novellhall Chapter 729 Key Witness!
Chapter 729 Key Witness!
Then another person flashed by—the "old lady" who always said she was unwell and insisted on being near the elevator.
There is another person: Raphael Thorne, who is on the registration list and lives in a detached house. Until now, he has only existed on the list and mentioned once or twice at the front desk. No one has really described his whereabouts today.
“Where is Raphael Thorne?” Lynn asked.
The sheriff immediately looked at the deputy sheriff. The deputy sheriff's expression changed: "Half an hour ago, the front desk said that no one answered the door at the detached house, and they thought the guest had gone out for a walk."
“Go now,” Lynn said.
As the police car and the estate's patrol vehicle drove towards the edge of the woods where the detached house was located, dusk was already approaching. Greyridge Estate was nestled against the mountain, and as the sun dipped low, the shadows of the trees and houses stretched long, edging the ground with cold blue edges. Gwen was still in the fifth-floor meeting room. Lynn only had time to send a policewoman over to tell her, "The suspicion has been cleared; you can stay put." He didn't say more, because he knew that as soon as Gwen heard the word "cleared," she would understand what it meant—a third person's skeleton had appeared at the scene, and it wasn't just a figment of her imagination.
The four detached cottages are located along the treeline behind the main building, spaced far apart. Raphael lives in the one closest to the slope, with a rented dark green Jeep parked in front of it, covered in mud, as if it had actually been out during the day.
As the sheriff got out of the car, his hand was already on his holster: "Be careful, everyone."
Lynn, however, noticed a detail on the wooden steps leading to the door—there was cigarette ash, but not just one kind. Light gray cigarette ash mixed with darker cigar ash. In the corner of the steps was a flattened coffee cup lid, from the resort's breakfast bar.
“Someone has been here,” he said.
"When?" the deputy sheriff asked.
“This afternoon, and more than one.” Lynn went up and pressed the doorbell, but there was no response. He then knocked. “Raphael! Open the door!”
There was no movement inside.
The sheriff tilted his head toward one of the officers. The officer took a step back, about to ram the door, but the door opened gently from the inside first.
The door was only a crack open.
A male voice came from inside, low and steady: "I suggest you don't make such a commotion."
Lynn stood at the front and glimpsed a man's eyes through the crack in the door. The eyes were pale, and their emotion was almost nonexistent. The person behind the door didn't immediately reveal their entire face, but instead raised one hand to a position where they could see it, while the other hand was clearly still behind the door.
The sheriff had already drawn his gun: "Hands up."
The door slowly opened a little more. Behind it stood a man in his thirties, of medium height, wearing a dark gray wool sweater and black work pants. His face was remarkably clean, even his stubble was neatly trimmed. He didn't look like a tourist at the resort, nor like a leisurely writer taking a break. There was something about him that was too reserved, as if every action had been carefully planned in his mind.
“Raphael Thorne?” the sheriff asked.
"Yes, that's what it says on the registration," the man said.
"Come out from behind the door."
The man did as he was told. In his right hand, there was no gun, only a door sensor the size of a silver coin, which he calmly placed on the entryway cabinet.
“You’ve saved us the trouble of searching,” the sheriff said.
Raphael glanced at him, then looked at Lynn: "What is the Federation doing here?"
"Let's see how far you go in your acting," Lynn said.
Raphael's lips twitched, a smile that seemed like it, but it wasn't. He stepped aside: "You'd better come in first. The one on the ground is bleeding heavily."
Everyone paused for a moment.
There was a faint smell of blood in the living room. Beside the carpet, Thomas, the fake old lady's—no, now she should be called Rachel's—accomplice, was supposed to be in the police car, but the person lying on the floor wasn't Thomas, it was Ben Cardenas.
Ben lay on his side beside the sofa, a long gash cut into his shoulder, blood soaking a large patch of his dark sweater. His face was deathly pale, but his eyes were still open. When he saw Lynn enter, he seemed to both breathe a sigh of relief and want to curse.
“I knew it…” he said, his voice slightly weak, “I knew you would turn this place upside down.”
"Shut up." Lynn had already knelt down next to him, pressing on the bleeding spot under his shoulder. "Who did this?"
“It wasn’t him.” Ben gritted his teeth and tilted his head toward Raphael. “At least not… just now.”
The sheriff immediately glanced at Raphael: "Speak."
Raphael raised both hands more emphatically: "Half an hour ago, this man burst into my room and said that something Violet left behind might be here with me. Before I could even ask him anything, a woman cut him off through the window."
