Ch.177012 Investigation Record – Tail Chasing (3)

It didn’t take long to reach Willem’s home. Since he seemed to have properly returned to his profession, should I call it an office instead of a home? I’d have to ask Michael about that later.

Somehow, it was a house that suited Willem. With its orange roof, it looked like it could be on a magazine cover with the headline “A Happy, Warm Scene from New York’s Suburbs” if someone took a photo of it just like this.

It was more of a bright orange roof than just orange. Even if I took a photo, it wouldn’t capture that color, so I didn’t bother. No one takes pictures of things they can see anytime.

There was no need to ring the doorbell. Willem was already at the door. In front of him was… a vampire. His secretary, perhaps? I had noticed something odd about the voice I heard on the phone.

The two seemed quite close. Willem was smiling comfortably, and though the vampire was acting somewhat snippy, her expression and voice didn’t show genuine anger.

Eventually, Willem patted the vampire’s shoulder, and she walked out of the house with a cigarette in her mouth. As she was about to light it, she noticed me and put her lighter away with a sigh.

“Boss! Your client is here! I’ll head out since you told me to go home, but are you sure you’ll be okay?”

So it was quitting time. Willem, who had been saying goodbye to his secretary before going inside, turned to look at me. He waved at me.

“If I couldn’t even work alone, I wouldn’t have reopened at all. Ah, Miss Rose, please come in. I was just formulating some hypotheses, so your timing is perfect.”

The vampire made no attempt to hide her scrutiny as she looked me up and down. Though she was hiding her fangs, her piercing gaze clearly marked her as a vampire.

Apparently deciding I wasn’t a strange or dangerous client, she walked out through the garden gate with her unlit cigarette and only lit it when she was quite far away.

I entered through the garden gate she had left open and briefly shook hands with Willem, who was waiting at the door. He stroked his well-groomed beard and made a sound like a lament.

“I’ve told her not to size up clients like that, but she still does it. Please don’t think her rude. She’s just cautious and actually quite kind. Ah, please come in.”

“She seems quite close to you for a secretary? Usually, secretaries don’t scrutinize their boss’s visitors like that. Perhaps…”

As I entered, I caught a glimpse of the interior. It was an office with comfortable armchairs and a luxurious carpet. Behind the desk were two rows of bookshelves, and there weren’t many file cabinets.

This place was the complete opposite of the Husband Detective Agency. That place was quite cramped, having been converted from a two-room apartment into an office, with no bookshelves but three file cabinets.

Willem shook his head, as if he knew what misunderstanding I might have.

“She’s not my hidden daughter, so don’t worry. She’s someone I met during a case long ago. I’m glad she’s endured and is living well now. I’m also happy that I can help her more.”

I had thought she might be a young lover rather than a hidden daughter. I suddenly felt the age difference between Willem and me, but I tried not to dwell on it and changed the subject.

“Ah, was she a victim in some case? I’ve read a lot in books about detectives stepping in to protect such people.”

Michael was similar in a way. Except he walked quietly instead of stepping in, and handled things instead of protecting. So they weren’t similar at all, but somehow they felt alike.

“No, she wasn’t. Let’s see… let me see how many guesses it takes you. If it’s more than two, you have no talent as a detective.”

As if it wasn’t such a heavy story, he twisted the end of his beard once and smiled leisurely. If she wasn’t a victim that a detective would protect like that, then… ah, I had a word in mind.

“Was she falsely accused?”

“You should work harder as a journalist. Wrong again. She was the actual culprit. It wasn’t that long ago… Have you heard of the Carter Farm murder case? It happened about four years ago.”

I had never seen a detective become friends with the actual culprit of a murder case. Still, I tried… I really tried to believe that if someone like Willem hadn’t rejected her, there must have been a reason.

“Ah, I only came to New York exactly three years ago. I don’t have a habit of digging into others’ pasts, so I won’t ask what kind of case it was. But she’s not a bad person, right?”

“It’s not so much that she was bad, but that she had no choice. She chose the wrong path once, but I thought she had potential for rehabilitation. That’s why I’m helping her in every way I can. Now that your curiosity is satisfied, please have a seat.”

