Chapter 8: A Confession Dedicated to Persephone 02
“The shooter’s name is Mark Jones,” said Officer Bart Hardy. The office building had now been cleared out, and they stood inside the chaotic cordon. The injured employee had already been taken away by ambulance, and a large pool of slowly drying blood remained on the ground. “He had some kind of grudge against your employee, right?”
Hestal, as one of the owners of A&H Law Firm—his partner Mr. Holmes was currently on a business trip in Europe and could offer no help at all with this sudden disaster—stood beside Officer Hardy.
Both he and Albanino had stayed behind to give statements. Other forensic examiners and the crime scene investigation team were working at the scene. Olga and Bates were nowhere to be seen; evidently, this kind of shooting case was not yet important enough for these elites to appear.
“That was probably more than half a year ago… but I don’t think that really counts as a grudge.” Hestal recalled, frowning slightly. “Half a year ago, Mr. Jones’s daughter was prosecuted for armed robbery. Our firm’s Davis—the employee who was shot—served as the defense attorney for the defendant in that case. The evidence in that case was clear; there was nothing much to say. In order to get Mr. Jones’s daughter a lighter sentence, Davis entered a guilty plea for the girl.”
“Mr. Jones doesn’t see it that way?” Albanino asked.
Hestal brought out his No. 8 cold snort to deal with that question: “Jones believes his daughter was forced into crime by her boyfriend at the time. He wanted Davis to enter a not-guilty plea, but obviously the jury wasn’t going to see it that way—in the end, Jones’s daughter was only sentenced to three years in prison. That was the best result we could get.”
“Even if that would displease Jones, it wouldn’t lead to this kind of outcome, would it? Besides, you said yourself that all of that happened half a year ago.” Albanino asked in a tone of complete incomprehension.
Just then, Hardy’s phone buzzed—clearly someone had sent him a message. He looked down at his phone for a while, then said, “I know why now: Mark Jones’s daughter is dead.”
Albanino said, “Huh?”
“She died in a small-scale riot at the women’s prison. It was completely an accident. It happened a week ago,” Hardy said.
“That explains it: a desperate father can’t accept his daughter’s accidental death, so he can only shift all the blame onto my employee. In any case, he’s unwilling to take any responsibility for his daughter’s death himself.” Herstal said coldly, making no attempt whatsoever to conceal the trace of contempt in his voice.
“Anyway, that’s all we need for the statement for now. I don’t see any suspense left in this case.” Hardy said dejectedly. Half his mind was probably still preoccupied with the matter of the Sunday Gardener and the Westland Pianist—being made to run this case now was likely something he was very reluctant about. He waved a hand, gesturing for the officer who had been taking the statement earlier to hand the notepad in his hands to Herstal for inspection. “Take a look. If there’s no problem, sign at the bottom and we can head back.”
Herstal took the notepad, along with the pen from the officer’s hand. He had only written a single letter before frowning: “This pen’s out of ink.”
Albanino gave a careless hum, pulled a pen from the pile of papers on the nearby desk, and tossed it to Herstal: “Catch.”
Hestal nimbly raised his right hand and caught the pen with a smack, his agility far more impressive than when he dodged bullets. Albanino stood leaning against the table, watching him sign the transcript with a half-smile, then hand the clipboard back to Officer Hardy.
Interesting, Albanino chewed over every movement of the lawyer in his mind, filing them away into neat categories.
The crime scene was simple, the case clear. By now Hardy’s officers had recorded almost everything they needed. Albanino watched them take down the cordon—meanwhile, Tommy had been sending him text messages for days, complete with cryptic emojis, asking why he still hadn’t come back to work. This was truly awkward. He had thought he could make it back before his lunch break ended.
Just then, Hardy’s phone rang again.
Being a detective was always busy—or perhaps for Hardy, it was simply “exhaustingly busy.” After all, he had been assigned two serial murder cases that had never been solved, so it was understandable. He answered the phone with a stern expression, and as the unknown person on the other end spoke, his face grew increasingly grim.
“It’s not that simple,” he said to the people present after hanging up. “Mr. Armalite, did you know that your employee Davis also has a daughter?”
“I’ve heard about it. She’s only eight or nine, isn’t she?” Hestal frowned. He could already roughly guess what had happened. “What happened to her?”
“Our officers have tracked down Mark Jones’s movements. He didn’t flee all the way to Mexico in a blind panic after shooting someone.” Hardy wore a bitter expression, clearly already foreseeing the exhausting amount of work ahead. “He somehow found Mr. Davis’s home—apparently, he stormed into the place and kidnapped Davis’s youngest daughter.”
