Chapter 6256: Chicago Stories (25)

As if driven by some Ghostly Spirit, Bruce slowly walked toward the chapel’s main doors. But those eyes vanished in a Blink, like an Illusion. The light in the crack of the door trembled faintly, and then there was nothing at all.

Bruce caught a faint scent of blood.

His Instinct started blaring like crazy; the keen senses that belonged to Batman were describing something to him through the door. But Bruce merely placed his hand on the door panel and saw his own pale, thin fingers, the knuckles in the dim light looking as if their skin had been stripped away, like the figure standing outside was a skeleton that had been buried for a long time. Then he gently pressed; the door swung open.

In the exact center of the chapel lay a corpse.

The lights began to Blink, cold wind poured in, and a shrill siren screamed in his ears. Scenes from certain stories he’d once heard beneath the High Tower were playing out right on cue: police tumbled in like beans, the arms holding guns layered over each other like petals.

Bruce jolted awake. No corpse, no police, and the chapel lights weren’t even on.

Bruce staggered back a step, swallowed, turned and walked out through the doors, then looked back again. The entire chapel was pitch-black, as if the lights had never been turned on at all. He should have known: a university chapel isn’t a church, and if there’s no group event, it simply doesn’t get used—let alone have all its lights on this late at night.

Bruce drew several deep breaths of fresh air. What had just happened was far too bizarre; this really was stepping straight onto the set of a supernatural horror flick.

“Brainiac, Brainiac!” Bruce called.

If he’d learned anything over the years, it was to just ask directly when something came up. There was no way he’d guess the answer by flailing around here; better to go straight to Arrogant. Unfortunately, Brainiac still ignored him.

Annoyance flared in Bruce. He went straight to a nearby phone booth, called the Chicago Police Department, and in the name of a Carnage case victim asked to meet Arkham Batman to report some “forgotten details,” successfully dragging him out.

In America, there’s a fairly complete protection system for informants willing to provide leads to the police. This includes allowing meetings at locations specified by the informant; the police can also show up out of uniform, and when necessary they can even fabricate documents and pose as the informant’s relatives or friends to meet him. Moreover, the informant can designate which police officer he wants to see; whoever he trusts can go, assuming he actually has valuable information.

Bruce was exploiting that loophole. But the Arkham Batman who got called out was clearly displeased. He knew full well that in the cosmos Bruce came from, the Justice League had a proud tradition of clocking out on time—once quitting time hit, even their official site shut down; whoever came looking for them after that was out of luck.

It was already very late now. If Bruce had dragged him over, chances were he’d punched a hole clear through the sky. Arkham Batman might have speed-ran Bruce’s game experience into the ground, but in his own view, if it weren’t for Bruce, he could have cleared it even faster. This guy’s ability to cause trouble was absolutely top-tier.

Bruce didn’t go anywhere else; he just stood in front of the phone booth and waited. It wasn’t long before he saw Arkham Batman, who emerged from inside a hedge. Bruce sighed, said nothing, and simply pointed at the chapel. Arkham Batman looked over and didn’t see anything wrong.

Then he pushed the door open and went in as well. After looking around inside, he still found nothing wrong. The place was small to begin with, and it didn’t have any very obvious religious elements—it was just an utterly ordinary public activity hall.

Arkham Batman had wanted to conduct a more thorough investigation, but he turned back to look at Bruce. Bruce recounted what had just happened to him, then said, “I called you over because I want you to Persuasion Brainiac into letting me contact the Professor, so I can figure out what’s going on.”

Arkham Batman’s expression went speechless. Bruce spread his hands and said, “I know you’re a Detective—you like to investigate things yourself. But I’m the kind of guy who, before reading a detective novel, flips straight to the last page to see who the killer is.”

Arkham Batman stood there, seemingly communicating with Brainiac. Bruce guessed he was doing it partly because he wanted to understand the backstory; after all, he’d come in the most hurriedly and hadn’t had the time to grasp the difference between Brainiac’s gaming platform and the Battleworld.

And now he should have realized that Brainiac pursued realism to an excessive degree: the game’s setting was the real world setting, and everything here was hyper-real, without even a newbie tutorial. That was obviously a serious disadvantage. All Batmen put a lot of stock in intel; he was probably asking Brainiac for a briefing.

Bruce watched as Arkham Batman’s brows knitted tighter and tighter, to the point where they could’ve crushed a fly. Whatever Brainiac was telling him, Bruce didn’t know, but Arkham Batman walked out of the chapel without saying a word and vanished into the night.

“Brainiac.” Bruce sent another message. “You really have to help me get the line through. I swear this is the last time.”

Brainiac said nothing, but connected him to Arrogant. Bruce hurriedly asked, “Professor, are you sure you didn’t have any Superpower when you were young?”

“That depends on how you define Superpower,” Arrogant replied. “I’m very strong. Medical research shows that my neural recruitment capacity far exceeds that of ordinary people, and I can further remove muscular limits through pain stimulation.”

Bruce of course already knew that. He asked, “I mean in terms of Mind Control—something like Professor X. You might not believe this, but I just saw an Illusion…”

Bruce described his recent experience to him once over. This time Arrogant waited a while before answering; maybe he was a bit speechless. He said, “You were hypnotized.”

