Chapter 2565

"I think the two cases we are discussing now, namely Officer Clay's trespassing and my self-defense, as well as the corpse-dumping cases encountered by my neighbor and presented by Commissioner Gordon, may all have the same murderer."

As soon as Schiller said this, everyone looked at him.

"The murderer is Officer Clay."

Clay widened his eyes. Just as he was about to roar, the prosecutor looked at him, his gaze containing no suspicion, only warning.

Clay wasn't stupid either. Now he regarded the prosecutor as the only normal person like him in this crazy world. If he angered the prosecutor again, then this damn world would be completely hopeless.

"Mr. Rodriguez, I don't object to you stating your speculation here, but everything must have solid evidence, otherwise this Officer Clay can also sue you for framing."

Schiller shook his head and said, "My following argument will not produce any interference with your judgment of the case between the two of us. I am just stating my judgment from my professional perspective."

Hearing the term "professional perspective," the prosecutor hesitated and didn't speak again, because he knew Schiller's identity; he was a famous psychologist.

If Schiller made a judgment about someone from a professional perspective, then this itself was a kind of factual evidence, because no one on the scene was more professional than Schiller, and there weren't many in the world either.

In many cases that were relatively difficult to judge, the court would seek professional technical support. Schiller was clearly a member of these professional technical support teams. What he said could greatly influence the jury's judgment and could completely serve as evidence.

"Please speak, sir." The prosecutor said.

"Clay suffers from a certain degree of mental disorder." Schiller said, "Because of the type of work he is engaged in, his goal orientation is too strong, and he has strong paranoid emotions, and paranoia is the fuse for mental disorder."

"Are you crazy? I'm not sick!" Clay still couldn't help but refute.

"I didn't say you were sick, Officer Clay. Mental disorder in a broad sense is usually not seen as a complete pathological disease; it has to do with personality, environment, long-term education received, and short-term sudden events."

"I think it's possible that you killed those people in a state of mental disorder, dissected their corpses, and used the convenience of your job of going to people's homes to investigate to throw the severed limbs into the other party's refrigerator."

Clay opened his mouth to refute. Although he did indeed do these things, it wasn't because of any mental disorder; this was his mission. But he definitely couldn't say it like that.

"You are completely twisting the truth." Clay said, "You are the serial killer who killed many people and dismembered them."

"Persecutory delusion and cognitive dissonance are also common symptoms of mental disorder." Schiller tapped the table with his fingertips and said, "And the most common symptom of persecutory delusion is believing that others want to kill oneself, or believing that others have killed many people and the next one is oneself."

"Then how do you explain that I was really stitched into human skin by you?"

"I was just about to say that point." Schiller looked at the prosecutor unhurriedly and said, "Mr. Prosecutor, I only said I picked up human skin, but I never said I stitched him into it. I have never done such a thing."

The prosecutor widened his eyes slightly. Schiller crossed his fingers and placed them in front of him, saying, "That day I was driving on the road and saw a trash can overturned in a remote alley. I have already written the specific time and place in the report."

"I am a very helpful and environmentally conscious person, so I got out of the car and went to lift the trash can. It was at this moment that I saw a black plastic bag under the trash can. I picked up the bag and found it was human skin."

"In fact, I'm not afraid of corpses. What I'm more afraid of is that if this kind of thing appears in my car or house again, I will be interrogated and subjected to violent persecution like my neighbor, Mr. Sivana."

Speaking of this, he glanced at Sivana, and Sivana glared at Clay.

"And the damage caused to my new house by the last accident hasn't been repaired yet. I can't let so many police officers break into my house again, so I thought I had to find a place to hide this thing."

"I came to the manor where I used to live. It's very large and very suitable for hiding items, so I put this human skin in the kitchen's cold storage cabinet."

"But after returning to the new house, I felt uneasy, worried that someone would discover it, so I drove to the manor again. But I didn't expect that after I entered from the back door of the garden, I saw a figure in the kitchen."

"Later I knew that was Officer Clay, and he was putting that human skin on himself at the time and stitching himself inside."

Everyone was stunned. Clay looked at Schiller in disbelief and said, "What nonsense are you talking about?! Why would I do that? More importantly, how could I possibly do it?"

"You certainly can, Officer Clay, because I saw it with my own eyes." Schiller still used that unhurried tone and said, "And there are traces to follow in the case reports of mental disorder."

"About three years ago, I saw a mental patient perform a kidney removal surgery on himself in a suicide case, which was mistaken by his family as an organ trafficking gang breaking in and hurting people."

"Finally, after an examination by a professional medical team, it was found that this was a surgery he completed himself. Before this, he had never had any medical education background or work experience, but he completely removed his own organs and saved his own life."

"I have also seen patients perform castration surgery, lung resection surgery, joint removal surgery, and even amputation surgery on themselves, and they weren't roughly cutting organs off with a knife. They would perform preoperative analysis, perform marking, creatively choose the incision position, not use any anesthetic drugs, and could perform postoperative stitching and bandaging."

