Chapter 83 The Truth

“Why are you here?”

“Why am I here?”

Pipe narrowed his eyes.

Unbidden, a man’s seductive voice echoed in his mind.

“Our common enemy is in the City Investigation Division.”

“You… don’t you want to do something?”

That voice, like the whisper of a devil, so easily ignited the hatred he’d suppressed for fifteen years.

“If I’m not mistaken, Pipe, your presence here wasn’t arranged by the production team at all, was it?”

Su Qingzhu’s beautiful eyes sharpened, and she pressed on instinctively, “Then who was it?”

“Heh!”

Chen Yu chuckled softly and uttered a name.

“A pitiable soul, blinded by hatred, just like him.”

“Zhang Fu!”

At the mention of the name, the air in the interrogation room froze again.

All color drained from Shen Tao’s refined features.

He knew he’d lost—utterly and completely.

“To be honest, at first I really thought you were just a blade Zhang Fu had bought with a heavy price.”

“After all, the role of ‘detective’ is the perfect disguise, isn’t it?”

“But me, I have a bad habit—my curiosity is insatiable.”

Chen Yu leisurely pulled out his phone.

With practiced ease, he opened Green Bubble. The interface showed a girl with rainbow twin-tails as her avatar.

Bubble Girl.

“I asked a hacker friend to… look into you more deeply.”

“And then, some very interesting words just jumped out by themselves.”

“My friend told me your wife is almost a ‘ghost’ in society.”

“A living person who left no social trace.”

“Her last public record is a prenatal checkup at the hospital, fifteen years ago. After that, it’s as if she vanished into thin air—no birth records, no miscarriage records, not even a death certificate… absolutely nothing.”

“A living person—a pregnant woman at that—just disappeared without a trace.”

“So I thought, why is that?”

Chen Yu looked up, his gaze burning into Shen Tao.

“And then, I realized why you’d come here today.”

“Zhang Fu—what gave him the power to enlist such a proud, elite teacher and amateur detective to do his dirty work, to kill and silence?”

“Money?”

Chen Yu snorted.

“I checked your bank statements—clean as a blank sheet of paper. Your life looks so spartan, it borders on ascetic.”

“A man with no desire for material things—how could he kill for money?”

“So there’s only one thing that could drive you.”

“Hatred.”

Chen Yu turned his phone toward Shen Tao, displaying a densely packed shopping list.

“This recent list of your purchases is quite interesting. All chemical supplies. I suspect you handle procurement for the school laboratory, am I right? Slip in what you really want, and no one suspects a thing.”

His finger jabbed at a particular chemical name.

“You think the most conspicuous item here, the one I’d fixate on, is the invisible killer—sarin gas?”

“You’re wrong!”

“As a chemistry teacher, your misdirection is superb—but unfortunately, you met me.”

His voice suddenly rose.

“What really made my hair stand on end was something else!”

“Argon—gas!”

Chen Yu practically shouted the last two words.

Shen Tao’s body flinched violently, visible to the naked eye.

Seeing this, Chen Yu slowly turned to the dumbstruck Su Qingzhu and winked.

“Detective Su, these two words shouldn’t be unfamiliar to professionals like you, right?”

Su Qingzhu’s red lips pressed tight. She struggled to maintain her cool façade, but the trembling of her lashes betrayed the storm raging inside.

“An inert gas… it can effectively isolate oxygen, allowing a corpse… to be preserved for a long time, without decay.”

“Bingo!”

Chen Yu snapped his fingers with flair.

He looked again at Shen Tao, whose face was now ashen, spreading his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“I said I was guessing earlier because I really have no direct evidence that you hid a body.”

“But!”

His tone abruptly shifted, his eyes turning sharp as blades.

“I can’t just accept that so many sensitive, pointed clues—like pieces of a puzzle—are all gathered around you, and pretend to be unmoved!”

He stood, pacing as he called out each word.

“Fifteen years!”

“Pregnant woman!”

“Mysterious disappearance!”

“Argon gas!”

“And… Zhang Fu!”

With each word, Shen Tao’s complexion grew more ghastly.

“When all these clues are strung together, a thought so bold it scares even me took shape in my mind!”

“If I really could search your home, and find the body of your wife, perfectly preserved by chemicals for fifteen years—!”

“Then only the last and most terrifying possibility would remain!”

Chen Yu stopped, fixing Shen Tao’s desperate eyes with a gaze as cold as death, pronouncing each word with grave clarity:

“Your wife was also one of the victims in the ‘Ripper’ case all those years ago!”

Boom!

