Chapter 121 - 112: Major Conjecture! 2 Inferences

The eighth person... is dead!

Xu Huo’s pupils contracted. His hands clenched unconsciously.

"When this afternoon? What was the crime scene like?"

"It happened this afternoon, during the search of the public school."

Li Jianye explained, "The police were at the school at the time, but the dean of discipline wasn’t there, so we couldn’t bring him into the station for immediate questioning."

"Afterward, the police couldn’t contact him and set the matter aside. It wasn’t until they started making house calls..."

"...that they eventually found him dead in his home."

"As for the crime scene..."

Li Jianye paused, his brow furrowed. Instead of continuing, he pulled out several new photographs.

"The crime scene was a mess. The killer didn’t make any detailed effort to wipe away their tracks."

"It’s completely different from the first two crime scenes!"

The photograph showed a well-decorated house with a minimalist style. But unlike usual, it was now...

Covered in blood!

The dean of discipline from the public school lay in the very center, blood gushing from his wound. Fresh red blood was everywhere.

Even through a photograph, you could almost smell the metallic tang of blood!

It was bloody, horrifying, but at the same time...

There were so many clues!

"A copycat killing?"

Lost in thought, Qian Hua leaned in, his brow creased.

The scene in the photo was completely different from the two previous crime scenes!

Take Cheng Yu’s case. Anyone who saw the state of the home wouldn’t have suspected a thing.

The killer had cleaned the first and second crime scenes meticulously, erasing every trace of their presence!

But this third scene...

"His head is still attached..."

Xu Huo stared at the victim’s head, his eyes wide open in death. After a moment of thought, he looked back at Li Jianye.

"Was the body tortured?"

"No. A single slice to the throat."

Li Jianye shook his head. "A very professional method. Clean and efficient. He must have attacked as soon as they met, then vanished without bothering to clean up the scene."

"This could almost be considered a completely separate case from the first two!"

But the number "80" locked the two together...

This was why Qian Hua suspected a copycat was at work.

"What is the killer doing?"

Li Jianye frowned. "A completely different M.O. from the first two incidents. He didn’t even take the head, which was his signature."

"What happened?"

"Why kill the dean of discipline? To silence him? But even with the dean dead, the police can still get important information from other people."

"Is it... revenge?"

Qian Hua paused, then looked at Li Jianye. "What was the reason for Shen Miao’s withdrawal from school?"

"Voluntary withdrawal," Li Jianye said.

"Was the bullying mentioned in her file?"

"No, the school administration didn’t record it. That’s why the police couldn’t pull it up immediately and had to conduct interviews related to Cheng Yu instead..."

Viewed this way, the role the dean of discipline played in all this becomes quite intriguing...

"Let’s not worry about what he did for now."

Xu Huo, who had been silent all this time, suddenly spoke up. He stared intently at the body, his brow furrowed.

The pieces of information he’d gathered in his mind were now connecting.

"The killer... why wasn’t this a torture-killing?"

It was an inappropriate thing for a police officer to say, but that was the question.

The killer didn’t torture this victim!

"The four victims at the second crime scene also had no injuries on the surfaces of their bodies."

"The bodies weren’t dismembered, just simply hidden. You could say the only wounds on them were the multiple gouging marks on their necks!"

"But at the first crime scene, Cheng Yu was covered in wounds from head to toe!"

"Why is that?"

Hearing this, Qian Hua and the others began to ponder it subconsciously.

Eight people. Three, including Cheng Yu, from the private academy, and five, including the dean of discipline, from the public school.

Looking at it this way, it seems the killer is deliberately torturing the people from the private academy!

Is it because Cheng Yu’s group of three were the masterminds?

You have to understand, in a bombing, the innocent people caught up in it can’t even be considered accomplices, and yet they still suffer a hellishly brutal death!

So why?

"Is his hatred only directed at Cheng Yu and the other two?"

"Why is that?"

Xu Huo asked again.

The method of killing reveals the killer’s emotions.

At the first crime scene, the bodies of the three victims were all subjected to the same level of torture, which shows a furious, hateful rage.

But the second and third crime scenes were different. They were so calm that Xu Huo could almost believe it was the work of a hired hitman, someone emotionally detached who was just doing a job for money.

"If we analyze it based on emotion, then there are only two possibilities."

"One, the killer is in a hurry."

Xu Huo thought for a moment before speaking slowly.

"The speed of the police investigation has exceeded his expectations; it’s an unforeseen variable. He needs to rush to complete his plan before he’s caught. That’s why he’s willing to abandon cleaning the crime scene, leaving after only a cursory attempt at concealment."

Xu Huo and Li Jianye had been moving very fast.

In less than two days, they had gone from an unidentified head in the suburbs to uncovering clues at the private academy, and now the public school.

They had even identified Shen Miao as a key figure!

On top of that, they’d found the murder scene and the bodies the killer had hidden.

If Li Jianye were the killer, he imagined it would be terrifying.

It was like a monster relentlessly chasing you, trying to tear you apart, but you were nowhere near fast enough to escape!

You thought you had erased all the useful information from the scene, that you had done a perfect job of not exposing yourself, but somehow...

The police were moving impossibly fast!

Under these circumstances, their interviews were systematic, and Xu Huo even had time to go find the bodies.

Li Jianye figured if he were the killer, he’d probably be losing his mind by now.

But if that’s the case...

"How is the information getting out?"

Xu Huo narrowed his eyes, his gaze sweeping over the people around him.