Chapter 1083 - Who Will Be Next? [2 in 1] (1/2)
Standing next to Chen Ge, Wen Qing did not know what to say or ask. She was afraid that she might accidentally expose some important information. After all, by now, she at least understood that there was no one in this building that could truly be trusted. One wrong step and she could put them in extreme danger.
“Why don’t you go and accompany Granny Lee in the living room? I will stay to investigate what happened here.”
Wen Qing nodded and left.
Chen Ge stayed in the bedroom alone. He closed the bedroom door and knelt by the bed to inspect the boy’s dead body. The burning from electrocution, the bruises from heavy beatings, Chen Ge’s eyes finally landed around the boy’s neck.
“He was strangled to death by electrical wires. There are wooden chips lodged in the boy’s fingernails. Before he perished, his arms were tied to the bed frame…”
Chen Ge undid the rope around the body. He placed the clean cover over the boy.
“The electrician looked like a reticent and harmless worker on the surface, but in reality, he has a flaming temper. Yet, he has a knack for reining it in around others. And then he vents it through torturing others who are weaker than him. The man is rotten through and through.”
The scary thing was that the electrician was not an exception to the rule at this apartment building. Chen Ge started to think deeper into other consequences.
“Under the limitation of law and morality, their actual nature was hidden and closed away, but in the world behind Xiang Nuan’s door, the most disgusting and horrid facet of their personality is exposed. This door appears to purposely highlight the sin in human nature, and it twists everyone into monstrous beings.”
Chen Ge tried to analyze the ghost fetus’ thoughts, but with the meagre number of clues that he had so far, he was unable to come to any concrete conclusion. Rummaging through the backpack, Chen Ge noticed that blood vessels had started to surface on the comic. He tried to summon his workers, but unfortunately, he still got no response.
“Chen Ge!” Wen Qing’s voice came from outside the bedroom, and then the door was pushed open. “Something seems to have happened downstairs!”
The sound of screaming, running, wailing, and crying were mixed together as they drifted up from downstairs. It sounded like a battlefield down there.
“Do not worry. Let them deal with this among themselves for now.” Chen Ge slowly walked out from the room. The faces of the tenants that were in the room earlier flashed across his mind. “Who will be next?”
Chen Ge’s group soon arrived at the second floor. The smell of blood lingered in the air. There were even fresh blood stains that were noticeable on the staircase.
“What is going on here?” Before Chen Ge got near, he was able to hear Auntie Ding crying. The rest of the tenants blocked the corridor. They formed a wall that did not allow anyone to pass.
“The electrician is dead.” Xiao Sun leaned against the wall, and his face was pale as a sheet.
“He’s dead‽” Chen Ge looked very surprised. He picked up his pace and crossed through the crowd. “Move out of the way please!”
Standing at the corner between the first floor and the second floor, Chen Ge appeared to have frozen. He could see Auntie Ding kneeling on the ground, her lips mumbling Jia Qi’s name again and again. Both of her arms and her upper body were covered in fresh blood. Auntie Ding appeared to have lost her grasp on reality due to overwhelming sadness. Others had trouble getting close to her, or to be more precise, no one was willing to get close to Auntie Ding in her current state.
“You… have killed him?” Chen Ge’s pupils were shivering. “But he was our only clue!”
“Jia Qi was the first child that I adopted. He went missing in this residential area! I have been looking so hard for him!” Auntie Ding’s hair was disheveled as she pressed her hands into the pool of blood on the ground. “That was my child. Can you understand how that would have affected a mother like myself? Do you know how I felt when I saw that child in that state in his room…”
Auntie Ding’s words petered off into a blubbering mess. All the energy in her body seemed to have drained from her as she collapsed in the pool of blood.
“Actually, it would wrong to say that Sister Ding has killed him. I saw with my own eyes that there was an altercation between Sister Ding and the electrician. Both of them slipped down the stairs, and the fruit knife just so happened to get stuck in the electrician’s neck. I suppose, in a way, this is karma working her magic. No one is to blame but the man himself.” The one who spoke was a tenant from the fifth floor. He was very tall, and he always stood together beside Auntie Ding. This was the first time he had spoken with Chen Ge.
“An accident you say?” Chen Ge’s gaze moved past Auntie Ding as he looked down the first-floor corridor. The electrician had already run out of the stairwell and was racing to get out of the building. His body was lying near the entrance, and the locked front door even had the man’s bloody handprints on it.
“With a knife puncturing through his neck, even if he was not dead, I doubt he wouldn’t be able to speak anymore. This is so unfortunate. The trail of clues that we found with such difficulty has been wiped away just like that.” Chen Ge’s tone was quite helpless. He then turned to the tall guy. “And who are you? I do not think we have met before.”
“My surname is Li.”
“I am sorry if this is a forward question, but why do you reek of medicine?”
“I am a practicing pediatrician.”
“Isn’t the medicine meant for children supposed to have as diluted a smell as possible to prevent them from gagging on the taste?” Before waiting for the man to answer, Chen Ge changed the subject. “I was not here when the electrician died. Did anyone hear what he said before he died?”
“He called out Auntie Ding’s full name…” Xiao Sun started to say something, but he was rudely interrupted by Doctor Li.
“The electrician is already dead. What we need to do now is confirm as soon as possible whether he is the murderer behind Qu Gui’s death.”
“But…” Xiao Sun insisted on saying something, but this time, Chen Ge cut him off.
“Indeed, the most important thing that we needed to do now is capture the culprit. If the electrician is Qu Gui’s murderer, of course, that would be best, but I am afraid that he is just an accomplice, and the real murderer is still hiding among us.”
A living human being was murdered just like that before their eyes. The atmosphere inside the apartment building became more suffocating.
“I will take Auntie Ding back to her room for now. She must have been greatly traumatized to have seen her adopted child in such a state.” Doctor Li tried to pick up Auntie Ding from the pool of blood, but he failed even after several tries. He turned to the crowd and waved at a short guy. “Big Head, would you mind coming over to help me?”
The short man was bald, and a large part of his face was swollen, giving him the look of a monster. Big Head and Doctor Li carried Auntie Ding back to the fourth floor while Chen Ge watched them walk away quietly.
Doctor Li is tall and well built. He looks quite strong. As large as Auntie Ding is, it is impossible for him to be incapable of carrying her on his own. He was merely looking for an excuse to get Big Head to leave this place with them. The three of them should know each other, and they operate as a group.
Doctor Li, Big Head, Auntie Ding, and the electrician—Chen Ge now suspected that it was the four of them who cooperated to kill the landlord and then stole the spare keys to all the rooms. With regards to their motive, Chen Ge had a fairly good guess. The landlord had found out about their secrets, so he needed to die.
“Er… So, how shall we deal with the electrician’s body?” Qu Yin felt a headache coming. Qu Gui’s dead body was still lying in his living room, and now they had another dead body in the building. Their initial intention was to find the killer, but somehow, things had started to get out of control as if there was a pair of hands that had been pushing them around for the tenants to turn on each other.