Chapter 302

On a stormy night with thunder and lightning, the rain fell on the manor's roof, making a rustling sound that mixed with the crackling of the fireplace that had not yet fully gone out.

This was a very hypnotic sound, so Shiler, lying in bed, was sleeping soundly, but just then, a sharp ring of the telephone sounded, and Shiler in bed opened his eyes.

He looked out the window; at this moment, a bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, and the grid of the window was imprinted on the floor and the bed, with one of the shadows passing right across Shiler's eyes.

He took a deep breath, then stood up from the bed, walked through the pitch-black manor in slippers, went downstairs, and picked up the telephone receiver. Quite unsurprisingly, on the other end was Gordon's somewhat anxious voice, and he said: "Harry Cooper is dead, Professor Shiler, you have to come over."

"Is it related to the serial murder case? If it is, go find Batman."

"Batman is already here, Professor Shiler. I know, it's so late, I shouldn't disturb you, but the situation this time is really a bit bad, you'd better come over..."

Shiler looked up at the grandfather clock in the room; the hands on it pointed exactly to two in the morning. He remembered that the last time Gordon called him on a rainy night was when Fish Mooney died.

He went upstairs to get dressed, then took his umbrella. When he walked out of the manor gate, the night in Cat Getan was still terrifyingly dark, and after the damp moisture was inhaled into his lungs, it dispelled his sleepiness.

A black sedan drove into the manor gate—black suit, black umbrella, black sunglasses, the unique silent style of Cat Getan gangsters. The person who opened the car door said nothing, and Shiler asked nothing.

Cooper's manor was in the west of the North District, relatively far from the Falcone manor. When the car carrying Shiler stopped at the entrance of Cooper's manor, Gordon ran down in a hurry. Shiler stepped out of the car, and Gordon led him upstairs.

"What exactly is going on? It's rare to see you so flustered. I think even if it's a serial murder case, it shouldn't make you this panicked, right?"

Gordon's complexion didn't look very good. He didn't explain too much, just said to Shiler: "You'll know when you see the crime scene."

They walked up to the third floor, where there were many police officers at the top of the stairs. After Gordon walked over, he nodded to one of the people wearing a special uniform. That was an old police officer with a dignified appearance. He sized up Shiler, walked forward to shake his hand, and said: "Hello, I am Smith, the Commissioner of the Cat Getan Police Department. I've long admired your name..."

Shiler shook his hand and briefly introduced himself. The Commissioner didn't look like someone who liked small talk; he waved his hand at Gordon and said: "Take this professor in, but be careful."

Gordon nodded and walked through the crowd with Shiler to the door of a room at the end of the third-floor corridor. He took out a key and opened the door. In the room before Shiler, the situation was extremely tragic.

Unexpectedly, there were no corpses there, or rather, there were no complete corpses.

This was a red room, but the floor, ceiling, and furniture in the room shouldn't have been this color; all the red on them was fragments of fresh blood and internal organs.

The reason why it is said there were no corpses here is that the corpses had already been evenly smeared across the entire room.

Batman stood in a corner, his gaze falling on the center of the room, where there was a very eye-catching object: a pattern drawn in black ink that looked like a magic circle, with a pile of black ash in the middle of the pattern.

Shiler walked into the door and then stopped at the entrance. Gordon squeezed past between him and the door frame and turned to close the door. Shiler tapped the floor with the tip of his umbrella, then picked up the umbrella and looked at the blood on it.

Then he looked around the entire room again. This room was not large, about twenty-some square meters, and it looked like it should be a reception room. A floor-to-ceiling window, the wall on the right side of the door, and the wall on the side of the door were each placed with three sofas, with a round table in the middle, and on the other side was a desk and a bookshelf. This was a common reception room layout in English manors, and Shiler's manor was the same.

The black magic circle was located in the center of the room, and the red spread from the magic circle as the center to the lower half of the entire room, including the entire floor, most of the walls, and the ceiling in the center of the room.

"The reason I didn't tell you in detail on the phone is that I don't know if this situation can be called dismemberment; it's really a bit... too shattered." Gordon said while covering his mouth.

Shiler turned back and asked Gordon: "Are there shoe covers?"

Gordon took out shoe covers and gloves, the essential auxiliary supplies for investigating cases, from his pocket, and then took out a mask and a face shield to put on himself. He wanted to hand them to Shiler, but Shiler shook his head and refused.

After putting on the shoe covers, Shiler walked into the room. He walked around the entire room once. During the process of his observation, Batman said: "Cooper's corpse was pulverized and then evenly smeared across the entire room. This method is completely different from the previous three cases..."

Shiler squatted not far from the magic circle to check the ground and said: "The corpse was pulverized? No, this description is not quite accurate."

"Doesn't this count as pulverized?" Gordon asked: "We can hardly find a complete corpse fragment; blood, skin, bones, all were crushed and then spread across the room."

"Indeed, but not all of it."

Shiler stood up, looked up at the ceiling, and said: "The mass of the corpse here is not enough."

"What do you mean?"

"What you are seeing now, the red part in the room, that is, the fragments containing blood, internal organs, skin, and bone tissue, after being fully collected and pieced together, only have the mass of about two-thirds of a person."

"One-third of the corpse's mass has disappeared."

