Cerita Pendek & Novel Police After Death

The border crackdown finally comes to an end. The police finally capture the notorious Roxanne Thorne, who has made headlines across the country. In the interrogation room, Jordyn Croft sits across from her in a police uniform, repeatedly asking the same question. "Where is that traitor, Christopher Savile, hiding now?" Roxanne slowly raises her eyes, her slender fingertips gently rubbing the edge of her handcuffs. "That young cop? We tied him to a metal frame and took turns beating him. Then we injected him with highly concentrated drugs before using blunt weapons to smash his knees and ankles piece by piece. Finally, we chained him to the barbed-wire fence at the border." She licks her lips, as if savoring the memory. "By dawn, his body was already stiff." Jordyn stands up and slams the files onto the table. "You're lying! He was the one who leaked the information back then and got more than a dozen of our officers killed. He even covered your retreat through the back mountain. The surveillance footage captured everything clearly!" Roxanne suddenly bursts into laughter. Her handcuffs clang loudly against the table. She says, "Christopher never gave us a single useful piece of information until the end. Instead, it was a hostage he'd previously rescued from us who kept feeding us information. His only condition was that we take Christopher away and make everyone believe he was a traitor. "That way, he could conveniently take Christopher's wife for himself." The entire room falls silent. Just then, the interrogation room door flies open. Jordyn's newlywed husband, Milo Lumley, rushes in, his voice urgent. "Jordyn, did you catch the suspect? Did they tell you where Chris is?"

The night I was kidnapped, I made one last phone call to my dad, police captain Marcus Harper. "Dad, save me!" "Grace, even your jealous tantrums should have better timing." On the other end of the line, he was celebrating his adopted daughter's birthday. His voice dripped with impatience. "Today is Annie's eighteenth birthday. Pushing her down the stairs wasn't enough for you? Now you have to lie and make a scene too?" I cried and told him I hadn't done it. All I got in return was a dismissive chuckle. "Grace, either come home right now and apologize to Annie, or don't ever come back." I never made it back. Three months later, a girl's body was unearthed at an abandoned slaughterhouse on the edge of the city. Dad led the team to the scene. He pulled back the blue tarp covering the body and saw the red cord around my wristbone, the one with "Stay Safe" engraved on its silver tag. The man who had saved countless missing children finally lost his mind.

Jocelyn Nicols was celebrated as the police department's genius detective. I'd spent ten quiet years at her side as her assistant, unnoticed by anyone. By her eighth year on the force, she still hadn't cracked the decade-old cold case that had haunted her career. "You know the rule," she told me. "I won't marry until this case is solved." I didn't say anything back. I just packed her bags for another out-of-town assignment and wished her a safe trip. What she didn't know was that the moment she finally cracked the case and became a household name across the country, I'd just received a notice from the hospital. It told me I was going to die.

When the murderer tortures me to death, my criminal investigator dad and chief forensic pathologist mom are cheering at my brother's match. The criminal saws off my tongue. He answers my Dad's call with my finger. Just before the call ends, Dad's cold voice cuts through. "Playing dead, huh? We should never have brought him back." The murderer chuckles mockingly. "Looks like I grabbed the wrong kid. I thought they'd care more about their real son." When Mom and Dad arrive at the crime scene later, they stare at the mutilated body in shock and rage at the murderer's cruelty. But they never realize that the broken, bloodied body is their biological son.

When I was sixteen, a criminal broke into our home, tortured and murdered my mother, then set the house on fire to destroy the evidence. I was there and saw everything. My father, my uncle, and the police asked me again and again what happened that night. I refused to speak. They thought the shock had left me unable to speak, so they gave me a pen and asked me to write down what the killer looked like. I still said nothing and made no move to write. Ten years later, I was twenty-six. My father and I fell out over my mother’s case. We went eight years without seeing each other. Then, out of nowhere, he came to see me. I came home from work to my rented apartment and opened the door. He and my uncle were inside, watching me with cold expressions. “Lynn, were you the one who killed your mother?”

When I'm on the verge of dying, the kidnapper who has kidnapped me calls my fiance, Connor Weston, who's also the youngest patrol officer in the pack. The call goes through, only for us to hear Connor's voice, which is filled with suppressed rage. "Sylvia Kline, I'll give you three seconds to stop bothering me. Vivian's initiation ceremony will take place at night three days later. If you dare pull off another one of your tricks again—" "Connor…" Blood gushes out of my mouth as soon as I open it. My voice is so hoarse that I don't sound like myself at all. "Save… me…" "Your acting's pretty good," Connor cuts me off, his tone filled with disdain. "Listen, if you dare skip out on the ceremony and embarrass me in front of the entire pack, you can forget about going home." After that, the line goes dead. In the end, I die from mutilation. It's fine, Connor. I can't go home for real this time.

