Chapter 209: The Real Killer

Hearing Lin Ranhai’s words, Su Yaxi silently praised her own cleverness.

When she had gone downstairs earlier, she hadn’t taken the elevator, but the stairs instead.

The reason she had avoided the elevator’s security camera was that she had snuck out without her parents’ knowledge.

Her parents were already asleep at that hour. She had slipped out quietly, avoiding the elevator camera to ensure they wouldn’t find out later that she had snuck out at night.

She wanted to prevent anyone from knowing she’d gone out.

And it was precisely this decision, made in advance, that ironically became the key to her evading the investigation.

When she went back, as long as she didn’t take the elevator and used the stairs again to return home...

...then everything would be fine.

The elevator’s camera footage would only show her returning home in the afternoon.

Furthermore, her parents already thought she was asleep. As long as she didn’t wake them when she got home, no one would ever know she had gone out in the middle of the night.

Even if she did disturb her parents, Su Yaxi was confident they would never betray her.

As long as outsiders couldn’t find out she’d left at night, and the elevator footage could prove she *hadn’t* left, everything would be safe.

Most importantly, her actions were logically consistent.

If she had deliberately avoided the cameras to go out and kill Su Yuqing, then she should have been the one to prepare the murder weapon.

But neither she nor her parents had any record of purchasing that type of fruit knife.

Even if the police were to investigate her...

...the part about the murder weapon wouldn’t make sense.

Because assuming Su Yaxi premeditated the murder meant assuming she had made adequate preparations.

The murder weapon must have been provided by her.

If Su Yaxi hadn’t premeditated the murder and had no intention of committing the crime, then why would she have been so deliberately secretive when leaving home? Why deliberately avoid the elevator?

Therefore, without conclusive evidence...

...and without a reasonable cause for suspicion, Su Yaxi’s age was her shield.

Even if there was an exceptionally brilliant detective on the force who decided to suspect her...

...they would run into the two logical contradictions mentioned above.

After all, there was no camera footage of Su Yaxi taking the elevator to leave the building after she returned home that afternoon.

It would be very difficult for the police to suspect Su Yaxi out of thin air. To suspect her without cause, they would have to presuppose she had premeditated the crime, which would be her reason for deliberately avoiding the cameras.

The problem would just circle back around to the murder weapon.

This was the most difficult part of the case and the biggest reason her name could be cleared.

Namely, it was hard for anyone to imagine that the murder weapon had been provided by the victim, Su Yuqing, herself.

This fundamentally interfered with the police’s line of investigation from the very beginning.

Furthermore, Su Yuqing had barely struggled when she died. After all, she was already lost in absolute despair. Even as she was being killed, she was in a state free of worldly cares. As a result, not much information could be gleaned from the crime scene. The torrential downpour that relentlessly washed over the area only made the clues even more scarce.

Trying to deduce, from such faint clues and such an outrageous sequence of events, that the culprits were two people who shouldn’t have even been at the scene...

...was simply too difficult.

A case born from such a series of coincidences, especially one where the victim provided the weapon, was a hundred times harder to solve than a truly perfectly planned crime.

Normally, even if a victim provided the weapon, there would usually be a struggle with the killer, who would then snatch the weapon away to commit the murder. In that scenario, signs of a struggle would be left on the body and hands, making it easier for the police to consider the possibility that the victim had brought the weapon.

But in Su Yuqing’s case, she died with almost no struggle. It didn’t look at all like a victim who had brought a weapon, had it stolen from them, and was then killed in a failed rape attempt.

The second reason the police found this case so difficult to crack was the testimony from that passerby.

He had fabricated a story about a pervert running away after a rape attempt, which severely derailed the police’s initial line of investigation.

After hearing Su Yaxi say she hadn’t taken the elevator when she left...

...Chen Mo had a moment of realization.

No wonder the investigation showed that no one from Su Yaxi’s family had left the house after Su Yuqing did.

They could essentially be ruled out as suspects.

And in the subsequent investigation, they were fully cooperative, answering every question asked. As people with nothing to hide, it was naturally very easy for them to clear themselves of suspicion.

Since Lin Shiyu and Su Chengfeng weren’t suspects, the probability of someone Su Yaxi’s age committing a crime on such a rainy night was even lower.

Unless one had an omniscient perspective, no one would suddenly suspect Su Yaxi—a girl whose departure wasn’t even caught on camera—especially after a witness had testified it was a murder following a failed rape.

The two people guilty of manslaughter each had their own alibi.

Neither had any thought or plan of premeditated murder.

And there was no evidence to be found that either of them had prepared a weapon.

Naturally, they were extremely difficult to identify as suspects.

After they finished their discussion and composed themselves, they left one after the other.

At this point, Chen Mo finally understood the full picture of the case and the reasons it was so difficult to solve.

First, fate was on their side; the torrential downpour washed away all traces of evidence.

Second were two coincidences: Lin Ranhai happened to have invited a female classmate (his future girlfriend) over that day, and the cunning Su Yaxi, with her overly complicated thoughts, deliberately avoided the elevator when she left, leaving no surveillance record of her outing.

Third, the murder weapon was brought by Su Yuqing herself and had nothing to do with the two of them. Besides her, no one else knew she was carrying that knife.

When these three factors combined, and with the police unable to obtain most of this information, it naturally became an extremely difficult case to solve.

What’s more, one of the culprits was a criminal with a high IQ.

She had already seen through the police’s entire investigative path.

This made the already extremely difficult path of investigation several times harder for the police.

Watching their retreating figures, Chen Mo was suddenly filled with a sense of desolation.

’I never expected things to turn out this way.’

’But on second thought, it really is an answer that’s both unexpected and perfectly logical.’

But under these circumstances, Chen Mo couldn’t even pinpoint who the killer was.

In the instant Lin Ranhai grabbed Su Yaxi’s arm, the knife happened to slice across Su Yuqing’s neck.

’Who was the real killer?’

’Was it Lin Ranhai? Or Su Yaxi?’

There was no definite answer.

But in reality, Su Yuqing had already died long before they came along.

It was just that the killers who had condemned Su Yuqing to death before that were far more hidden, far more impossible to bring to justice.

The real culprits who killed her were her broken family, her mentally broken mother, and that beast of a father who could treat his own daughter with such indifference.

It was I, who had failed to see just how deep her despair ran, and who hadn’t been there to pull her back from the edge at the very end.

Compared to the hatred he felt for the two accidental killers, Lin Ranhai and Su Yaxi, what filled Chen Mo’s heart more was a deep loathing for the people who had truly forced Su Yuqing to this dead end.

Just as this painful thought crossed his mind, a small, cold hand gently touched his cheek.