Three Detectives (I)

On a stormy night crackling with lightning and thunder, rain fell onto the manor’s roof, making a soft rustling sound that mingled with the dying crackle of the fireplace logs.

It was an extremely sleep-inducing sound, so Schiller slept deeply in bed. But just then, an urgent telephone ring sounded, and Schiller opened his eyes.

He looked out the window. At that moment, a bolt of lightning streaked across the horizon, casting the window’s latticework onto the floor and bed. One of the shadows happened to cross Schiller’s eyes.

He took a deep breath, then got out of bed. Wearing slippers, he made his way through the pitch-black manor and downstairs, where he picked up the receiver. Entirely unsurprisingly, Gordon’s somewhat anxious voice came from the other end. He said, "Harry Cooper is dead, Professor Schiller. You need to come over."

"Is it connected to the serial murders? If it is, go find Batman."

"Batman is already here, Professor Schiller. I know I shouldn’t be disturbing you this late, but the situation this time is truly awful. You’d better come over…"

Schiller looked up at the grandfather clock in the room. Its hands pointed exactly at two in the morning. He remembered that the last time Gordon had called him on a rainy night was when Fish Mooney had died.

He went upstairs to get dressed, took an umbrella, and walked out through the manor gates. Gotham’s night was still frighteningly dark, and the damp air filling his lungs drove away his drowsiness.

A black sedan drove through the manor gates. Black suits, black umbrellas, black sunglasses—the silent style unique to Gotham’s mobsters. The person who opened the door said nothing, and Schiller asked nothing.

Cooper’s Estate lay west of the North District, quite far from Falcone Estate. When the car carrying Schiller stopped at the entrance to Cooper’s Estate, Gordon hurried down. Schiller got out, and Gordon led him upstairs.

"What exactly happened? I rarely see you this flustered. Even a serial murder case shouldn’t have scared you this badly, should it?"

Gordon looked pale. He did not explain much, merely telling Schiller, "You’ll understand once you see the crime scene."

They went up to the third floor, where quite a few officers stood near the staircase. After Gordon approached, he nodded to someone in a special uniform. It was an imposing-looking old policeman. He sized Schiller up, stepped forward, shook his hand, and said, "Hello. I’m Smith, Director of the Gotham Police Department. I’ve heard much about you…"

Schiller shook his hand and briefly introduced himself. The Director did not seem to be someone who liked pleasantries. He waved at Gordon and said, "Take the professor inside, but be careful."

Gordon nodded and passed through the crowd with Schiller, arriving at a room at the end of the third-floor corridor. He took out a key and opened the door. The scene in the room before Schiller was extraordinarily gruesome.

Unexpectedly, there was no corpse there. Or rather, no intact corpse.

It was a red room, but neither the floor, ceiling, nor furniture should have been that color. Every bit of red on them was blood and fragments of internal organs.

The reason there was no corpse was because the corpse had been evenly smeared across the entire room.

Batman stood in one corner, his gaze fixed on the center of the room. There was something extremely conspicuous there: a pattern resembling a Magic Circle drawn in black ink, with a pile of black ash in its center.

Schiller stepped through the doorway, then stopped at the entrance. Gordon squeezed past him and the doorframe, turned back to close the door, and Schiller tapped the floor with the tip of his umbrella before lifting it to inspect the blood on it.

Then he looked around the entire room. It was not large, roughly twenty square meters, and appeared to be a sitting room. There were floor-to-ceiling windows. Three sofas were placed along the wall to the right of the door and the wall on the door’s side, with a round table in the middle. On the other side stood a desk and bookshelf. This was a common sitting-room layout in English-style manors, and Schiller’s manor was the same.

The black Magic Circle lay in the very center of the room, while the red spread outward from it to cover the entire lower half of the room, including all of the floor, most of the walls, and the ceiling in the middle of the room.

"The reason I didn’t explain it over the phone was because I don’t know whether this can even be called dismemberment. It’s just… too thoroughly minced," Gordon said, covering his mouth.

Schiller turned and asked Gordon, "Do you have shoe covers?"

Gordon pulled out shoe covers, gloves, and other essential investigative supplies from his pocket. Then he took out a mask and face shield for himself. He tried to hand them to Schiller, but Schiller shook his head in refusal.

After putting on the shoe covers, Schiller entered the room. He circled it once, and while he was examining it, Batman said, "Cooper’s body was pulverized, then evenly smeared across the entire room. This method is completely different from the previous three cases…"

Schiller crouched near the Magic Circle to inspect the floor. "The body was pulverized? No, that isn’t entirely accurate."

"This still doesn’t count as pulverized?" Gordon asked. "We can barely find a single intact fragment. Blood, skin, bones—they were all ground up and spread throughout the room."

"True, but not all of it."

Schiller stood and looked up at the ceiling. "There isn’t enough body mass here."

"What do you mean?"

"The red material you see in this room—the fragments containing blood, organs, skin, and bone tissue—would amount to only about two-thirds of a person’s mass even if all of it were collected and pieced together."

