Chapter 3: Chunhua's Disappearance
Several minutes later, Charlie and Chunhua Chan arrived at the abandoned warehouse.
As they exited their car, Chunhua felt baffled. "I still don't understand what we'll be able to find here," she puzzled. "It's been closed down for almost a year. More than enough time for Vito to bury any evidence."
"You'd be surprised, my dear," Charlie reassured his wife.
The investigating couple entered the deserted building. Sadly, they found nothing in it other than old damaged wooden boards and a lot of silence. Upon noticing a stairway going up, Chunhua volunteered to examine an abandoned office room at the top while Charlie searched an empty workroom on the bottom floor.
The moment Chunhua entered the office room, she found a picture of the office's former owner, Tony Vito, on the wall and samples of drugs on the floor.
"Cocaine, marijuana," she clarified. "But I'm not sure it's enough to nail Vito."
As Chunhua continued to study the drugs, an unknown figure silently approached her from behind.
Back inside of the workroom on the bottom floor, Charlie used a flashlight to search all around the dark corners of the room, but found nothing. However, before he could call it quits, he smelled something burning and saw smoke coming from an office room on his left-hand side. The cautious detective slowly entered the room and found a pile of recently burnt paper on the floor.
"Someone left in a hurry," the sleuth thought to himself. "And for someone to just suddenly burn them clearly means they were still using this building even after it went out of business."
Charlie Chan soon saw one sheet of paper that hasn't been completely burned yet. Upon reading what was on it, he quickly became startled and ran out of the room.
"Chunhua!" Charlie shouted upstairs to the office room. "Chunhua! We must go!"
There was no response.
"Chunhua!" Charlie rushed up to the room to get his wife. Unfortunately, when he entered the office room, Chunhua was nowhere in sight.