CH 138

“Found them,” Yan Suizhi copied a few of the photos with him and sent them over to Gu Yan. “We circled out a bunch of people, but we completely missed out on these ones.”

Bens’ caption on the side of the photo stated that, out of convenience, he had stayed at the University of Batelia’s university town where Professor Zhou was near the School of Philosophy and School of Medicine. There was a residential district by the hotel he stayed at, which was where he had taken these photos of rare birds. 

There were four in total. Three were taken in the morning, while one was taken at dusk. The timestamps of the photos were spaced apart, but there were always four birds.

Three of the birds had long and slender crests that made them look graceful and beautiful, whereas the odd one out fell far short. It looked dusty, grey, and inconspicuous, like a passer-by who had accidentally stumbled into the frame.

Jim Bens’ caption stated that these were the seldom-sighted snowfinches. Those birds didn’t like nesting alone. They had a strong tendency to stick to others; they usually moved about in flocks of three and liked following birds with leadership qualities. Perhaps not fully awake, they had selected a greyfinch as their leader for that day. Of course, it was also possible that the greyfinch was too enamoured by their beauty to fly far away.

Were these photos more beautifully taken, even if they wouldn’t make the front page of the news, they’d at least have made it into a stock gallery for cover images or suchlike. 

However, the way the photos were taken made them look like a forensic scene. It went naturally then that they were discarded into the pile of photos, never to see the light of day.

Yan Suizhi said, “I cannot claim knowledge in other areas, but I coincidentally do know a bit about snowfinches. They reside over at Helan’s snow-capped mountains. Birds like this are not commonly seen. Although they are dependent on others, they have a prideful nature. Actually, I had thought it quite interesting when I skimmed through this caption yesterday; it’s really too unusual to see snowfinches following a greyfinch.”

He didn’t think too deeply into it at that time; after all, his attention was focused on looking out for recurring characters. However, this sentence still left quite some impression on him; little did he expect that it’d end up coming into use.

They magnified the photos several times without pixelation, and were finally able to view the small and unremarkable grey bird clearly.

Unsurprisingly, the tail plume of that small bird was tinged dark red.

“As expected,” Gu Yan said.

The three snowfinches weren’t dumb at all. What they were following was the exotic herdingbird and not a greyfinch.

It was possible that there wouldn’t be a single herdingbird sighting outside of Eyrie for decades. After all, Eyrie had a unique climate—different air composition, water quality, geomagnetic fields, as well as day and night patterns. Herdingbirds were particularly sensitive towards these, which was why they could only stay on other planets for a short time, surviving no longer than a month. 

Actually, their keepers were also seldom willing to bring them out.

Therefore, the odds of seeing a herdingbird at the University of Batelia were extremely slim.

And yet, it was during that time that Professor Zhou was admitted to the hospital.

Their many years of experience told them that it wasn’t impossible for events with small probabilities to occur in the same space and time; there were many coincidences in the universe. However, if there were really no other connections to be found, it was worth revisiting the so-called ‘coincidences’. 

Yan Suizhi searched with the close-up of the ‘herdingbird’ to filter through the collection of photos for high matches.

In the blink of an eye, a number of photos were sieved out of that thick deck.

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Like distributing poker cards, he flicked photo by photo onto the table.

“At Mr Bevin’s funeral, there was a herdingbird in the cemetery’s forest.”

This was the manufacturer of medical capsules that was mentioned at the start of Eunice’s video diary, who had died from overdosing on painkillers.

“The first time Professor Zhou was sent to the hospital for resuscitation, a large group of students from the University of Batelia visited him. On the upper right, there’s one flying across the sky. 

“The one in the residential district with snowfinches just now coincided with the day after Professor Zhou was hospitalised.

“When the University of Batelia announced Professor Zhou’s passing, one stopped on a statue in the central square of the university town.

“During Ms Lucy’s trial that arose from the medicinal mines, one mixed in amongst pigeons on the road outside the courthouse.

“This one’s during Ms Lucy’s suicide; a herdingbird was flying over the prison…” 

One by one, Yan Suizhi narrated the brief captions on the photos.

“They’re all familiar faces.” He’d already lined up the dozen or so photos.

Bevin, Professor Zhou, Lucy, and so on—all figures that Eunice and Joe had been looking into.

Some were even pioneers in genetic modification surgery and the pharmaceutical industry that Yan Suizhi had paid close attention to, who had died one after another due to illness or accidents. 

The further back Yan Suizhi went, the slower he set down the photos, and the tighter his frown became.

Until he saw yet another familiar face, and his hands halted.

“Bill Lu…” He read the name aloud.

This name was too familiar to him and Gu Yan—he was the defendant, Yan Suizhi’s client, of the medical case. 

“When was this taken?” Gu Yan eyed the photo’s timestamp with a frown.

Yan Suizhi had the answer on the tip of his tongue. “Likely half a year after he was imprisoned; the day of his execution.”

