Volume 8 Breaking the Ground] Chapter 20 Misguided Reasoning -

Chapter 20: Misguided Reasoning

"Let's sum up the current situation. Dick took the lead.

It was the morning of June 22, and in the police station, Dick, Cezelle, George, and Paper Man sat together to discuss the latest developments in the intimidation case.

In such a situation, Dick would be the first to speak, his experience and ability to handle cases are second to none in the Paris police station, and if he leads the reasoning, many detours can be avoided, and the people's thinking will be clearer.

"The morning before yesterday, Mr. Darden found a letter from a threatener in his mailbox. It is not yet certain that this intimidator may be a person or an organization, so let's call him a 'prisoner' for the time being.

The absence of a stamp or address on the envelope indicates that the letter was not delivered by post, but by the prisoner himself, or that he sent some unrelated person to put the letter in.

According to Mr. Dadan's account, he checked the mailbox when he left work on the 19th, and there was no letter in it at that time, so the time when the threatening letter was delivered should be fixed between 7 p.m. on the 19th and the next morning.

There is a camera in the lobby on the ground floor of the apartment, but the footage is not very clear. According to a preliminary investigation of the footage, only three people had access to Mr. Dardan's mailbox during the time period I have just mentioned. The first guy appeared around 9 p.m., and he sneaked into the building with the other residents, and stuffed advertising leaflets in the mailboxes of each house...... He showed up in the early hours of the morning, and judging from the surveillance footage, he entered the door of the apartment in the normal way, which was the kind of magnetic stripe hanging from the key. Of course, it's not difficult to get this thing, as far as I know, the magnetic stripe scanning lock of the electronic door of this kind of apartment building is very simple, and it is not even as secure as the traditional lock, and you can find a few fake phone card sellers on the street to get that kind of door.

The second person walked into the apartment lobby wearing a dark hoodie and half of his face covered by a hood, and due to the dim lighting, his height and gender could only be determined from the camera footage. This person also seems to know the location of the surveillance probe, covering the mailbox and his own hands with his body as much as possible, and he lingers in the frame for a short time, but he is standing in front of Mr. Dardan's mailbox, and the threatening letter is probably more than ninety percent sent by this person.

As for the third person, it was the postman who came in early in the morning to deliver the letter, which can basically be ruled out. ”

George then added: "By the way, judging from the video, the second person is very similar to the man I met the night before yesterday across from the police station. ”

Dick continued: "I reckon it is very likely that the two are the same person. Through the probe on the street to trace the route of the above three people, only the second person could not be traced, from the street at the door of the apartment to look backwards, you can see that the person came out of an alley, there is no monitoring probe in the alley, but there is a street at the other end of the alley, but there is no picture of him walking into the alley, so it is impossible to continue to push his route backwards. ”

"Maybe he's going up to the roof, climbing the fire ladder, or going down the sewer, or maybe he's picking on the blind spots of the camera and walking on the road without a surveillance camera. George said.

Dick said: "In short, it is certain that this person who sent the threatening letter has a very strong anti-reconnaissance ability, and he is very careful to hide his whereabouts, and the problem that ordinary prisoners may only pay attention to when he escapes, he has already noticed it on the way to the place where the crime was committed." Even if you go to a police officer to do this, you may not be better than him. He paused, then added, "Then let's talk about the letter and the 'head.'" ”

The "head" here does not refer to the head of a creature in the true sense of the word, but to a wooden carving of a human head, the package that Gallas received shortly after he went to work yesterday. He was frightened when he opened it, and this time he was no longer in the mood to do any inspection in the unit, so he directly asked for leave and rushed to the police station with the box. At this point, the case was put on the line, and Dick, George, and Paper Man also took the opportunity to officially intervene. The threatening letter, orange core, and wood carving were all taken to the Forensic Evidence Section for detailed examination.