Albanino thought for a moment, then said, “Before Jones opened fire, he shouted at Davis, ‘You will suffer the same loss as I did’…”
“Unfortunately,” Hestal nodded coldly, “what he expressed was clearly a literal threat.”
In the end, Albanino still rushed back to the Forensics Bureau as quickly as he could. He was nearly an hour late for his afternoon shift, and he still had to endure Tommy’s endless fussing. Tommy was an enthusiastic young man—in fact, far too enthusiastic.
“I never expected you to run into something like that just going out for lunch!” Tommy exclaimed, his eyes sparkling. “So, Al, are you okay now? Were you nervous when it happened?”
As he spoke, he was helping Albanino cook the pubic symphysis of an unidentified corpse, so they could determine the deceased’s age by examining the stripped bone surface. This wasn’t actually Tommy’s job—physical labor was generally handled by forensic assistants, and Tommy was only an intern.
The reason he was here was that the head of the forensic department thought he was a very talented young man and wanted him to get early exposure to homicide autopsy work. If he only did the intern’s share of the work, he’d only get to handle accidental and natural deaths. So whenever Albanino had a distinctive unnatural death on his hands, he would call Tommy in to help.
Now what lay before Tommy was a corpse that hadn’t been dead long—in other words, very fresh, not yet too decomposed, so the autopsy room was filled with an indescribable scent of meat. Many forensic interns couldn’t stomach their lunch when they first started working because of that smell.
Tommy was already very skilled at this, but because the number of corpses he had dissected had not yet reached the required number, he had not yet taken the forensic identification qualification exam. Albanino estimated that he would have to intern at least until the end of the year.
—Of course, it was precisely because he was a newcomer without even a forensic qualification that he was so excited about what had happened to Al.
“Things aren’t as thrilling as you imagine, Tommy.” Albanino answered, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. “Once you get your qualification certificate, you’ll run into all kinds of unexpected situations.”
“Not every forensic doctor gets the chance to participate in on-site investigations. For ordinary cases, isn’t it enough to just let the scene investigators handle it… I don’t want to spend my whole life just sitting in the office reading scene investigation reports.” Tommy wailed.
He wasn’t wrong: forensic scene investigators were responsible for completing the scene investigation reports, while forensic pathologists only needed to read the investigation reports and scene investigation reports in the office. Some people had worked as forensic pathologists for years without ever encountering a special incident that required them to conduct an on-site investigation in person.
So the look Tommy always gave Albanino was tinged with a deep envy—Albanino couldn’t help but suspect that before this young man had set his heart on becoming a forensic pathologist, he had probably watched far too many TV dramas, and assumed that being a forensic pathologist was a job where you went to crime scenes every day and could even kick down doors to catch criminals.
“What other impressive things have you encountered?” the young man asked listlessly.
Albanino gave him a faint smile: “One time, I nearly delivered the deceased’s wife’s baby at the crime scene.”
“I don’t think that counts as an ordinary emergency anymore.” A voice behind them commented with restraint.
Tommy nearly jumped out of his skin at the sudden voice, almost hurling the freshly removed, dripping pubic symphysis in his hand. Albanino recognized who the voice belonged to. When he turned around, he saw Hestal Amaret standing at the entrance of the autopsy room, having pushed the door open just a crack with a restrained hand, peering inside as if he would back out if anyone told him he couldn’t come in.
“And you are?” Tommy clutched the hemostat and the pubic symphysis tightly, his voice sharp.
“This is the lawyer I told you about,” Albanino nodded, then turned to Hestal. “Hestal, this is the intern forensic pathologist Tommy—speaking of which, how did you get in?”
“The young lady at the front desk on the first floor gave me directions. As soon as she heard I was looking for you, she let me come up on my own.” Hestal raised an eyebrow, a faint trace of slightly ill-intentioned sharpness seeping into his voice. “She also said—allow me to quote: ‘Every time someone comes looking for Al, it’s a different girl. I didn’t expect it to be a man today.'”
Tommy couldn’t hold back a burst of laughter. Albanino shot him a glare, and the young man shrank his neck, then went back to using the hemostat to strip away the soft tissue on the pubic symphysis.
Albanino considered whether he should take the time to explain what “different girls” was about, but on reflection, there didn’t seem to be much to explain—because he was certain that he and Hestal wouldn’t reach that point, even though many things had already taken unexpected turns.
He followed his own heart. Of course, if you asked those police officers, “his heart” was precisely the key to why law enforcement could never catch the Sunday Gardener. His attitude toward each of his works was different. Some people merely brushed past him, and then he killed them, and a few days later they were displayed before the public eye; others he would quietly stalk for months—just like Richard Norman in his original plan—before deciding what position they should occupy in his works.
