, she remembers what she had told Maria that day, so long ago: You are the only one who can know the truth that you saw. You should at least remember that. Maria had told her about Rosalia, the girl she kept on seeing, and the world she kept on murmuring: Beginning. The whole time, Rosalia had been saying the last word she had ever muttered... the beginning of the epidemic that origins from herself.
"I heard your final words. I'll make sure to pass them on, with the time I have…" Naomi doesn't elaborate on this cryptic statement, but instead goes to the helicopter, where her computer and equipment are waiting. This case has to be solved; the fate of humanity depends strongly on it.
Her phone rings, something so ordinary yet so unfamiliar to Naomi's crisis. Quickly flipping it open with her thumb, Naomi answers the call, recognizing the familiar number on speed dial.
"Testing, testing. Dr. Kimishima, can you hear me?" Little Guy's voice comes through the speakers, crystal clear.
"Yes, loud and clear," Naomi responds. "It looks like I can examine her normally." By her, Little Guy can tell that she means Rosalia, but...
Still confused, Little Guy says quickly, "You mentioned that in the email… what are you looking for?"
"If our information is correct, Rosalia was with Albert Sartre," Naomi murmurs slowly. "But we find Rosalia's corpse here. Isn't that odd?"
Little Guy shrugs, not sharing Naomi's wits. "What's so strange about that?"
"If Gabe brought Albert's corpse back from USAMRIID, then he would've died in Backcove, over 3000 km away," she explains. "What happened to these two must be brought to light."
He finally gets it. Rosalia was supposedly living with Sartre, but if Rosalia died in Mexico and Sartre died in Backcove, none of it makes any sense.
"But, will that make our situation any better?" Little Guy questions.
"Who knows?" Naomi answers grimly. "Rosalia's corpse has become adipocere. We can't get a serum."
"Argh." Little Guy rests his head in his hands, exhaling exasperatedly. "What a mess. This is it, then."
"No. These two must be related to the infection's source." Naomi insists, refusing to give up. "Filling in the gaps in the timeline will reveal the truth. That's what I believe."
Little Guy sighs, frustrated. "All right. I'll follow you to the very end."
"Thank you. I'm grateful for that."
Little Guy's microphone fills with static. "Uh, sorry, Dr. Kimishima. Can you repeat that? The transmission cut out there for a moment."
What a coincidence, Naomi laughs in her head. One of the few times she had ever given Little Guy a compliment happens to be the only time Little Guy ever asks her to repeat something.
"Adipocere… it occurs when bacteria do not multiply. It's beautiful." Naomi looks at Rosalia's body, not carrying out Little Guy's request. "As if she was still alive and with us... What's death, anyway? What does it signify? We cry when we are born… what about when we die?" Her voice hardens. "Let's begin. Show me the light that you were robbed of!"
And with that, Naomi Kimishima begins the autopsy of Rosalia Rossellini.
First, she investigates the body of the adipocere girl. "Rosalia Rossellini… the girl at the very center of the disastrous outbreak of infections. Let's begin. Time to expose the hidden truth." Naomi murmurs softly to herself, strolling around Rosalia's body, unsure of where to begin. Her body has been carried away, yet, it still rests in a bed of flowers.
First, Naomi notices the two-inch laceration on Rosalia's foot. "Hm… There's a cut on the bottom of her left foot. There's dirt in the area she was bleeding from. This means that she walked on the injured foot. Even more, she was walking in dirt." Naomi sighs. "It must've been very difficult for her to walk at all with this wound." This could be a vital clue.
Next, she moves her way up the body, noticing something else: a hole in the girl's leg, going all the way through to the other side. "This is an indication of having been shot with a gun. The bullet has completely passed through the body. The entrance GSW, gun shot wound, is where the bullet enters the body. Conversely, the exit GSW is where the bullet exits the body. Normally, the exit wound is larger than the entrance wound." Keeping that in mind, Naomi discovers which is the entrance and which is the exit GSW. "Hmm, that's right. This one would be the exit GSW." Naomi looks at the hole in the front of the girl's body.
Then, something catches her eye. In the center of Rosalia's chest…
"This…It's a bullet wound. Does that mean Rosalia was shot?" Naomi frowns; shot a second time? "It looks as if the bullet has passed all the way through her body." Naomi sees that the entrance GSW is in the front of the girl's body, while the exit GSW is on Rosalia's back.
While Naomi had turned the body around to study the exit GSW for the chest wound, she notes something else: "Hypostasis is present in the corpse's back. If I sent this in for analysis, we might figure out the position she was in when she died."
Naomi's eyes flicker down to the arms and gasps, looking at Rosalia's palm. "This is severe. Something's gone completely through the right palm." She leans in closer. "I can see fine, black particles around the wound, as well. Judging by the general condition of the body, this wound is a gunshot wound. But what would these black particles be?" she wonders, moving on in the investigation. Black particles have appeared before and Naomi has always figured them out. "Still, someone shot at her hand? Why would that happen?"
Still mystified, Naomi investigates the clothes Rosalia was wearing when she died. "Let's start looking at these right away. I should definitely be able to find something."
First, near the bottom of the dress, the once-beautiful pink-and-white laces torn up muddy and bloody. "This hole corresponds to the wound on her thigh." Indeed, a small hole is torn in the cream fabric, with varying shades of blood smeared around it. "So whatever injured her there created this as well."
Naomi's eyes slither up, and near the top of the dress, right in the center of the chest area, she finds a small hole, with a small blossom of blood around it. "This hole matches the wound on Rosalia's chest. It's likely that this was caused by the same thing that created the wound."
This does explain a great deal of things: the fact that Rosalia was shot while wearing this dress, and most likely died in it. After all, who can survive a gunshot to the heart without treatment immediately? But if she died immediately... bullets could be a crucial piece of evidence.
For the first time, Naomi notices something, distracted by her own myriad of thoughts. A few small splattered bloodstains, near the bullet wound on the chest. "Could this blood have come from the chest wound?" she breathes, leaning in closer. "There's something odd about it, though... It's splattered around. If it was hemorrhaging from the chest, it would only be coming from one area." She frowns, head cocked, thinking hard. "If it's spattered around this much, it means there's another reason for this hemorrhaging."
Having discovered all she could from the corpse, Naomi heads to the makeshift office set up in the helicopter. She begins to sort through the information she has gathered, on the computer she had fortunately brought along, and, of course, ask Little Guy for help. Well, more like giving him homework.
"Little Guy, could you analyze this hypostasis?"
"Yes, of course." The familiar voice answers. "Please send your data over to me."
"All right," says Naomi, in a voice too calm for a crisis like this, when all of the world depended on this. "Please look at it right away."
She drums her fingers impatiently, waiting for the few seconds it takes for her partner to analyze the data.
"Okay, I've got it." Little Guy answers, after another moment. "Let's see here… Well, the hypostasis matches the position Rosalia's body was in when she was discovered.
Naomi thinks that over, reciting the definition. "Hypostasis occurs when the blood flow throughout the body has stopped. The blood settles within the corpse, pooling in the areas closest to the ground. Thus, Rosalia's corpse was not moved. If the corpse had been moved, the hypostasis wouldn't match the position we discovered the body in. That place truly is where Rosalia drew her last breath."
"Oh, um, Dr. Kimishima?" Little Guy interrupts her poetry talk. "I have a question."
"Hopefully, it's something I have an answer for," she says bitterly, still drowned in her musings. "What is it?"
"Well, the blue flowers are only growing in that one particular area of the field, is that correct?" Little Guy asks cautiously. Naomi had described the meadow to him briefly, and specifically about the blue flowers blooming around Rosalia while the rest were warmer colors.
"Yes, that's right." Naomi answers, going along with Little Guy's train of thought. "Rosalia was found in the center of this area of blue flowers."
"Well, isn't that too much to be coincidence? It just seems so set up." Little Guy's voice is hesitating, as if afraid to get another lecture from Naomi about jumping to conclusions.
"I see," says Naomi, understanding. "What you're trying to say is that the killer moved her there."
"Yes. Doesn't that make more sense?" Little Guy asks.
"Hm. You may have a point," she admits. "Hypostasis begins to appear roughly 30 minutes after death. It's possible that her corpse was moved here immediately after she died, to create this situation."
"If that's the case, why would her killer do such a thing to her?" Little Guy asks. Murderers, such as in Dennis Taylor's case, tend to leave their victims on a bed to rot, and even the more graceful ones, such as Veronica Cage's case, had tried to throw her off a bridge. For Rosalia... someone had not only taken great care to not disturb her, and even to fold her hands and to set her at rest.
Naomi sighs. "We're just grasping at straws here. We'll need real evidence and facts in order to solve these mysteries," she answers irritably. Her lecture comes on anyways.
Before Little Guy can protest that she's just being a hypocrite, she picks up on another trail. "Hey, Little Guy. I need you to analyze this gunshot wound." Naomi sends over the information about the gunshot wound on Rosalia's hand.
"Yes, ma'am." Little Guy says hurriedly, quickly opening the file, glad that Naomi had spared him. "A gunshot wound to the palm… I see. The bullet entered through the palm and exited through the back of the hand. It seems she was raising her hand towards the gun when it was fired."
Naomi frowns. "Why would she put her hand up like that?" Then, she answers her own question, as usual. "To defend herself. A defensive wound is damage taken while trying to protect oneself from harm. She likely put her hands up as an instinctive reaction to having a gun pointed at her..." Remembering the question that had bothered her before, Naomi asks, "Little Guy, could you analyze these black particles?"
"Okay," he agrees, glad that he hasn't been forgotten. "Hmm… this is gunshot residue."
"Gunshot residue?" Naomi asks, irritated that Little Guy knows more than her.
"When a gun is fired, it launches more than the bullet," Little Guy explains eagerly. "Particles of gunpowder are blasted out of the barrel by the force of the explosion as well. When those particles land on the target being shot at, it is known as gunshot residue."
"I see," says Naomi, understanding. "So, since it was on Rosalia, that means that she was shot from very close range."