Dick's statement continued: "The envelope is quite ordinary, but the yellowed letter paper ...... According to the identification, it was actually paper from the end of the 19th century, and the intimidator did not write the contents of the letter by printing or cutting out newspaper impurities, he chose to write it by hand with a pen.

This prisoner likes to use the old ways, and every step he takes is imitating the organization that was founded more than 200 years ago, the Ku Klux Klan, and he is imitating the oldest set of things. The paper, the handwriting, the orange kernel, are all messages he gives us, as if he had traveled directly from the nineteenth century to the twenty-second century. ”

"But what's the point?" said George, lighting another cigarette.

"That's a good question. Dick said: "In my opinion, the 'intimidators' in this case are not an organization, and they are far from the scale of the Ku Klux Klan in the past. One of them may be a smart guy, but not too smart.

Eighty percent of these intimidators are just a group of ordinary people who are not living well, full of grievances, and have certain racist tendencies, and they are not Ku Klux Klan at all, but they are trying to disguise themselves like that, huh...... Do not draw a tiger into an anti-dog.

The Ku Klux Klan in the nineteenth century was not an extreme racist murderer, it was an evolved impression of them. From today's point of view, it was a group of post-war Southern diehards who were unwilling to be defeated, who violently imposed their political views on others, who wanted to limit the civil rights of the liberated blacks, drive out the northerners and Republicans who moved south, and hope that they could return to their old lives through hooligan politics. ”

Paper Man sneered, "Sounds like they want to be nobles." ”

Dick laughed, too: "That's a big deal, I mean, the man in this case, his imitation is nothing more than a form, and he doesn't think it's very good to pick up an old book at some second-hand book stall, tear up a piece of white paper from the nineteenth century, make some articles on the handwriting, and put some orange kernels in the envelope." Judging from the content of the letter, this racist approach is more like what the Ku Klux Klan would do in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He simply used ordinary letter paper and pasted some words cut out of the newspaper to make an ordinary threatening letter, and he didn't put any orange cores, just signed three Ks, then he really looked like a Ku Klux Klan in the later period.

Well...... Let's go back to George, what's the point of him doing this?

There are generally two kinds of prisoners who design and lay out clever tricks, do a lot of obscure detail work, and provide evidence to the police on their own initiative. The first is nothing more than to become famous, and it is obvious that the case in front of us was done by the first kind of person.

We have already analyzed and seen that this person's ability to act and counter-reconnaissance are very strong, and he can almost do nothing in detail, putting all the information and evidence he wants to convey in front of our police, even if he is discovered by the police in an unexpected situation, he can successfully escape.

Would it be difficult for such a person to kill Gallas? The answer is definitely no. He didn't have to send any threatening letters, and it was funny, and the real Ku Klux Klan, I mean the kind of nineteenth-century Ku Klux Klan that he tried so much to imitate, would have asked the other party to change his opinion or leave, but the prisoner didn't say anything like that, he just said, 'You has violated our bottom line of tolerance, this letter means death', it's not a threat, it's a death declaration, according to the content of the letter, he doesn't have anything to get from Mr. Dardan...... Except for life.

But why didn't he just do it? Why did he personally confirm that Mr. Dadan had come to us to report the crime in person across the police station?

Quite simply, he wanted us to get involved, to play games with the police, to be like the well-known criminals in history, to be reported by the media, chased, and even mentioned many years later, and even written in textbooks. ”

"Wait, wait......" Cecair finally couldn't help but interject: "I only have one question, let's say this person is just to be famous, but generally this kind of guy who plays games with the police in order to be famous, doesn't he start by killing people?"