“Rachel?” Lynn asked.
“If it’s that fake old lady you just arrested,” Raphael said, “then it’s her.”
Ben cursed, his forehead covered in sweat from the pain: "She didn't come to kill me at all. She came to search the house, and I just bumped into her."
The sheriff told the deputy sheriff to call for an ambulance, while he stared at Raphael with his gun at him and asked Ben, "What are you doing here?"
Ben took a breath: "Because I told one last lie."
Lynn's men didn't loosen their grip: "Now tell me."
“Last night, before Violet went back to her room, she slipped something to me.” Ben closed his eyes. “It wasn’t the silver box, it was a room key and a sentence. She said that if she didn’t contact me by nine o’clock in the morning, I should go find ‘R’ at the detached house. I asked why, and she said, ‘Because he will definitely look for the half that I didn’t bring first.’”
The sheriff cursed, "You're only telling me now?"
"I fucking thought she was playing some kind of spy game!" Ben's voice rose, his shoulder injury immediately causing him to tremble. "She died this morning, how was I supposed to know that if I told you, you guys wouldn't immediately label me an accomplice!"
Lynn asked, "Where is the other half?"
Ben looked at Raphael.
Raphael sighed softly: "Finally, it's my turn to speak?"
“It’s your turn to explain why the deceased pointed the finger at you,” the sheriff said.
Raphael leaned against the entryway cabinet, surprisingly cooperating: "Because she originally came to see me. Or to be more precise, she came to see something belonging to my former employer."
“Speak like a human being,” the sheriff said.
“Six months ago, internal project data from a military outsourcing company was leaked. Some of it wasn’t weapon blueprints, but a client list, test range coordinates, and several shipment records that shouldn’t have existed,” Raphael said. “Violet isn’t her real name; she was acting as a middleman for this data. She was supposed to hand over the complete package, but she found that neither the buyer nor the seller intended for her to finish the job alive, so she split it into two parts.”
Lynn looked at him: "Are you the buyer or the seller?"
“No, not at all. I’m a former employee who was pushed out to clean up the mess,” Raphael said. “I arranged to meet her here because she thought the resort was quiet, less crowded, and not in a city that anyone usually watches. She suddenly changed her mind after arriving last night, feeling that someone had stepped in first.”
“Someone,” Lynn said, “referring to Rachel and Thomas.”
Raphael nodded. "I've met Rachel once before, but we're not friends. She does the dirty work for people higher up. I only learned Thomas's name today, but the moment I saw his wiring habits and the locations of the surveillance cameras, I knew there was an inside man here."
The sheriff said coldly, "You still haven't told me where the other half is."
Raphael looked at an old wooden chess box under the coffee table.
“Here.” The deputy sheriff immediately stepped forward and opened it with his gloves. Inside wasn’t a chess piece, but a disassembled chessboard-shaped compartment. Embedded within the compartment was half a black storage module, about the size of a fingernail, with sealant around its edges.
The sheriff's expression changed instantly: "You've been carrying this thing around, but you haven't called the police?"
Raphael said calmly, "Before calling the police, I need to make sure the person coming to get it doesn't want me to disappear with them."
Lynn asked, "What about the half that Violet took up this morning?"
“It’s either Rachel or Thomas,” Raphael said.
The deputy sheriff had already gone over and searched the travel bag by the entrance. In less than ten seconds, he pulled out a small, transparent evidence bag containing half a module of the same size.
"It was found in a doormat bag," the deputy sheriff said.
The sheriff stared at Raphael: "You didn't run away."
“Because you came faster than I expected,” Raphael said, “and by the time Ben barged in, the situation was no longer suitable for running.”
Lynn ignored them and looked down at Ben: "Why did you come to see him?"
Ben's face was still pale, but his eyes were a little blank: "Because last night I was used as a harmless background character by her, and this morning I was almost used as a ready-made substitute corpse. I need to know what kind of lousy show I'm in."
Lynn glanced at him and adjusted the pressure slightly: "You're lucky, just the shoulder. One inch deeper and it would have pierced your lung."
"Thank you, that's really comforting."
The sirens of ambulances could already be heard outside. The sheriff finally lowered his gun slightly and turned to the deputy sheriff, saying, "Take them both back. Raphael is a witness and a key suspect. As for Ben, get him to the hospital first, don't let him die."
Ben gave a weak laugh: "That's really heartwarming."
