When Alfred came over, I just asked Aisuen to go upstairs to change her clothes... because she was only wearing a nightgown and definitely couldn't meet outsiders, but I didn't think that Alfred might have come over just to find her!
The more he thought about it, the more he felt that this was the case, because it was a very simple logic: the feud between him and Nian Lun started almost a week ago. Even if we count from the day she led people to seal up the newspaper, four days have passed. During these four days, she has lived in No. 221 for almost two days. Why did Alfred have to come to talk to her tonight when he could not come at any other time?
Perhaps he got the news that Aisuen returned to the capital with him, and he mainly wanted to talk to Aisuen about something.
But Aisuen was just sent away by me, so he chatted with me about all sorts of things and even ate slowly - all to buy time!
"He wants to ask me for something," Hitzfeld whispered. "It has to be told to me in private, and it will make me feel embarrassed."
Li Ang was stunned. He glanced at Agent Dorey who was helping to put away the books at the door, and asked, "Are you sure?"
"There's no 100% speculation, but the reality is that he came back and committed suicide directly."
Hitzfeld glanced at the body on the table.
The autopsy has not started yet, but having seen so many dead bodies and having a girlfriend who is a police officer, she has learned how to judge the time of death from some details of the body.
It was what happened shortly after Alfred returned from Iris Street.
He wanted to find her, but failed... She guessed that it was something very important to him, but it would make her very embarrassed and it was extremely against his personal principles.
So he felt even more uneasy and guilty. Perhaps on the way back he kept asking himself why he had made this trip. The accumulated emotions finally overwhelmed his rationality, prompting him to choose to say goodbye to them in this way.
What could it be?
Li Ang and Xia Yibing stopped talking. They both began to wonder what Alfred wanted to do by visiting her, if that was what the girl had speculated.
"I don't have much interaction with him." Hitzfeld whispered, "I guess there are only two directions. One is related to Lilith-Gree. Maybe he was not coerced, but just wanted to make some requests... For example, ask me where her body is buried. Or, let me give you a less respectful example, he may hope to be buried with his wife after his death..."
"Then this is a simple suicide case." Li Ang glared, "If that's the case, the case can be closed immediately!"
"Yes, but there is another direction."
"External interference?"
"Maybe there is someone..." Hitzfeld sighed, "someone who is very important to him, a ghost that even the Security Bureau's intelligence system cannot find... He found him recently and asked him to do something through this relationship, and this something includes coming to see me."
Xia Yibing frowned: "Can't it be an organization?"
"An organization that can hold a huge secret meeting in Port Wayne and threaten Shadow Lion Agents without being discovered - do you think this is possible?"
"It's hard to say during the Villefort period, but now." Xia Yibing grinned, "Impossible!"
"In comparison, the movement of an individual - a person will make much less noise." Hitzfeld nodded, "It is easier to hide when acting alone. If Alfred cooperates, this can be concealed."
Li Ang glared again: "So he really betrayed me?"
"Oh, that depends on how the search for the newspaper turns out."
As he was speaking, there was a hurried noise coming from downstairs.
A slightly younger agent ran up. He might not have seen Xia Yibing come in when he was downstairs. He originally wanted to report to Li Ang, but was suddenly stunned when he found that the director was also here.
"Just tell me what you found."
Xia Yibing took her hair down and tied it into a high ponytail again.
This is her fighting stance.
She likes to wear her hair in a low ponytail when working, and recently she has fallen in love with women's buns. But a high ponytail is always her first choice when handling cases and fighting.
She has long been used to it.
She is most comfortable with this hairstyle.
"It's like this..." The young agent stammered as he recounted his findings.
It turned out that they searched every corner but didn't find any newspapers, but they found a stack of brand new envelopes under the sofa in the living room.
Here comes the problem: Before Dolly moved in, Alfred had always lived alone. He didn't have any close friends, so he didn't need to write letters frequently. These envelopes were very suspicious.
"Where's the post office?" Xia Yibing asked, "Can we retrieve the mail records?"
It would be impossible in other cities because the work would be too onerous. But Yongen District is a wealthy area, and considering that the rich would worry about their letters being intercepted, they opened a post office in the neighborhood to deliver letters to people.
That would reduce the workload a lot, and with the record keeping mechanism set up to prevent theft, if any letter is mailed from No. 306, the record should be found in the neighborhood post office.
With urgent hope, the group quickly went to the door of the post office.
After finding a way to open the door lock and calling the person in charge and employees, we finally found a record at around 3:00 .
"Sender: Yong'en District, Yong'en Road, No. 306."
Xia Yibing pressed the characters with her fingers and read out syllable by syllable.
"The address is at Crossroad No. 13, Xianshui Road, Changning District."
Chapter 31: Tracking All the Way
"Gone?"
After reading this line, Xia Yibing picked up the entire notebook and flipped through the pages quickly. No matter how hard she searched, she could not find a second similar piece of information.
"He couldn't have sent just this one letter!" Li Ang said, "He bought so many envelopes! Three sets in total, and one set is already half used! He must have sent out at least 12 letters!"
A set of envelopes contains 24 sheets, half of which is 12 envelopes.
Hitzfeld looked at Mr. Kossori, the head of the Yongen District, and asked him, "Are all the records here?"
Mr. Corsalis said with a sad face: "I'll stake my life on it - here's all I can find!"
"Where do you usually keep your information?"
"On the table, inside the drawer."
“Is there a lock on the drawer?”
