Netherworld Investigator

Chapter 41

Bai Yue’s body was strange in the fact that he could only ingest food in the form of blood. But when this bizarre ‘eating habit’ of his was discovered by the Christian nuns, he was regarded as a demon child!

In order to allow him to stay here, the director might have reached a certain tacit agreement with Bai Yue. As long as Bai Yue would stop and refrain from biting anyone, the director would secretly feed him with the blood of animals, although to Bai Yue it was not nearly as delicious as human blood. But at the very least, Bai Yue would not die of starvation.

When he grew up, Bai Yue escaped from the orphanage and lurked quietly for a few years before beginning to act out his hatred for his mother on the prostitutes! I was skeptical that he ever felt grateful to the director. Instead, he was resentful of him. He hated him for bringing him into this world and resented him for his tragic childhood. The director, however, had always been remorseful of the way he abandoned Bai Yue and his mother.

This then turned to guilt, which drove him to become an accomplice of Bai Yue’s horrendous crimes, where the director would do anything in his power to protect Bai Yue from getting arrested by the police.

These were just my speculations, but I believed that the truth was probably not so different from them.

After listening to me, Huang Xiaotao said with anger, “But no matter what reason this father and son had for their crimes, we must arrest them for justice!”

After a while, Wang Yuanchao bought in the things that I requested. I found a washbasin, cut the squid’s ink sac with scissors, dripped the ink into it, and then poured the linseed oil into the mixture to mix the two.

“Isn’t there ink on the table? Why do you need to take the ink of a squid?” asked Dali.

“Don’t you understand?” I asked. “Squid ink is an ancient Chinese medicine called the belly ink. There is even a record of it in the Compendium of Materia Medica. This ink has two characteristics: firstly, it is light and will not destroy the shape of the ashes; secondly, it contains phosphorus and it can glow!”

“Glow?” Dali widened his eyes.

I asked Xiaozhou for a straw, sucked up a little bit of the prepared squid ink, and then asked him to prepare a camera and set the light exposure to the highest, and finally ordered the police to turn off all the lights on the scene.

After the lights were turned off, there was some faint light coming in through the window. I asked people to pull the curtains up too. The whole room suddenly looked like a dark room.

“Do you need a flashlight?” Huang Xiaotao asked.

“No, I can see!” I turned on my Cave Vision, and everything in the room was visible again.

“But I can't see anything!” said Xiaozhou.

I guided Xiaozhou to a position and told him to lift the camera up in position, and be ready to take a picture when I said it was ready.

Then I dripped the squid ink in the straw onto the ashes and waited for about ten seconds. Some of the glowing handwriting appeared slowly on the ashes. Everyone gasped, I said, “Snap a picture now, it can only last for a little while!”

Xiaozhou quickly took a picture, when he was done, I immediately asked someone to turn the light on.

Xiaozhou used a digital camera. He checked the photos immediately and it seemed to give great results. So, he asked the people in the forensics team to transfer the photo to the computer and the piece them together using photoshop. Under the eager gaze of the people, the pieces were restored into a line, which was an address—No. 48, Nanqiang Road!

“This may be the place where they are committing a murder tonight!” said Huang Xiaotao. “Xiaoxu, you take a few officers and stay here to guard this place, as for the others, you’ll follow me!”

Our group rushed to No. 48 Nanqiang Road. This was a residential building. Huang Xiaotao was going to go door to door and ask, I said that this wouldn’t work, because it would alert the murderer. I asked Xiaozhou for the UV lamp.

I handed the UV lamp to Dali and taught him how to use it, then let him lift it up. I took out the red umbrella from my bag, opened it, and slowly rotated it to an angle. The light from the umbrella showed a messy set of footprints on the ground.

“I thought this umbrella was only for autopsies?” Huang Xiaotao asked curiously.

“Absolutely not! There are many uses to the umbrella!” I replied.

“That’s amazing!” said Xiaozhou with admiration. “We should have one handy in the forensics toolbox too!”

I thought that might not be possible. It took time to prepare this umbrella, and some of the recipes in it are from the Song family, which I couldn’t disclose, of course.