Thinking that over, Naomi decides to ditch Little Guy and go to Albert Sartre's research facility, the lab where he and Rosalia worked and lived. It could be interesting... if Rosalia was found in the flower field, she must've died within half an hour of the field. The house could be an extremely likely place to search.
Arriving at the scene, Naomi takes in the view around her. Bare rafters let in rays of sunlight that illuminate the room. All around, cabinets and desks hold a lot of lab equipment. The floor is cluttered with papers. Outside an open door, Naomi catches a glimpse of the beautiful field of Asclepias flowers, blanketing Rosalia's death.
"So this is Albert's research facility," Naomi says quietly. "There's so much equipment and material. It seems there are household items here, as well. I wonder if Rosalia was living here, too... First, I need to investigate the details concerning what happened here."
Looking around, Naomi can't tell much from the clutter. But something catches her eye. On the door, one of the glass panes is shattered, the starburst pattern covered with dirt and grime.
"Judging by the accumulation of dust, it doesn't look like this was shattered recently. This might not necessarily relate to this case, but it should be looked at, just to be sure." Naomi already knows that Sartre had died two years ago, but Rosalia... either way, no one has stepped into the house for several years, most likely.
Looking around some more, Naomi notices something on the floor: a small gold-colored container, near the door.
"It's a bullet case," she gapes in amazement. "What's it doing in a place like this?" she wonders. "There's a lot you can learn from a bullet case; I'd better have this analyzed."
She walks around the room, searching for clues. Near the bottom of one of the cluttered cabinets…
"These stains… it's blood," Naomi whispers, playing with the luminol. "There's a trail of it, too." And indeed, a small spattering of blood leads back to the door. "These weren't cleaned up. Could this mean these bloodstains were from when the incident occurred?" Naomi thinks. "Is this blood Rosalia's? Or…" She trails off, still mulling over the possibilities.
Still searching around, Naomi sees a familiar object. Another bullet case, identical to the one near the door, only farther in the room, lies almost invisible underneath a desk. "Is this another bullet case? Not a standard piece of lab equipment. If I have this analyzed, I might learn some more details about it."
Guns and fire are taking such a major part of this case now. Sighing, Naomi keeps on looking, determined to win this war once and for all. Somewhere in the distance, she can hear Maria and Holden yelling to each other as they try to get the old equipment working, but Naomi's mind is isolated, alone with her own wits. But even the smartest cannot overcome the greatest mysteries to be unraveled, and Naomi cannot find another object that's out of the ordinary.
Taking one last glance around the room, Naomi finally notices something on the floor that could at first pass for ordinary, but now come to think of it, may be a vital clue: an old-fashioned recording machine.
"Is this a voice recorder? I wonder if there's anything recorded on it." Naomi presses a few buttons, trying to get the machine to give up its secrets. "It seems to be broken. I hope the data inside can be retrieved."
If anyone had recorded voices from this recorder, perhaps it could be a clue: this virus Sartre was developing, what if he left recorded entries from it? Better yet, recordings from the dead girl herself...
Stepping outside, Naomi almost lands a foot on a pile of glass. "The glass on the door is shattered," she says out loud, quite obviously, yet she is so used to talking to herself, it's irresistible and has become a habit.
But then, she takes a closer look at the pile of shattered pane. "This is a bloodstain." She gingerly picks up a particularly sharp piece of glass with blood on the edge. Could this be related to the case? I should get this analyzed at once.
Naomi heads back to the helicopter hurriedly to sort out the clues she found at the laboratory.
"Little Guy? I need you to analyze this," she demands, bursting into the helicopter and fumbling with the computer.
"Sure thing." Little Guy looks at the data Naomi had just sent him. "A piece of glass?"
"I found this near the entrance to the laboratory," she explains, inputing more data. "There's a trace of blood on it."
"I see… all right.," Little Guy agrees. "Can you give me some time?"
"Don't rush yourself, but I want to know as soon as you find anything out." Naomi says, cutting off the call. But then, she immediately calls him back, an action very typical of Naomi Kimishima.
"Hey, Little Guy? I want to know more about this bullet casing."
"Okay, let's see here." Little Guy examines the casing without even pausing to complain.
"Well? What can you tell me?" Naomi interrupts impatiently.
"First of all, it's a case for a 9 millimeter round," says Little Guy, taking his time. "Bullets that size are normally used in handguns."
"Hmm," grunts Naomi. "So it's not something rare that could be a big clue for us." So much for that clue. The same had happened with the knife used to "slay" Dennis Taylor.
"Unfortunately, that's correct." Little Guy only confirms the dreaded news.
"But why was a bullet casing on the floor inside a lab?" Naomi tacks on, ticked. "That question might lead us to some important information. Hmm... Little Guy? Could I borrow you for a moment?"
"Of course," he says openly, though squirms a little at Naomi's words of choosing, as if she's trying to make Little Guy feel awkward at a time like this. "Do you need something analyzed?"
"I found this bullet casing near the entrance to the room." She sends the information, hoping that the casing would be something more rare, but it's a negative. It's the same kind of casing that she found in the other area of the room: 9 mm casing, used in handguns all over the world, according to Little Guy.
Naomi sits down to puzzle over the clues, but she has barely started thinking when, she receives a call from Little Guy, not vice versa as usual.
"Oh, Dr. Kimishima. I've found out something new."
"Hm?" Naomi grunts tiredly, mind wandering elsewhere. "Great. What is it?"
"Well, the bullet cases that you found under the desk and at the entryway both have a characteristic abrasion in the same area on their sides."
"A characteristic abrasion?" Naomi asks, confused. How much does Little Guy know about guns, out of everything?
"Yes," Little Guy explains. "Likely formed when the empty casing is ejected from the chamber after firing."
"It was… ejected…" Naomi thinks over her limited, tiny knowledge of guns, wracking her brain to the hardest. "Are you saying the gun was an automatic?"
"Well, the evidence suggests the use of a semi-automatic pistol, not a revolver," he shrugs.
"Hm." Still confused, Naomi confirms, "So, a casing is ejected after every round fired?"
"Yes, that would be the case," Little Guy answers.
"That would mean that the places where we found those shell casings were where a shot was fired," says Naomi excitedly. This could be pieced together with several clues, but Naomi, in a rush, scans the rest of her information,
Holding the recorder up to the screen, Naomi asks, "Hey, Little Guy. Do you think this can be repaired?"
Little Guy looks at the broken recorder with suspicion. "Whoa. This is one old recorder."
"I know." Naomi rolls her eyes in exasperation. " I want to see what's in this."
Little Guy sighs, but obeys. Several seconds later, he mutters, "Yikes. This can't be fixed. Not even I could do it."
Naomi sighs. "I see. That's unfortunate."
"Hey, wait a second." Little Guy cries, suddenly. "I can't fix the machine itself. But I might be able to get at whatever data's been saved on it. "
"That would be great. Can you get on that?" Naomi asks, almost eagerly. Scratch that, she is eager.
"Okay," says Little Guy hurriedly. "Can you connect the recorder to the computer over on your end?"
"All right, one second…" Naomi inserts the correct cables and wires, and the recorder beeps. "There. What's next?"
"You don't have to do anything else. I'm going to try taking a look at the data from here."
"You can do that remotely?" Naomi, who has apparently been living in the Stone Age for the past thirty years, sighs. "What an age we live in."
"Really?" Little Guy rolls his eyes, a snarky smile crawling onto his face. "It's not that difficult. Don't you know how to use a computer?"
"Zip it," Naomi snaps, her cold form returning. "Just hurry up and start looking already."
"Hey, don't get mad," Little Guy mutters. "You should be thanking me for this."
"What was that?" Naomi asks, although she knows perfectly well. Her voice has a cutting edge and a warning tone to it, telling Little Guy exactly what to say and what to do.
"Uh, nothing!" he says, covering up his words quickly. "I'm on it!"
"And?" Naomi arches an eyebrow, waiting for the results.
"Huh. Looks like most of the data's been corrupted." He keeps looking at the files. "Wait… this file might still be intact. We can play this one as it is."
"Hm," Naomi grunts. "All right. Transfer it over here."
"Right away. You're going to listen to it on your own machine, right?" he laughs anxiously, voice wobblng. "I'll name the file "record-01" and send it over to you."
"Good," she says, ignoring the joke. "I'll try listening to it. Does the rest of the data look like it can be repaired?"
"Hmm. I can't really say for sure myself," he says, and Naomi frowns in disappointment. "I'll talk to the lab techs about it. If the files can be reconstructed, I'll send the data over to you."
"All right," Naomi sighs. "I'll be looking forward to hearing some good news from you."
Little Guy leans back in his chair, cowering from Naomi. "No pressure, right?"
Naomi ignores him completely, and changes the subject rapidly. "Little Guy, can you have a look at this?"
"Sure thing!" he says, wary of Naomi's cold tone. "Is this… glass from a door?"
"Yes," she says. "It's from the entrance to the laboratory. Can you tell me anything about it?"
"Hmm… we'll have to see," says Little Guy, eager for something simpler to do. "I'll take a look at it."
"Please do," says Naomi. "Tell me when you've got anything... oh, and also, I found a bloodstain on the floor here," she adds. Maybe that can help.
"A bloodstain? Isn't it just another one left by Rosalia?" Little Guy guesses, and instantly regrets it.
"Hmm… making assumptions is a dangerous habit," Naomi says in a superior tone, being a hypocrite yet again. "I need you to go over this in detail."
"Got it," he says, not daring to point out the hypocrite part. "I'll have to receive the data from the helicopter's equipment and merge it with what we have here. Then I'll have to use that to come up with analysis results. Is that okay?"
"Will it take time?" she asks worriedly, eyes glancing at her watch. Several precious minutes have passed already. "We're racing against the clock as it is."
"Yes… but I'll try to hurry it along," he says quickly. "There are more and more patients piling up here."
Naomi sighs bleakly, and agrees. What's use in arguing? You can't fight against time, and this is one of the times when the Healing Touch is useful, even if it's just for a short split second. "All right. Contact me when the results come in."
Leaving Little Guy alone with his piles of homework, Naomi goes to listen to the reconstructed recording. Pressing the play button softly, she hears a heavy French accent coming through the speakers, the voice of Albert Sartre.