"No."
"Is there anyone keeping watch tonight?"
“If it’s just the office, then no.”
"That means if someone can find a way to get around the sentry at the door and sneak in, he can easily steal the information."
"That's impossible! We will check! We can find out if there's any missing information! Because the date and time won't match!"
"What if the thief didn't steal anything but just changed the content?"
"this--"
Kaosoli was now speechless.
But the problem is that they are just a neighborhood post office, right?
There are post offices like this everywhere. They just record letters. Who would have the spare time to do such a thing?
"Are all your information books the same?" Xia Yibing thought of something and asked Kaoshaoli while holding the book.
Kaosoli nodded: "Yes... office supplies are all purchased in bulk, so we can get discounts... the price is lower..."
"That means every file record is the same book, and they come from the same manufacturer."
"Is such that."
"Aisun." Xia Yibing turned around and called the girl, then handed her the two notebooks in her hand: "Take a look, the page number is wrong."
Hitzfeld took the notebook and flipped through it for a while, and found that one of the notebooks was missing three pages.
"It was torn off." She said softly, turning it back to look at the spine and found that this kind of book had no spine, they were strung together with iron rings.
“…and it is the most convenient structure to be torn off.”
Following this line of thought, she went back and looked through it again. This time, she easily found that the records in the middle had traces of re-transcription.
The handwriting was obviously forged, and the postal employees had no ability to decipher it, so there must have been a lot of records of mailings from No. 306 that were erased.
Even if Kosoli was slow-witted, he knew that this was a serious matter. He took out a handkerchief to wipe his sweat and tried to defend himself: "I swear I didn't know anything about this!"
"My daily job is to come here and supervise my employees! I haven't even been to this office this week! If something really happened, it has nothing to do with me! Please believe me! I never meant to hurt anyone!"
"Don't get excited, sir. We didn't say it had anything to do with you."
After comforting the other party, the group came out of the post office and found that it was almost dawn.
"Could it be him?"
Agent Dorey asked nervously.
Her suspicion has not been completely ruled out, and she is also very concerned about the truth behind Alfred's suicide, so naturally she follows along.
"It's not him." Xia Yibing rejected it. "I asked him to sign the execution form at the beginning. At that time, we hadn't discussed what we were going to do. His writing habits don't match the forged handwriting."
“Is that a postal employee?”
"…It's possible, but I don't think that person would be stupid enough to find a stable job that would allow him to identify himself immediately if he disappeared."
"Then he is most likely an unemployed vagrant." Li Ang raised his eyebrows. "This kind of person is the most difficult to investigate."
Unemployed people...
Hitzfeld's eyebrows jumped, and he suddenly asked, "The intersection of No. 13 Xianshui Road, where exactly is this place?"
"you ask me?"
Li Ang stared at her in surprise: "Didn't you just go there this morning?"
what?
Hitzfeld opened his mouth slightly, and then suddenly realized - could this intersection be the one she encountered this morning when she walked left along the burglarized shop?
So it's the intersection with the abandoned corner tower diagonally opposite?
The place they guessed was filled with homeless people, gangsters, and vagrants!
How could that be?
"Call a taxi." Xia Yibing immediately ordered the person beside him, "Also contact Lori as soon as possible and ask him to meet me at the intersection of No. 13 Xianshui Road!"
Driven by the grumpy sheriff himself, Hitzfeld saw the familiar Ross Gold Crown logo again before daybreak.
She felt very heavy at the moment, because she really didn't expect, or didn't want to think that the people who threatened Alfred wanted him to talk to her about something that would be related to the theft of Ross's golden crown.
No matter how you look at it, this is just a fairly common case of a burglary in a locked room.
Among the stolen items, there was nothing that could be linked to poltergeists or the supernatural—at least that was what outside intelligence had been told.
Isn't it that the prisoner only wants money?
If it was this group of prisoners who pushed Alfred to commit suicide, then what did they want him to talk to her about?
Let her stop?
But she had never intended to devote much energy to this case. Wouldn't this make her care more?
"I think they might be afraid of your fame."
Li Ang gave his opinion, "If it was before, it might not be the case, but now you are an earl, your fame has spread further, and there are very few people who don't know you."
"What you mean is," Xia Yibing looked back with a bad face, "the senior agent of the Security Bureau secretly made friends with a group of thieves, and is willing to risk his lifelong reputation to plead for them?"
"Uh……"
Li Ang opened his mouth.
Indeed, he himself found it too magical.
It shouldn’t…it shouldn’t have developed like this.
"And then he didn't get the favor, and he was so embarrassed." Xia Yibing didn't let him go, and laughed while driving: "It's so embarrassing and shameful, he might as well just shoot himself."
"Stop talking!" Li Ang's face flushed red. "I'm crazy, okay?"
"Oh!" In order to ease the embarrassment, he simply leaned back on the cushion and closed his eyes.
"I've been sleeping in the water for too long... I can't read the case anymore!"
Hitzfeld did not expose his shameless behavior of putting the blame on the Pierre. After the car stopped, she got out first and made sure that the place where she was standing was the place where they stopped last time they explored here.
She was also standing at this position at that time, looking diagonally across, that is, at the opposite corner of the intersection, where there was an abandoned archway that was pitch black and looked eerie and dilapidated just by looking at its appearance.
That's it... huh?
However, with such a general address as Crossroads 13, who is it for and how can that person trust it?
With this thought in mind, she turned her gaze to the bookstore behind her.
