The Shadow Tycoon
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 28: Blood on the Floor
Half an hour later, Michael’s wife was sent to the hospital. After the police finished examining the scene, they left.
They considered it a very ordinary and very obvious case of home invasion, robbery, and assault. To be honest, in the Baler Federation, cases like this were not exactly rare. There were always lazy poor people unwilling to work who took risks and obtained cash through illegal means.
But the police had not come away with nothing. At the very least, they believed the fugitive criminal was very likely familiar with Michael’s home. He knew Michael had gone away on business, that the child had not returned from school, and that only Michael’s wife was at home.
Even the fact that robbery had turned into assault became, in the eyes of the police, evidence that the criminal might know the family: hatred.
The empty house was pitch black, hollow and silent. Wearing gloves, William pushed open the yard gate and entered, then closed it behind him again.
He took out his homemade lockpicking tools from his pocket: a turning tool modified from a corkscrew, and a pick modified from a crochet hook. Both could be bought at hardware stores and tool shops.
The principle behind old-fashioned door locks was very simple. In plain terms, as long as the pins were pushed into the pin chambers, the plug could be turned and the door would open.
With a key, doing that was very easy. Without a key, one had to apply a certain amount of torque to the plug.
That torque would create a tiny, almost negligible offset between the plug and the pin chambers. It was precisely that tiny offset that kept the pins from falling back out once they had been pushed into the chambers. When all the pins had been moved into the correct position by the pick, the door would open.
After two rounds of faint clicking, the lock gave a soft clack. William looked around, turned the doorknob, and slipped through the gap into the house.
The house was somewhat messy. The police had stayed here for a while earlier while collecting evidence. He took out the flashlight he carried with him, turned it on, and made his way up to the second floor.
A few minutes later, he found the study.
Unexpectedly, a hot-tempered special agent like Michael actually liked reading. Looking at the rows of books neatly arranged on the shelves, William felt that whatever Michael had read had all gone straight into a dog’s belly.
He searched around and found a safe, but did not touch it.
He had learned how to open this kind of old-fashioned safe. In fact, once one understood the principle, opening the lock was not difficult at all. This old rotary combination lock was essentially a set of wheels.
By turning left and right at intervals, one changed the positions of the different wheels. Once all the positions aligned, a small spring plate attached to the wheels, or a notch, would line up. At that moment, turning the handle would allow the bolt to retract smoothly into the safe door.
Some movies used stethoscopes to distinguish the sounds made by the internal wheels turning. That had indeed worked at first, but manufacturers had quickly corrected that obvious loophole. Afterward, it became very difficult to hear anything.
But for a craftsman with fine technique, feeling it by hand was actually easier. Of course, that was beside the point.
The safe would contain nothing more than some money, or evidence, notebooks, or other things useful to Michael and utterly useless to William. That had nothing to do with why he had come here.
He moved around the room and opened several drawers beneath the desk. In the right-hand drawer, he found some loose change. At once, he had a plan. He placed the gold ring he had brought with him into the second drawer from the bottom, restored everything to its original state, checked it once, and only then left.
That was one of his purposes tonight: to put that gold ring inside Michael’s home. Then he needed to solve another problem: the news boss.
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