"Recording started, August 7th. Two days ago, I verified the sample collected from the biopsy. I have succeeded in extracting the virus, and will begin cultivating it as a sample. Compared to mononegavirals, there are 24 similarities found, and..."
The voice cuts off, replaced by a young girl's voice, sounding exasperated. Naomi's heart goes cold when she recognizes the voice; it differs from the one she has heard before, but there's no doubt about it. The speaker of the voice is Rosalia Rossellini.
"Dad! Hey, Dad! Sheesh!"
"R-Rose! Give that back!" Rosalia seems to have snatched the recorder from her father, and her voice sounds extremely irked as Sartre makes desperate sounds in the recording.
"No! It's time for dinner!" she replies, just as fast.
"Oh, is it?" Albert's voice shrinks back, fallen and weak at his defeat. He chuckles, "I didn't even notice. I'm sorry."
"Sheesh… you never hear me when you're working! No more work for you until we're done eating!" Rosalia's words are harsh, but she seems to be smiling, too.
Albert laughs again. "Well, you've got me. I accept my defeat. All right, let's go to the dining room. What's for dinner today?"
"Yay! Dinner, dinner!" Rosalia's voice gets fainter and fainter as she moves away from the recorder, presumably skipping towards the dining room and leaving her father behind.
"H-Hey! Don't run! You'll trip and hurt yourself!" Albert cries after her, and the recording comes to a stop.
Naomi sits in the helicopter, thinking over the happy life that Albert and Rosalia had. They seemed so happy, like a proper family whose happy days would never end. But as everyone knows and realizes, forever will die... What could have made it all go so wrong?
Naomi is jerked out of her stupor and collected thoughts by her cell phone ringing (the regular one).
"Dr. Kimishima, we've finished the analysis on that bloodstain," says Little Guy.
"You mean the bloodstain that was on the floor?" Naomi asks, her train of thought changing directions. "Great. What were the results? Was that Rosalia's blood after all?"
"Actually, about that..." says Little Guy slowly, "It didn't match her DNA."
"Hmm..." Naomi hadn't anticipated this. If it isn't Rosalia's blood... "Then, whose?"
"That blood was Albert Sartre's." Little Guy lets that sink in for a second, and a moment of silence comes between the two.
"What?" Naomi gasps, brows furrowed in deep thought. "It's Albert's blood?"
"There's no mistake," says Little Guy softly. "I compared it with the DNA we examined before."
Naomi thinks this over. "Then, does that mean Albert was also injured, like Rosalia?"
"I don't know about that," says Little Guy; Albert's corpse had been found as a skeleton. "But, considering that Rosalia had been shot…"
"Was he also shot?" Naomi murmurs under her breath, not letting Little Guy hear her conjectures.
Little Guy hears her, and pointedly coughs, "Dr. Kimishima."
"We don't know if that's the case yet. We can't know until we investigate this." Naomi continues, completely neglecting Little Guy. "This bloodstain… it'd be best if I looked into it for more details."
Realizing that she needs more evidence to piece everything together, Naomi decides to go outside to the Asclepias field, the meadow of flowers that had almost completely buried Rosalia. Naomi's shoes crunch against the flowers and into the rich soil as she carefully picks her way through the beautiful blooms, as if trying to preserve what so little is left of Rosalia Rossellini.
She walks around, searching for clues in the yellow, orange, and patch of blue flowers. What she spots underneath the layer of flowers is remarkable, and it's so tiny and small, it must've been sheer luck that she had found it at all: inside the patch of blue in the landscape lies a familiar object.
"Another bullet casing here!" Naomi breathes incredulously, picking it up. "I almost didn't see it among all these flowers... This may be an important clue."
With the bullet casing in her hand, glinting off the sun's morning rays, and reflecting off of Naomi's pale blue eyes, she tries to look deeper into the case. This is the third bullet casing yet... does that mean three shots were fired? Of course, Naomi's eyes may not be sharp enough to spot other casings, if there are any, and it's dangerous to assume, but definitely one thing can be determined here: three shots were fired around this area.
There were three bullet holes in Rosalia's body...
Shoving that thought out of her mind, Naomi heads back to the helicopter to investigate, struggling to cope with this overflow of information. As she thinks it over, she receives a call from none other than Little Guy.
"Uh, Dr. Kimishima," he says. "The analysis results are in."
"Good. Which analysis was this?" Naomi asks.
"It's for the glass from the door at the entrance," he responds.
"All right," she says fairly. "Tell me what you've got."
"Right." Little Guy gathers his information, clearing his throat. To anger Naomi now would be a really, really bad idea. "We've analyzed the broken glass. We can determine the direction the glass shattered in from the stress marks on the edges of the fracture."
"Stress marks?" Naomi asks, looking for clarification.
"It refers to the marks left on the inner edges of a fracture line when the glass is broken," he explains. "The direction of impact can be found by studying the stress marks on the fractures."
"Is that so? And what did you find?" Naomi asks.
"Well, the glass wasn't shattered from the outside," he says, squirming in his seat, making no sense of this either. "The blow that broke it came from inside."
"Inside?" Naomi asks incredulously, eyes narrowing despite the discovery of the new news. "So nobody shot into the room from the outside, then?"
"That appears to be the case." Little Guy almost hangs up, his dead done (remember, he still has a ton of homework left), but then remembers something. "One more thing about that glass. We weren't able to find any evidence like fingerprints or gunshot residue on it."
"I see. So, the glass was shattered from the inside out." But when Little Guy had mentioned gunshot residue, Naomi remembers something, the very thing she had wanted to tell Little Guy earlier. "Hey, Little Guy. I found another bullet casing."
"It's a real battlefield there, huh? Let's take a look at it." Little Guy's voice sounds like he has been expecting this, or at least, not surprised at all. "Well, just like the other two casings you found, this one has similar markings on it. It was likely fired from the same gun as the other two."
Naomi cocks her head at this. "One bullet was shot outside, while the other two were fired indoors. Why was the gun used there? That seems like an important fact to know..."
She takes a deep breath and starts piecing together the clues, notably the three bullet casings she had found. "If a bullet was fired near where we found the shell casing, the question is which direction the bullet went. First, we should consider the number of times the gun was fired: inside, the gun was fired twice. But…"
Naomi frowns, looking out the helicopter window at the lodge that lies in the distance. "There isn't a single bullet or bullet hole in this room. Other than the cases, the only other indication of the gun being fired indoors is that the glass at the entrance was shattered from the inside out..." Coming to a realization, Naomi cries, "There is a possibility that a bullet fired from indoors broke the glass! If so, then the person who fired the gun would have had to be near the desk. If the glass had been shattered from a close-range shot, there would have been gunshot residue on the door and window." And according to Little Guy, there were none. "Thus, the bullet that broke the glass was fired from further inside the room, near the desk." At this point, her voice hesitates slightly as she whispers out the next words: "A shot from indoors, fired towards the outside… Is that what happened here…?" Naomi trails off, lost in thought. Absentmindedly, she puts together more pieces of the puzzle.
"Little Guy, can I talk to you?"
Little Guy, as always, answers immediately. "Yes, what is it? Can I analyze something?"
"Yes. I'd like to know more about this bloodstain," she says distractedly, eyes still wandering off into the distance.
"Is that Albert's blood?" Little Guy asks, and remembers that there was only one bloodstain found. "Okay. Please wait for a bit."
"Fine," she says crossly. "I'm going to continue with my investigation."
Knowing that there's not much to ask Little Guy until more test results come back, Naomi goes back to her old traditional way of figuring things by herself:
"Yes, if I think about that happened at the time of the murder, these do have a common link." She looks at the evidence scribbled all over her papers. "These fine bloodstains spattering Rosalia's clothing… this hemorrhaging was most likely caused by the defensive wound on Rosalia's palm. The killer turned his gun on this girl and pulled the trigger. That bullet tore through the hand she held up, ineffectually trying to ward off the blow. It then continued into her body, piercing her heart." Naomi sighs. Who could do such a thing to an innocent girl? "The fine bloodstains were from the blood that came from her hand."
Swallowing hard, Naomi remembers the assumptions she had made earlier: three gunshots, three bullet holes in the body. But now that she has learned that one bullet had caused two of the injuries... does that mean one bullet never hit her at all? Again, it's still too early to make assumptions, but the gunshots and wounds... could be a vital clue to what really happened the day Rosalia died.
She thinks hard about the wounds she found on Rosalia's body, specifically the shot in the chest. "The entrance and exit wounds tell us what happens when someone has been shot. In this case, the victim was shot from the front. The bullet entered through the chest, created the entrance GSW. It then passed through her body and out her back, creating the exit GSW. This proves that she had been shot from the front."
Now, for the other wound, on the leg. "The back of the thigh is the entrance wound, and the front is the exit. If that's the case, then the victim was shot from behind. The shooter was behind the victim when she was shot. In any case, the wound on the thigh isn't the same size as the wound in the chest. Could this mean that two different firearms were used?" Naomi remembers then that her knowledge of guns is limited. I think contacting Little Guy and asking him to look into this would be my best option here.
She makes the call, reluctantly. "Hey, Little Guy. Can I ask you to analyze this information?"
"You need me to look at the gunshot wound in the leg, right?" he asks, having overheard her. "Okay, just wait." Little Guy begins to input the data.
Knowing that she has other work to do and there's no time to waste, Naomi hangs up, saying, "Thank you. Let me know as soon as you're done."
Then, to herself, she talks through the evidence. "In any case… whoever shot Rosalia… why did he do it?"
Making another call right on top of the other, Naomi abruptly says, "Little Guy? Analyze this chest wound."
"Understood." Little Guy says, matching Naomi's tone, not the slightest ticked at Naomi's five-second interval calls. "Hmm… this is a penetrating bullet wound from a firearm?"
"That's right. Rosalia was shot." Naomi confirms. As if Little Guy doesn't know it.
"The bullet entered her chest and went through her heart. I don't think there was any doubt that this was a fatal wound."
"I see." Naomi says, her suspicions confirmed. Rosalia died of guns and fire. "The question now is, who pulled the trigger?" Her eyes narrow. "The events of Rosalia's death are becoming clear...
