[Zhongyingmei] The clown is actually me

When Jason came home, the small villa was filled with the rich and sweet aroma of butter.

Jack, wearing a blue plaid apron, is pouring butter onto a stack of pancakes, then using a toothpick to secure squares of cheese to the top.Hearing the movement, he took off his apron and hung it on the wall, poured a cup of warm milk, and said to Jason, "Are you back? Just in time for breakfast."

"Are you in a good mood?" Jason was a little surprised.Since both of them knew he was anorexic, Jack rarely went to the kitchen to cook because the smell of food made him sick.

"Something good happened," Jack said ambiguously. "But you, did you find anything? Birdie?"

"Well,? I visited a group of family members and police officers of the victims at night. According to their testimonies, all the victims 24 years ago have one thing in common." Jason pulled out a chair and sat down, "They not only They were all women, or women who had been pregnant. Some of the victims had given birth,? Some had abortions, but they were not pregnant when they were killed. Mrs. Shrike may be a doctor, so she has accurate information. He is psychopathic, ?Extremely hostile to married women."

Jack pondered for a while: "I think what he hates is childbearing,? not women. In the eyes of this serial murderer, 'female' is an untenable concept,? They are not human,? It's just the word 'birth' carrier."

"A lot of documents from that year were left behind. I only checked the list of male doctors who worked in a large hospital and had connections with the Wayne family. There were six people in total. Each of them was over 35 years old, and two One person has passed away, and the rest are all over sixty." Jason took out a stack of files while eating pancakes, "It's really difficult to kill people at this age, so I still think it's a copycat crime."

Jack found the yellowed and old file in his hand, carefully flipped through a few pages, but did not find any suspicious person immediately.He only had male files. At that time, most obstetricians and gynecologists were women, and female doctors should be more suspicious. Jason must be very aware of this detail, but he didn't investigate women.So Jack raised his head and looked at Jason: "You still believe that your father is right, Mrs. Shrike is male?"

Jason shook his head: "There is no suitable suspect among the female doctors. There were two female doctors who were in contact with the Wayne family back then. One died early, and the other immigrated to France. He just passed his 68th birthday this year."

"The most important thing about being a detective is not to let your emotions cloud your judgment." Jack shrugged, undeniable, "Since you still love your father, go visit him at the grave. The time spent with relatives and friends is limited, so we can’t live too much.”

"I wouldn't love a bastard man who abandoned his wife and son." Jason snorted coldly.

Why don't you see Batman being so principled.Jack groaned, but he didn't dwell on the matter. He took a sip of soup and said, "We have to go and see the body."

The remains of the victims of the Shrike murder 24 years ago have been cremated and buried one after another. What Jack wants to see is the body left by the new Mrs. Shrike.Jason nodded, and suddenly there was a slight beep sound in his pocket, he turned on the communicator, and the screen displayed the name of the caller, who was persuaded by him (physically) and agreed to pass on the details of the Shrike murder to him The police, the message is very short, only a few words, and he understood it with just a glance: "A new body was discovered."

Jack paused for a moment: "The last victim died only about a week ago, and the second one appeared so soon?"

Unexpectedly, the second body was a floating corpse.

The person who discovered the body was a cleaner. According to her, she was sweeping the floor on the bridge in the early morning and saw something like a large white plastic bag hanging on the stone pier floating in the river. The rubbish was hooked up with a wire and it turned out to be a pale corpse. I was so frightened on the spot that I crawled to the public telephone booth on the roadside to call the police.

Jack opened the printed map of Wayne's official website, marked the place where the body was found with a red marker pen, and then the tip of the pen slid up the river and landed on a string of words upstream: "Wade Lester Port".According to the sign on the map, Bruce intends to build a port here. The location of Wedleis Port is close to the slums, which can provide more job opportunities for the poor.

Not long ago, Gotham City ushered in a cold wave, the temperature dropped sharply, and the sea surface and rivers were frozen, but in the past few days the temperature has risen, and the ice surface has thawed again.Therefore, Mrs. Shrike probably dumped the victim's body on the ice of Wade Lester's port, but she didn't expect the weather to warm up, and the body of the victim was washed down by the river water mixed with ice cubes, turning into a floating corpse.

But...strange, why?

In the Shrike murder case 24 years ago, Mrs. Shrike's crime frequency was very stable, basically killing one person a month, but this time the first victim was found less than ten days before Mrs. Shrike murdered again, as if by something Scary things are chasing and urging, why is he in such a hurry?Even copycats should be aware that they should not commit crimes when they are in the limelight. Otherwise, not only will there be a risk of leaving clues with dirty hands and feet, but they may also be regarded as provocations by the police, thereby increasing the police force for investigation.

Jack bit the cap of the pen. After 24 years, the reappearance of Mrs. Shrike gave him a strange feeling, a sense of incongruity that stuck in his throat.This sense of incongruity is like a few grains of sand on the sole of a shoe, or a sneeze that cannot be sneezed after a long time, it is so uncomfortable that he almost suffocates him to death.He spent a long time thinking about where the incongruity came from, but he still couldn't reach a conclusion that convinced him.