But he hadn't killed anyone at all, he was just intimidating. Even if this prisoner is arrested and imprisoned tomorrow, what is the point of intimidation? The court assigns him a rookie lawyer, and it is impossible for the case to escalate to attempted murder or something, right? Intimidation can sentence him for several years, three years, five years? If the prisoner has no criminal record, he may be able to be suspended and paroled. ”

"It's very contradictory, I feel that if we pay attention to the case, it will be in line with his heart. George spat out the smoke ring and said half-jokingly, "But with conventional means, it seems that we take the lives of the Garas Dardans too seriously." ”

Paper Man said at this time: "Pay attention to the investigation and keep a low profile to the outside world, just have the same attitude as we have on the serial homicide case, and I haven't seen how hot the media has hyped up that case." ”

Dick said: "Yes, the safety of the citizens is the first priority, and it is certainly not right to sacrifice civilians in order to keep the prisoners satisfied." ”

George shrugged his shoulders and asked noncommittally, "I'm curious, what about the second type of person you just mentioned?"

Dick replied: "The kind of person who carries out crime as a goal in life or as an art form, in order to complete his ideal case, even if it doesn't matter if he dies, this kind of person is crazy." Of course, this second type of person generally starts with a murder case, takes the serial killing as the process, starts a game with the police, and finally commits suicide, surrenders, is killed, and gets away with it, basically every one of them has become a character who has been stinking for thousands of years. Anyway, the intimidator we have at hand should not fall into this second category. ”

Paper Man said: "Let's continue to talk about the evidence." ”

Dick nodded and collected his thoughts: "There is no residual saliva of the prisoner on the orange core, and there are no fingerprints on the letter, so far, the other party has not left any useful evidence.

As for that head...... I looked at all the surveillance footage of the building in front of the Louvre, where Mr. Dadan's office was located, and I could confirm that the man posing as the courier was the same guy as the person who delivered the letter in the early hours of the day before yesterday, and the person George met across the street from the police station the night before yesterday. This also corroborates my inference that there is only one person in the other party's eight achievements.

He was bold enough to be in a place like the Louvre during the day, where there were many surveillance probes. In addition, I have to say, pretending to be a courier may be one of the easiest disguises, now most people have a mindset, as if a person only wears a dark suit, wears a cap of similar color to the clothes, it doesn't matter what logo is on the clothes, and a postal bag with a list in the hand with this dress will definitely send the courier, no one will ask the courier to ask for documents to see. Even the doorman at the Louvre was no exception, signing a random slip on a scribbled list and receiving the packet.

So our intimidator swaggered and personally went to Mr. Dardan's place of work to deliver the packet, and it worked.

He must have put on simple makeup, lowered the brim of his hat, put on gloves, and still didn't leave us with facial features or fingerprints. At this point, he picked up a stack of files at hand, looked at the photos and texts and said: "The head in the package is carved from wood, pure handmade, carved into a face similar to Dadan, painted with black paint, the eyes of the wood carving are chiseled, and a white pointed hood is also covered, which is the kind that the Three Klux Klan put on the head in the past, with two holes in the triangle and the position of the eyes, and the hood on this wood carving just exposes the rotten eyes of the wood carving." ”

Putting down the information, Dick continued: "It seems that our prisoner also has a carving trade, and in his current situation, this is an important clue to his identity. ”

"Could the prisoner be a street performer, or a down-and-out artist who has never met a talent, and is not used to being an academic with a high salary?"

George stood up and moved the leg that he sprained yesterday: "Then we need to investigate, the origin of the orange core, the origin of the letter, and the whereabouts of the prisoner are all broken clues." He snuffed out the cigarette butt: "I'll look along the clues carved to find out...... Wood, paint, and the clothes he wore when he was a courier, everything had to have a source, and there was still a place to get it. ”

Paper Man said, "By the way, where is Garas Dardan now?"

He had taken a long leave of absence, and now he should be on his way back to his wife's home, his wife's parents live outside the city, and Mr. Dadan insisted on seeing her off in person, and he was relieved to see her enter the house. "Don't worry, I sent an officer to follow them in the car, and he will report back to me if there is any situation." After sending off his wife, Mr. Dadan will come back to cooperate with all our actions. ”

Before the words fell, Cezelle's mobile phone rang, he picked it up, but he didn't answer it, but when he saw the number, his expression changed......

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