"First, the cause of death. The wound that killed Rosalia was a gunshot to the chest. The bullet that went through her chest struck her heart, ending her life, and we know that the fatal shot came from the front; the entrance and exit wounds tell us the path of the bullet through her body. Rosalia was alive just before this shot, as well. The wound on her palm is a defensive one, caused by her trying to protect herself from the gunshot.
"Her right hand also has another piece of important evidence; that is the gunshot residue on her palm from the shot that killed her. Gunshot residue is left behind on targets that have been shot at close range. We can tell that Rosalia had been shot in the chest from a short distance away." Naomi sighs sadly, resting her head in her hands. "What would drive someone to be so determined to kill Rosalia?"
All of Naomi's other cases had clear intents on the murder. The electrician wanted Dennis Taylor's drugs. Veronica Cage's parents hadn't been trying to kill her, it was just the disease taking place, the same disease taking over the world at this instant. Alma Parker had wanted to lead her daughter and husband to freedom, influenced by the brain tumor... and the Raging Bomber was driven mad by the same virus that had killed so many... who would want to take the life of a young girl?
Naomi sees another piece of evidence that can be fitted into the puzzle: the casing. "This casing was found in the blue flower field, and this tells us that a shot was fired here. Plus, this is the place that Rosalia was found dead, and the cause of death was a close-range gunshot through the heart. Thus, Rosalia was killed here."
Yes. The whole time, Naomi had known it: the red marks on her back matched the position she was in. But this also means that Rosalia died in the field of blue flowers... why? Is it too much of a coincidence for her to fall right in the middle of the blue flowers? Asclepias tuberosa doesn't grow in blue, so what kind of things have happened here?
This is Naomi's first piece of solid evidence, but she doesn't feel like she has found out the most important information yet. The real question is, "But who?" Who did it? Who has a motive to kill such an innocent and young girl?
A call comes in from Little Guy, the beep so out of place in this bright yet gloomy world. "Ah, Dr. Kimishima! The analysis on the glass shard has been completed!"
"You mean the shard that was found near the entrance?" Naomi asks, just to clarify things. "Did you figure out whose blood that is?"
"Yes," says Little Guy. "At first, I thought it might be Albert's, like the bloodstain on the floor. But, it seems that the blood on the glass shard came from Rosalia."
"Rosalia's?" Naomi asks, pieces clicking together in her mind. Rosalia... Sartre... both had spilled blood in the house. How? Why?
"Yes. The DNA matches," says Little Guy darkly. "There's no doubt."
"Rosalia left a bloodstain indoors as well." Naomi thinks about this and what could have caused it, but can't think of any reason why. "What in the world does this mean?"
Exasperated, Naomi examines the glass shard from the door, trying desperately to clutch onto some hope. She looks back and forth from the glass shard to the other pieces of information, and...
"This glass shard was found on the floor near the entrance, which came from the glass on the door after it had shattered. That piece of glass had Rosalia's blood on it, and her corpse's foot had a cut and signs of hemorrhaging on the bottom, as well. This most likely means that Rosalia stepped on the broken glass and cut her foot. From the amount of hemorrhaging, she must have injured it just before her death."
It should be a safe assumption, unlike Little Guy's wild ones (but some were logical, although Naomi would never admit that). If Rosalia had cut her foot in a way not related to her death, she would've had an extremely hard time walking. The cut wasn't sutured up, or treated at all. Naomi presumes that Rosalia did cut her foot on the shard of glass, for now.
"These do give us something we can draw a conclusion from. When the glass on the door shattered, Rosalia was standing inside the lab. Rosalia cut her foot on the broken glass. This proves that she left the room after the glass broke. Hmm…" Naomi thinks about that, hesitating for a split second before continuing her theory. "Rosalia's foot was cut right before she died. Given the fact that there aren't any more bloodstains from her inside the room, Rosalia headed outside immediately after cutting her foot on the glass. In other words, Rosalia was running away from somebody. She most likely avoided the shot and ran from the room. The gun was obviously being pointed at her. The shooter had been aiming at Rosalia all along. That's why she ran from the room. In doing so, she stepped on the broken glass, injuring her foot. That is what happened at the entrance to this room."
Now that Naomi knows some of what had happened, her heart is clenching tighter and colder around her chest. A painful spasm gives out, and she takes in a deep breath, ignoring the dormant disease lying inside her that isn't so dormant anymore...
"Two shots were fired from inside this room. If neither of them were from somebody shooting into the room, and someone inside was targeting Rosalia, then…"
Naomi's phone beeps, jerking her out of her thoughts. "Little Guy. What is it?"
"Ah, Dr. Kimishima. We've located the lock."
Lock. Naomi hasn't asked Little Guy about a lock yet, and much less found a key.
"The lock?" Naomi echoes her thoughts, confused, and thinks back over the past few days. What lock? After a few awkward seconds of embarrassment, she remembers. "Oh, you mean the lock that goes to the key found in Albert's clothes?"
Now it's all coming back to her: the Sartre skeleton recovered in Backcove had a key in one of its pockets. She had asked Little Guy to investigate it, but she had wrapped up the case before Little Guy could find out. His techies must've been working on it all along, which usually would've ticked Naomi for wasting time on a completed case, but now, she is grateful for it. Whatever's behind the lock could be a vital clue to the Rosalia case.
"Yes. It was a safety deposit box in a bank," says Little Guy, hearing Naomi's sharp gasp on the other side. "We've already taken it and the contents inside."
"Good. What was inside it?" Curious, Naomi leans closer to the phone, as if a few extra millimeters will help her hear the news faster. Well, it would, but it wouldn't make much of a difference.
"A 9-millimeter handgun." Little Guy pauses, letting that sink into Naomi's already confused mind before continuing. "Albert Sartre's fingerprints were found on the grip, as well." Little Guy takes a shallow breath, swallowing before he delivers his theory. "Could it be that the person who shot Rosalia was…?" He trails off, letting Naomi make her own connections.
Naomi reels back from the desk in shock. This throws a new light on the case. Albert Sartre, the man CR-S01 had described as a demon, but was a caring adoptive father. Albert Sartre, the creator of the Rosalia Virus, and the father of Rosalia herself. Albert Sartre, the beloved man to his daughter... it's not possible for someone who loved Rosalia to kill her, right? Alma Parker had loved her daughter and husband, but it was the tumor that drove her to madness... was Albert Sartre going mad too? It's so unbelievable and seems so abstract and impossible, that Naomi almost refuses to believe it... but the truth doesn't lie.
Collecting her thoughts, she says, "Let's confirm something before that. Was the gun loaded?"
"Yes. The magazine holds seven rounds, and it's possible to keep an additional round chambered," Little Guy answers. "When the gun was found, there were five rounds in it."
"Five shots," Naomi repeats. "So, the maximum number of bullets that could be missing from it is three rounds. And, if the gun is missing three bullets, then that number corresponds to the number of shots used here. That's the same number of cases that were found here." Her voice is icy, with a chilling linger of truth attached to it.
Both Naomi and Little Guy take a few seconds to think it over. Naomi's mind is reeling with the new informatin; just a few mere moments ago, she was in a helicopter, unknowing, clueless, but now... she's almost there. Almost to the truth.
"Uh, Dr. Kimishima. If I may?" Little Guy asks slowly, hesitating with each syllable.
"Yes, what is it?" Naomi answers absentmindedly
"Well, luckily, the gun is in condition to fire," he says. "If you can find one of the bullets from the scene there, we can use the rifling to determine if it had been fired from this gun."
"Nonsense." Naomi dismisses the idea without it even grazing her mind. She might've been lucky to find the bullet casing among the flowers, but, "You expect me to find something that can fly over 250 meters a second?"
"Well, yes, I know it might be a long shot, but…"
Normally, Naomi would've retorted something like If you think it's so easy, go look for it yourself! But seeing how Little Guy is something like three thousand miles away and the fate of the world rests in Naomi's eyes, she swallows and accepts.
"Looks like I don't have a choice." Naomi snorts, cutting Little Guy off. "I'll let you know if I do find one."
"Please do. I'll try to come up with a different plan from here."
After sitting around thinking uncomfortably for a while looking over information before she heads out into the fields, Naomi is startled when her phone beeps again. "Dr. Kimishima, we've received the results of the analysis."
"Good. Is it about the differences between the chest and thigh wounds?" Naomi guesses.
"Are you some kind of psychic superspy or something?" Little Guy grins, laughing at his own joke. "Creepy…"
Naomi's eyes narrow, and she frowns, not sharing Little Guy's laughter and humor. "You'll pay for that slip of the tongue, Little Guy." Her voice is kept level, and her words are chosen carefully, but underneath runs a tone of malice that spells out trouble for Little Guy. Big trouble.
"Whoa! S-Sorry!" Little Guy hastily makes amends, trying not to get fried by Naomi's death glare from three thousand miles away. "It was a joke!" he explains.
"Hm. Fine. But I'll remember that." Naomi decides to get off the subject of her psychic powers, and back to the case; there's no time for fooling around. "Just tell me what the report says."
"Oh, y-yes!" Little Guy stammers gratefully for getting off the hook. "Uh, regarding the comparison between the two wounds… looking at them, it appears that both wounds were made by the same caliber of gun."
"Hmm." Confused, Naomi challenges Little Guy to his research. "But the wounds are of different sizes."
"Yes, it's possible for wounds to be differently-sized, even from the exact same gun." Now Little Guy is duelling Naomi's wits.
"How can that happen?" Maybe this will help with the case, anyhow. "The reason I can think of is…" Naomi thinks for a second, then makes her logical guess: "The bullets were shot from different distances, weren't they?"
"Way to go, Dr. Kimishima!" Little Guy cheers.
Naomi's voice is hostile. "Sucking up to me won't spare you from my wrath." Apparently, she hasn't gotten over the joke from earlier yet. Knowing her, she most likely never will. If that's so, then Naomi probably still remembers the hundreds of conversations she had with Little Guy that had all gone wrong; and there's grudges to be held for all of them.