Is it really a copycat?

He put down his pen and tidied up his clothes. Since the Gotham Police Department received a batch of high-tech products from Wayne Enterprises, it has become more and more difficult to sneak into the morgue at the bottom of the police station.He had to pretend to be a criminal police officer and stole the other party's ID card, fingerprint iris and other information in order to open the door of the morgue.At the same time, he had to carefully avoid his colleagues, lest they find that today's police officers are a bit tall.

Logically speaking, the remains of the homicide should be sent to the identification agency, but there was a small problem with the dispatch of the identification agency in the morning, and the Gotham Police Department had to park the body in the morgue first, waiting for the dispatch to be completed.This gave Jack time to put on gloves, a hood, and a mask, use the key to open the morgue door, and push the body out.

different.That was Jack's first thought when he saw the body.

Unlike all previous victims.

The most notable difference is that the body was naked, without a single piece of clothing on it, and was naked from head to toe.Her eyes were closed tightly, and there was a strange and calm smile on her face, which could be called serene, creepy.

The surface of the body is also covered with wounds, but what is more obvious is the light-colored marks on the skin one after another, like alopecia areata. Jack carefully observed the wounds and found that they all showed signs of contraction and healing.Generally speaking, the biggest difference between the wounds caused after death and the wounds left in life is that when alive, muscles and blood vessels will automatically contract to stop the bleeding, but dead people will not have this reaction.Such obvious traces made Jack a bad guess. He pressed the communicator next to his ear and said to Jason, "The new victim didn't die from a blow to the back of the head, but from freezing to death."

"freeze to death?"

"Yes, I think this is Mrs. Shrike's negligence. He didn't realize that the victim was still alive when the body was dumped. The victim died of hypothermia on the ice. Before death, the blood vessels were paralyzed, the cerebral cortex was suppressed, and all of his body was taken off. Clothes, muscle contraction will turn into a smile. The clothes should have been washed away by the river, so when they were salvaged, they were naked, with frostbite on the skin." Jack said, turning the body over for inspection, and it turned out that there were scars on the back of the head .This is the disadvantage of heavy blows. It is not as easy to kill people as in film and television dramas. After all, human skulls are very hard and have a shock absorption effect, so there is a high possibility of being stunned rather than dead.

Presumably Mrs. Shrike knew about this. If the murderer was really himself, then he was already very old. Why did he use a killing method that required a lot of strength to kill?Stabbing to death is obviously simpler and more convenient, and it is not easy to miss.

Jack continued to check, and he saw the victim's hands, a pair of bruised hands. What caught Jack's attention was the sunburn on the ring finger of his right hand, a very slight white circle, indicating that the victim had worn the ring for a long time.

The ring on the ring finger, the victim is married?

He was about to check further, when suddenly there was a slight beep sound in his ear, and the small sound wave detector he placed in the hidden place was triggered, which indicated that someone was coming to the morgue. Jack listened carefully, but A second siren from another detector was not heard.The situation is bad now, and being able to trigger the first one but not the second one shows that he has noticed the detector and avoided it on purpose. The person who came is probably not an ordinary Gotham police officer.I don't have a disguise now, I just wear a big cap to cover my face, and put a layer of flesh-colored foundation on my skin, and my identity is a deceased person, so it will be very troublesome if I bump into an acquaintance.You have to hide first.

He looked around, the morgue was empty, there was only a layer of cold mist under his feet, other than that, there was no place to hide at all.

dark.cold.

Jack lay stiffly on the iron board, the white shroud covered his face, the cold was as real as it was, cutting and scraping the exposed skin like a knife.His eyes were closed tightly, his breathing and heartbeat were reduced to undetectable, like a corpse that had been dead for three days.There was silence all around, but it was this silence that hit his temple like bullets.There was no sound, no vibration, but he knew very well that someone was coming, and that person walked into the morgue softly, like a ghost.

Can't move.Can't move.

The other party can find the detector, but they may not know who installed the detector, nor can they be sure that he is still in the morgue.The morgue is huge, and there are too many cabinets to count, and the visitors don't have time to check them one by one.The most important thing is to pretend to be the dead and hide from the thermal imaging scanners of the passing people.

The silence lasted for about a few minutes. Jack felt the iron plate carrying him vibrate slightly. Someone opened the cabinet door and pulled the body out.There was no need to pretend now, Jack was completely stiff from head to toe, as if being watched back and forth by Medusa.He had known for a long time that this ostrich method might—or would—not work on the visitor, and that the greatest detective in the world could deduce what he had eaten for lunch from his hiccups.He had left too many clues in the morgue, and it was useless to try to cover them up. Instead, he wanted to cover them up, but he still couldn't help but want to take a gamble.He didn't see who the other party was, what if it wasn't Batman?

The shroud hadn't been lifted yet, but he felt that the other party's eyes had pierced in.Although his eyes were still closed and he couldn't see, he could still imagine that the other party's expression must be very complicated, and the lips under the mask were tightly pressed.He hesitated for about a minute, until he had decided on his words, before he said, "Can you pretend you didn't see me, Bat?"