"One-third of the corpse’s mass has vanished."

Gordon opened his mouth, seeming as if he wanted to ask how Schiller knew that. But the question circled around in his mouth before he ultimately swallowed it. The scene before them was already horrifying enough; they did not need more horror stories to set the mood.

Batman walked over and stood beside the Magic Circle. "This pattern does not match any recorded Magic Circle, but I can be certain that the hexagram in its center is connected to demons."

"This is getting more and more bizarre, isn’t it?" Gordon forced himself to approach despite his nausea. "At first, it was the Twelve Apostles serial murder case. Then someone got sawed in half. Today, they’ve started grinding corpses into paste and smearing them on walls. What are they going to do next? Evaporate people?"

"Obviously, this is not something an ordinary person could accomplish." Schiller spoke very slowly and evenly, but his tone always made people’s skin crawl. "In this case, the killer’s level of power has risen to another level."

"Haven’t you been patrolling this area lately? Did you find anything?" Schiller asked Batman.

"I was the first to discover Cooper’s death. I came here because I heard an explosion, but by the time I arrived, I found no suspicious figures."

Schiller walked over to a sofa and rubbed the tip of his umbrella against an unstained section. "Although what I’m about to say may make you question my professionalism, I still have to say it… this case may be related to supernatural forces."

"Supernatural forces?… What do you mean?"

"Isn’t this Magic Circle obvious enough? Someone summoned a demon here, and the demon killed Cooper."

Gordon pursed his lips and tilted his head. "I thought you would give us an exceptionally brilliant chain of reasoning and then tell us some shocking conclusion. I also thought you might produce all kinds of evidence to prove your reasoning right. But I never imagined…"

"Detective Gordon, do not judge what happens in this city through the eyes of ordinary people."

Batman asked, "Why did you reach that conclusion?"

Schiller walked back over and lowered his gaze to the floor again. "Observe the direction in which the blood and muscle tissue sprayed. It spread outward from the center. That means Cooper was not killed by an external bomb. He exploded from the inside out."

"Could a lunatic have forced him to swallow a bomb?"

"Good deduction, Detective Gordon. That does sound like something Gotham criminals would do, but we’ll have to ask our weapons expert, Batman…"

"Is there currently any bomb in the world that can explode and grind a person evenly from skin to muscle to internal organs, then spread them flat across a room?"

"Blowing someone apart is possible, but it would be very difficult to spread the blasted tissue so evenly across the floor and walls."

"What if someone blew Cooper apart, then manually smeared everything evenly afterward?" Gordon raised another question.

Schiller made a gesture of approval. "Detective Gordon, your line of thinking is very suited to being a detective. Seriously, you have talent."

"If the perpetrator really was a psychopathic killer, then it is possible. They have done even more vicious things. But judging by the details, this was unlikely to have been manually smeared."

"Look here…" Schiller walked over, his heel making a sticky, dull sound against the floor, yet still drawing both men’s attention.

Schiller pointed to one leg of a sofa, where some tissue had accumulated. "When the explosion occurred, this was the portion of the human tissue that splattered out, poured onto the floor, and was stopped here."

"You can see that the part closest to this sofa leg is skin tissue. You can even make out the epidermis and dermis. On top of that is fat, and above that are fragments of internal organs."

"This shows that it was unlikely the killer blew the victim apart, chopped him up, and deliberately smeared him evenly afterward. If that were the case, the tissues piled here would not be arranged in such a regular order. They would be mixed into a mess."

"You can imagine Cooper being blown apart by some unknown force, first completely liquefied, then turned into a sheet spread over the ground, before being crushed even finer and beginning to pour outward across the floor like waves."

"The sofa leg was like a bridge pier standing in the sea. Only, the pulverized human tissue was denser, so this pier intercepted part of it and preserved its original state."

"I also don’t think this was something an ordinary person could do. Few bombs could create this effect, and crushing a human body this finely would require mechanical equipment."

"From the moment I heard the explosion to the moment I entered this room, there was absolutely not enough time for anyone to move large machinery."

Gordon also looked the room over from top to bottom. "Could there be some sort of mechanism?"

"Before I called you here, I had already checked every corner of this room. There are no mechanisms, no hidden doors, no concealed compartments, and no secret passages. This is simply an ordinary manor sitting room."

"So you both think some kind of supernatural force did this?"

"That’s right. And it probably has nothing to do with the Twelve Apostles murders. At least, I have never heard of anyone in the Bible exploding and then being crushed to pieces."

"Forgive me for saying this…" Gordon said awkwardly. "If this involves that sort of thing, the Gotham Police Department may be unable to help. No one here is skilled in this area."

"Even if I went outside and announced the results of your investigation right now, they would certainly think we were insane and throw us out."

Schiller shook his head. "Not necessarily. They may be far more superstitious than you…"

Just then, there was a knock at the door. An officer hurriedly pushed it open and said to Gordon, "Chief! This is bad! Mrs. Sanchez, the principal of that boarding school near Gotham River, is dead!"