"Ugh." Little Guy sighs, coming to the same realization himself.
"Keep telling me about the report," Naomi commands.
"R-right," he stutters. "Comparing the wounds in the chest and thigh… the shot that struck her thigh was from a greater distance. If the chest wound was made from close range, the other shot would have been fired from about 8 meters away.
"It seems that there's a big difference in the way she received both of these wounds, then," Naomi nods, understanding.
Little Guy goes back to finishing his analysis, and Naomi goes back to clue-sorting, and clue-hunting.
"Rosalia had a laceration on her left foot, and a gunshot wound in her right thigh. She was in no condition to walk; her foot had been injured by stepping on the broken glass at the entrance to the lab. And, when she was shot in the leg, she was standing in the field of flowers. Rosalia collapsed when she was hit in the leg... There's only one place in this lab a shooter could have been standing to shoot Rosalia in the field. That is from the entrance to the lab, near the door. The bullet that hit Rosalia's thigh went completely through. It'll be difficult to find that bullet…"
But Naomi decides to follow Little Guy's idea and find the bullet. After all, there's nothing else to do, and if Albert Sartre, Rosalia's beloved father, had truly killed his daughter, she has to find out why. For the survival of the human race, for the sake of her own sanity, and for Rosalia... the dead are alive too, in a way we never know it.
"The bullet that ended Rosalia's life… looking around randomly for it won't get me anywhere," Naomi thinks out loud, scanning the field carefully. "The number of bullets that were fired at this scene is a total of three shots. One shot in the flower field, one was by the desk, and another at the entrance. That's a total of three shots fired. Of these three, the shot in the flower field was fired last. The bullet shot in the field is the one that killed Rosalia. If it was before then, then she couldn't have stepped on the glass and there would be no need to shoot her leg. Then, when Rosalia was killed, she was collapsed on the ground." Naomi crinkles her forehead in deep thought, realizing something that could be vital.
"Wait... Rosalia was lying on the ground when she was shot!" Naomi's eyes widen. "She couldn't have been standing with those injuries to her foot and leg. So the shooter must have been standing above her, shooting down." Naomi thinks for a second. "The bullet that went through her chest must be…"
The bullet couldn't have landed far, if Rosalia was lying down when she was hit. Acting on her hunch, Naomi returns to the blue flower field. She steps gingerly around the beautiful blue flowers, matching blue eyes narrowing against the sun's glint, looking for anything that reflects the light... Then, there! Buried in the ground below where Rosalia's body used to lie is an object, foreign in the peaceful meadow, something that hints of blood and death.
"Here it is. This… is the bullet that killed Rosalia." Such a small thing to snuff out a life so quickly… and it seems so harmless...
"The bullet's in good condition," says Naomi quietly. "We'll be able to check the rifling on it."
She slowly digs her cellphone out of her pocket and punches in the number on speed dial: Little Guy's number. He may be honored to have his number on Naomi's speed dial, but then again, her number is on his phone, too.
"Hey, Little Guy. I found what you wanted," says Naomi briskly.
"You managed to find a bullet!" Little Guy cries incredulously; he hadn't expected Naomi to find it, because something so small could be easily lost among the beautiful blooms... to find it, you wouldn't be human, but then again, Naomi has taken a great leap from human to another being. "I don't believe it!"
"You don't?" Naomi smirks, her humor for teasing Little Guy coming on. "I'll just throw this thing away, then…" Her voice is lighthearted and casual, obviously a joke and definitely not going to be carried out as true, but obviously, Little Guy falls for her trick and lands at her mercy.
"No no! No, no. C'mon, Dr. Kimishima! I need that! Seriously!" He rolls his eyes, exasperated at both Naomi and himself, once he realized the trap set for him. "Sheesh. You knew what I meant."
"Did you say something?" Naomi asks innocently, smiling secretly on the other end.
"N-No! I'll start analyzing it right away!" Little Guy answers hastily, scrambling away from all Naomi-gazes as possible. "Hmm…"
"Did you check the rifling?" Naomi asks impatiently, only giving him a few seconds.
"It's a perfect match." Little Guy answers, amazed.
Naomi's eyes widen, her breath coming in fast now. "So that means…"
"Yes. There's no doubt at all that the bullet was fired from Albert's gun."
"What in the world caused all this to happen, though?" Naomi asks, not to Little Guy, but to the flower field, and Rosalia's body, wanting them to give up their secrets. Why? A family that was so happy together, the three of them... Albert Sartre, Rosalia Rossellini, and CR-S01. It was just the virus that had torn them apart, turning the young doctor into a prisoner confined to the depths of a dark and cold cell... the same virus had killed Albert Sartre... what would've caused this to go so wrong?
"Ah, yes. We can use these clues to find a deeper truth," Naomi states shakily. "Dr. Sartre left a gun in a safety deposit box. Its rifling perfectly matches the bullet that killed Rosalia. What this shows is…"
Naomi stares at the screen, willing this not to be true, but yet it is. "Yes… Albert Sartre killed Rosalia." She looks sadly out at the flower field, so beautiful and holding that enriching smell, yet it still carries actions of guns and blood and murders and deaths, a sign of a family torn apart from its once everlasting pride. "Rosalia and Albert lived together, like a true family. What happened between them?" So many questions, so few answers...
Naomi's phone gives its familiar beeping tone, the signal of a new call. Naomi answers quickly; time is running out, and she is powerless to stop it.
"Oh, Dr. Kimishima. About the recorder…" Little Guy says, through the speakers.
"What is it?" Naomi hurriedly asks.
"We were able to reconstruct one of the sound files."
"Good." More clues. This is another step closer "Can you tell when the recording was made?"
"Well, it seems to have been recorded after the one I gave to you before. But…" Little Guy trails off.
"What's wrong? Did something happen?"
"It's like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde…" Little Guy mumbles, too low for Naomi to hear, and too childish for her to understand. "Oh, uh, sorry," he quickly apologizes, realizing that he's on the verge of another lecture. "Anyway, please try listening to the new recording. I've sent it over to you in the file record-02."
"All right, I'll make sure I hear it." Naomi says, already grabbing her recorder and opening the file.
"Ha… hahaha! It's over… it's all over!" The voice is clearly Albert Sartre's, but different, too. It has a note of hysteria in it, like someone who is almost giddy… or has been driven insane. "I-I thought I'd found God's child…b ut it was a misunderstanding! It wasn't God… The Devil… It's the Devil…" The crazy laugh returns, the sinister chuckle ringing through the speakers of the handheld device. "It was beyond human control after all. Everything… it was all over on that day… that day six years ago! It must be stopped! I… I must stop it! Oh, God! Please, forgive my foolishness! I… I…!"
The voice cuts off, leaving an eerie silence in the helicopter and Naomi is left stunned and petrified, unable to think, unable to move, unable to absorb the words she had just heard. The god's child... the Devil... could that person be Rosalia?
The complete silence is soon broken by Naomi's phone receiving a call. Absentmindedly flipping it open, Naomi answers Little Guy's call.
"Ah, Dr. Kimishima," says Little Guy. "The results of the analysis are in."
"Good…" Naomi frowns, trying to call up requests from the distant past. "Which results are we talking about here?"
"Oh, right. The one on Albert's bloodstain." Little Guy answers, reading over the report. "Let's see… traces of saliva were detected in the components of the bloodstain."
"Saliva…" Naomi's brow furrows, thinking this through. "It means that the blood was from blood Albert had vomited." After all, that was the case for Veronica Cage... now come to think of it, both Sartre and Veronica's clothes had blood on the front, vomited on by their respective owners...
"Yes, that appears to be the case," says Little Guy slowly, coming to the same realization as Naomi. "Can you figure something out from that?"
"Well…" Naomi thinks back over her previous cases, the Sartre one. "Albert was infected with viral hemorrhagic fever. This disease causes severe attacks that trigger vomiting of blood."
"Severe attacks…" Little Guy slowly raises his head, thinking hard at his theory. "If that's the case, then he may have been like the other victims we've seen…"
"Yes, just like Veronica Cage and Alma Parker," Naomi sighs, admitting her theory that has haunted her since the vomited blood on his suit. "There's a possibility that the disease undermined his sanity and drove him mad."
"Whew… well, in any case, we're finally beginning to see the big picture behind what happened here," says Little Guy quickly, trying not to get into specifics.
"Hm… not yet," Naomi scolds. "The most important truth hasn't been uncovered."
"Do you mean the cause of the recent outbreak of this disease?" Naomi is right… they haven't found out the reason why the Rosalia virus is spreading, and now, of all times, is something critical that needs to be found out so something like this wouldn't duplicate in the future.
"Yes," says Naomi, nodding approvingly. "Albert died of viral hemorrhagic fever two years ago. Rosalia, the host of the virus, was killed even before that. So why would the virus begin spreading now? And how can we stop it?" The most important question. How can we save the lives of the victims of this disease? Unfortunately… no cure has been found, and no antiserum can be created with Rosalia in this condition... "We don't have any answers for these important questions yet."
And Naomi isn't sure how to get these answers, with the whole world so vast and Rosalia's death so vague.
"Sheesh," Little Guy sighs. "Looks like it's all over, then. Well, I really don't have much to regret."
"No." Naomi says defiantly, shaking her head fiercely, which only brings on another round of headaches. This is happening more and more frequent... "I can still do this. I'm not going to give up."
Naomi knows that she doesn't have much time left. In the last few moments of her life, she will do everything she can to call this pandemic to a stop. Why not? In just a few months or weeks, she would be at death, with the very victims she had performed autopsies on. It's all come down to this: either she dies trying to escape from the disease that has already settled inside her, or die trying to make a difference. The result is the same; the actions are the difference.
Little Guy sighs, so clueless and unknowing on Naomi's condition and her reasoning. Shaking his head, he says, "I thought you'd say that. I've repaired another voice file."
"Huh? You…" Naomi steps back in surprise, mind wandering from death abruptly.
Little Guy rolls his eyes. "Oh, come on. Did you really think I meant that?" He grins. "Even I have something to live for, you know."
"Hmm?" Naomi raises an eyebrow. Well, this is a first...