“What?!” Bruce said in disbelief. “I was on a busy street, I didn’t talk to any strangers, and doesn’t hypnosis require the subject’s cooperation?”

“That’s only when you’re not using drugs.”

“I didn’t use any drugs.” Bruce protested. “How could I possibly eat something of unknown origin?”

“It doesn’t have to be ingested. You must have come into contact with something related to him and been affected by a drug.”

Bruce’s hand paused. He lowered his head and looked at the suit he was wearing.

He recalled the corpse he’d seen in the park. There was a ligature mark around the man’s neck, but no traces of fingernail scratches. That meant the victim was very likely strangled while in an unconscious state; no resistance, so no defensive wounds. And the reason he didn’t resist was probably because he’d been drugged, with the drug most likely applied to the clothing.

Bruce only needed to think a little to call up several chemicals with hallucinogenic components, many of which volatilize more quickly at body temperature and don’t have an especially pungent smell.

Putting the drug on the clothes is unquestionably clever. If Upper-class people think they’re in danger, they’ll focus heavily on checking their food; plus, a lot of hallucinogens taste bad, and unless you’re dealing with some heavy, oily, saucy dish, it’s easy to notice the off flavor. High temperatures can also destroy the chemical components. Clothes are much safer.

When Bruce put on the suit, he did smell a faint fragrance, but it was more like aftershave. That couldn’t be helped; with second-hand suits you don’t get to be that picky. He hadn’t felt anything wrong at the time because it’s perfectly normal in the Upper-class for people to splash on aftershave. He sometimes uses it himself, and the scent getting on the clothes is nothing strange.

Bruce guessed that Shiller had actually used a very light dose, because his goal wasn’t to poison people to death, just to interfere with their minds. Just like what Bruce had just gone through — even if it only happened once a month, it would be scary enough. And with the method being so well hidden, it wouldn’t be discovered.

Bruce is extremely sensitive to chemicals, not only because he’s very restrained in his daily use of drugs but also probably because of his constitution. He’s found that all the Batmen have this problem, especially an increased sensitivity to hallucinogens — the dose required to trigger Illusion is only half that of a normal person. As for Scarecrow’s fear gas, one spray and he passes out each time, with no way to resist it.

So even though the drug on this suit had probably almost fully evaporated, Bruce kept wearing it and still ended up inhaling some by bad luck. Given how sensitive he is to such things, that was enough to trigger Illusion.

But Bruce also felt something was off. He told Arrogant about stripping the body and then said, “If the police found the corpse and had the medical examiner do a detailed examination of the items on it, wouldn’t the whole thing be exposed?”

Bruce meant that once this tactic was discovered, people would surely take precautions against it, and at most it could only be used once or twice before becoming useless.

“Why do you think the corpse ended up in the Black man district?” Arrogant asked again.

Bruce of course knew that the University of Chicago is in Southern Chicago; Hyde Park and the surrounding area are a Black man neighborhood with terrible public safety. Around here, when someone comes across a corpse, it’s almost certain that their first reaction won’t be to report it, but to strip it. So bringing stolen goods here to be dealt with is perfectly normal — you throw something on the ground anywhere and someone will pick it up and take it to the black market.

The key question is why they didn’t strip off the clothes and bring just those over, but instead dumped the entire body here. Transporting a corpse from a rich district to this area is quite a distance, and it’s far easier to be spotted.

“Because the whole corpse is valuable, of course,” Arrogant said. “Even if it’s already dead and the organs are useless, the skin and skeletal specimens still have value. The corpse collectors down south are poorer; they won’t let even a single strand of hair go to waste. They’re more effective than any method of corpse disposal.”

Bruce suddenly saw the light.

It comes back to the same point: disposing of bodies is extremely troublesome, and for a solo offender it’s even harder. Although detection methods in this era aren’t particularly advanced, basic blood analysis techniques already exist. Dismemberment makes it easy to leave clues.

Better to transport the corpse whole to this area. Toss it randomly into some little corner, and gang members will easily find it. Once they do, they absolutely won’t call the police, because they’re not clean themselves and would worry that if the police found a body on their turf, it would bring them trouble. Most likely they’d pinch their noses and accept it, handing it over to the corpse collectors.

Some corpse collectors don’t process things very thoroughly: they just take the valuable parts and chuck the rest anywhere. But the southern corpse collectors won’t do that, because they’re extremely short on money and will squeeze every last bit of value from a corpse. Big-ticket items like clothing and jewelry are stripped off meticulously and then passed to different fences to move. The loot is dispersed so widely, with so many people involved, that the police can’t trace it. As for the flesh, they also prefer to sell it in separate lots, even splitting up each individual bone — that makes it even harder to track.

If the body is left in a wealthy district, even if whoever finds it doesn’t call the police, they’ll still hand it to corpse collectors. The rich district corpse collectors have stronger connections; they’re quite likely to sell the whole thing to some medical research lab or to a specimen archive. Following the trail back from there is relatively simple and can’t distract the police.

Bruce sighed that if a young Shiller had never been enlightened and was operating purely on talent, then he truly was gifted at this.