“Want to know? Then make a trade. If you’re willing to exchange all the information you’re entitled to in this deal, I’ll tell you who killed Walter Reed.” Ethan threw out another choice.

Samuel Grant said angrily, “Trying to trick me again?”

“Trick? Ridiculous. The choices in a deal are always yours to make. Don’t blame your stupidity on me.” Ethan sneered.

This time, Samuel Grant thought it over carefully before replying, “I want the original information. I won’t change my choice!”

Ethan continued to mock, “Oh, this time it’s a stubborn choice, but still a foolish one.” He rested his hands behind his head and began, “First, the reason Henry Clark went to the school is simple: Walter Reed asked him to.”

“Why?” Samuel Grant asked.

“That will be explained after I finish the general situation,” said Ethan. “Walter Reed had decided from the start to kill and silence him. That day, he deliberately stayed out late before going home. After the students on duty and the janitors had left, he tampered with the sliding window on the first floor. All it took was a strip of clear tape—no matter which side you looked from, it seemed closed, but in reality, there was a tiny gap before it was fully locked.

At ten o’clock that night, he called Henry Clark, then took the tools he’d prepared for the murder and headed to the school.

Henry Clark arrived not long after. He wasn’t stupid—he thought it was very suspicious to be called to an empty school in the middle of the night. But Walter Reed had mentioned a large sum of money on the phone, and greed got the better of Henry Clark.

The door to the teachers’ office slides open to the side. Walter Reed strung a wire across the doorway, fifteen centimeters above the floor, behind the door. Turning on the lights openly was out of the question, so in the dim light, when Henry Clark opened the door, he could only vaguely see the cash box on the desk. As expected, he got excited and stepped forward, immediately tripping over the wire. Hiding in the shadowy corner behind the door, Walter Reed pounced, pinned him down with his weight to keep him from getting up, then quickly pressed his knee against the back of Henry Clark’s neck and strangled him with a rope.

With this method, the force of strangulation is pulled upward from below, and the counterforce pins the victim to the ground. Even someone with average strength could strangle someone much stronger than themselves. For the burly Walter Reed, killing the frail Henry Clark was easy.

After Henry Clark stopped breathing, Walter Reed hung him up. That wasn’t too much effort for him, either. He tidied up the steel wire at the scene, checked and cleaned any footprints left in high places, and put anything that could be evidence into the empty cash box he’d brought. Walter Reed had pulled off a pretty decent murder.

But the problem was, just as he closed the door and was about to leave, he heard you coming upstairs.”

The more Samuel Grant listened, the more terrified he became. A murder had just been recounted by Ethan in such a casual tone. “So Walter Reed hid in the dark to watch me?”

Ethan said, “That’s right. In fact, he even considered killing you at the time, but in the end, he didn’t. You did well not to scream or do something like leave waste in the hallway—you just did some unnecessary things, and Walter Reed didn’t bother with you anymore. After all, he’d covered his tracks perfectly.” Ethan took another sip of coffee. “Of course, I think if he hadn’t been so meticulous before, he might have just gone ahead and killed you too. It was precisely because he’d so successfully staged Henry Clark’s death as a suicide that he didn’t want to complicate things further.”

Thinking back to the terrifying scenes of that night, and now knowing that there had been a pair of hands in the darkness that could have killed him at any moment, Samuel Grant was understandably filled with dread, cold sweat breaking out down his back.

Ethan continued, “Now let’s go back to the original question: why did Walter Reed ask Henry Clark to go to the school?

Actually, from what I just said, you should be able to guess most of it. Henry Clark, that guy… he was indeed trying to blackmail Walter Reed. After all, the other party was the son of a big hospital director, and his family was very wealthy.

Walter Reed’s weakness fell into Henry Clark’s hands, but Henry Clark didn’t dare to blackmail his father directly, so he told Walter Reed, ‘Steal your family’s bankbook, or beg your father, whatever works.’ Words like that. In the end, it led to this murder.”

Samuel Grant asked again, “What was the weakness? And how did Walter Reed end up being killed? Who wanted him dead?”

Ethan stroked his chin and said nonchalantly, “The weakness? Hmm… what was it? Maybe something that happened on September 4th last year.”

Chapter 7: An Earlier Customer

December 13th, 10 a.m.

White fluorescent lights stretched along the ceiling, and the walls on both sides of the corridor were also white.

Every time he walked this way, Owen Brooks felt his eyes were uncomfortable. He took out his usual sunglasses from his jacket pocket and put them on, continuing forward. The closer he got to the room at the end, the stronger the distinctive smell of chemicals and the inescapable stench of corpses became.

Inside the morgue, Henry Clark’s body lay across the autopsy table. The cart beside it was covered with bloodstained tools, and the basin on the floor was filled with all sorts of foul-smelling bodily fluids.

When Owen Brooks entered, he didn’t see anyone, but there was the sound of running water from the washroom inside. He stood in the center of the room and waited for a while, and then Edwin Carter pushed the door open and came out of the washroom.