"Anyway, I've transferred the restored recording to you." Little Guy changes the subject abruptly, stepping back from the topic they were wandering on. "The filename is record-03. Give it a listen."
"All right," she agrees. "Do you know when this was recorded?"
"Yes…" he mumbles. "I've listened to it, and it seems to be from before Albert lost his mind." He sighs exasperatedly and tiredly. "The recorder doesn't have any more files for me to send you."
"All right. I'll try listening to it." Hanging up the phone, Naomi gathers her thoughts before turning on the machine and hearing what Sartre had to say in the last few moments of his sanity... perhaps he will finally reveal why... he had ever had the intention to kill his beloved daughter... hopefully, this will solve all the mysteries that are still wandering out there... "Rosalia was found dead in that field of blue flowers. I think I might be finally able to understand why now."
Naomi turns on the recorder, ready to listen to any other messages Albert Sartre left behind in his recorder.
"The results of the experiments from the other day are in. It's a disaster. That virus… it's the most vicious and dangerous thing I've ever seen. No matter what attempts I make, nothing can stop their activities. They… multiply… and devour… and destroy everything! How can she still be alive while that… monster… lives within her?"
Her. Naomi's heart clenches. Her. The only her Sartre could've referred to is Rosalia... a sharp gasp draws from Naomi's chest as she recalls the very words CR-S01 had uttered, shortly before their departure for Mexico: "There is no cure... yet she was infected without falling ill. She's a natural host." This disease... was the monster that inhabited Rosalia's body, and perhaps still thrives now, if Sartre's case proves to be true.
"I feel that her blood holds the secret to that," Albert Sartre continues hastily, his voice becoming more and more panicky. "Her blood is the only key to saving all of humanity. I cannot give up. There's nothing more I can do to stall it. One day, this virus will be brought to heel, and I will return to that place… And…"
The voice in the recorder gives a final sigh, and then cuts off, the recording having ended. Naomi still sits, recorder in hand, lost in thought. The tragic tale of Sartre and Rosalia has almost been brought to light... there's only a little bit left to do.
"Professor Sartre said that Rosalia's blood was the only key. This key that Rosalia had that allowed her to live with the virus was a glycoprotein called immunoglobulin. In other words, it was an antibody. The Rosalia Virus is immensely powerful. The professor tried to extract the antibody in order to suppress and control its activity." Naomi swallows down her grief and mourning for the sad little girl and the extinguishing of Sartre's life. "That was a Pandora's box that should never have been opened. Rosalia's blood was too much of a danger to look into."
Pain suddenly strikes her heart again, pulsing with its rising beat, the disease growing restless as it tries to surface. Naomi takes a deep breath and ignores the throbbing pain, repeating to herself over and over again that the end is near – for both the case and herself – and for the world if she doesn't end both fast.
"Little Guy. I need your help," she says briefly, dialling the speed dial number. Naomi's cell phone is getting a lot of use today, as she is constantly sending in more data for Little Guy to analyze. It also means more homework for him, but hey, welcome to the world of assisting Naomi Kimishima.
"Whoa… that's rare, coming from you," Little Guy smirks, smugness creeping into his voice. "What can I do?"
Normally, Naomi would've snapped back, chomped off Little Guy's head and flushed it down the toilet or something, but today, in the middle of a huge emergency, she remains calm and cold, stating out very clearly, "I need to get to the bottom of these blue flowers."
"Huh? Didn't we analyze those already?" Little Guy is taken aback at Naomi's request.
"What we know now may throw a new light on what we've looked at before," she counters sharply.
"All right," Little Guy shrugs; it's best to humor and please her for the moment, before she really reaches through the screen and wrings his neck. "Let's sort through our information again, then."
"Yes," she says, relieved that Little Guy had agreed. "Rosalia was found collapsed in the middle of these blue flowers."
"That's right," he confirms. "We had a number of ideas about why that happened."
"We thought that the killer might have moved the body before hypostasis set in," Naomi says, continuing Little Guy's sentence. "Another possibility was that Rosalia ran to the blue flowers herself."
"Yes…" says Little Guy, nodding, but... why would Naomi go over something that has been burned and implanted and engraved into both their brains? "Does any of that change with the information we've gained?"
"Indeed," says Naomi, and the corners of Little Guy's eyes narrow in confusion. "One of those possibilities has already been ruled out."
"Huh? Which one?" Little Guy asks, head cocked, trying to catch up to Naomi in terms of thoughts.
"Don't you see?" Naomi rolls her eyes, sighing exasperatedly, and Little Guy could've sworn that she's enjoying this. But Naomi isn't, because Little Guy isn't at the verge of death... never knowing the threat of it... and she must get to the very bottom of the case before her light goes out. "It's that the killer moved the corpse. It's impossible for the body to have been moved after death. The reason for that is the bullet found in the ground beneath Rosalia proves she was killed right there."
"Hey, wait," Little Guy cuts in, preparing for the words he is about to give after only a moments' hesitation. "Let me try arguing against you for once."
"What's that?" asks Naomi, surprised. Little Guy trying to defeat her logic? He must be joking.
"Never mind…" Little Guy says quickly, backing down and chickening out at Naomi's tone of voice that suggests superiority above anyone else. However, after some thought and realizing that Naomi biting his head off won't be the least of his worries when the world's population decreases by the billions, Little Guy slowly says, "It's still possible she was killed elsewhere, right? She could have been killed somewhere else, then dragged here and shot in the chest to cover it up."
"Hmm... That's not possible." Naomi cuts, chops, shreds, and throws away Little Guy's theory so fast, he didn't even have a chance to protest before she goes onto her counterargument. "She was alive before she was shot in the chest. The proof of that is the defensive wound in her hand."
Little Guy slinks back in his seat, once again having been defeated by Naomi.
"Rosalia held up her hand to try to protect herself from the gunshot," Naomi continues, unaware of Little Guy's horrid defeat. "This pattern of wounds could only happen if the victim was conscious at the time."
"You're right." Little Guy sighs and tries to recover his calm and steadiness, which has barely appeared since the pandemic began. "The student fails to defeat the master…" he mutters, unable to keep it within his own mind, which earns him more drilling from Naomi.
"What do you keep muttering to yourself?" Naomi asks, smirking, all her troubles and woes forgotten for one split second, the one moment of harmony. Then it all comes back again when Little Guy averts her question and it all comes clashing back down, a merciless waterfall of unforgettable and untreatable depressing thoughts.
"Uh, nothing!" Little Guy calls, smiling an extremely fake grin that gives it away immediately. Don't FBI agents ever get training in the art of lying? "Um, anyway… if that's the case, then that means that Rosalia ran to the blue flowers of her own free will. Hmm… I wonder why." Little Guy's voice is very theatrical and fake, Naomi almost wants to laugh at it.
"I still don't have an answer for that… yet," says Naomi, reminding herself that this is serious. "It might be a good idea to examine those flowers in detail once more."
Naomi goes to do exactly that, heading back out to the Asclepias field to investigate the mysterious blue flowers. Looking out into the distance, the sky is still clear and bright blue, a cloudless day dawned over by the golden rays of the sun. Noon approaches fast; by this afternoon, the virus could've well spread to almost all of America. Within several days, the whole continent will be infected, and the US will surely be left dead. It will soon rampage to South America, take over the Western Hemisphere, and eventually travel to the Eastern Hemisphere... how can all of this evolve from such a happy family? A father and two children... one was betrayed by the father and left to rot in a prison, another was found dead and skeletonized... and another one died here, in one of the most beautiful places Naomi has ever seen...
Taking a deep breath, Naomi uses three precious seconds to draw in the fresh summer air, filled with the sweet smell of flowers radiating from the ground below. Soon, she will lose the soft breeze on her back, lose the flutter of hair that flies around her head, lose the beauty of nature and the sunsets... Naomi looks down at the Asclepias flowers, knowing that she will soon be forced to let go.
Treading through the patches of flowers with the distant blue blooms in sight, Naomi tries to take in as much of life as she can possibly get. This could very well be the last time she will be out in the outdoors, free from the burdens of everything that will chase her until the end... finally reaching the patch of mysterious blue flowers, Naomi swallows and bends down, disrupting the peace that has been casted over the flowers since the day Rosalia died.
She picks one, investigating it in her hands. "These blue flowers…" Naomi's tone is almost wistful, as if she wants to be with the flowers forever... as much as it would be lovely to, she does have a job to do... "I can't believe such a vibrant color exists in nature." Indeed, they are a vibrant blue, deeper and more vibrant than the pale blue sky overhead. "I should send a picture of this to Little Guy and have him study it. There could be a reason for why Rosalia had collapsed here."
Almost gliding across the carpet of flowers again, Naomi runs off for the helicopter. Her chest wobbles in pain, but... now isn't the time to care. This is the time to care about the millions of other people waiting for their savior to come and save them all.
"Little Guy. I've collected some samples of the flowers." Naomi climbs through the helicopter door, already talking to the always-on computer.
"Huh? Why?" Little Guy's reply is fast, as faint as Naomi's voice may be.
"I want to know why Rosalia collapsed there," says Naomi hurriedly, explaining, settling herself down in the makeshift office. "There's no guarantee that it will help us, but there's a chance we might learn something useful."
"Hmm… okay," Little Guy shrugs, and since they're at a dead end anyways, "It's worth a shot."
"Good. Thanks for the help." Naomi leans back in her chair, trying to piece together things in her mind, but failing...
After a few anxious minutes of Naomi tapping her finger against one side of a chair and softly murmuring the facts out, trying to smooth out the wrinkles of the case, she is just about to pester Little Guy to hurry up when his reply comes first.
"Huh? What the…!"
"What's the matter?" Naomi quickly asks, changing the words she was about to mutter.
"Oh, well, this flower's… Um, it's Asclepias." Little Guy's tone is awkward, as if he is a little kindergartener admitting that he stole the chocolate.
"What are you talking about?" Naomi demands, the very reaction Little Guy had feared. "The red flowers are the Asclepias. I want you to tell me about the blue flowers." Naomi's tone is like that to an inattentive child, who, unfortunately, happens to be Little Guy.