I decided to trust his word. Willem wasn’t the type of person who hid dark secrets like Michael.

I entered the detective’s office and sat in the client’s chair. After briefly stopping by his desk to retrieve a file, he sat across from me and placed the file on the table. He gestured for me to look at it.

Inside the file was a more detailed account of the police investigation than what I had heard. People who could obtain such information with just a few phone calls from home seemed quite impressive.

Willem’s title always included “Police Investigation Consultant,” so an officer who had sought his advice must have passed this along. Though it wasn’t exactly proper, I couldn’t help but find it useful.

The police still hadn’t properly determined the number of perpetrators. Opinions ranged chaotically from as few as two people to at least nine or ten, and some even suggested as many as sixteen.

Sixteen was the number of victims from the Old Gourmet Society, so that theory lacked credibility. When facing nine ogres, ten people from other races wouldn’t be that many. It was probably around ten.

Considering that a gun was found at the scene, it seemed plausible that a bribed security guard had threatened the ogres with a gun while helping the bereaved families take revenge. But eventually, the ogres began to fear death more than the gun and went berserk, resulting in a violent struggle. In this scenario, the security guard would have had his gun taken without firing a single shot.

The report also mentioned the possibility of using dogs. The ogre who appeared to have been killed first had severe bite marks on the nape of his neck, which would have been impossible with human bite force.

It might make sense if they had barely managed to fight using both dogs and guns. After slowly reviewing the file, I closed it and looked at Willem.

“First of all, they didn’t use dogs. If you look at the photos collected at the back, there should be torn flesh, but the shape is too wide for a dog’s muzzle… and crucially, the marks embedded are in the shape of human teeth.”

Following his words, I flipped through the entire report and examined the photos. As he said, there was a photo of a chunk of flesh that had been bitten off and torn away by a human mouth. It didn’t look that revolting. I could say I was used to it.

“And if it wasn’t a dog, then the police got the order of deaths wrong. That ogre probably wasn’t the first. The bribed security guard would have been holding the ogres at gunpoint, but when the ogres began to fear death more than being shot, they attacked him. That old ogre probably died then too.”

With those words, he took the file from me and showed me a photo of the dead security guard. This one was a bit more gruesome, so I felt a bit queasy, but Willem quickly put it away.

“An ogre’s flesh cannot be torn off by human bite force, but if someone who was being attacked by an ogre and knew they would be eaten alive if caught was fighting desperately, wouldn’t it be possible? They would have been resisting with all their might, literally fighting for their life. The problem is…”

“We can’t verify this either. That deceased security guard, his face was completely… yes, it was.”

At my words, Willem shook his head lightly, as if to say that wasn’t the case. The hypothesis he said he would think about until I arrived must have been about this.

“I think that might actually be evidence. Having your throat bitten doesn’t kill you immediately. Human life doesn’t end that easily. So, that ogre must have counterattacked. Doesn’t it make sense that the traitor tore a chunk of flesh from his neck, and in response, the ogre focused his attack specifically on the face that did this to him? Including the blood that soaked the suit.”

It was a reasonably convincing story. Only ogres could have done that to a person’s face. And if an ogre had been on top of him, that much blood could have been spilled.

No, ogres weren’t the only ones. The Argonne Invincibles could certainly do such things too… but they wouldn’t.

They had twice the strength and twice the vitality, but they wanted no one to know that fact. And they would certainly have known that if the entire Old Gourmet Society died like this, it would attract attention.

Many of the bereaved families might have been willing to take that risk for revenge, but if an Argonne Invincible had discovered such things, they would simply have called the police and stepped back. The motive was insufficient.

“When you think about it that way, it certainly makes sense! So, was I just being unnecessarily suspicious, and he really was a hero who fought those cannibals?”

Willem, who had been giving definitive answers until now, didn’t provide an easy answer this time, as if he wasn’t certain. He pulled out investigation results about the tailor shop rather than the Old Gourmet Society building and laid them down.