Su Qingzhu’s mind went blank. Staring at the man’s back before her, she felt as if he was shrouded in an unearthly, bewitching aura.

A madman!

This man was definitely a madman!

What kind of lunatic could deduce a fifteen-year-old hidden-body case and a Ripper mystery from a single bottle of argon gas?!

Yet these seemingly wild theories were, damn it… so perfectly reasonable!

“What a pity…”

Chen Yu looked at the utterly defeated Shen Tao and shook his head, his tone filled with complex emotion.

“I truly underestimated the power of hatred.”

“You and Zhang Fu are both smart—brilliant, even.”

“That business with Lei back then—the flaws were obvious to anyone with eyes! He only confessed under duress, just to end it all with self-harm.”

“With Zhang Fu’s intellect, there’s no way he didn’t see through it!”

“But hatred made him lose all basic reason!”

“It drove him to the terrifying thought of ‘better to kill a thousand by mistake than let one go free!’”

“And you, Teacher Shen Tao,” Chen Yu’s voice turned cold, “you are the most pitiful… casualty of his madness!”

“You… you mean…” Shen Tao raised his head abruptly, hope flickering in his eyes. “You already know who the real killer is?!”

Chen Yu met his gaze without a hint of evasion and nodded slightly.

“Though I don’t yet have direct evidence to nail him—”

“But I know who he is now.”

“And thanks to your involvement, I think I have a better chance of persuading him to turn himself in.”

“Re… really?” Shen Tao’s voice trembled—not with fear, but with the shudder of a soul finally set free after fifteen years of torment.

Chen Yu stared into his eyes and nodded again, solemnly.

“Who is it? Tell me… tell me who the murderer is!” Shen Tao pleaded.

But the next moment, clarity returned to his heart.

By the rules, Chen Yu would never tell him. He understood that well.

“Alright!”

Shen Tao let out a long breath, as if expelling all the resentment, hatred, anguish, and unwillingness pent up for fifteen years.

“Wait!”

Su Qingzhu, who had been struggling to process everything, finally found her voice. Her icy, beautiful face was alight with curiosity.

“How did Shen Tao manage to kill Lei right under Captain Yan’s nose? That part is still unclear!”

Her eyes sparkled as she looked at Chen Yu.

“It’s simple—poison gas,” Chen Yu explained. “Sarin nerve gas, colorless, odorless, highly volatile in liquid state. Once inhaled, it disrupts the central nervous system in minutes, paralyzing the respiratory muscles and causing death by asphyxiation. Most crucially, conventional autopsies rarely detect its traces.”

“But… how did he do it?” Su Qingzhu was still puzzled. “The holding cell’s a sealed room; he couldn’t have smuggled a gas canister in, could he?”

“He relied on this, of course.”

Chen Yu pointed to the evidence-sealed folder on the table.

It was what Shen Tao had brought, the very folder he’d handed Lei during the interrogation for him to examine the “documents” inside.

“This?” Su Qingzhu instinctively reached for it.

But quick as lightning, Chen Yu’s eyes flashed and he seized her slender hand with blinding speed.

“Don’t touch! It’s dangerous!”

He barked the warning with such urgency, it seemed as if some monstrous beast was locked inside that folder.

Su Qingzhu froze, reflexively trying to withdraw her hand, only to find her delicate fingers trapped in a warm, powerful grip—she couldn’t pull free for a moment.

Worse still, that hand was far from well-behaved!

Chen Yu’s fingers expertly kneaded, caressed, and toyed with her smooth, delicate skin…

The sensation was tingling and electric, shooting straight up her arm to her very core.

Su Qingzhu was no fool—how could she not realize this scoundrel was taking advantage of the situation!

Her eternally frosty cheeks instantly bloomed with two flushes of intoxicating red.

The next moment, she snapped back, yanking her hand away with all her strength.

An icy glare, sharp as a blade, slashed across Chen Yu’s face.

You lecher! Scoundrel! Trash!

How could he always be scheming to take advantage of girls, no matter the situation?!

Chen Yu withdrew his hand sheepishly, even raising it to his nose to inhale with an air of satisfaction.

Then, donning a serious face, he said, “Ahem, there are residual toxins inside—don’t touch it, it’s bad for your skin.”

“Hah!”

The long-silent Shen Tao issued a mocking snort at last.

“It’s already completely evaporated. You, ‘Mr. Risen-from-the-Dead,’ know that better than anyone, don’t you?”

He truly couldn’t take it anymore.

This man—brilliant as the devil, endlessly resourceful, yet prone to mischief, and… downright lecherous.

He really is a scoundrel you just can’t bring yourself to hate.