A large number of people came and went through the residential building, and there were correspondingly messy sets of footprints on the ground. Huang Xiaotao looked at the footprints and asked, “Which ones belong to the murderer?”

I looked at them and pointed to one of the footprints and said, “This one is interesting: the left foot is heavy and the right foot is light, it is probably left by the director!”

We followed the footprints all the way to the fourth floor, and the footprints disappeared in front of a door. I was about to unlock it, but Huang Xiaotao actually kicked it down with one foot, pulled out her gun, took the lead and rushed in, while the others followed close behind her!

Everyone searched through the room, and suddenly there Huang Xiaotao’s scream was heard from a room, followed by the sound of flapping wings. I saw countless black bats flying out of the door and which shocked me and Dali very much.

“Song Yang, we’re a step too late!” said Huang Xiaotao.

I walked into the bedroom and found a female body lying on the bed, wearing a floral skirt, the skin was as white as paper, and there were two blood marks on the neck, the same as that of the former victim.

There were a lot of bats hanging on the roof. Although they had just been shocked by the police barging in, the number that remained there was still very impressive.

Those bats seemed to be the messengers of hell: they were very close to each other, forming a black surface that creeped and moved from time to time, their tiny eyes glowed with a strange green light, people with trypophobia would probably faint when they’re faced with this sight.

I was a little frustrated with myself. If I could find out that the director was an accomplice earlier, the girl might’ve not died.

But the corpse still had to be examined. I said to Huang Xiaotao, “Dali and I will stay here to examine the corpse. You should take everyone and do a search in the immediate vicinity of this place.”

“Will you both be safe here?” Huang Xiaotao asked.

“Don’t worry, the murderer won’t come back here.” I replied.

“But these bats...” Huang Xiaotao glanced at the ceiling.

“These are ordinary bats that can't hurt people,” I said reassuringly.

“Fine, I’ll leave Wang Yuanchao here to protect you.”

After that, Huang Xiaotao went out with the other police officers, and the forensics team began to collect evidence. I rolled up my sleeves, put on my gloves, and got to work too. I checked the victim’s pupil dilation, and checked the body with Organ Echolocation. I decided that the time of death was about two hours ago.

Even though I knew that we might not find any important clues this time, the dead body still needed to be examined. I asked Dali to take the Xuan paper and camellia oil from the bag, and used the oil paper test to detect any handprints.

“Why don't you just use your umbrella?” asked Dali.

“Autopsy and evidence collection should be tailored to the immediate environment and conditions,” I explained. “One method doesn’t work every time.”

But eventually, this test ended up giving me some clues too. This time, the handprints on the Xuan paper showed vague fingerprints.

Xiaozhou rushed to take a photo.

“This is definitely not the same person!” he said.

“Wait!” I compared the handprints. “It is Bai Yue. He sucked too much blood during the murder, so his skin began to secrete oil again. Even Bai Yue himself might not realize this.”

“Is there a possibility that the murderer is actually trying to cure his own strange disease?” Dali asked.

I thought about it and said, “There is this possibility, but since we now know that his skin secretes a little oil, we can change to a simpler method.”

I asked Dali to hold up the UV lamp, then I opened the red umbrella and gently rotated it. I was using ultraviolet light to simulate the sun.

The bats above our heads were stimulated by ultraviolet light, so they flapped their wings and flew out from the open windows. The people in the room screamed as they did so.

We walked into the living room and shone the faint red light from the umbrella onto every surface. Faint fingerprints appeared on the door frame, the table, and a water glass.

Xiaozhou was about to come over, I said to him: “Stay there. Check the water left in the cup to see if there is any DNA!”

“Oh... Okay!” Xiaozhou nodded.

I continued walking out and found the same fingerprints on the stair railings, and they seemed to be going up.

Dali gasped and said, “The murderer didn’t go downstairs, he... he’s still in this building!”

Wang Yuanchao, who was smoking at the door, immediately tossed away his cigarette. His hand was on the model 92 pistol on his waist, and he looked at me as if he was waiting for orders.

We can’t let this opportunity go to waste. I made a decision.

“Let’s go up there and catch him!”