292 — Analysis

This serial murder was unlike any case in the past.

They thought it was a man with some psychological trauma who hated women and hunted only women, only to find male victims. They thought it was for some monetary benefit, so they tied it to the salt shipping business, only to find that the victims were connected to brothels and courtesans. They thought it was because someone was in love with a courtesan and had been willing to even commit murder for her. In the end, they found a link to what happened 18 years ago, which was connected to the nation’s traitor they had been looking for.

The waters were getting murkier and murkier.

Zhao Zhi and his team never stopped working. They continued to do their best to dig deeper and harder. After some time, they found some things but couldn’t really make anything out of them, so it was time to share their thoughts with the team and put their heads together to analyze the clues.

Once more, the four of them sat around a table with solemn faces, accompanied by the warm afternoon sun and some mild tea.

“Let’s talk about the victims first. As far as we know, besides the two women, the rest have something to do with salt shipping and the shipping of gold by the traitor,” said Zhao Zhi as he glanced at the rest and spoke up first. “The special box with secret drawers and its design, the huge amounts of bribes and illegal kickbacks, the disappearance of gold without a trace, all point to this.”

Wen Yuansi’s investigation had overlapped with Zhao Zhi’s, so he nodded as well. “Evidence proving this had been found with most victims. Where we couldn’t find evidence, we found some suspicious areas, so all of them are accounted for.”

In other words, there was definitely evidence, just that they hadn’t found it yet.

Zhao Zhi went on, “And all these victims with clear evidence show traces that the Eagle Guards had kept tabs on them.” His gaze dimmed a little. “Just traces. There was no follow up.”

The implications were clear.

The Eagle Guards would not start something and just leave it without any conclusion, and they certainly wouldn’t let someone suspicious go. Either they found that these victims led them to nothing worth investigating and there was no further need to keep tabs on them, or they were discovered and silenced before they could take any action.

But since they were all linked to this national traitor, how could anything about them be no longer worth investigating?

And if the Eagle Guards had been silenced before they could make a move, it meant that they were dealing with a formidable foe.

Their foe might not be the killer they were looking for, but the head of this organization, the one overseeing the entire operation.

That thought was scary. The enemy was concealed, but the investigation team was known to everyone. The team didn’t know who the enemy was, but the enemy knew all about them.

“Uh…” Qi Yan hesitated for a long time before slowly raising his hand to ask a question that had bothered him for a long time. “So, was my uncle an Eagle Guard?”

His impression of his uncle was that he had been a truly wonderful man with the best personality and character in the world. While he had no idea that his uncle might have been involved in very dangerous situations, he refused to believe that his uncle had been a bad person.

He already had an answer in his mind when he asked this question.

Song Caitang and Wen Yuansi exchanged glances. They felt the same way. They had an answer in their hearts too.

After gathering information from the various cases and putting the clues together, this was the only reason why Jing Yan would have been involved in the case in this manner and to this extent.

But they didn’t want to ask about it, since it concerned a secret organization that reported solely to the emperor himself.

Zhao Zhi scanned the other three, then nodded after a long time. “That’s right. Jing Yan was an Eagle Guard.”

He had already checked with the emperor about this. The emperor said that as long as the Eagle Guard had already died and had something to do with this case, Zhao Zhi was allowed to talk about them briefly.

“Besides him, there was one more.” Zhao Zhi tapped his fingers against the table. “Remember Lin Feizhou’s case? The man he was looking for via Lv Mingyue, the man who helped Madam Gu at Beiqing Mountain 18 years ago? He was an Eagle Guard too.”

Qi Yan gasped. “That Eagle Guard—”

Zhao Zhi explained, “He’s a little on the older side and had taken care of Lin Feizhou at some point in time.”

Wen Yuansi asked, “Is he still alive?”

“No,” Zhao Zhi shook his head. “He lost his life that night 18 years ago.”

Song Caitang’s gaze flickered. “So, the reason why he had the same symbol as Jing Yan was because they were both Eagle Guards?”

That was a pointed question, so Zhao Zhi gave her an approving glance. “Nope.”

It would have been great if that was the case. But it wasn’t.

“In that case…” Wen Yuansi narrowed his eyes. “This traitor already had an organization on the move 18 years ago?”

