Chapter 3556: Edge of Tomorrow (Part 13)

Friends who kill people often should know that killing is easy, but disposing of the body is hard. But in fact, while disposing of the body is hard, cleaning up the crime scene is the hardest.

Humans are carbon-based organisms after all, and their physical strength is very low. Even for an adult male, those who can reach 100 kilograms are in the minority. It's not that difficult to hide, dismember, burn, or corrode something that weighs less than 200 jin in total.

However, cleaning up the crime scene is troublesome.

If it's a one-hit kill, it's fine; at most, it pollutes a few square meters around you. But if you don't kill them in one blow and let the other party run away, then anything from a living room of dozens of square meters to a shopping mall of tens of thousands of square meters might need to be cleaned.

Blood can splash into any unexpected corner, and no cleaning method can guarantee the complete elimination of all traces of the crime.

Therefore, in modern criminal investigation, the primary crime scene is highly valued, because the primary scene can leave more traces and clearly reconstruct the entire case process.

Shiler had encountered this situation now. The traces and bloodstains in the rehearsal room indicated that a chase had occurred here.

The entire rehearsal room had two doors, front and back. About two meters inside the back door was the bathroom door, and a large amount of blood was spreading out from the bathroom; clearly, that was where Harley had acted.

The bloodstains spread all the way from the bathroom to the front door, leaving many bloody handprints on the door, and then spread to the window opposite the front door. The blood there was the most abundant; not only was it inside the room, but it was also in the gaps of the window and on the exterior wall.

It wasn't hard to see that the deceased's path of movement was from the bathroom to the front door and then to the front window.

So it could be inferred that Harley must have stabbed the bassist in the bathroom but failed to kill him in one blow. The other party stumbled to the front door wanting to get out, but found the front door locked.

And by this time Harley had already chased after him; he had nowhere to run and could only run toward the window, wanting to climb out, but ended up being finished off by Harley in front of the window.

When Shiler checked the corpse, he had already discovered that the deceased had been stabbed into the chest cavity with a fruit knife, which must have been pulled out the moment it was stabbed in, which was why blood had splashed everywhere.

In reality, a real crime scene is much bloodier than what is filmed in TV shows. Because the pressure inside the arteries is very high, once cut, blood can even spray out like a high-pressure water gun, reaching up to two or three meters away.

Moreover, the human body stores quite a bit of blood, and if the person still has the ability to move, it's enough to spray for several minutes. If they run away during this time, it's definitely enough to spray the whole room red.

Harley's stab went straight into the bassist's aorta, and perhaps because she realized she had missed, she pulled it out the moment she stabbed it in, causing the arterial blood to spray out directly, making a mess everywhere.

What made Shiler feel even more of a headache was that the rehearsal room had wooden floors. What was visible to the naked eye was that quite a bit of blood had seeped into the gaps in the floor; blood residue was almost unavoidable.

"Although that's the case, as long as no one calls the police and the police don't pry up all the floorboards, ordinary people probably won't be able to tell anything." Thinking this, Shiler began the cleaning work.

Somewhat counterintuitively, the first task of cleaning a crime scene is not disposing of the body, or even dealing with the corpse.

Shiler took a plastic sheet from Victor, laid it flat on the ground, placed the corpse on it, rolled it up, tied it with rope, and put it in the next classroom.

Then he and Victor each took a squeegee—a cleaning tool that looked a bit like a sponge mop, but the head was made of plastic—and scraped the liquid and semi-coagulated blood plasma together.

"This reminds me of the past." Shiler said while circling to scrape off the blood. "I also once took care of someone backstage at a university auditorium. But back then I only had about half an hour, because the school anniversary event was about to start."

"Half an hour? That's too tight. Did you handle it well?"

"Actually, it wasn't that complicated, because he was strangled by me and didn't bleed much; I just needed to deal with the dirty things from incontinence. Fortunately, I was prepared, so I barely managed to finish."

"Unimaginable." Victor said. "I might not have told you before, but I've killed people too. Although I feel he brought it on himself."

"Oh?"

"I was doing low-temperature research before, but many times I didn't have such professional equipment as I do now; I just rented a basement or warehouse to store raw materials and cryo-chambers."

"The technology for cryo-chambers back then wasn't that mature, and I needed to constantly replace low-temperature reaction materials to maintain the temperature. That stuff looked a bit like potting soil, and I often pushed waste in and out of the community."

"Then there was an unlucky guy, probably a drug addict high on drugs, who thought I was growing marijuana. While I was away, he rushed into my lab and somehow crawled into an empty cryo-chamber. I think you should know what the consequences would be."

"When I got back, he had already passed out due to the low temperature. I wanted to wake him up, but that guy almost pulled the plug on Nora's cryo-chamber. In a fit of anger, I finished him off."

"How did you do it?"

"Uh, it might be a bit embarrassing to say." Victor rested the squeegee on the ground, rested one arm on it, recalled for a moment, and said, "The scene wasn't that bloody, but it was a bit ridiculous."

