CH 98

The atmosphere was abnormally still.

The young nurse looked at the finicky patient, then at the frosty lawyer who brought along a smiling intern. A thought abruptly occurred to her, and her face paled. 

She hastily took out two surgical masks for them. “I was just thinking what was missing from your faces. There should have been a nurse handing you a mask before you stepped into the ward, did she forget? Hurry up and put it on.”

Yan Suizhi had forgotten it as well, saying, “We were distracted discussing the health condition of Mr Lee over here.”

Right after saying so, the nurse outside hurriedly pushed open the door to come in, panic splashed over her face. “Just now I forgot to—”

“This?” Yan Suizhi waved the masks in his hand at her. “It’s fine, we got it in time.” 

As he spoke, he passed a mask in his hand to Gu Yan and wore one himself.

The nurse was still feeling uneasy. She pointed at the soundless air humidifier installed in a wall corner. “This building is constantly being disinfected throughout the day. Not wearing the mask for a while shouldn’t cause anything major, but just in case, please get tested again an hour later.”

“Yes, just say that I forgot to pass masks to the both of you,” the nurse stationed at the door was extremely apologetic. “The hospital won’t charge you for it. I’m really sorry.”

“It’s fine. We’ll remember to head over,” Gu Yan wore the mask.

Yan Suizhi said to the nurse, “By the way, could you please turn off the surveillance for this ward? Thank you.”

Lawyers didn’t permit any form of surveillance when meeting clients. In the past, the meetings were all in detention centres. The wardens knew the rules so they would automatically turn off the various surveillance equipment. However, the situation now was special; the hospital might not necessarily remember this.

The nurse jolted. “Oh, oh. Alright. I’ll go over and inform the security room.”

With that, she clutched the medical tray, hastily running out of the room. 

Not long later, the small red light on a corner of the ceiling of the room died out.

At a detention centre, when the small red light of surveillance went out, suspects would always subconsciously relax their muscles. However, Mr Horace Lee had different brain circuits from usual suspects. When he glanced at the light that went out, he seemed even more annoyed.

Then he heaped this annoyance onto the intern.

He raised his hand and smoothed his hair back. When he turned back over, a smile that could barely pass off as polite was hanging on his face. He said to Gu Yan, “A bumbling intern can’t be of much use in this setting, right? Can we have him leave?” 

Gu Yan calmly said, “No.”

Horace Lee, “…”

His mouth twitched, a little as though he was making to speak but didn’t. It was hard to tell if he wanted to scold someone but after withholding himself, still wanted to retort, yet was unable to find the words. His face was strained for a while before he abruptly opened his mouth to say, “I’ve heard of you before. It seems that you’re on the shortlist recently released to the public? I thought that someone who could be a First-Class Lawyer at such a young age would be exceptionally professional. Isn’t the responsibility of a lawyer to protect the interests of the client? This intern really displeases me.”

Gu Yan, “Thank you for the compliment, but I’m not a First-Class Lawyer.” 

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“…”

It was as though he was at the defence table, coldly and unhurriedly responding to Horace Lee’s earlier complaints, even doing it item by item, not missing a single question. 

It was reasonable and justified, leaving no room to refute.

Horace Lee was going to crack from rage.

Gu Yan, “Do you still have other questions?”

Horace Lee whipped his face away and wiped his hand over it, pursing his lips and recouping for a few seconds before nodding. “Fine.” 

He walked back to sit on the sickbed and the infusion pump rattled along behind him, automatically moving to the bedside. He repeated again, “Fine.”

Saying this, he turned his gaze back to Gu Yan, his dark brown eyes narrowed, scrutinising the lawyer he requested again. “This is the first time I’ve come across a lawyer like you… and an intern like him. As the proverb goes, can I say, ‘as the teacher, so the student’?”

In a certain sense, he wasn’t wrong. Only that the teacher-student relationship was reversed.

Yan Suizhi glanced at Gu Yan, saying to Horace Lee with a smile, “Thank you for the compliment.” 

Horace Lee, “…”

I’m not goddamn complimenting you in any way, alright?

He raised his hand again and smoothed his hair back on both sides of his temples again. During this, his expression flickered, finally changing back to composure. “Alright, then. Even though our conversation just now wasn’t that… pleasant, I still trust that you should have the ability.”

Gu Yan didn’t give this an answer, but he sat on the chair and said, “Describe the case.” 

“The two of you chat, I’ll record it.” Yan Suizhi sat next to him, a basic jotting paper laid on his knee, an electronic pen in his hand.

Horace Lee mulled over it then asked, “Where should I start? Explain the evidence that the police have? Or what I was doing at that time?”

Yan Suizhi lifted his brows.

The reactions of this man were consistently deviating from the norm. 

Like his attitude to the surveillance earlier, and his answers to this question now as well.

When most people get involved in a lawsuit, there would generally be three types of responses.

The first would be like Chen Zhang; with secrets that they couldn’t divulge. They would brim with resistance, silence, or straight-out refuse to cooperate.

The second type would be like Joshua; before talking about what happened, they would first declare that they were innocent, that it wasn’t them who did it, that it had nothing to do with them. Naturally, the verity of this claim of innocence was a separate matter, but they would definitely stress on this at the very first moment. 