And there were some people—a very few, perhaps only two or three over the past decade—with whom he would sleep. Usually it was a chaotic one-night stand at a bar; in some brief night he would trace and measure the bodies of these men and women with his own two hands. Then he would withdraw from their lives just like any other one-night stand, and kill them three months to half a year later. To this day, the police have never connected them to him.
And Hestal Amalite—at first there was a vivid and sharp image of him in his mind, which was the position he decided to place him in within this world. But after more interactions with him, he began to doubt whether that originally conceived position truly suited Hestal… He needed more contact—risky, but also interesting.
To put it ironically: because he was an artist with standards for himself.
And it was at this moment that something seemed to take yet another turn:
It wasn’t because of that gunman named Jones—Albanino had no interest whatsoever in a broken, desperate man. But when Hardy went to the crime scene to take statements, Hestal had someone pull the surveillance footage from the time of the incident to assist with the investigation. The camera angle in that large office was excellent, and it had recorded the entire sequence of events.
He watched the recording again, and became even more certain: when Jones fired at Hestal, the posture the other man instinctively assumed—left side of the body reflexively forward, left hand raised, as if trying to shield his face. It looked so fragile, so telling—
In that moment, a strange realization rose in Albanino’s mind. He thought, this person might actually be left-handed.
This should have been nothing. There were plenty of left-handed people in the world. But in that instant, it triggered his vigilance.
He remembered that at the gardener’s crime scene, Officer Hardy had questioned why the Westland Pianist would consider an older brother’s jealousy toward his younger brother a sin. Olga had said at the time, “A thought in one’s heart certainly doesn’t count as a real crime, but what if Richard Norman had actually acted on his thoughts? A failed assassination?”
At the time, none of them had thought about it more deeply, but now Albanino realized there was something that didn’t quite add up—the Westland Pianist liked to reenact his victims’ crimes upon the victims themselves. Their manner of death had to be the crime they had already committed.
There was no need for him to go to such great lengths to stage a crime scene just to express an emotion like “jealousy.” That wasn’t his style—in fact, that wasn’t his criminal signature at all.
In other words, for a killer with such an intense need for control as the Westland Pianist, when he dressed a victim up as Cain, the most likely explanation was that this person had literally attempted to murder his own younger brother.
So Olga was very likely right after all—Richard Norman really had plotted to murder his own younger brother. That was why the Westland Pianist, knowing this fact, had chosen Richard Norman as the victim of his dramatic murder.
But if that was true, it raised another question: the profile they had previously built for the Pianist might have been wrong in its scope. Because the Pianist’s chosen victims all had criminal records, and some of their crimes had never even been released to the public, they had suspected the Pianist might be a law enforcement worker. But assuming Richard Norman had once tried to murder his own younger brother, the police had never heard a whisper of it.
So the Pianist might not be a law enforcement worker at all—or, narrowing the scope even further, the Pianist might actually be someone from the Norman brothers’ gang. Otherwise, he shouldn’t have known about something so secret.
And so now the problem was fundamentally this…
Albanino’s gaze fell upon Hestal Amarette, the mob lawyer wearing a cold and polite mask. Albanino still could not forget the look in his eyes when he had stared at that corpse: it was not the look of someone gazing at a person who had once been alive—it was the look of someone gazing at lifeless meat.
An ordinary person would not have noticed, or perhaps this was simply a kind of intuition Albanino had toward his own kind.
The problem lay precisely in this: Hestal—this mob lawyer who might know countless sordid secrets of the Norman brothers, this fellow who might be hiding the fact that he was left-handed—could he possibly be the Westland Pianist?
Actually, he did fit the profile: Hestal was between thirty-five and forty-five years old, wealthy, and his work as a mob lawyer gave him access to all kinds of undisclosed criminal cases. He was very likely left-handed. Most importantly, he might be the only person among those who could know about the possible “Richard Norman attempting to murder his younger brother” incident who fit the profile.
Now Hestal was looking at him too, not avoiding eye contact, clearly completely unaware of the thoughts spinning in his mind. He shook the transparent bag he had been holding earlier, which clearly contained Albanino’s glass lunch boxes from before—he was now carrying the bag with his left hand, because he had just needed his right hand to open the door. Damn reasonable. This person was either truly not left-handed, or he was a master of disguise with terrifying willpower.
“I’m going to the hospital to visit Davis. He still hasn’t woken up, but I heard his wife is there too. After everything that’s happened, we have to talk, after all.” The lawyer said, still looking utterly composed. “While I’m at it, I brought this to give to you—you left it in my office.”
