Prologue

The dark-haired man sat in the interrogation chair, looking down at his fingers as if a wonderful show was being performed on them. 

He was wearing a well-fitted, expensive gray coat. His short hair was slightly dishevelled because of the murder, but he had a natural air of elegance and a neurotic temperament that belonged only to the fictional aristocrats in novels. Lynn thought that such an aura, at least, definitely didn’t seem to belong to this kind of remote town.

Lynn was wearing the uniform of a police officer and sitting opposite the man to confront him.

He was not yet used to this small town’s sheriff’s uniform, but he had always been very used to confronting suspects. Even though he had been away from the Major Crimes Unit for three years already, having been transferred to a small town where the biggest case was a street robbery, he had not lost any of the vigilance of being a hunter in the big cities.

“You mean, you just passed by there in the dead of night and found a body hidden in the bushes?” He said, “It was torn in half, but you wanted to save him, and that’s when you got the blood—the blood you tried to wash off, by the way—on you, Mr. Arthur?” 

“Yes,” the man named Arthur said, in his refined and annoying British accent, his gaze still fixed on his fingers. “I’m a bit of a clean freak.”

Lynn was well aware that the other person’s excuses were a joke from start to finish. He had interrogated people like this when he had still been in the Major Crimes Unit. They spoke just like him in a shameless tone—no matter how preposterous the excuse, their expressions were more and more confident and trustworthy than the last, completely unperturbed. Their lies couldn’t be detected even with a lie detector because they had sociopathic tendencies, and naturally didn’t think that it was a big deal to do antisocial things.

“Two hours had passed between the time you found the body and the time you called the police,” he said.

“Yeah, that scene was so horrible, officer,” the suspect said, dragging out his words in an elegant tone, “Of course, I was very scared. It took me some time to calm down.”

Lynn glared at the other person sternly. His gaze was fierce enough to make the average criminal hide beneath the table, but the other remained unmoved and was still staring at his neatly trimmed fingernails.

Lynn opened the file and flipped over the photo of the body from it before throwing it in front of Arthur.

The corpse in that photo didn’t look like it came from the police files; instead, it looked like it belonged to the file of a horror film director. The body didn’t resemble a human at all. It looked like a human who had partially transformed into a rodent. It had a protruding mouth, sharp teeth, and dense body hair; it looked deformed and horrifying.

The corpse had been torn in two halves by an unknown force, and lay sprawled across the outskirts of the town. 

The biggest case Lynn had dealt with since taking over as the sheriff was a burglary, and the culprit had just been a high school student trying to get his baseball cards that his uncle had confiscated. But such a bloody corpse had immediately knocked him back into his old form as the head of the Major Crimes Unit.

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Is he a sociopath? Lynn pondered.

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“Pa’r j qlmaegf bo j mbgqrf, bynlberis,” atf rerqfma gfqilfv.

“Is this a human corpse?” Lynn said.

“Otherwise, what else could it be? You can’t disqualify someone as a human just because they look ugly,” Arthur said, “I see that you’ve been asking the same question over and over for two hours, Officer. If you’ve finished asking, will you please excuse me? My daughter is still waiting at home, and as upright people always say, it’s inhumane to leave a six-year-old girl waiting alone in the dark. You must think so too.”

Lynn stared at him. Arthur returned the gaze back with an expressionless face. His pupils were pitch-black, and the bottom of their depths couldn’t be seen. 

Yes, Arthur did have a daughter, Lynn thought. This fact didn’t match the current situation, but it was the truth.

At that moment, the man revealed a smile. His appearance was cold and calm, as if he knew that this stubborn policeman had no other tricks up his sleeve.

He stood up, pulled aside his chair, walked past Lynn, opened the door, and left the interrogation room.

Lynn sat still, his fists clenched tightly, his body taut like a tight bowstring. 

If his current colleagues saw him now, they would be amazed that their mild-mannered sheriff had such a violent expression, like the turbulent sky before a hurricane. But if it was seen by his former colleagues in the Major Crimes Unit, they would know what it meant and sympathize with the prey he had set his sights on.

Lynn could smell that scent; maybe this was an innate talent, or maybe it had been honed by experience. He could smell the blood in someone’s past, and he also knew that Arthur was hiding something. This person had only been in this town for a month. He was a single father with a little girl—the dream man of the women of the town—and he had that scent on him.

He was hiding something, and the stench of blood on him was so thick that Lynn choked on it whenever he took a deep inhale.

In a normal situation, Lynn, with his deep facial features, looked like a typically handsome man. 

However, after the passing of his wife, he had quickly begun to fall in the direction of slovenliness. His black hair was as messy as a bird’s nest. His last shave seemed to have been three days ago, but it might have been a week ago. Only occasionally could one see the falcon-like sharp eyes under his dejected appearance, but that, too, was only an occasional flash.