The ones with this symbol were the people the organization were to kill!

Qi Yan’s eyes widened and almost clamped a hand over his mouth. That would be crazy! These people had been doing this for 18 years without getting caught?! How much gold had they secretly stolen?!

Zhao Zhi replied, “We don’t have any proof of that. Neither does the emperor.”

Song Caitang got it. “Perhaps this person started planning 18 years ago but did not do anything. Something happened after the raid on Beiqing Mountain… and this person started executing their plans.”

If the emperor, a man with the most and best resources on hand, couldn’t find anything, it only meant that 18 years ago, nothing had started yet.

It was true that these people were behind the killing of Jing Yan, but the fact that Jing Yan shared the same symbol as the Eagle Guard connected to Lin Feizhou might have been just a coincidence.

But they had no other clues in this aspect so there was no point discussing this matter further. Song Caitang moved back to the original topic, which was the murder case on hand. “It still goes back to the same thing – any murderer must have a motive for killing. We’ve found the commonality among the victims, so we can analyze that. Why did they have to die?”

Qi Yan was the first to suggest something, “This is a group of nasty people who did wicked and vicious things in secret. Maybe a member of the killer’s family got in their way and was silenced?”

Sometimes, even if you only got close to a secret and didn’t really uncover anything, people involved in illegal dealings would want to get rid of you already.

Seeking revenge for a family member who got killed would make sense.

“Otherwise it’s hard to explain why this entire group of people are victims,” Qi Yan shrugged.

“That does make sense,” Wen Yuansi affirmed Qi Yan before continuing, “but this organization is a very secretive one. We’ve been investigating for so long, with Prince Ping’s help, no less, yet we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg and we can’t get an actual list of people. How did the killer get it?”

How much could one person do by themselves?

There was no sign that the killer had any accomplice so far.

Qi Yan had no answer to that and could only furrow his brows. Wen Yuansi had a point.

This part alone could be expanded further. Song Caitang frowned slightly as she held her teacup with both hands. “So, do we have reason to believe that the killer came in contact with this group of people?”

Zhao Zhi nodded, his eyes as sharp as an eagle’s. “Maybe it’s a traitor from this organization, or it’s someone who is investigating this organization. Someone against these people.”

Like the Eagle Guards, for example.

“Then whatever I said earlier would be impossible,” Qi Yan rubbed his face. “No matter how much an ordinary person would want to take revenge, they wouldn’t be able to get this level of information.”

Wen Yuansi added, “I don’t think it would be a traitor from this organization, though. This organization is very secretive and careful, so they would have some rules about its members. Any traitor would have been killed and dealt with immediately. I’m more inclined to think that the killer is not the traitor, but perhaps the family or someone loosely related to the traitor, so it’s hard for us to draw a connection.”

It would be even more impossible if the organization was actually the Eagle Guards.

This was an even more secretive organization. The family of their members didn’t even know they were Eagle Guards. If they died, the organization would find a way to cover up their deaths properly. Taking revenge for an Eagle Guard… didn’t sound plausible either.

“We can try to analyze the killer’s MO again,” said Song Caitang. “Many things that humans do have to do with their psychological state. The psyche of a serial killer is very important. There is meaning behind each thing the killer does.”

“For example, dragging the body could be a way of showing hate. It’s also used as punishment in some cases.”

One example was the culture among the nomads in the north in this era. They would tie a criminal to the back of a horse and make the horse run and drag the criminal around as punishment.

“Of course, it could also be because the killer just doesn’t have enough strength to carry the body.”

Song Caitang recalled how they found the bodies. “Humans use their brains to think and to remember things. The killer struck the victims in the back of their heads, so that might be because the killer wanted to destroy the victim’s thoughts and memories. These might have been hurtful to the killer in the past.”

“All the victims were found with their faces bowed, so perhaps the killer did not want to see their faces. As for pulling off their clothing on the bottom half of their bodies and soiling their private parts, that has something to do with sex.”

But why?

How much hatred did the killer have to have toward these people to do such things to them?

