Chapter 50: Everyone is a Murderer
When they returned last night, Su Yuqing had eaten too much. Chen Mo was so busy taking care of her that he forgot to put this inside her pillow.
His grandparents had said putting it in her pillow would help her sleep more soundly.
Remembering this now, Chen Mo didn’t give it a second thought and went straight into the guest room.
Su Yuqing had already folded the comforter neatly, and the bed was perfectly smooth, without a single wrinkle. A faint, pleasant scent lingered in the air.
Chen Mo paid it no mind and walked straight to her bed, picking up the pillow.
To Chen Mo’s utter astonishment, there was a small knife under Su Yuqing’s pillow—a fruit knife!
A fruit knife almost identical to the murder weapon the medical examiner had identified in his past life!
This wasn’t a fruit knife from his house; it was one Su Yuqing had likely been carrying on her person.
’Ever since Yuqing arrived, she’s barely left my side. The only way she could have this knife is if she was already carrying it when she first came here. There’s no other possibility!’
Chen Mo was stunned.
’Why? Why would she be carrying a fruit knife almost identical to the murder weapon?’
It was as if a bomb went off in Chen Mo’s mind, and he froze on the spot.
Countless scenes flashed before his eyes like a chaotic montage.
’First, it was impossible for Su Yuqing to have committed suicide.’
’The angle of the weapon and the type of wounds would be completely different in a suicide versus a homicide. They could never be the same.’
’Besides, if she had killed herself, the weapon would have just fallen beside her. How could it have never been found?’
’So, even if Su Yuqing herself was carrying a fruit knife identical to the murder weapon, the possibility of suicide was absolutely zero.’
However, if she had been carrying a weapon that so closely matched the presumed murder weapon, then all of Chen Mo’s previous deductions had to be thrown out.
No one would have guessed that a homeless girl, usually so gentle and mild-mannered, found drenched by a storm and stranded on the street, would be carrying such a thing on her person.
Naturally, when deducing the weapon’s origin, no one had ever considered a possibility so far outside the bounds of common sense.
All his previous deductions were based on the premise that the culprit had brought the knife to the scene. Therefore, Chen Mo had ruled out anyone who had no possibility of carrying such a weapon.
But now, from the moment he saw that Su Yuqing had been carrying the weapon herself, every person Chen Mo had previously ruled out for not carrying a weapon was once again a suspect.
In fact, you could say that any man, or even woman, who was in that area at the time of the crime was now a suspect!
In an instant, every face he had seen on Friday night flashed before his eyes!
He had first ruled out Lin Yu’an precisely because he wasn’t carrying a weapon, but now that reason was invalid.
The three hooligans who were bullying Lin Yu’an: he had ruled them out because they were already carrying different knives, and a person typically wouldn’t carry two. But now that the weapon belonged to Su Yuqing, the three of them were back in the running.
Zhou Hao, Li Yan, the homeless man, the delivery driver—every single person present at the time of the crime began to cycle through Chen Mo’s mind.
’Who was it? Who could it be?’
Since he had already saved Su Yuqing in this lifetime, Chen Mo should have been able to put this matter to rest.
But during his time as a criminal investigator, Chen Mo had seen his fair share of crime dramas, many of which involved time travel.
He’d seen plenty where the saved victims, people who were supposed to have died, were eventually ensnared once more by the causal forces of the timeline.
Through some twist of fate, the rescued victim would still end up dead at the hands of the original killer.
Chen Mo absolutely could not accept that happening to Su Yuqing.
The only thing he could do was keep Su Yuqing by his side twenty-four hours a day.
But that was obviously impossible.
So, the best solution was to find the killer.
Dealing with the killer was the only way to solve the problem at its source.
If the killer had a criminal record for a past offense, the law would deal with them.
If the killer currently had a clean slate, then Chen Mo had his own ways of dealing with things.
’But who was it? Suddenly, there were so many suspects.’
Plus, the killer hadn’t actually committed the crime in this lifetime, which made trying to connect the dots across timelines incredibly difficult.
Chen Mo could only rely on the vast amount of case information he had memorized from his past life and try to deduce the truth from there.
Fortunately, he had already etched every detail into his mind in his past life; he would never forget a single thing, even in death.
What he lacked now was someone to help him organize everything and deduce the killer’s identity together.
A single person’s perspective is often limited; it’s easy to miss important details.
More heads were better than one, and they could generate more hypotheses.
Just as Chen Mo’s mind was racing with information about the case and the various suspects he could now link to it, Su Yuqing finished washing the dishes and returned to the living room.
Not seeing him in the living room or his own bedroom, she grew curious and walked toward her room.
And that’s when she saw him, standing frozen in place, holding her pillow.
Instantly, her gaze fell upon the fruit knife on the bed, which should have been hidden beneath the pillow.
In that moment, her heart filled with panic.
Hearing the noise behind him, Chen Mo snapped out of his thoughts about the killer and slowly turned around.
"Chen Mo... this knife... it’s not..."
She was terrified, terrified that Chen Mo would misunderstand.
She hadn’t put the knife under her pillow to protect herself from a sneak attack by Chen Mo or anything like that. It was a habit she had formed for personal reasons back when she was living at her own home.
It helped her feel more secure at night while she slept.
As Su Yuqing stammered out a panicked explanation, she was suddenly pulled into a hug.
"It’s okay. You don’t have to explain to me. It’s good for a girl to be so safety-conscious," Chen Mo said with a smile, gently patting her back.
Once he felt her tense, trembling body gradually calm down, Chen Mo smiled and slowly released her. He took out the Calming Grass and said, "I came to put this here for you. I forgot last night."
He tucked the Calming Grass inside the pillow, placed it back on top of the small knife, and then walked out of Su Yuqing’s room with a smile.
Watching Chen Mo leave, seemingly unbothered by her knife, Su Yuqing let out a huge sigh of relief. As she gazed at his back, her heart filled with a wave of profound gratitude.
’How could I be so lucky to meet someone who cares for me and understands me so well? He doesn’t even need a single word of explanation from me.’