Chapter 181: The Poison and the Antidote (1/2)

I asked Xiaozhou about the results of the lab testing, and he told me that the capsule found in the victim’s stomach contained Cedilanid, which was a common drug used to treat heart disease.

“A heart medicine, huh?” I mumbled. “Any other discovery?”

Xiaozhou replied that the drug sample I took from the victim’s skin was an unknown chemical, while the substance that was injected into the victim’s body four hours ago was an unknown biological enzyme. The effects of these two substances could offset each other, which was to say that the victim had both the poison and the antidote injected into his body!

“I get it now!” I exclaimed. “The murderer controlled Chen Da by injecting poison into his body then forced him to act a certain way by promising to give him the antidote!”

Xiaozhou nodded in agreement, then added, “The dose of antidote found in the victim’s body is too small, though. It wouldn’t be enough to completely neutralize the poison.”

“That’s probably the cause of death,” I said. “Once the victim completed his task, the murderer rushed to inject the antidote into his body, but it was impossible because the bodyguards had subdued him.”

“You mean to say that the murderer was there at the party?” Xiaotao was shocked.

“That is a possibility,” I replied. “But perhaps Chen Da was just a pawn. Perhaps the murderer didn’t care at all if Chen Da died or lived. Still, it’s not a bad idea to investigate the background of the guests’ at the party.”

Xiaotao immediately made some phone calls to direct some officers to check the hotel’s parking records.

It was getting late, so Xiaotao told Dali and me to go back to our dorms. Before I left, I told Xiaozhao, “You should tell the coroner to dissect the body and extract the poison from the victim’s liver. Just inject the poison into a couple of mice and observe the effects over time.”

The next day, Dali and I went to the police station early in the morning. When I saw Xiaotao, I noticed that her complexion was slightly sallow.

“Did you stay up late again last night?” I asked.

“No,” she sighed. “I had a quarrel with my father.”

I asked her if it was about the arranged marriage, but she replied that it was more than that. Because of the incident at the party, the rich lady’s pharmaceutical company’s stock fell to the lowest point since its conception. Since Xiaotao’s father had tens of millions of shares in the company, he suffered a terrible loss. He asked Xiaotao to reveal some details about the investigation of the case, which angered her because instead of valuing the gravity of the murders committed, all her father ever thought about was money and the stock price fluctuations.

“Nothing matters to him except money, money and money!” Xiaotao grumbled resentfully. “Why was I born to such a horrible father?”

“But how did the stock price fall so quickly?” asked Dali.

“It’s because once those rich folks at the party saw the murder attempt on the rich lady, they immediately rushed home to sell their shares in her company, causing dramatic fluctuations in the stock price!”

“Did you discover anything from yesterday’s investigation?” I asked.

Xiaotao then reported their findings to me one by one. They didn’t find anyone who looked like the suspect in the hotel’s surveillance videos. From the bank, they found that the person who withdrew the money from Chen Da’s account was Chen Da himself. There had been no large deposits amounting to 20 million yen in any accounts lately, so the money should still be in someone’s hands in the form of cash. Lastly, the rich lady received a call from an unknown number at around 3 pm yesterday, and the call lasted about one minute.

Apart from that, there was a setback to the investigation. Amid the chaos that happened yesterday, a key piece of evidence was lost— it was the knife that Chen Da used to stab the rich lady.

“The knife is gone?” I groaned. “What about the little experiment with the mice? How’s that going?”

“You can go see for yourself now!” Xiaotao replied.

The three of us went to Xiaozhou’s laboratory. He had injected the poison obtained from the victim into two mice last night. They were now lying motionless in the cage as if they were dead.

My skills were useless in this instance, so I asked Xiaozhou to dissect one of the mice to check its internal organs.

“That’s just cruel!” Dali exclaimed with a frown.

“It’s the only way we can solve the case,” I replied. “Besides, these mice were bred to be used in medical experiments anyway.”

“Um, actually…” Xiaozhou meekly interjected. “I’m not very good at dissecting animals myself. You should go ahead and do it, Song Yang.”