Oak Town was a peaceful place, and for the most part, the town sheriff always had a soft smile and a gracious attitude, as he politely dealt with cases like a cat climbing a tree, a lost garden shovel or a couple’s quarrel.

He had been transferred from the Major Crimes Unit of a big city three years ago due to his health but he didn’t look arrogant and out of place at all, as if he had been born in a small, quiet town rather than a big city with a high murder rate.

The people of the town had almost forgotten where he came from, like a corpse on a battlefield which had been covered in fresh snow, showing a pure and clean aftermath. 

The women in Oak Town even thought that he was a good match. He was slightly neurotic from working too hard after his wife’s death, so he had been sent to this small town with his clever and introverted little daughter. He also had a slovenly appearance, which gave people the urge to step into his life, take good care of this handsome and devoted man and become the woman in his life. How satisfying that would be.

However, Sheriff Lynn remained single even after three years, raising his young daughter day by day and handling all kinds of boring cases in the town.

Lynn was not too old. He had been a young and promising type in the police station back then, but his excessively fragile feelings had made him quickly fall from the police circle. As he stayed in Oak Town, living the same life day after day, he thought, maybe this was what he was going to do for the rest of his life.

There was nothing wrong with living a quiet and serene life. 

That was, until the man called Arthur moved in.

Arthur had used to be a first-class medical practitioner, specializing in neurology. Like most people in this town, he was well-educated and had quite the social status. He also had a lot of money in the bank, and wanted to find a decently safe place to live in seclusion.

These days, except for being occasionally invited to do some difficult surgeries, he hardly ever went out—he had earned enough money in the first half of his life anyway—and spent most of his time in town, looking after his darling daughter.

Lynn had seen the child. She was as refined and calm as her father. It was said that her IQ was 173. But Arthur was not ready to send her to receive elite education, thinking that it would be better for her to spend an ordinary childhood in a small town. 

Lynn and Arthur were not familiar with each other. To be precise, no one in the town was familiar with Arthur. There was a natural air of detachment around him. While he was polite to everyone, no one could get too close to him.

As a police officer, Lynn innately despised this type of person.

There was always a smell of darkness and secrets on Arthur, which had made him feel disturbed from the first time they had met. Like a cheetah smelling the blood in the distance, it almost made his hunting impulse, which had been suppressed for a long time, reawaken.

And a month after that person moved here, this bizarre murder happened. 

After the incident, Lynn worked overtime into the night, which was a rare occasion. It was his first time working overtime since he had moved to Oak Town. Under most circumstances, no one cared whether he was late or left early. Even at work, he just sat in his chair and stared into the distance blankly.

The sudden appearance of this corpse seemed unreal for a small town that was as tranquil as an advertisement model.

The next morning, Lynn got up early and was brushing his teeth when a call came in from the police station, which was a very, very rare occurrence. Lynn spat the foam out of his mouth and picked it up. It was Donald who was calling.

Donald was a young man, just a year into his career, and he still handled cases like a schoolboy. The way he was speaking right now also resembled a student presenting a paper to a particularly picky tutor, lacking both confidence and an idea of what he was doing. 

“Is there something wrong?” Lynn asked.

“Um,” said the man on the other end of the phone, “the body… is missing.”

“What?!” Lynn yelled.

Even though he was on the other end of the phone, the young man was clearly still very terrified. He said tremblingly, “That, that body, in the forensic office, it disappeared this morning.” 

“But how could it just disappear? It’s a corpse! Inside the police station!” Lynn shouted.

“I, I don’t know, I opened the door this morning and it was just gone,” Donald said, “Oh, by the way, the autopsy photos and DNA evidence are missing too.”

Lynn cursed harshly, and the boy on the other end panicked and made up an excuse that Jessie was calling him and hung up the phone.

Lynn stood there with a toothbrush in hand, and he didn’t even hear Chrissie, his daughter, saying goodbye to him as she went to catch the school bus. 

The case had not been reported to the superiors yet, nor had the deceased’s identity been found. He thought, without the photos and the body, he had no evidence of its existence, except for a few agents who had seen the body.

Someone wanted to destroy everything related to the case and make the case disappear. The strange appearance of the corpse appeared in his mind. Now that the evidence was gone, who would want to believe that such a thing existed?

He hastily spat the foam out of his mouth and hurried towards the station, grabbing the transcript he had brought home with him yesterday along the way.

It was probably the only piece of information left on the case. Only words were left, telling him that the body had initially been found by an old man walking his dog, and it wasn’t until an hour later that the police had received a belated call from Arthur. Lynn had a feeling that Arthur had called the police only because he knew that his bloodied appearance had been caught on CCTV for a split second. 

As he drove, Lynn thought bitterly that he would catch the bastard by the tail and drag him out of the darkness.