The three of them sat down on the sofas facing each other.
Thomas stood up and slowly arranged twelve victim photographs into two neat rows on the pinboard.
The cold white light fell across them, making the young faces look pale and distant.
His voice was low and clear:
“Let me give you a brief summary of the case.”
“Twelve victims.
Every single one had their face slashed dozens of times until it was unrecognisable by ordinary sight.
The eighth and tenth male students attended the same school; the others came from different institutions.”
“At every scene we found female DNA highlighted hair, red-painted nails, faint lipstick traces.
None of the samples matched anyone close to the victims.
We believe the killer left them deliberately as misdirection.”
Thomas pointed to the first five photographs.
“The first three cases had no mark.
Starting from the fourth, the crossed-out heart appeared—a heart drawn in red ink, then slashed through with a blade, carved into the victims’ necks.”
He shook his head slightly.
“We still don’t understand why he changed his pattern.”
Jay continued at once, his voice low and tired:
“We once suspected personal grudges against the first five victims, and that he only added the mark later to mimic a psychopath.
But the deeper we dug… the clearer it became that those five people had no connection to one another.
They were all good students no enemies, no debts.”
He placed the file of the first case on the table and opened it to Mark’s forensic report.
“The first case.
Mark, a male student from West Tower University, was found by two high-school girls inside a black plastic bag at an abandoned television station.
He had been dead for approximately one day.
Mark was an exemplary student bright, gentle, well-liked by everyone.
He had never caused trouble.”
Jay slid the report across the table toward White and Knight.
“His blood contained a high dose of Propofol hospital-grade anaesthetic.
No obvious injection mark on the arms, but a close examination of the left side of the neck revealed a tiny puncture near the external jugular vein.
The killer most likely injected from behind in one swift motion, delivering the full dose at once and rendering the victim unconscious.”
“The first stab struck the right carotid artery at a forty-five-degree angle, four centimetres deep.
Death was almost instantaneous.
The fatal weapon was concluded to be a surgical scalpel.
Female DNA red hair strands was found on the body; none of it matched any of the suspects, and all of them had solid alibis.”
White remained seated, her ash-gray eyes fixed on Mark’s case file behind the lenses of her glasses.
The words on the white pages seemed to etch themselves deeper into her mind, bringing the victim’s gruesome death into sharper focus.
Knight suddenly widened his eyes, his voice rising with undisguised surprise:
“So White was right?
You guys suppressed the real number and only announced five cases?”
Jay let out a heavy sigh.
His deep brown eyes showed the exhaustion of too many sleepless nights.
He rubbed his forehead lightly, his voice dropping:
“You have to understand our position.
If we released the true figure to the press, the public would panic and the pressure on the investigative team would only increase.
It wouldn’t help solve the case.
It would just make everything more chaotic.”
Knight nodded slowly, though a faint dissatisfaction still flickered in his pale-violet eyes.
He leaned forward, his voice lower, almost speaking to himself:
“I feel the killer is 100% familiar with medicine.
The common point I see from the victims’ photos… they’re all good looking some of them extremely so.
Mark especially looked gentle and approachable, the kind of person everyone finds easy to like.”
He paused, then continued:
“I have two hypotheses.
One: the killer is a woman who is attracted to handsome young men but gets rejected because of her own appearance, so she kills at random.
Two: the killer is a man who is jealous of their looks and acts out of envy.”
White lifted her head slightly from the file.
Her ash-grey eyes behind the glasses flicked over Knight for a brief second, then returned to the pinboard with its twelve young faces.
Her voice was even, cold, cutting through the air:
“Your hypotheses would only hold if all twelve victims lived in the same area.
But they came from different schools, scattered across the city.
It’s not realistic”.