“Just put it on the table over there.” Albanino replied. He clearly didn’t mind in the least leaving the food containers temporarily in the autopsy room. He hoped that next time he brought food to Hestal’s place, Hestal wouldn’t mind either. “Oh, right—if you have time tonight, Olga invited me out for a drink. Do you want to come?”
Hestal paused mid-step on his way to the table. He turned back, raising an eyebrow at Albanino with an expression of extreme disapproval.
“Come on, if you pull that ‘sense of distance in interpersonal relationships’ crap again, I’ll actually get angry,” Albanino said in a tone that was not angry at all. He plastered on the smile that young girls found most irresistible, though he held no hope whatsoever that the other man would give in. “Seriously, I think we can be considered friends by now—after we got shot at by the same gun, right?”
Tommy did his best to hide himself in the corner, as if that pubic bone on the stainless steel tray were truly that fascinating. He pricked up his ears to listen to the two of them talk.
Hestal was silent for a while—so long that Albanino began to wonder whether, if the other man really was the Westland Pianist, he had already added himself to the other’s assassination list.
He wouldn’t give up on this guess—he would find a way to confirm it. There was nothing to lose. If the other person wasn’t the one, they would still be his prey.
Then Albanino realized that he actually hoped this person was the Pianist, because he had come to see the interesting side of this fact.
Honestly, when normal people suspected someone they knew was a serial killer, they shouldn’t be deliberately provoking them the way he was—but he truly couldn’t control himself. Making an already crazy situation even crazier was in his nature, even if he was already the Sunday Gardener.
As Shakespeare said, self-confidence is humanity’s greatest enemy.
And the other—perhaps the human whose mysterious veil had yet to be lifted, the indescribable killer, the lurking monster—looked him straight in the eye, and in the end raised no objection to the word “friend.”
“If I’m not back too late from the hospital,” Herstal conceded, “you can give me the address first.”
A little past eight in the evening, Olga sat at the table drinking her favorite cocktail, a dainty pink concoction. Apart from the fact that the bar was called “I Want to Quit” and the cocktail was named “Fuck Your Deadline,” it was truly a very pleasing scene.
And that Herstal would actually join them genuinely surprised Albarino a little. As the other man crossed a row of wildly dancing lights in his tailored suit, he looked for all the world like someone who had never set foot in such an environment in his entire life—which might well have been the case.
And then this guy insisted on drinking a non-alcoholic fruit juice at a bar like this, because he’d driven there and still had to meet a client tomorrow. But since this was an establishment that didn’t allow anyone under drinking age inside, that fruit juice was called—and could only be called—”I Have a Little Dick.”
The expression on Hestal’s face when he ordered that drink was one to remember for a lifetime.
Their ending up in this situation was probably just due to some inexplicable twisted sense of humor on Olga’s part. No one could really bring themselves to blame her, even though she was, as Albanino had said, extremely annoying. Albanino toyed with his beer glass and asked, “How’s your employee doing?”
“Not great. His heart stopped once on the way to the hospital. He’s still in the ICU.” Hestal watched him quietly over the rim of his glass. “But at least he doesn’t have to endure as much as his wife does. The poor woman completely broke down after their daughter was kidnapped too.”
Poor woman—he said it like that, infusing enough pity into the light, drifting syllables before the words ended, and in such a dim and noisy environment, Albanino could not be sure whether it was entirely hypocrisy. The man furrowed his brow slightly, looking almost sufficiently worried.
Albanino thought of the question he had asked the other man earlier that day, before it was interrupted by the sudden sound of gunfire.
—You don’t feel anything about these things you’ve done, do you?
“There’s nothing else we can do about this matter,” Olga replied kindly. “It’s already clear who the kidnapper is. As long as Bart and the others can find his hiding place… They’ve set up checkpoints at all the city’s entry and exit points, and the surveillance system is quite advanced. If that kidnapper leaves, the police will find out.”
“But that girl might already be dead too. You should know how many criminal cases we in this line of work have taken on. I know the probability.” Hestal pointed out calmly.
“That’s true. A lot of bad things could happen.” Olga nodded reluctantly. “It’s also possible that we’ll never find them again, that they’ll just vanish from our sight forever.”
Hestal frowned. The drink in front of him had not been touched at all. In fact, after seeing Hestal’s work environment, Albarino found it a bit hard to imagine him drinking anything in a place like this. He said, “How does the police department usually handle it? Those kinds of unresolved cases?”