"At first I wanted to strangle him, but then I thought that might cause him to be incontinent. My house is a basement, and the exhaust fan isn't good; I didn't want to leave any strange odors."

"Then you could have chosen to poison him, safe, fast, and pollution-free."

"Yes, I thought about that too, but I didn't have the right materials on hand. After all, I wasn't really growing marijuana."

"So what did you finally choose to do?"

"I stabbed a ballpoint pen into his heart—aiming at an anatomical chart I searched for on the website. Thank goodness, I stabbed it accurately. He died quickly and didn't cause me any trouble."

"How did you solve the problem of his corpse?"

"Of course, I froze it, then smashed it with a hammer, throwing away a little bit each time, mixing it into the kitchen waste of the bar next door; it took more than half a month to finish throwing it away."

"Very smart approach." Shiler said. "You have a talent for this."

"This is too trivial compared to you, isn't it?" Victor turned the squeegee, gathered the last bit of bloodstains together, and then said, "It's hard to imagine what you've been through."

"Not that ordinary, but not as ups-and-downs as you think." Shiler shook his head gently, shook the squeegee on the ground, and then said, "Human vigilance is actually very weak, and their attention to things unrelated to themselves is even lower."

"Is this some kind of psychological effect?"

"You could say that. I dare say you could even carry a corpse that is still bleeding through an entire street in a community. As long as your demeanor is natural and your pace is relaxed, almost no one will pay attention to you. If you saw someone like this on the road, would you be very terrified?"

"I would think he might be trying to take his friend to the hospital, or simply that it's some kind of prop. Because a serial killer wouldn't walk so openly on the street, right?"

"This is a psychological blind spot. You first assume that everyone is afraid of the police, so you feel that if people killed someone, they wouldn't walk on the street so openly. But the fact is not so; this might just be a means for him to escape."

"You really are rich in both theory and experience."

Shiler didn't deny it. He looked down at the ground; most of the liquid had been scraped together by him and Victor.

"Then what do we do? Soak it up with a sponge?"

Shiler shook his head. He brought over another plastic sheet and began folding paper.

The plastic sheet had some hardness, and after folding it repeatedly, it could support itself. Shiler folded the plastic sheet into a rectangular box with one side open, then placed the open side on the ground and said: "Scrape the blood into here."

Victor did as he was told, but he still asked: "Why not use a sponge or a rag?"

"We must try to use things that can be completely washed clean. If we use sponges and rags, no matter how we wash them, there will be residue."

"But can they be destroyed?"

"That would add another step, which is very troublesome. And if it's not destroyed cleanly—for example, some idiots choose to throw that stuff into a garbage disposal, the blood and tissue samples will be spread evenly on the blades, leaving residue for a long time, which can't be cleaned at all."

"Alright, you're the professional."

Victor used the squeegee to scrape most of the liquid into the box Shiler had folded, and a little bit remained. Shiler said: "Don't worry about it; small amounts of blood coagulate very quickly. Just pick them up and throw them in after they form blood clots."

Shiler took out a high-pressure water gun from the equipment on the side and directed Victor: "Lay all the furniture flat on the floor. For furniture with complex structures, like the drum kit, take them apart and arrange the parts evenly." Clearly, he wanted to wash everything.

"What about the carpet?" Victor looked down at the carpet on the floor. A black and white zebra-striped carpet was placed under the drum kit, and because it wasn't far from the window, it was also covered in blood.

"Didn't you bring cleaning agent?" Shiler said. "Take the carpet to the bathroom, soak it in cleaning agent, and scrub it later."

"But there's no sink that big." Victor frowned.

The carpet on the ground was quite large; although it was circular, the diameter was at least two meters. Shiler had just looked at the rehearsal room's bathroom; the width of the sink was at most the length of an adult's forearm, and this carpet couldn't fit in either way.

"Should we go find a basin or something?"

Shiler shook his head and said: "That would at least require an inflatable pool to fit it. You wash the furniture and floor here, leave the carpet to me."

Victor took the water gun from his hand. He saw Shiler roll up the carpet and take it to the bathroom.

He was a bit curious about what Shiler would do, so he turned in a direction, facing the bathroom, and began to wash.

Victor saw Shiler fold the plastic sheet in half, then cut off a piece, and then cut it open from the crease, obtaining two plastic sheets of the same width.

Immediately after, he closed the bathroom door, first rolled up one of the plastic sheets, stuffed it into the door gap, stuffed it tightly, and then sealed the door gap with tape; then he stuck the upper half of the second plastic sheet to the door and the lower half to the ground, completely covering the door gap, and then taped all four sides shut.

Finally, Victor heard the sound of rushing water in the bathroom, and judging by the sound, the water seemed to be falling on the ground.

Victor suddenly realized: That's right, as long as the bathroom door is sealed, the entire bathroom becomes a large water basin, which is perfect for washing the carpet. The cleaning agent can decompose blood residue very well without getting it everywhere.

And even if it leaks water to the floor below, he could break the water pipe later and pretend it was an accidental accident. Shiler was indeed experienced.

(End of chapter) ===== CHAPTER 3557 =====