"That's what I'm saying!" Little Guy insists, which is one argument he is refusing to give up. "These are Asclepias."
"What're you saying?" Naomi is now confused by Little Guy's proclamations and statements, which is something that rarely happens. "Asclepias doesn't have blue flowers."
"Y-Yes, there are no known breeds of blue Aslepias." A note of amazement enters his voice, causing his words to stammer, but Little Guy is still firm. "But, from the shape and structure, this is an Asclepias blossom." He pauses for a second, and it has the desired effect on Naomi. "This flower… shouldn't exist."
"What in the world is it, then?" Naomi asks, but receives no answer. Then, she continues. "Let's try sorting out the information we have. The blue flowers in the center of the field are Aslepias, just like the flowers surrounding them. Then why are the blue flowers only around Rosalia?" Naomi thinks for a minute, but can only come up with one reason. "Those flowers must have become discolored for some reason. A probable cause of that is Rosalia's blood. Rosalia was shot through the heart. Rosalia would have lost a large amount of blood from that wound. That blood then seeped into the ground around her. Hmm…" Naomi thinks back over Albert Sartre's words. "This miraculous blood, containing both the divine and the demonic. The flowers around her body absorbed Rosalia's blood from the soil. That, in turn, caused the flowers to take on this unnatural blue hue." Naomi sighs. "I don't want to believe it. But that's the conclusion that I have to arrive at."
Naomi puts her final two pieces of evidence together. "Yes…these allow us to finally figure everything out. It's no coincidence that Rosalia's body was surrounded by these blue flowers. They were normal red flowers until she died. When she died, her blood soaked into the ground. The Asclepias flowers absorbed her blood and changed color. Most likely, what caused the color change in the flowers was Rosalia's blood. The demon within Rosalia's veins lived on after her death, finding another viable host in the blue Asclepias flowers.
"I can't believe it." Little Guy's wonder-filled voice comes through Naomi's phone (her regular one, not voodoo hotline). "How could such a thing…?"
"It may be unbelievable, but it is the truth. The corpse itself is a testament to that."
"Huh? The corpse?" Little Guy frowns.
"Yes. Remember, Rosalia's corpse had turned completely into adipocere. Adipocere normally occurs when the bacteria that break down bodies do not multiply for some reason. This normally occurs when the corpse is stored in anaerobic conditions for long periods of time. But, this is hardly an anaerobic location. The reason her body became adipocere was not due to environmental or weather conditions. It was because the virus within her continued to protect her body.
Little Guy gasps in surprise. Collecting himself, he says, "But even if the blue Asclepias are harboring the Rosalia virus, how does that connect to the pandemic going on right now in America? It's impossible!"
"You're right. The Rosalia virus is only passed on via contact with the mucous membranes. Even if this entire field was filled with flowers holding the Rosalia virus, it wouldn't be able to cause the outbreak in Portland, over 3000 kilometers away."
"Then…how?"
"There was a vector." Naomi says, eyes narrowing.
"A vector?"
"Yes. Some method of transmission that carried the virus from these flowers. This is how the virus spread to cause the infections in cities hundreds of miles away from here."
"Huh? What?" Little Guy still can't see where Naomi is going with this.
"Can't you tell? It's the Monarch Butterflies." Naomi says, pausing to let that piece of information sink in.
"Wha-?" Little Guy is now well and truly astounded.
"That's right. The butterflies that led us here carried the virus. The Monarchs are the vector for the Rosalia virus. This is how the Rosalia Virus has spread!"
Naomi hangs up the phone. She now has enough evidence to solve the case, but somehow, she still feels as if something is missing. Some piece of information that will bring this case together to its conclusion.
Her phone gives its familiar beeping ringtone. "Dr. Kimishima, can I bother you for a moment?"
Naomi stares out at the beautiful landscape surrounding Rosalia's deathbed. "Yes? What is it?"
"You might not need this anymore, but I reconstructed another voice file."
"Another one? I thought you'd said you'd repaired them all."
"Yes. This file was actually marked as having been deleted. It still existed in the memory, though, so I was able to reconstruct it."
"I see. When is that recording from?"
"From looking at the date, it's right before Albert lost his sanity."
"All right." Naomi arches an eyebrow. "Still, it's unusual for you to go and do something unnecessary like this."
"Yeah, well, not sure how to put this…" Little Guy seems sheepish. "I felt this was…something that I needed to pass on to you."
"Okay," says Naomi softly, figuring that something Little Guy would go through all these measures must be something important indeed. "I'll try listening to it."
"Please do. It'll be file record-04."
Immediately, Naomi picks up the recorder and flips through to record-04. What is this recording about? Right before Albert lost his sanity... what last words could he have had?
Immediately, it's recognizable whose voice this is, though, a voice too fresh to be Sartre's old croak, but familiar all the same. A young girl's tones come through the speakers, and Naomi's heart skips a beat as she hears the voice.
I'm… Rosalia.
The voice seems hesitant at first, then picks up speed, as if growing more confident to saying what she wants to record.
I live here with my daddy. My daddy… is really nice and says a lot of nice things.
Rosalia smiles as she says these words. Naomi can sense the love shared between father and daughter.
Daddy's a great doctor. He says he's going to save everyone from diseases. He says I've got a poison and a cure in my body, and that the poison's really scary, but the cure is really amazing!
Naomi sighs. Did Rosalia have any idea of the devastation the virus within her would cause?
That's why he's researching how to get that medicine out of me! If that medicine is made…I wonder if it'll heal everyone… And then I can make lots of friends and play with them…
Rosalia's voice trails off, as if lost in a daydream. Then, it returns, with a slight melancholy tone in the sweet sound.
Daddy's… really bothered right now because the research is difficult.
Was Albert beginning to lose his sanity, even then? Naomi has so many questions, and so few answers.
The voice changes to a sad tone, as if remembering something lost.
But… I think I'll be okay if I can stay here like this! I can't see my brother… or my big sis…
Naomi's eyes begin to get tears in them, and she hastily wipes them away. Rosalia's brother… if only CR-S01 were here now to hear this. But of course, he won't be. He stayed at Resurgam for his reason: to fight for humanity, to save as many lives as he can... but could he be fighting for Rosalia too?
But Daddy's always here for me. He's always laughing... it's really funny. I think Daddy will be happy if he can get the medicine out of me! The exams hurt, but if Daddy's happy, I'll be okay!
Naomi now sees the family that shared this home, before it was torn apart by the virus. CR-S01, Albert Sartre, and Rosalia. All loved each other and would do anything to help the other.
So I hope that Daddy's research comes true soon. And then everyone can be healed!
The voice in the recorder fades away, replaced by the soft sound of the wind sighing through the Asclepias flowers.
Naomi gives a sad sigh. "A father who wanted to end all disease, and a daughter who wanted nothing but his success. This is far too sad a conclusion to their stories. And yet, now I can see the truth behind everything that happened here."
Naomi stands in the center of the blue Asclepias flowers, Rosalia's deathbed. Unseen, a small figure stands in front of her. Rosalia Rossellini has been waiting for her story to get out, for all wrongs that she may have inadvertently caused to be put to right. Yet, Naomi can feel something there. And, slowly, the figure of the girl appears in her vision. The long, white hair braided down her shoulders. The cream-dress, without any traces of the bloodstains on the objects Naomi examined. The pale pink eyes, staring back at Naomi's own, sadness and hope reflected in them.
"This…" Naomi gasps. Then, she closes her eyes, steadying herself for the task at hand. "I see. I understand now." She takes a deep breath. "Let's put together the truth of what happened here."
We came here to find an antiserum in Rosalia's blood. But what we found was that Rosalia had already been killed. I know now what killed her.
Naomi remembers how it was when the group had arrived at the field in the helicopter. Rosalia, peaceful, undisturbed in her final sleep, in the center of the blue deathbed, flowers swaying gently in the breeze.
The one who murdered Rosalia, the girl acting as host to the virus, was Albert Sartre. The bullet's rifling matches that of Albert's gun. There's no doubt Albert Sartre was her killer. Three shots were fired. This is how it began…
Naomi closes her eyes. In her head, she can picture the photo of Albert Sartre from CIFM's database. The long, blue-ish hair, the hard features, and the cold, unforgiving eyes.
Three shots were fired at this location. The first one was at the desk inside the room. Albert pulled the gun from his desk and fired. He was aiming at his loving daughter, who stood at the door.
Naomi's vision swims over, and she is at the scene. Albert aims the gun at the door, lab coat billowing in the breeze. His dark, cluttered office is scattered around him. Sunlight does not reach the darkest corners of the room.
However, he missed and the bullet went through the glass. Whether this is due to hesitation or his condition is unknown.
The door swings open on its hinges. A starburst pattern from the gunshot has been rent into the glass, with a shattered pile of shards below. Outside, the red, yellow, and orange Asclepias flowers lend an unaccountable beauty to the scene.
Rosalia fled the room, trying to escape. The blood on the glass shard is from her stepping on it. She ran in desperation, but this prevented her escape.
In her mind, Naomi fixates on the pile of razor-sharp glass shards. They lay scattered from where the bullet shattered them. One of them has a red stain on it from Rosalia's miraculous blood.
Rosalia ran into the flower field, but she was unable to escape her assailant. Albert stood in the doorway and shot her. The bullet pierced Rosalia's leg and she collapsed.
Now Rosalia is falling onto the bed of Asclepias flowers, pain, confusion, and fear written all over her face. She cannot believe that her beloved father has done this to her. A thin stream of blood trails from her leg. Her hair flies out behind her as she falls, ever so slowly, to her deathbed.
Albert caught up with the frightened girl as she lay there.
She lies collapsed on the pillow of flowers, staring up with wide, frightened eyes at the bright blue sky, the last piece of beauty she will ever see, as she waits for death to come to her, unknowing, lost, unable to process of this sudden betrayal.
And then…
A shot rings through the air, shattering all other images. The echo continues to ring in Naomi's mind as she sees the next part of the puzzle come together.
Yes… he ended her life. But Albert didn't kill Rosalia because he wanted to. He truly loved Rosalia as he would his own daughter. But he had no choice but to kill her.
