Capítulo 3919: Chapter 3036: The Shade of Green Trees Is Dense and the Summer Days Are Long (34)

Counting Williams' heartbeat in front of him, after making sure he was unconscious, Shiller slowly relaxed the strength in his arms and then, when he retracted his arms, he used the thumb dislocation technique to free himself from the handcuffs. He grabbed Williams and helped him sit on the nearby chair.

Shiller searched his body, but did not find the key to the handcuffs, so he deliberately made some noise to draw over the subordinates outside.

He pushed the chair to the center of the room, arranging Williams' hands around the back of the chair, pretending they were still handcuffed. Shiller hid behind the chair and shouted to the people outside.

"Get me a car, or your boss's life is in danger."

"What are you doing? You crazy man! Let him go!"

Shiller knew he was being aimed at by a gun without looking, but he still spoke calmly, "I know it's not easy to find a job these days, and he pays you well enough to support your families."

"But I hope you can think for yourselves, if it really was just regular security work, patrolling and monitoring every day, why would he pay you so much? Do you think he's a fool?"

Several people outside exchanged glances, obviously struck by Shiller's words. Williams was a businessman, not one of those former mob bosses of Gotham. All his employees were paid, and even in this day, such high wages were enough to make people risk their lives for him. But it couldn't prevent them from wondering how this contradicting economic practice was happening.

No capitalist is ever kind-hearted, and while Williams wasn't exactly a big capitalist, he was nevertheless a cunning businessman. Anyone who dealt with him could feel his shrewdness. How could such a business-minded person agree to spend more money in a declining economy?

If the money was spent, how could he not expect a return ten, even a hundred times, over?

Those who took the money also had a premonition, Williams certainly wasn't up to anything good. People are good at deceiving themselves. As long as the biting frost hadn't hit their faces, they could hypnotize themselves. Only now, brutally exposed by Shiller, did they start to feel fear retrospectively.

Gotham has changed from the past.

Shiller was about to say something more when he suddenly heard someone step forward and say to his companions, "This voice sounds familiar, step back and let me see."

Shiller had a bad feeling. Could it be those traitors who had left his circle?

He had taught at Gotham University for so many years, and because of his extremely high expectations and terrible temper, many students wanted to challenge him. Not in physical combat, but in academic confrontations.

Gotham never lacked geniuses, and many attempted unorthodox methods that nearly succeeded. However, most ended up studying behavioral science, and then they would shake their findings in front of Shiller, who, though seemingly indifferent every time, had genuinely thought countless times about getting the shredder out of his office.

Luckily, the head that peeked out was unfamiliar to Shiller, but the person was surprised and then said, "Professor Shearer! What are you doing here? Don't you remember me? I'm Andre... a 1994 graduate of Gotham Vocational Technical College, I studied weapons engineering!"

Shiller recalled carefully and then said, "Isn't your last name Lawrence? What are you doing here?"

"I'm here to make money," Andre put down his handgun, turning to the others, he said, "Put your guns down, you can't afford to offend Professor Shearer. How have you been, Professor?"

"It's been too hot lately... Speaking of which, do you guys know what this fatso has been up to?"

"Not really, he hasn't told us. But I guess it's some killing and dumping bodies since there have frequently been some strange bodies transported to the crematorium. I think this crematorium was built just for this."

"Do you know why those people were killed?"

"Why?"

"They were silenced because they knew too much," Shiller said, kicking Williams' shins. "This guy is a child abuser. In the last ten years, he's abused at least a hundred children. You know what that means."

Andre gasped in shock.

Of course, having come from a gangster family, he had seen plenty of perverts, but the logic of the Mob dictated that anyone who harmed children would become a target.

Even the previously decrepit Gotham left some room for street orphans to survive because without children, there are no youths, and any ruler whose area lacked youths would be overtaken due to insufficient manpower to fight back.

People pay more attention to children's rights under two conditions: one is when the standard of living is high enough that cultivated morals require them to protect children, and the other is when rulers need a large labor force, thus encouraging childbirth and advocating the protection of children.

Only those who lack morals and do not care about the future disregard the lives and development of children; they don't care the impact of severe child abuse on birth rates. They aren't tyrants who feel responsible for the country they rule; they are merely cowardly, yet greedy, parasites.

"I didn't know," Andre emphasized. "If I had known he was into this sort of stuff I wouldn't have come. Just my bad luck."