It wasn’t much. There was a photo of a submachine gun magazine that had fallen inside a changing room with a broken one-way mirror—one that allowed people to see out from inside but not in from outside.

“This is the place where witnesses say the ogres stopped by before the incident. And this magazine matched the submachine gun that security guard was carrying. Also, the mirror was broken, but there are hardly any glass shards on the changing room floor. That means the cannibals broke the window from inside the changing room toward their secret room. If someone broke it and discovered what was inside, what would they have done?”

“Well… they would have gone in, right? They might have wondered what this place was for. Or if they knew what they were looking for, they might have gone in to wait for the ogres.”

If so, the intruder would have been inside that secret room. The security guard would have been either inside or outside the changing room, and if he had entered the changing room, he could have aimed at anywhere in the secret room.

I slowly visualized the situation in my mind. It was clearly advantageous for the security guard. The intruder trapped in that room had nowhere to run, while the guard was holding an automatic weapon.

I couldn’t imagine what happened next. I had never stood in a gunfight holding a gun. I was always the person who stayed out of the way. Willem continued, taking this into account.

“The intruder probably had a gun too. They removed the magazines as a promise not to shoot each other. Seeing the submachine gun magazine removed, the intruder must have agreed to the deal. So it must have been just one person, right? If there were two or more intruders, they wouldn’t have made such a deal.”

A person can only watch one person at a time. If they both removed their magazines simultaneously, but someone who wasn’t being watched fired their gun, it would have been a major setback for this security guard.

That didn’t happen. This security guard made it alive to the Old Gourmet Society’s headquarters. So the intruder was just one person… but something didn’t add up. And an ominous feeling crept over me.

I knew a man who would pick up his pistol magazine that he had removed, just in case. I knew a man who could kill nine ogres by himself.

Of course, things still didn’t add up. If he had been holding a gun, he would have used it. He would have pretended to talk to the man with the submachine gun, approached him, and taken the gun. But there were no bullet marks there.

I wanted to say there was no motive. But he was always filled with anger and hatred whose edges couldn’t be seen. Not toward others. Toward himself. It was always directed only at himself.

But he was human too. What if those feelings had started to overflow and reached other people? He might have found the Old Gourmet Society while looking for a target to vent his uncontrollable emotions.

Excessive emotions drive people mad. Leonard’s obsession with cleanliness and hatred of traitors took away his reason, and my father’s obsession with safety and protection turned him into the Forest’s Firstborn.

He was a rational person, but he definitely had an excess of anger, loneliness, and self-loathing. If it could happen to others, it could happen to him too. There are no exceptions.

Or perhaps I was starting to blindly suspect those around me because I had become too accustomed to such things. Rational inference and delusion, intuition and madness—they were separated by just a paper-thin difference.

If I could think of another alternative, I wouldn’t have to suspect him, but at the moment, I had no other options. Fortunately, Willem had one.

“This is purely speculation, but I think the bereaved families might have discovered more than just the tailor shop’s connection to the Old Gourmet Society. So they went in and caused a disturbance, and one person served as bait to lure the Old Gourmet Society members. They all followed that bait to the Old Gourmet Society. Since it was clearly a planned action, they would have taken their magazine like professionals. What do you think?”

I felt somewhat relieved. Unfounded fears and anxieties always dissipated when evidence emerged. Still, it would be better to ask Michael about it later.

“That makes sense. But then, they probably didn’t bribe the security guard in advance, right? If they had, the guard would have revealed the location of the Old Gourmet Society’s headquarters.”

“We can’t be so certain about that. The security guard, being an insider, would have known the Old Gourmet Society was full of cannibals. Rather than doing something that might get him in trouble with those cannibals, it would be much safer to just reveal the tailor shop’s location and stage a scene there to naturally lead them to the headquarters. Traitors always seek safety.”

Although Willem had given me very clear and logical answers to all my questions, somehow my doubts only increased.

Nevertheless, in my notebook, I only wrote: “The security guard might have really performed heroic actions. Or actions that appeared heroic.” Recording doubts only deepens them.