Now Albert Sartre kneels in front of the body of his dead daughter. Head bent, shoulders slumped, face grief-stricken. Rosalia lays there, sightless eyes staring up at the sky, head surround by a soft pillow of Asclepias flowers. Her body is peaceful, as if she is only sleeping. It will remain undisturbed for years to come.
Albert had been infected with the Rosalia Virus. However,, this virus does more than infect the body. It eats away at the heart and soul, as in my other cases.
Albert Sartre, face clenched in agony, hands gripping at thin air, vomits blood into his palm. Just as so many of the victims of the virus before him, his rational mind has gone, leaving him with no heart, able to kill his own daughter.
Because Albert knew of the virus's threat all too well, in order to exterminate it, he killed his own child. And yet, ironically, he may have caused the exact opposite. The blood spilling from the gunshot wound in her chest provided the Rosalia Virus with a new host. This is the true cause of the spreading infection.
Naomi looks down at Albert's gun, sitting discarded on the table in a pile of papers and books. The black metal of the barrel holds so many secrets… and one very important life.
The blue Asclepias flowers around her body drew in Rosalia's blood and became a new host for Death. And so, the mass infection began. A certain organism served as a vector for the virus…
Naomi is back, looking down at Rosalia's peaceful body, flowers grown up around her face. As she watches, the flowers, over the season, slowly turn blue, as they absorb the virus and are discolored by the pathogen.
Monarch larvae store toxins of the plants that they ingest. The Monarchs carrying the Rosalia Virus migrated north, and as they went, they showered death in golden scales. This is the truth behind how the virus spread.
Now, Naomi sees the Monarch butterflies that led the team to this field, as they pollinate the Asclepias and ingest the poisonous virus. All seems so peaceful in the field, the innocent girl's body keeping watch over the butterflies as they carry death away in their golden wings.
Rosalia never…Neither did Albert. No one intended for it to end this way. One sought an end to all disease, and the other his success. But that…was the beginning. The evil sealed in Rosalia gained wings and flew. That's what Rosalia's last word meant.
Naomi looks down at Albert's desk one last time. There, sitting on the flat surface, is a picture. Rosalia, her hair hanging loose about her face, laughs at the camera, eyes closed with joy. Albert Sartre also smiles, pure joy radiating from his face. Behind them, the Asclepias field flowers, looking the same as it does now, with the family's entire life turned upside-down. And so the wheel of fate will eternally turn, carrying with it sadness, hope, joy, and despair.
Beginning…
Rosalia Rossellini's face stares back at Naomi's, as her ghostly face mouths the whispered word. Beginning... a word with so many meanings pertaining to this sad story.
"This is the whole truth, illuminated by the light of life." Naomi concludes, finally having told this family's full story. "You must've suffered, too…" Naomi says to the girl whose fate brought so many lives down with her, though inadvertently. "Let's end this."
The ghostly eyes of Rosalia Rossellini close for the final time, and her pale features slowly fade away, leaving behind the field of beautiful Asclepias flowers of every shade of yellow and orange and red... but also the deadly carpet of blue death.
Naomi stares at the faded illusion now blanketed by the dead girl, asleep forever. Asleep. Secretly, Naomi has never liked to call the dead as gone from the world, but merely sleeping... in peace. She sighs, knowing that in just a few mere months – or even weeks, even days – she will be with Rosalia, with Sartre, and with all the dead people in the world.
She doesn't have much time left.
"Naomi, come quick! We got the equipment working!"
Maria's cries are urgent and they sharply cut through the air, but it takes a few seconds for the skilled forensics examiner to come to her senses and process it. Naomi turns from Rosalia's body, making up for lost time.
"All right," she calls back. "I'll be right..."
Her voice cuts off as a sudden spasm strikes her body, forcing her to the ground. Naomi's pale eyes vanish from the world as her eyelids slam down, squeezing hard, wincing in the pain that has suddenly attacked her heart. "Urgh..."
Bent down on her knees in the Asclepias field, Naomi clasps one hand to her heart, struggling to breathe, struggling to stay alive. Of all times... why now? This... can't be... we must... return to America... Her eyes snap open and she takes in the view around her: the flowers, still blooming, the butterflies, still dancing. To die tragically in such a beautiful place is exactly what had happened to Rosalia...
Another sudden spasm causes her to cough loudly, and Naomi feels something wet at the back of her throat. No... she takes the other hand and covers her motuh with it, unwilling to let Maria or Holden to see it.
Will Naomi's blood also pour into the soil and turn the flowers blue, and have a new disease spread across America? A twisted one, far beyond the reaches of the Rosalia Virus, a mutation? A horrible mutation? Naomi's heart ebbs in pain, doubled over with fears that have clawed her for months, since the day she had found out from Derek Stiles. The lines of her face are hardened, refusing to give up, refusing to give up...
Maria, who had turned in shock at the sound of Naomi's horrible, wracking coughs, now runs over, paramedic instincts kicking in. "Hey, Naomi? What's wrong...?" She kneels by Naomi's side, grasping her shoulders, keeping her steady. She looks so weak, she might fall over.
"It's nothing," Naomi chokes out. "Let's go."
Maria refuses to let go, and her face turns into a completely new one: distorted and insane, fierce and stubborn. "It's not nothing! Let me take a..."
She bends closer to Naomi, her voice cutting off, and her heart hammering as she sees what had just happened. The corners of Naomi's mouth are scarlet, brimming with fresh blood she had spilled moments before, and her palm... is covered with the crimson blood.
Coughing up blood... Maria is far too familiar with this symptom, for she has treated many of them, those patients, the not-so-uncommon ones who are spreading every day throughout America. The victims... of the Rosalia Virus.
"You!" Maria cries. She turns, about to call for Holden, but Naomi stops her.
"As I said before, we don't have much time," she says briskly, wiping her hand off. She forces herself to get up, although the pains are wracking her body now, merciless, unforgiving against the breeze. "We still have a job to do, and we must accomplish it!"
Naomi walks up, refusing to let go of the world's slim thread of hope. Maria follows her, yelling loudly. "H-Hey, wait! Hey...!"
But no matter what Maria does, deep down, she knows that she will have to let Naomi go just this time. The fate of the world depends on it – even if it means sacrificing the newest member of the trauma team. Maria had come to dislike the forensics examiner, especially after the episode in which they had just found Rosalia, but now... she is starting to see her with a new respect. She trudges after Naomi grudgingly, trailing several meters behind her.
This isn't just the fight for this world. Maria had been Rosalia's friend... no, more than a friend. Ever since the fire, Maria had felt some attachment to her, and especially now... Maria isn't thinking about the world right now; this is a fight for Rosalia, to fulfill what she cannot do.
I wonder if she's watching us now...
"How's it coming, Agent?" Naomi's sharp voice cuts through the drone of the machines as they warm up after several years of rusting over and gathering dust. "Did you find anything?"
"We've got the power back on, as you can see," Holden shrugs, gesturing at the machines around him. "The rest's a pile of records, chemicals, and equipment... you?"
"It's all been solved," says Naomi, praying that her disease wouldn't attack now. "Albert Sartre killed Rosalia."
"How sad," says Holden, though his voice is merciless and cold, patches of it frosted over with ice. He doesn't seem to care at all, and the news doesn't seem to disturb him. But to Maria, it might break her down... "His effort to save the world is close to killing it."
"Yes," says Naomi, keeping her voice at a level tone, trying not to work her bloodied throat. "He must have realized the virus couldn't be used. That... is what caused this tragedy to strike."
"So...?" Holden turns his back to Naomi, examining a machine behind him. "Did you find a countermeasure to the virus?"
"Yes," says Naomi, closing her eyes, feeling the pain wobble in her chest. "The virus's vector is the Monarchs. The scales they lose during migration are spreading it."
Now Holden's voice shows alarm. "Don't tell me... the quarantine failed because..." He shuts his eyes, remembering the butterflies flying past him as he shut down Portland for quarantine... how can something that small and that beautiful be so dangerous?
"The Monarch migration pattern extends from Mexico to Lake Erie," says Naomi softly. "Even if the virus isn't airborne, it will still spread."
"Dammit," Holden swears. "What should we do, then?" His voice has finally risen to a panicked rate, for even he has lost hope...
As if on cue, Maria runs into the doorway, having done the deed Naomi had briefed her on earlier. "Naomi! I gathered as much as I could!"
"Flowers?" Holden asks incredulously, staring at the blue bunches in Maria's hand. Indeed, blue Asclepias flowers are gathered in bunches, clutched in Maria's arms. "What are you planning on doing?" This is just absurd...
"I'll use antibody stabilizers to extract an antiserum," says Naomi briskly.
"You can do that?" Holden reels back in shock, and Naomi is reminded of the conversation she had with Little Guy about the recorder and her inability to use computers...
"Yes," she sighs, deciding not to pull a Little Guy. "Thankfully, this facility has the necessary equipment. I'll make the serum contain tripeptides in N-terminal order."
"A-All right...!" Holden agrees, not getting a word of what Naomi had just said, and even Maria stands in confusion. "Just tell me what to do to help you!"
"Of course," says Naomi. "Let's get this over with as fast as we can."
The three look at each other in the eye, and nod in unison. This is it. The final step before eliminating the virus for good – either they succeed and become the heros of the world, or fail and take the earth with them.
Fuuuun. Word count: 18152. I never knew fanfi- ahem, I mean, this site could support chapters that long. (What? I'm joking. Geez.)
This was written by Aya, as always, because SOMEBODY (*cough* me) procrastinated too much and realized I had one freaking week to finish Friends, Carpet of Blue Death, Despair, Time For Rejoicing, Twisted Rosalia, and The Seventh Doctor, so... *hugs Aya* She wrote Carpet of Blue Death's autopsy, all of Despair, Time For Rejoicing's op and Twisted Rosalia's op. Frankly, I got sick of the operations. :)
By the way, in this chapter, if you see any typos or whatever towards the end, feel free to blame fighterkirby. I got sorta lazy to edit it towards the end... and... let's just say that if you had to edit a 46-paged chapter, you would give up halfway too. :P
~fk