When Lynn stood up, his shoulders and back felt stiff, and only now did he realize the burning sensation from the thin tear that had brushed against his cuff. He looked down at the thin tear in his coat and remembered Gwen saying that it "sounded like burnt metal, or a very thin burnt smell."
It wasn't an illusion. She didn't do anything wrong from beginning to end.
On the way back to the main building, the sky had completely darkened to the color of the mountains at the boundary between morning and evening. The lights in the lobby were all on, and the guests had been reassured and moved to the restaurant and lounge, their hushed conversations sounding like a blurry background noise. Gwen was still in the fifth-floor meeting room. The policewoman guarding the door, upon seeing them return, first looked at the sheriff, then at Lynn, seemingly already discerning the outcome from their expressions.
"Can I go in now?" Lynn asked.
This time, the sheriff didn't stop him; he just said, "I'll go in in two minutes too."
When Lynn pushed open the door, Gwen was sitting in her original spot, the cup of hot water beside her now replaced with a second one. She looked up when she heard the door open, first at his face, then at the tear in his sleeve, and her brows immediately furrowed.
"Who cut you with the thread?"
“You have a really good nose,” Lynn said.
Gwen stared at him: "Don't move. What's it like outside?"
Lynn closed the door, walked over and sat down opposite her: "Your suspicion has been basically cleared."
Gwen's fingers paused on the rim of the glass, and she didn't speak immediately. She seemed to slowly process each word of the sentence in her mind, confirming it wasn't just comforting, before gently exhaling.
“What does ‘basic’ mean?” she asked.
“It means,” Lynn looked at her, “that we now have evidence that the service corridor has been tampered with, the fake old lady in 608 has been confirmed to be an imposter, the equipment layer surveillance footage has been deleted, remnants of the high-temperature wire used to fix the body have been found on the northwest corner return grid, and similar traces have been found on the wound tools. You were there, but you weren’t the only one. When you found the body, she had already been dead for some time.”
Gwen slowly leaned back in her chair, her shoulders finally relaxing a little. Not completely, but the tension that had been building up since morning was finally lessening.
“Where’s Thomas?” she asked.
"They've arrested them. The fake old lady has also been arrested."
"Did she do that to your sleeve?"
"Ah."
Gwen stared at the opening for two seconds, her eyes turning cold: "I should have kicked her."
"We'll start queuing up after she's sentenced."
Gwen actually smiled this time, briefly and faintly, but at least it was a smile. After she finished smiling, she asked, "So what exactly happened?"
Lynn recounted the entire route from the rooftop to the detached cabin to her, bit by bit. When she mentioned the book cover, Gwen murmured, "I knew it." When she mentioned the return grating and the body being secured, her face paled slightly, but she didn't look away. It wasn't until she mentioned Thomas being exposed in the monitoring room, Ben being injured in the cabin, and Raphael having that half-module that she truly realized this was no longer an ordinary manor murder, but a pre-arranged finale from the very beginning.
“So the look she gave me last night,” Gwen said softly, “was an assessment of whether I was clean enough and suitable to take the blame.”
"Correct."
"And she probably heard me say I'd be coming this morning."
"Correct."
Gwen paused for a moment, looking down at the steam rising from her cup: "The most annoying thing in the world is being looked at by a stranger and then having your life decided for what to do with them."
Lynn didn't say anything.
Gwen looked up at him: "Right now, do you really want to drag out every single person in this manor with the surname R and beat them all up?"
“We’ve moved past that stage,” Lynn said.
"So, what stage are you at now?"
"I want to let you go downstairs to eat freely first, without the policewoman following you."
Gwen stared at him, her lips twitching slightly. "That sounds a lot like my brother."
"That's who I am."
There was a knock at the door. The sheriff pushed the door open, holding a draft report. He saw the brother and sister both looking up at him, and coughed, as if he wasn't used to making such announcements.
“Miss Gwen,” he said, “based on the current physical evidence and the statements of the newly arrested suspects, you are no longer the main suspect in this case. The official statement will be ‘discoverer and key witness.’ You’d better not leave the manor until we’ve completely wrapped things up, but not in the way of being under guard.”
Gwen looked at him: "So, you mean I finally don't have to stay in this house like a dog waiting to be picked up?"
The sheriff paused for a moment, then surprisingly nodded: "More or less."
Gwen finally put down her cup and straightened her back for the first time: "Thank you. Although your comment this morning, 'both the witnesses and the suspects are established,' was still really annoying."
The sheriff touched his nose: "I'll keep that statement as reasonable at the time."
"I also reserve the right to kick you out now." (End of Chapter)