Never in Deborah Michaels’ seven-year long career at the Boston Police Department had she ever seen anything like this. She’d had all sorts of cases over the years, and had met with all sorts of hardened criminals and snivelling suspects under the roof of the precinct. But now, as she watched the dark-haired teenager before her, she felt as if she was dealing with something beyond her league. With her translucent skin and pale blue eyes, Valerie Jisoo looked practically supernatural under the dim fluorescent lights in the interrogation room.
Has she even blinked once? The detective couldn’t help but think. At first glance, the girl seemed every bit as weak and delicate as the media had portrayed her in its nationwide coverage of her mysterious disappearance. However, seven years of working in the police force had taught Deborah that no one that entered the precinct was ever what they seemed on the surface. The story they officially gave out to the media was that of a vicious kidnapping, of a terrifying odyssey across the country with each day being a gamble of life and death for poor Valerie.
Now that she was actually in the room, Deborah wasn’t sure if she could believe it. Valerie herself had shown no signs of trauma thus far, and as time went on, it seemed less and less like a kidnapping. Deborah would go so far as to assume, even if there was no real evidence maybe aside from the far too nonchalant way Valerie had described her ‘kidnapping’, that she went along with it completely willingly, for reasons that she couldn’t be sure of. However, it might just explain how she remained missing for so long even with the extensive media coverage and the entire nation on the lookout for her.
She went through the series of standard questions anyway, encouraging the girl to notify the station if anything happened, or if she’d recovered any details she’d missed the first time around. She’d dug around on Valerie’s medical files during the investigation, and while there had been a history of potential psychotic or schizophrenic disorders that she’d been treated for. Deborah still couldn’t be quite sure of how exactly all this played into her disappearance. However, the case was deemed closed, and Valerie was reunited with her family after a harrowing three months of searching. It would be inconsiderate to drag this case back into the limelight, as it was rare that missing persons cases ended this well.
The next time she heard Valerie Jisoo’s name, however, was that she had been found dead in the bathroom of her church. There was no time to register the shock, as Deborah had been assigned to the case of investigating the murder. With no other choice, she’d thrown herself into the investigation, reviewing and puzzling over just how could Valerie, who was under close watch by her entire community after the ordeal of the previous year, somehow end up murdered in a secluded bathroom with no witnesses? Deborah almost didn’t want to believe it.
The autopsy results came in to confirm that it was, in fact, the body of Valerie Jisoo. Her throat was slashed open in a single clean stroke, as if the killer was sure of what they were doing, and there had been no evidence of the murder weapon, or the potential killer themselves. Months and months on the case turned up nothing, and even when a shocking reveal through a DNA test proved that the body wasn’t even Valerie’s, coinciding with the reported theft of a body from a hospital morgue, the true whereabouts of Valerie herself, or if she was even really dead, remained unsolved and soon faded out of the public conscious.