Soon, however, his face turned sour as he suddenly remembered that if Williams was up to such activity, then sooner or later he would find a way to dispose of them too, because these crimes were even less publicly acceptable than drug trafficking, smuggling, or murder.

In Gotham, if you do the above-mentioned jobs, people would only be surprised that you have a side hustle, but once people know you're a child maligner with numerous crimes, your business is definitely not going to survive, and no one would help such a person because of the risk it entails to their own reputation.

Once Williams's crimes are exposed, both his real estate company and he himself would be finished, so in order to keep his crimes undisclosed, he might do whatever it takes.

The people behind Andre clearly had also thought of this, and one of them cursed and said, "It was Jim who referred me here, two days ago he mysteriously had a car accident, and do you remember Anjiele? He suddenly disappeared too."

"Have any of you seen the old employees from the last batch?" Andre's voice gradually deepened as he spoke, "When we first arrived, there were a few of them, but now they seem to have vanished..."

The atmosphere in the room fell silent.

"Professor, please help us." Andre immediately showed a pleading expression, clasped his hands together towards Shiller, and said, "I know I've been up to no good, but my Dad helped with the restructuring of Living Hell, he even donated to the elementary school there, you must help us this time!"

"I was about to ask, given that your last name is Lawrence, how did you end up doing this kind of work?"

"Our family turned into a corporate structure, everyone has to work, but my dad has a terrible temper, he offended too many people, didn't secure a good position when trying to go legitimate and now has been edged out, although we're still getting by, money is tight, and I just wanted to earn some pocket money."

"It's not me who'll save you, but you will save yourselves. Only the evidence you provide can bring this guy down in one fell swoop without giving him a chance to recover, thus putting an end to future trouble."

After a moment of thought, Andre said, "We have all recently arrived, we don't know much, but we can help you find employees who have been here since the crematorium opened, maybe they know something."

"Take me there."

About ten minutes later, a slim Mexican Descendant woman took off her mask, she hung her gloves on the door of a storage room next door, and said timidly, "The boss hired me to clean, has he done something illegal?"

"It's something very serious, Aunt Dana, you have three children, right? You brought them all the way across the national border to America, but do you know what this bastard did? He killed at least a hundred children and put those who knew about it into the crematorium's incinerator!"

Andre's exaggerated tone clearly frightened the small Mexican woman in front of him; her eyes widened in disbelief, but then, as if remembering something, she fell into a reflection and remained still.

"You remembered something, didn't you? Please tell us everything, so he can't continue his wrongdoings!"

The woman called Dana murmured a few phrases in a dialect they could not understand, then said in heavily accented English, "Can you guarantee he will go to jail?"

Andre gritted his teeth and replied, "If he doesn't go to jail, then he will die. I guarantee your safety."

"Alright, come with me."

Shiller noted that the woman seemed timid and afraid, but it was possibly just a façade; smuggling herself and her three children into America was no mean feat.

Indeed, when it was time to act, she was unequivocal; she led several of them to a room in the crematorium, opening the door only for Andre to shudder, because the room housed all the urns.

"These are all the unclaimed ashes from recently and probably include those you spoke of who were killed," Dana said. "They should be nameless; you can take them back to find out who they were."

"Thank you so much, ma'am, are your children in high school?" Shiller asked as he walked inside.

Dana seemed to notice Shiller's presence only then, turned around, and scrutinized him carefully, slowly nodding her head.

"Then think about Gotham University."

"We can't afford the tuition," she said bluntly. "And we definitely won't take out those outrageously expensive loans; we can't pay them back."

"Maybe I can offer some help." Shiller pulled out a business card and handed it to her, saying nothing more and went in with Andre and others to look for the urns.

The crematorium didn't have many urns, as the local residents seemed to have objections to the newly opened facility; many avoided it, and occasionally some were government-found unclaimed homeless bodies, all of whom had names.

They quickly found four or five nameless urns, seemingly purposely grouped together. Williams seemed to have a particular interest in bones; he not only collected children's bones but also kept the urns of those silenced informers, which greatly facilitated the investigation.

One shouldn't call themselves a collector without the capability, Shiller thought. When the Serial Killer's club was active, he had seen the craziest killer who only made a blanket from the victims' hair, hair that had gone through countless chemical processes, then he still didn't dare to display it openly, only keeping it hidden in the basement.

Contrary to many people's stereotype, in fact, most serial killers are not that brazen; the main reason they become serial killers instead of being caught after a single incident is, to put it nicely, they are cautious, or less kindly, they are cowards.

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