The third type were conversely those who had silently acknowledged themselves to be guilty of the crime. They didn’t carry delusions of clearing their name, only hoping that the sentence would be lenient. For people like these, as they knew what they had done, they would unconsciously choose to cut straight to the chase and begin by describing the sequence of events.

Horace Lee was none of these.

He didn’t directly proclaim himself to be innocent, nor did he cut to the chase.

Before coming, they had heard that Mr Horace Lee was tight-lipped and couldn’t be pried for information. They had assumed that they would encounter reticence the likes of Chen Zhang; but this wasn’t so. 

What did this reaction tell them…

That he didn’t stress on his innocence indicated that he did have some relation to the case, or that he didn’t care whether or not they thought he was innocent.

That he didn’t cut to the chase indicated that he wasn’t completely clear of the circumstance, thus was unable to find the ground beneath him at this time.

His lack of reticence or resistance also indicated that he wasn’t ‘compelled’ to be in this situation, but that it was completely voluntary, of his own volition. 

As well as Horace Lee’s attitude towards the surveillance just now…

Why would someone hope to leave the surveillance on under such an occasion; or, better put, why would they worry about the surveillance being turned off?

It was obvious. Horace Lee was feeling an undercurrent of worry and unease. He was worried that someone would act against him when the surveillance was turned off, so he hoped that the surveillance would be kept on all the time.

Yan Suizhi didn’t reveal anything on his face, yet his mind was already methodically going over this client in detail: 

Horace Lee should be facing some kind of threat, and to protect himself, placed himself under constant police watch. He’d even rather be temporarily incarcerated to assure his safety.

The special wards in this quarantine station had surveillance, police, and medical staff that regularly came by to check on his health status. Due to his identity as a suspect, these medical staff were also unable to close the door; no matter whether they were doing an examination or treatment, it’d be right under the police’s noses.

To Horace Lee, this was probably the safest place to be.

If that really was the case, then it was only too easy to understand how he could gain weight and have the mood to tease birds with worms. 

He had no doubt that Gu Yan could think of this.

Yan Suizhi had complete faith in Lawyer Gu’s competence.

However, at the end of the day, it was just a conjecture. The specifics would still depend on what Horace Lee would say.

Gu Yan didn’t wear a smidge of emotion on his face. Others couldn’t read his thoughts at all. After hearing Horace Lee’s words, he didn’t say much. He merely projected two pages from the memory storage containing the case file, saying, “You can start from what you were doing in Redstone on March 10.” 

While the case file he received actually did include a portion of the evidence, the bulk of it was still being put together by Senior Manager Adams and would only be sent over to him as a whole within the next few days. However, he didn’t toss out the evidence one by one as questions to Horace Lee.

According to the regulations of legal bodies in the alliance, before going to court, evidence couldn’t be directly communicated to the suspect; the suspect had no right to go through it. This was similar to how a lawyer couldn’t simultaneously represent two defendants for the same case, preventing the suspects from colluding by fabricating lies to clear their names.

The evidence stated that on March 10, the elderly man from Redstone took his tools to go fishing for autumn fish in the countryside. There were no surveillance equipment installed in the vicinity of the lake, and based on traces found at the scene, the suspect had lured him to a road outside the woods, knocking him out and stuffing him into the car, taking him to an abandoned warehouse in the Black Rock district.

This district used to have many mining lines and underground storage warehouses. After many decades and even centuries, the mining lines were almost fully excavated. New lines had to be found, and those warehouses were abandoned. 

Due to the abundance of habitable planets and land, those abandoned sites were seldom maintained or converted for other use.

This was a frequent sight in mining sites across stellar systems.

And all of the warehouses in the Elderly Bobblehead case belonged to this category.

Similar to the majority of elderly implicated in the Elderly Bobblehead case, the senior named Mike Alden was a widower. As such, his disappearance had gone unnoticed for a long time. 

On the evening of October 3, he was trapped in the ninth medium-sized warehouse in Black Rock district. The steel cage that he was enclosed in had a steel trough on one side, which was partitioned into two sections—one for food, the other for water.

When the senior was hungry or thirsty, he would sprawl on the side of that railing and reach into the trough, dredging up something to eat or drink.

Alden gave vague statements, such as that ‘his skin was cut open, and needles were stabbed into him’. He even thought that ‘wolves and monsters were pouncing onto him’. To get them off, he tried everything; scratching, tearing, slamming, etc. This should have been the cause of the signs of abuse littered over his body. Police evidence revealed that Alden had traces of a psychedelic drug in his system.

This drug would start by inducing hallucinations, then cause a gradual lapse into insanity. 

The day after Alden was found, residual traces of the drug abruptly began to fade from his system, and were undetectable by the third day.

These details did not appear in any of the flurry of articles out there. Gu Yan only saw it when he received the first set of case information from Adams this morning. The moment he was done reading through it, he immediately brought Yan Suizhi along and made a beeline for the hospital.

One reason was to meet the client as early as possible.

The other reason was that… the adverse effects of this psychedelic reminded them of Ke Jin.