Albarino let out a soft laugh. There was no trace of contempt in his expression, which only made it seem somewhat cold and ruthless: “They leave them in a corner of the archives to gather dust forever, then take them out to mourn whenever someone remembers them—just like they do with the victims of the Westland Pianist and the Sunday Gardener.”
“Speaking of the Sunday Gardener,” Olga said slowly, looking at Hestal with curiosity, “Hestal, why do you think he chose you?”
“Why do all of you think he ‘chose’ me?” Hestal frowned and retorted, his tone somewhat stiff.
“Because he never cares who his works are displayed in front of. He chooses public places indiscriminately, not caring who sees them first.” Olga said in a very light tone, placing her empty cocktail glass on the bar counter, her eyes showing no trace of intoxication. “But this time, the text message he sent you—he consciously chose you to be the first viewer of his work, as if he opened a private exhibition just for you. The significance of that is vastly different.”
And at that very moment, their other companion by the bar counter—the chief forensic examiner of the Westland City Forensics Bureau, the real Sunday Gardener—suddenly realized: when he had chosen to show Hestal the corpse, he had originally only meant to hint at the ending for his prey who was still ignorant of his own future. But if his deduction was true…
If his deduction was true, then he had directly provoked the Westland Pianist himself.
The Pianist should be able to see that the corpse of that Thomas Norman was a provocation aimed at him—using a similar theme with a completely opposite method. Or rather, Albanino was certain that the two of them would both look down on each other’s methods, so the Pianist would not misunderstand the meaning of the provocation. What if, by some twist of fate, he had directly displayed this work to the Pianist himself?
In that case, he would have hit the mark by sheer accident.
Albanino revealed an inconspicuous smile in the darkness. At the same time, Olga was asking: “Do you hold an important position in his eyes? Hestal, I suggest you think carefully—is there anyone by your side who might fit the profile of the Sunday Gardener?”
The lawyer’s lips moved slightly, as if he wanted to say something in response, while Olga watched him with curiosity. It was at that moment that Hestal’s phone ringtone interrupted them.
Hestal silently slid down from the barstool, softly excused himself, and went to answer the call; meanwhile, Albarino looked at Olga and asked, “Seriously? You really think the Sunday Gardener is by his side?”
Olga Moroz was an interesting girl, a good friend, but if necessary, Albarino felt he might as well sacrifice that.
“Just asking casually,” Olga gave him a lazy glance. “At this point, I wouldn’t mind grasping at straws—but I suggest you don’t tell Bart I asked this. If he knew I was considering the problem from this angle, he might think I’ve completely lost my professional standards, and I still want to keep working as a consultant for the police department.”
Olga had mentioned before that she consulted for the police department because it gave her the authority to access all the case files on the Sunday Gardener and the Westland Pianist. She wanted to use the subject to write a book someday. If they could all make it to that time Olga envisioned without a scratch, Albanino wished her success.
But right now, suppose—just suppose—the three people sitting here really were a former BAU profiler, the Westland Pianist, and the Sunday Gardener, and they were all drinking oddly named wines and beverages together. That would mean the future almost certainly wouldn’t unfold the way they expected. The future would be crazier, more twisted—perhaps darker.
It could also be more interesting. Albanino lowered his lashes silently. He was willing to make a wish for this possibility that might exist.
No one knew what he was thinking at this moment, and Hestal had already returned. He really did look like a stern, upright gentleman. His brows were tightly furrowed, and the news he brought back was explosive.
“Officer Hardy called me,” he said. “Martin Jones contacted them on his own initiative. He wants to exchange the little girl from the Davis family for a ransom.”
Albanino nodded. “It’s not an impossible scenario. He needs money to escape—from what I know of Bart and the others, the police will agree to that demand, right? And then carry out an arrest when the ransom is being handed over?”
Hestal nodded. “Yes, but… Martin Jones clearly stated on the extortion call that he wants me to go to the designated location to deliver the ransom.”
Note:
A guilty plea defense is one that, on the premise of acknowledging the defendant’s guilt (whether by accepting the charges brought by the prosecution or by rejecting the prosecution’s charges while simultaneously asserting that the defendant constitutes a different crime), seeks a lighter sentence for the defendant.
An innocent plea defense is one that asserts the defendant simply did not commit a crime, or did not commit the crime as charged by the prosecution.
[2] By examining the bone surface of the pubic symphysis, one can determine the sex and age of the deceased. Boiling the pubic symphysis makes it easier to strip away the muscle tissue, cartilage, and periosteum from the bone.
[3] “Self-confidence is humanity’s greatest enemy.”
—William Shakespeare, *Macbeth*, translated by Zhu Shenghao.