"Is there another woman here? Or maybe a cross-dresser…" Max pointed to the women's clothing on one side.
Larry shook his head and gestured toward the row of regular men's clothes. "People with cross-dressing tendencies usually don't behave this normally. Maybe our suspect is also a patient with dissociative identity disorder. And his other personality is female!"
Max opened his mouth, eyes wide with horror.
"Oh God, that's terrifying."
"You make it sound bad, but it's completely normal. Even a child's personality can emerge in an adult if certain special conditions are met." Beneath the women's clothing, there was a wardrobe with a door. Larry opened it casually and found a cardboard box inside. He pulled it out and saw that it was full of multiple layers of cardboard boxes in various sizes.
The labels were all for women's clothing of a certain kind, and all the dates were from earlier this year.
"Maybe, due to some external stimulus, his hidden personality was awakened!"
"Looks like we need to find out what happened earlier this year that caused Cristhoper to change like this." Markus was also feeling overwhelmed by all the threads they were uncovering in these people's lives.
Max thought for a moment and approached Larry. "I remember Nelson said he started treating Alicia at the end of last year. Could that be it?"
The two men continued searching and found a suitcase under the bed in the master bedroom. It was full of sex toys, whips, ropes, and handcuffs.
Max quickly boxed them up as evidence.
Suddenly, a shout made them both freeze.
"Larry, we found a knife!" Larry grabbed the evidence box and rushed toward the source of the sound.
At that moment, Markus was coming out of the kitchen holding an evidence bag with a long, narrow knife. The knife was very similar to the one Larry had sketched on paper.
Single-edged, the blade had a slight curve along its surface, with the front end slightly wider and narrowing toward the back. The spine of this type of dagger was wider than that of a typical dagger.
Larry took it, extended his finger, and gently pressed along the belly of the knife. A pasty white substance appeared on his gloves.
"Vaseline!"
"It's the same substance found in the wound on Alicia's neck, so we can run a comparative analysis." Larry raised his magnifying glass and looked closely at the one-third mark on the blade.
Sure enough, the blade curved slightly. With a knife this sharp, if it were used with great force to cut through bone, the edge would undoubtedly break.
Larry carefully placed the knife into the large evidence bag Max had prepared. He turned around and saw Markus with a frustrated look on his face.
"What's wrong?"
Markus sighed. "We found the knife, but it's so clean it's hard to find any blood."
"Leave it to me. I'm sure I'll find blood traces. Don't worry, blood isn't something that disappears completely just by wiping it."
"Even if you boil it in hot water, you can still extract it—but the protein breaks down and the DNA structure gets damaged, so the quality of extraction isn't great."
"Seal off the scene. We'll go back and run the tests as soon as possible to compare it with Alicia's DNA."
…
At three in the afternoon, in the inspection department on the third floor of the Forensic Identification Center.
Larry was pacing back and forth in front of the door. The glass door opened, and he turned to see an analyst walking out.
"We got what you were waiting for—it's all in the documents."
"Alright, thank you very much." Larry took the documents and left the building shortly after.
He was exhausted. He now had to investigate Nelson and track down the killer from the Chesapeake massacre, which had his hands full.
But in a way, that could serve as his alibi—anything that happened, he only had to explain to Jack, who was his superior.
He was in this city and this state for one reason, so there wasn't much else to worry about for now—aside from Sergeant Doakes waking up and accusing him of murder.
Larry still remembered that gunshot. The scar Sergeant Doakes had left him still bothered him a bit.
At that moment, while sitting in the driver's seat, Larry spotted through the rearview mirror a completely white van that had been following him for a while.
He didn't want to be paranoid, but once he realized the van had been behind him for some time, he knew he was probably being followed.
To be sure, he made several random turns in different directions—and the same van stayed close behind. That gave Larry the certainty that he was being tailed, and a smile appeared on his face.
"You want to play?" Larry pulled out his pistol, then drove toward a more isolated direction. Before doing anything, he called Jack.
"Larry, what's going on?"
"I think I'm being followed. Send some agents to my location."