"So, it turns out that the threat was more prominent than we had thought. You warned us about your friend's suspicious behavior towards you mentioning about your citrus allergy. So, we wanted to see if any of our medicine or vitamin has been tempered with since.
"There was no evidence that your friend or whoever might've employed had tried to incorporate citrus into our diet, but we found this in our parents' daily tablets," Kenji laid out a file.
The file consisted of a list of chemical components and their percentages. Some of them were familiar to me. Most of the them were normal things found in vitamins, but there were three chemicals that I could tell was not supposed to be there.
"Those are antidepressants," I muttered quietly.
"Yes, it might've not shown side effects on us or our mother– "
"But it will clash with your dad's heart medication," I finished his sentence.
"Wasn't Suki in charge of their medicine cabinet? Could there really be a mishandling? Or has it been happening right from the start?" Hiro's face turned sour.
"It appears that things had been happening even before Suki was handling things. I take full responsibility for the damages that had been done. We haven't thought of the possibilities of them being drugged before. We discovered it thanks to you."
"How's mother and father now?"
"I think things are taking a toll on mom. The doctors said dad's unstable state was getting worse that even one stroke would be fatal."
"Do we know who had swapped the content? Or when it happened?" I asked.
"Our team figured that it must've been someone from the hospital as it was purchased and produced there. We still can't be sure that Suze wasn't involved either.'
"We'll take care of that," Hiro closed the file.
"Very well. I'll leave it to you two. I'll take care of the hospital situation then," Kenji stood up and walked out of the meeting room.
"Do you think it's her?" I faced my partner.
"We can't be sure yet. Let's head back to my office and see this through. You need to submit that essay too, right?" he signaled me to follow him back.
"Oh, damn! I almost forgot about that," I throttled behind him.
I opened my laptop and reviewed my document before submitting it to my university portal for grading. It was worth 40% of my whole semester's grade. I would have to work extra hard for the exam if I had forgotten to submit it. Hiro started to work on our new case immediately and schemed on how to be sure that Suze was involved in the case at all.
"What? I don't understand," I scrolled through my e-mail aggressively.
"Something wrong?" Hiro looked up from his computer screen.
"My lecturer just sent me back my essay with the turn-it-in result. It said 75% similarity. He said he'll report me for plagiarism and forging documents, and it may cause my expulsion," my eyes widened.
"Did you download the documents before you submitted it?" he walked over to me.
"Yes! I attached my result in my submission too."
"Show me," he sat next to me.
My essay file and originality result were still there. I got a 5% on my initial submission. Hiro submitted my original file in the website again. The result was still at 75%.
"Someone had tempered with the website. It should've been a 100% match if your essay was in the database. Clearly, they deleted yours and submitted their fake one to make yours seemed plagiarized," he took over my laptop.
"It's fine. I'll just e-mail him back and explain everything. We have the proof anyway," I said hopefully.
"That's not going to work," he said after a long pause.
"Why not?"
"Because he was the one behind it," he showed me a statistic report.
It showed the IP address of whoever tempered with my submission and whom it belonged to. It showed the time log of the submissions as well. I couldn't believe my eyes. How could my own teacher had done it to me?
"Should we press charges, or do you want to do it my way?" he asked calmly.
"What?" I tried to process what had just happened.
"I can help you get justice and expose him in court. Or we can keep this discreet and anonymously harass him into surrendering himself."
"What?!" I got even more confused.
"Which one will it be? Unless you want to get unrightfully expelled."
"Of course not. But what can I do?"
"Not you, me. I won't let them expel you with false accusation. So, what will it be?"
"I-I don't know," I stuttered.
"It's gonna be okay. I'll take care of it," he rubbed my shoulder to comfort me, "just continue with Suze's case. I'll handle this one."
He collected the files and conversation from my laptop and went back to his computer silently. I couldn't shake off the feeling of being terrorized by my own teacher. Was it a blackmail for getting involved with Hiro?
Did someone really make a similar essay? What was Hiro planning to do? I didn't want him to get into any trouble because of me. And more importantly, I didn't want to get myself into deeper trouble.
I spent the evening worrying about it as I looked for the correlation between Suze and the swapped pills. They tested for fingerprints and took the background check of people that had been working in the hospital since Hiro's dad went in. Everyone seemed to have an alibi and CCTV proof of their innocence. In fact, it was Hiro's mother who had bought the vitamins. Suddenly I felt sick to my stomach.