The alliance had abolished the death penalty a long time ago, and hence only the length of the prison term was worth paying attention to. The most dangerous felons were shoved into special space prisons and sent into interstellar exile. The longest sentence could even rival a planet’s lifespan.

However, due to the repercussions of the conflicts with interstellar pirates, the alliance reinstated the death penalty, primarily targeted at convicts who threatened public healthcare or safety. 

After all, both of these sectors concerned human lives—hundreds of billions of lives, at that.

The death sentence was carried out in a special courthouse, which was heavily fortified, looking akin to a colossal casket of gold. Nobody other than the executioner and the supervising officer could watch it. On the day of Bill Lu’s execution, many cars were stopped at a mountain road a distance away from the courthouse, mostly families of the victims and some reporters, including Jim Bens, of course.

They could only view the golden facade of the courthouse from afar on a hill, somewhat indirectly witness to the enforcement of divine justice and righteousness.

In fact, that herdingbird wasn’t in the direction of the courthouse, but perched in the woods at the top of the hill where they were at. 

If another reporter had taken the shot, they’d definitely miss this bird. Only Jim Bens, who took from every angle and was unconcerned about the aesthetics of the picture, would have nabbed that unremarkable patch of woods into the shot while photographing the crowd of onlookers.

“Here’s one last one.” Yan Suizhi spread the very last photo on the table.

A sedate and imposing manor house partially concealed by flora was depicted in the photo. Jim Bens, who was likely on some hover road a distance away, had zoomed the lens in as far as he could. With the interference from the anti-surveillance equipment, he was just barely able to get past the thick wall of tall trees, to capture the social gathering being held around the fountain in front of the mansion. None of the attendee’s faces could be recognised from the photo; the only objects that were in relatively higher definition were the birds spiralling over the mansion.

There were many birds, which, at first look, appeared to only consist of greyfinches. If it weren’t for the precision of the search parameters, one would have been completely oblivious to the herdingbird blending in with them. 

Gu Yan looked at the building’s architecture and said, “This is the Mansons’ Tian Qin Manor.”

Nearly twenty photos were lined up on the table, knocking the so-called ‘coincidence’ into smithereens.

Herdingbirds were indigenous to Eyrie and nowhere else. For it to appear on other planets, only one possibility existed—its keeper brought it over.

The many photos with the presence of a herdingbird implied that its keeper was there every time. 

And this conformed neatly with Yan Suizhi and Gu Yan’s initial thought patterns.

They wanted to find a suspect who ‘returned to the scene’, but finding someone like that from amidst the crowd of so many photos was like looking for a needle in a haystack. However, it was different with the herdingbird. The suspect’s features instantly became recognizable, because he now had an additional identity—a birdkeeper.

They carefully inspected the nearly twenty photos and, eventually, someone at Mr Bevin’s funeral caught their eye.

Many people had attended that funeral—not only his family, but also business partners he had worked with and reporters. Everyone was dressed in black, forming a large, dark crowd. 

At the time the photo was taken, the cemetery’s tomb sealing ceremony had just concluded and the crowd was loosely dispersed. Some people were whispering to each other while some were walking with their heads bowed. There were some who looked into the distance, whereas some glanced back at the tombstone.

Mingling in the crowd was a young man. He didn’t look at the ground or at anyone; he was looking up at the branches of a tree.

Yan Suizhi magnified the photo manifold.

After the photo was enlarged, they found that the man was younger than they had envisioned him to be, possibly not even twenty years of age. Solely judging from his side profile, the young man’s features were actually quite well-proportioned; it was just that he had several measures of sombreness in his countenance that slightly unsettled people. 

“What’s that on his earlobe? A mole?” Gu Yan asked, frowning.

Yan Suizhi magnified it some more.

This time, the two of them could see it clearly. That was probably a very small tattoo of a Spade.

All of a sudden, Gu Yan spoke grimly, “In the classic card suit symbolism, regarding Spades, besides soldiers and guards, I’ve also heard of another explanation. It’s in the same tangent, but might be more appropriate in this case.” 

“Hm?” Yan Suizhi looked at him.

Gu Yan said, “The Sweeper.”

It was difficult to conclusively say that the young man was the birdkeeper simply based on his posture and the direction of his gaze.

But it was a different story when factoring in the Spade tattoo as well. 

“Do you think that we might be able to pull up information about this man online using this photo as the source?” While speaking, Yan Suizhi was already loading the side profile into a facial recognition frame, running a high-conformity filter of information from the web in the last thirty years with his smart device.

“Possibly, but it certainly wouldn’t be much,” Gu Yan said.

As he spoke, almost simultaneously, results were generated from their online search.

Only one photo perfectly matched their specifications. 

It was an old photo taken many years ago but posted relatively recently on a newly built web page, so nondescript that it only had a handful of site visits. Perhaps it was due to its recent posting and that the site didn’t have much traffic that it had managed to survive.

The newly built web page was for a welfare institution called Cloud Herb, situated in Wine City.