Three years after my death, Matt Lewinsky meets another professional gold digger just like me. He's not easy to fool anymore. He plays along and catches our ringleader, Simon Hale. "Where's Natalia? She scammed me out of so much money. Who knows where she's enjoying herself now?" Simon blows out a puff of smoke, as if he has heard the funniest joke in the world. "Mr. Lewinsky, do you really have no idea? Natalia died a long time ago. Her whole face was slashed to pieces, and even after three of her fingers were chopped off, she still refused to hand over the Lewinsky family's secret key. "Our leader threw her into the snowy mountains to feed the leopards." Matt stands up abruptly and punches Simon in the face. "Stop covering for her! She didn't hesitate when she scammed me back then. Tell me! Where did you hide the key? Where is Natalia now?" Simon spits out some blood and laughs. "You're so damn stupid. You still think Natalia betrayed you? Then, that poor woman died for nothing. Yes, she was one of us, but she never did anything to betray you. If revenge is what you want, you should go after your fiancée." Matt's pupils constrict sharply. "What do you mean…" Before he can finish speaking, his bodyguard pushes open the door. "Mr. Lewinsky, the police found a female corpse in the snowy mountains."

My boyfriend is a forensic artist. He was forced to make a harrowing decision to save his first love. At the killer's demand, he created a portrait from a photo—he never realized that the young girl in the photo was me in my childhood. Two weeks later, the police investigate a grisly bomb explosion and dismemberment case. The victim's identity was unrecognizable, and the investigation dragged on for days as the authorities desperately searched the blast site, looking for my remains. After three days and nights, they finally recovered enough of my remains to reconstruct my face. When my boyfriend unknowingly brought the shattered fragments back to life with his art, he was confronted with a horrifying truth—one that drove him to the edge of madness.

My father was a hero cop, but I was a blemish to his shining resume as I was a delinquent who smoked, drank, and got into fights. Every time I tried to visit him at the precinct, he would slap me and tell me to leave in front of his colleagues. His fatherly love was all meant for Nana Smith, the daughter of his fallen comrade who was a paragon of good character and academic excellence. When Nana was kidnapped, he sent the entire city's officers after the kidnappers. When I was stabbed three times by some thugs and called him for help, he snapped at me, "Quit being a bother. The death of vermin like you is simply good riddance anyway." Even as I suffocated in agony, I lay in a pool of my own blood and sent him one last text. [Father, would you finally look at me twice if I end up a corpse?] He never replied. Then, three days later, the cops destroyed a major cartel hideout when my father found me, still holding on to evidence I had gathered against the cartel. That was when the madness started…

A rival pack invaded, plunging our pack into the worst crisis we had ever faced. The witch, Morgana Vale, said that only a blood sacrifice could save the entire pack. So despite my anemia, I was dragged onto the altar. Morgana slit my wrist, and the moment my blood dripped onto the totem, the ritual began. When the bleeding got to be more than I could take, I tried to call it off, but my mother stopped me cold. "Sweetheart, hold on a little longer. You're the Alpha's daughter. Making a small sacrifice for the pack is only right. It's just a little blood. It won't kill you." I gritted my teeth and held on, my heart pounding like it would burst. The ritual lasted from morning until dusk, and my blood never stopped flowing. "Mom, I really can't take it anymore." My face was ghost-white, and my vision was starting to blur. But she just gave my bloodless face a cold glance. "Sacrificing for the pack is an honor. Being the Alpha's daughter doesn't mean you get to shirk your duty. I did not raise you to be selfish." By midnight, everything went black, and I collapsed on the altar. I'm sorry. I failed to do my duty. I'm sorry, Mother. I let you down.

While a killer was dismembering me, my father was busy throwing a coming-of-age party for my adopted younger sister. When I called him for help, all I heard on the other end of the line was his venomous voice. "What kind of act are you putting on this time? If you want to die, hurry up and do it! Just stay out of my sight!" The next day, Dad went back to the police station to investigate a dismemberment case that had shocked the entire city. He gathered every clue the killer had left behind. What he never once suspected was that the body being pieced back together belonged to the biological daughter he hated so much.

My husband, who was a drug enforcement police officer, personally got me into rehab. My son was cheering on the side, saying that he no longer had to see me under the influence for a long time. After I was discharged, I discovered my husband moved in with his lover and our son. I begged him to come back and told him that someone would kill me. He did not believe me. Instead, he said coldly, “If you die, you better end up in a trash can. Otherwise, I’d have to deal with your body.” My son cheered at the side. “Mommy is finally gone!” After a week, I was dismembered. My body parts were found in multiple trash cans. He was the police in charge of the case.

Three years after I landed on the wanted list, all 88 pieces of my dismembered corpse were thrown in front of the police station. After the forensics team put my body together, they identified my body as Julian Colt, the fiancé of the Organized Crime Department, Captain Kyra Schneider. Everyone, from elders in their eighties to young children, wanted me to see justice because not only had I betrayed Kyra and her team, but I had also publicly joined the criminal organization and become the lover of its leader. I was fired from the police force and hated by my loved ones. Kyra hated me the most, and she used the most cruel method of retrieving my memories to be broadcast to the world. On judgment day, the city square was filled with spectators, but when my memories were retrieved, along with the huge word 'innocent' splashed on it, everyone went crazy. "Traitor! A man like him should have been executed." "The evidence clearly points to his guilt. How is he innocent? Everyone knows how he helped the criminal organization to kill numerous police officers!" "Don't be tricked by him! He must have altered those memories!"