Gordon opened his mouth, seemingly wanting to ask Shiler how he knew, but the question circled in his mouth and ultimately wasn't asked. After all, this realistic scene was already terrifying enough, and there was no need for more horror stories to set the mood.

Batman walked over, stood beside the magic circle, and said: "This pattern is not any recorded magic circle, but I can be sure that the hexagram in the center of the pattern should be related to demons."

"Things are getting more and more mysterious, right?" Gordon also resisted the nausea and walked over to say: "At first it was the Twelve Apostles serial murder case, then a person sawed in half appeared, and today, they have started to grind corpses into minced meat and smear them on the walls. What are they going to do next? Evaporate people?"

"Obviously, this is not something an ordinary person can do." Shiler's speaking speed was slow, and his tone was steady, but it always gave people a creepy feeling. He said: "In this case, the killer's power level has been raised to another level."

"Aren't you always patrolling nearby recently? Did you find anything?" Shiler looked at Batman and said.

"I was the first to discover that Cooper was dead, and the reason I rushed here was that I heard an explosion, but when I arrived here, I didn't find any suspicious figures."

Shiler walked to the sofa on the side, rubbed the tip of the umbrella in his hand on the sofa that was not stained with blood, and said: "Although what I say next might make you question my professionalism, I still have to say... this case might be related to supernatural power."

"Supernatural power?... What do you mean?"

"Hasn't this magic circle expressed it clearly enough? Someone summoned a demon here, and the demon killed Cooper."

Gordon pursed his lips and tilted his head. He said: "I thought you would give an extremely exquisite reasoning process and then tell us a shocking result. I also thought you might produce various pieces of evidence to prove your reasoning is correct, but I never expected..."

"Detective Gordon, don't look at what happens in this city with the eyes of an ordinary person."

Batman, however, said: "Why did you make this judgment?"

Shiler walked over again, looked down at the ground, and said: "Pay attention to the direction in which this blood and muscle tissue sprayed. They scattered outward from the center, which means Cooper wasn't killed by an external bomb; he exploded from the inside out."

"Could it be that a madman forced him to swallow a bomb?"

"Good reasoning, Detective Gordon. This is indeed something a Cat Getan criminal would do, but this has to be asked of our weapons expert, Batman..."

"Is there any bomb in the world today that, when it explodes, can cause a person to be evenly crushed from skin to muscle, and then to internal organs, and then spread flat across the room?"

"If it were blown to pieces, it's possible, but it's hard to make these exploded tissues smear so evenly onto the room's floor and walls."

"Could it be that someone blew Cooper to pieces and then manually smeared these things evenly?" Gordon raised another question.

Shiler made a gesture of approval and said: "Detective Gordon, your way of thinking is very suitable for being a detective. Seriously, you are very talented."

"If the person who did it is really a perverted killer, then it is possible for him to do this; they have even done more disgusting things. But according to the details, it is unlikely to have been manually smeared."

"Look here..." Shiler walked over, his heels stepping on the floor with a sticky, dull sound, but it still attracted the attention of both of them.

Shiler pointed to a leg of the sofa, where some tissues were piled up. He said: "This is the part that was blocked when the human tissue splashed out and poured onto the floor during the explosion."

"You can see that the part closest to this sofa leg is skin tissue; you can even see the epidermis and dermis layers. Above them are some fat, and above that are fragments of internal organs."

"This shows that it is unlikely that the killer blew the person to death, chopped them up, and then deliberately smeared them evenly, because in that case, the order of the tissues piled up here wouldn't be so regular, but mixed into a ball."

"You can imagine that Cooper, blown apart by some unknown power, was first completely melted, then turned into a pancake, spread flat on the ground, and then crushed even more, starting to pour toward the surroundings of the floor like sea waves."

"The legs of the sofa are like bridge piers standing on the sea surface, except that the crushed human tissue is denser, so this pier intercepted a part and preserved its initial state."

"I also feel that this cannot be something an ordinary person can do. It is difficult for any bomb to achieve this effect, and if one wants to crush a human body so thoroughly, one must use some mechanical tools."

"From the time I heard the explosion to the time I arrived in this room, it is absolutely not enough for a person to move large machinery."

Gordon also looked up and down at the room and said: "Could there be some mechanism or something?"

"Before I called you to come, I had already checked every corner of this room. There are no mechanisms, no secret doors, no secret compartments, and no secret passages. This is just a very ordinary manor reception room."

"So you both think that this might have been done by that so-called supernatural power?"

"That's right, and this should have nothing to do with the Twelve Apostles murder case. At least I have never heard of anyone in the Bible who exploded and was then crushed."

"Forgive my bluntness..." Gordon said somewhat embarrassedly: "If it involves this aspect, then the Cat Getan Police Department is afraid it can't help. There is no one here who is proficient in this kind of skill."

"Even, if I went out now and announced the results of your two investigations, they would definitely treat us as lunatics and then drive us out."

Shiler shook his head and said: "That's not necessarily true. Maybe they are much more superstitious than you..."

Just then, the door was knocked. A police officer pushed the door open in a hurry and said to Gordon: "Boss! It's bad, Mrs. Sanchez, the principal of the boarding school near the Cat Getan River, is dead!"