"Its essence lies in the fact that during mental disorder, the human brain's activity is abnormal, its functions are disordered, and the nerves are out of balance. At this time, the patient's sensory organs are completely confused; they can't even tell the difference between themselves and others."

"Patients have described after the incident that they thought they were famous doctors and were performing surgery on the president at the time. Others thought their cat was about to die and they had to perform surgery to save it."

"Of course, there are also people who are very clear that they are removing their own organs, but mental disorder makes them think that this part of the organ doesn't exist in their body, that these things are abnormal and need to be cleared away immediately."

"This is a common symptom of cognitive dissonance, but apart from this, their hand-eye coordination is normal, and they clearly know that injury and bleeding will bring them what, so they can complete such delicate and complex work, and also know how to stop bleeding in time, because they don't want to die, they just want to correct the wrong things."

"'Correction' thinking is a way of thinking common among those with mental disorder. They think certain things are abnormal and must be corrected, not knowing that the abnormal thing is exactly themselves, their spirit and brain."

"This kind of thinking sometimes only brings pain to the patient, but sometimes it brings harm to society, because once some mental patients put such thinking into practice, it is very likely to harm others."

"According to my observation, Officer Clay, you have very typical symptoms of mental disorder. Please think carefully, haven't you had any abnormalities recently?"

"Of course I haven't! I'm very normal!"

"Every mental patient thinks they are very normal." Schiller said, "We usually don't look at the patient's subjective judgment, but only at the facts."

After speaking, he placed his gaze on Gordon and said, "Recently, has Officer Clay been exceptionally irritable, and often appeared to have repetitive movements, repetitive language, and chaotic and fragmented logic?"

Gordon and other police officers looked at each other. Gordon hesitated for a moment and still said, "He has been quite irritable recently."

Bullock pondered for a moment and said, "I think his behavior is very abnormal, especially after rushing into the manor. I clearly said we might be able to find clues and find the switch, but he just had to rush in all the way. After rushing in, he also frantically smashed things. I don't know what's going on."

"I was just following normal investigation procedures! Because he is a damn serial killer!"

"I realized that you are always repeating this word." Schiller looked into Clay's eyes and said, "Serial killer, serial killer, serial killer, but your sentence structure is always illogical. You neither argue why he is a serial killer, nor argue what you plan to do, just repeatedly emphasizing a fact. This is a quite typical symptom."

"I already said I'm not crazy!!!" Clay was about to collapse. He was clearly a normal person, why did everyone say he was a lunatic?

The sunlight at nine or ten in the morning shone into the room along the window. Schiller and the others sat near the window with their backs to the balcony, while Clay faced the sunlight directly.

A bright beam of light was reflected by the adjacent building and overlapped with the sunlight, turning into a bright spot of light in front of Clay. The rush of blood caused by his sudden anger made him even more dizzy.

Schiller's face kept shaking in front of him, and that bright spot of sunlight also seemed to overlap with the light of that day. When Schiller put that human skin on his face, the light kept flickering.

Clay began to detach again, feeling that everything around him was unreal. If this wasn't a dream, how could they all think he was crazy? Only dreams could be so absurd and fickle.

He felt that he had returned to the basement. The sticky touch of blood under the skin was gradually crawling onto his fingertips. He saw the bloody truth behind the human skin mask.

"Is this a human skin?"

"This is a human skin..."

"Is this my skin?"

"This is your skin..."

"Is this the real self?"

"This is the real you..."

In a trance, Clay heard Schiller's voice echoing dully in the basement.

"When we are born, we are beasts. Over decades, we carefully stitch a human skin for ourselves, learn to restrain, learn to suppress..."

"But this is not the real you. If there is anything you can't do while wearing human skin, then tear this layer of skin apart, and as a beast, go hunting to your heart's content, and let them see how powerful you are."

The human skin was stitched on. Clay felt endless suffocation. He was shackled under this skin. No matter how he struggled or twisted, he could never break free. This feeling was exactly like living.

Flattery and fawning, mockery and sarcasm, panic and screaming—what was spinning on the colorful dance floor were monsters wearing human skin, ready to reveal their fangs at any time.

He had to be fast, faster, faster than them to break through the limits, to regrow fangs and claws to bite others' necks, instead of being slaughtered, being a gun.

He was fed up with the limitations of this layer of skin, and fed up with this hypocritical world. He didn't not exist; he needed to exist.

"Uh ah ah ah ah!!!"

Gordon watched in shock as Clay suddenly grabbed a police officer next to him and bit his neck. Gordon took out his gun as fast as he could, aimed, and fired.

*Bang! *

Blood spread along the clean floor, flowing to the edge of the black leather shoes.

That pulsing blood reflected the cold morning light and thin mist, illuminating a terrified crowd, and the claws extended by the monster from under the human skin were never noticed by anyone.