“Let’s go through all the suspects in the cases.” The first one Zhao Zhi mentioned was Marquess Anyang. “He was very close to Zhao Zhong, had a hand in the salt shipping business, loves money and is also the older brother to the empress. We have not found any evidence linking him to the national traitor, but even if we did find such evidence, there’s nothing else about him to make him want to kill these victims in this manner.”

He hadn’t lost any close friends or family to a murder, and any feuds he had were about money. The empress’ status was high enough for her to do whatever she wanted without getting her own hands dirty.

Unless… he was doing this for the empress.

Qi Yan nodded vigorously. He agreed with this. “I would think Ji Bo looks more like the killer! He’s very good at acting! He’s good at sweet talking and seems sincere about Linglong, but he doesn’t give her anything special at all. And because Prince Ling backs him, he goes around secretly making trouble for people who get in his way, but nobody knows he’s such a person! He’s so fake!”

“But he hails from a pretty good family and there’s nothing odd about his family and friends,” Wen Yuansi frowned slightly. “The only thing about him is a connection to the empress’ nanny, the older Madam Liang.”

Back in Luanze, they had cracked a serial murder case where the victims were all courtesans. The last two victims, Wenxiang and Yuetao, were the granddaughters of Madam Liang, the younger sister to the empress’ nanny. The family wasn’t doing too well per se, but they lived comfortably in Luanze because of this little connection to the empress.

The two serial murder cases did not seem connected, but… was that really the case?

Wen Yuansi felt that he might be overthinking things, but when it came to investigating cases, it was better to overthink than to overlook things.

Everyone fell into deep thought and the room was quiet for a while.

Zhao Zhi folded his arms and mentioned another suspect, “Jiang Shaoyuan has a huge change in his attitude. He was not cooperative at all when I tried to question him. I’m very sure he’s hiding something.”

“That’s for sure – he must have done a lot of nasty things to protect Linglong,” Qi Yan scoffed before suddenly sitting up straight with a gleam in his eyes. “Come to think of it, on the night Madam Wang died, the man whom Linglong ran into sounds like him, according to the description she gave us. Could there be something more to this?”

“Brother Zhi,” Qi Yan looked at Zhao Zhi, “where’s the black robe we found? Should we get Jiang Shaoyuan to put it on?”

Zhao Zhi let out a low hum. “This matter is rather strange, alright. Linglong claimed that such a person appeared in that alley that night, she really had bruises on herself and we also found that robe. Yet we simply can’t find any trace of such a person going through that area…”

That didn’t sound right at all.

Qi Yan fanned himself. “If we didn’t have this much evidence, I might have suspected that Linglong was directing her own show and pretending there was someone when there wasn’t!”

As he laughed heartily, the room fell silent.

Eerily silent.

He stopped laughing abruptly and stared at the other three. “Why are all of you… looking at me like that?”

Zhao Zhi’s eyes were narrowed and Song Caitang’s brows were furrowed as though they were deep in thought.

Wen Yuansi smiled faintly and said quietly, “Because your words made us think of a new possibility.”

Qi Yan nearly spat his tea out. “You—NO WAY!”

Linglong had really put up an act?

“But that’s impossible! She was so cooperative! Besides refusing to talk about Jiang Shaoyuan, she was willing to answer all other questions! She’s a victim!” Qi Yan started getting worked up. “If she hadn’t run into Brother Zhi that night, she might have met a much worse fate!”

Song Caitang smiled. “So, did that worse fate happen?”

Qi Yan frowned. “She… was lucky enough to escape?”

“It’s precisely because she was so cooperative and behaved so much like a victim, that none of us suspected her at all. But nothing bad happened to her after that and she didn’t seem too frightened by this ordeal too. Could it be because,” Song Caitang looked at Qi Yan, “she knew right from the start that nothing would happen to her?”

Zhao Zhi’s gaze was frosty. “If we remove our impressions of her, her appearance out of nowhere that night at that particular time is indeed suspicious.”

This could have been done on purpose.

She didn’t need an actual man in black to attack her. She could hide a black robe somewhere along that alley.

She could find a way to get herself bruised too. Some people got a little violent during lovemaking and it was not easy to tell when a bruise was made by just looking at it.

Qi Yan started getting confused. “But if you eliminate all these people, then we’re only left with female suspects!”

Wen Yuansi smiled faintly at him. “And who said the killer had to be a man?”