By the time Marcy sends himself Gerald's address in Belvedere disguised as Orin, who Ed is not even sure if there is such a person now, Ed realizes that something bad is wrong. The hotel he was staying in was in a corner of the Belvedere side, and Gerald was living in a modest residential area on the other side, close to the suburbs, and it would take him a long time to drive there right away.

There was no time to delay, Ed left right away. By the time he arrived at the house number of Gerald's address that Marcy had given him, it was already midnight, and a little further back in the middle of the night, he was still about 1,200 push-ups before the sun came out.

Ed pulled over to a low tree on the corner of the street. Now that the season is approaching, and the dwarf trees that used to be densely shaded have begun to shed their leaves, Ed is sure that if he stops here for one night, he will find that he has missed a ticket through the distribution of fallen leaves when the traffic police pass by tomorrow.

In the darkness, Ed looked at Gerald's house from a distance with the streetlights that never went out all night. He couldn't see the color of the house, but he could tell that it was a very large looking house, and the attic was divided into four floors, which was quite small, and it was a bit too spacious if it was for one person. The local gangsters in Belvedere treat their subordinates quite well.

The house with a porch, with a garage, with a yard with a big tree in the yard. Ed didn't study the tree much, but with his simple aesthetic eye, the tree's crooked length was really not pretty.

Then he looked further, and saw that the door of the courtyard seemed to be in an open state. Then he took a closer look, and found that it did not seem to have been opened, but violently broken, and had been struck open from the inside out by a tremendous force.

"Hell!"

Ed slammed his fist on the steering wheel, slammed the door and rushed out of the car, running all the way to the edge of the street in front of Gerald's house, facing the gate of his yard. From this angle, Ed could see something he couldn't see in the car he was sitting in on the corner. Whether Gerald had a car or not, he had a garage anyway, and now that the garage door was open, it was empty like the big mouth of a deep sea troll.

Ed calmed his breath. He was late, and he knew he was late now.

He lifted his glasses, calmly walked through the courtyard, through the porch, all the way to the door, and held the doorknob and twisted it gently. As he expected, the door opened easily. Ed then entered the room. Over the next few minutes, he quickly inspected every corner of the house, even the basement. In fact, because of the extra impact of something he had experienced recently, the basement was the first thing he started checking.

Then, in the bedroom in the corner of the second floor, he discovered what he had expected to find. A corpse. Gerald's body.

The guy who had been putting on Eddard's face during the day was now a dead man. He lay on his back on the bed, his mouth wide open, his eyes staring straight at the ceiling above, his pupils already dilated. There was a bloody hole in his forehead. The gunners did not drag the mud at all.

Ed looked at Gerald, frowned, and then glanced thoughtfully at the bedroom door behind him that had opened when he entered.

Gerald was dressed in clothes, but no shoes on his feet, and the futon was neatly folded on one side. In this way, it seems that when he was sleeping, he just slept there in his clothes, and then woke up when the gun opened the door and entered the house, but at the moment he got up, he was shot through the head and fell back to the bed and died on the spot. This is evident from Gerald's posture and the splattered blood on the wall.

Ed rubbed his nose and sighed inwardly. The game had just begun, and he had already lost a point beautifully.

At that moment, his eyes suddenly caught a glimpse of something. For a moment, he wasn't sure that what he was seeing was really what he was thinking, but he was immediately sure that what he was seeing was really what he was thinking. With a frown, he walked quickly to Gerald's bedside table in two steps, reaching for the photographs on it.

The photo shows a car, and a hotel, and all the photos show only those two things. The car is his car, the hotel is the one he lives in now, and it looks as if the time was photographed shortly after he arrived in the city.

“……”

Ed looked down at the photos in his hand with cold eyes, and then slowly slanted to Gerald on the bed next to him. His gaze and expression looked rude, but Gerald certainly wouldn't make any more protest remarks now. It's a blessing in misfortune.

A low humming sound came from Ed's arms, and someone was calling Eddard. Ed thought it was Marcy, thought she had found something again, and it should be something very important, otherwise she wouldn't have contacted him so quickly and in such a hurry, and when she sighed at the efficiency of this old friend, she took out her phone and realized that she had made a mistake. Not Marcy, it's an unfamiliar number.

A very familiar and unfamiliar number.

“……”

Ed pursed his lips, put the photo in his hand back on the table, and put the phone to his ear.

"Good evening, detective." The person on the other end of the line seemed to be driving, and Ed could hear the whistling wind. The wolf's voice sounded so pleasant that Ed could even imagine him smoking a cigarette in the window while driving the broken car that had crashed out of Gerald's garage.

He silently looked out the bedroom window at the clear and beautiful night sky of Belvedere and did not speak.

"Detective, are you listening?" The wolf asked, raising his voice a little.

"I'm here." Ed said, his voice was soft.

"What's the matter," the wolf chuckled, "and don't dare to speak loudly next to the dead?" ”

A chill rose from the back of my neck. Ed subconsciously turned his head left and right in the room to look around, but did not find any surveillance equipment.

"Take it easy. Please, take it easy. The wolf seemed to be clear about Ed's reaction, "If you freak out, the rest of the game won't be fun." ”

“…… Why him. ”

"What?"

"Gerald." Ed looked at the guy on the big bed next to him, he looked quite peaceful, "You turned him into a statue in the belly of a dead fish." I wonder why. ”

"Roar, looks like you already know who he really is. Move fast enough, detective. How did you do that? I just didn't want you to be red carded soon, but I didn't expect you to jump farther than a rabbit. ”

"I've got my way." Ed deliberately made his voice sound hoarse so that the other party could not hear his emotions, "You haven't answered my question yet. ”

"Do you think I'll answer?"

“……”

"At least it's impossible to answer directly." The wolf snorted helplessly, then grinned again, "Don't be too upset, detective. You still have a chance. ”

“……”

"Mr. Gerald is a small man, an insignificant victim." The wolf sighed, "I pity him, really. He's just a pawn, a poor man, and not the only poor man. But he had to die. I'm helping him out. ”

"I really thank you for him."

"Did I hear a little sarcasm?" The wolf's voice calmed down, "It's okay. Believe it or not, everything I say comes from my heart. I feel sorry for Mr. Gerald, so I will take responsibility to make sure that there is no more poor person like him. ”

After saying that, the wolf hung up the call. Ed heard the voice disappear on the other side and yelled at the phone a few times, but received no response. He took a deep breath, forced himself to calm down, and then returned his gaze to the pictures of his car and hotel on the nightstand.

He put the photograph away and double-checked it to make sure that none of the other were there, and then quickly and neatly restored the whole house to the way it had been when he entered, and returned to his car in the night.

On the way back to the hotel, he almost wanted to just drive all the way back to the city center. He almost did it, but in the end he managed to control himself. The almighty "intermission", a man's decompression artifact.

……

At the same time, in another corner of Belvedere under the cover of night, the evil wolf's mobile phone, which had just finished talking to Ed, suddenly vibrate. He extinguished the halfway cigarette in his mouth in the car ashtray and connected the phone.

"I thought you should get in touch." He said.

"I wonder if you understand what you're doing right now." An apparently processed voice rang out, with a slight graveyard silence, "Are you sure you want to pull that detective into the game?" ”

"I've already done that." The wolf smiled, his eyes in the darkness as bright as a real wolf cub, "Trust me, he will make the ending we want to be truly perfect." ”