Chapter 28: One Small Tip a Day, Part 2

Half an hour later, Michael’s wife was taken to the hospital, and the police left after finishing their investigation.

They saw it as a routine, obvious case of home invasion and assault. In the Baylor Federation, such crimes weren’t unusual—some lazy, desperate poor people risked breaking the law for money.

However, the police did gain some insight: the suspect likely knew Michael’s home well, aware that Michael was on a business trip, the children were at school, and only his wife was home.

The assault indicated possible personal animosity, suggesting the criminal might know the family.

The empty house was dark and silent. Lynch put on gloves, opened the gate, entered the yard, then closed it behind him.

He pulled out homemade lockpicking tools—a modified corkscrew and a hooked pick—items easily found in hardware stores.

Old locks worked simply: pushing the pins into place allowed the cylinder to turn and the door to open.

Without a key, applying torque misaligned the pins slightly; using the picks, pins were set to the correct positions to unlock the door.

After several clicks, the lock clicked open. Lynch glanced around, turned the knob, and entered.

The room was messy; the police had briefly stopped here to collect evidence. Lynch took out a flashlight and headed upstairs.

Minutes later, he found the study.

Surprisingly, Michael, the hot-tempered investigator, liked reading. Seeing his neatly arranged books, Lynch thought Michael must have memorized them.

He searched around and found a safe but didn’t touch it.

He knew how to open old safes—rotary combination locks aligned internal wheels; once aligned, a spring or notch released the latch.

Some movies show using a stethoscope to hear the wheels, but manufacturers fixed this flaw. For skilled craftsmen, feel was more reliable.

The safe likely contained money and evidence useful to Michael but irrelevant to Lynch, so he left it alone.

He rummaged through the desk drawers, found some change in the right one, and decided. He placed a gold ring he carried into the second-to-last drawer, restored everything, checked once more, then left.

This was one of his main goals—plant the ring in Michael’s home. Next, he had to deal with another issue: the informant.

The informant had escaped. Police in this era had a shockingly low case closure rate. Due to privacy concerns and other reasons, the Baylor Federation had no surveillance systems.

This meant physical descriptions of suspects came only from indirect clues and eyewitness accounts.

Without witnesses, cases—like Lynch’s own burglary—were nearly impossible to solve unless the suspect slipped up again and interrogators were skillful.

So the police couldn’t be relied on much.

This case was more serious, involving the tax investigation leader, so Sabin City Police assigned extra officers. They waited for Michael’s wife to recover from shock and give a clearer suspect description.

The community security provided a suspect sketch based on dim streetlight observations during the confrontation. The guard’s vague descriptions made the sketch unreliable.

Meanwhile, the informant was back in his small territory, his heartbeat calming from 180 bpm. Only the pistol in his hand gave him stability.

He felt foolish—he just wanted to threaten the woman and try to retrieve evidence from Michael’s home.

But something terrifying had overwhelmed him, causing his violent action.

Now calmer, he realized his grave mistake: the woman saw his face, a memory she would never forget.

Within a week, wanted posters with his image would be all over Sabin City, where many knew him.

He could already imagine Michael’s fury. Even now, he feared Michael—he couldn’t change that fact.

Reluctantly, he decided to leave Sabin City to hide.

Once the heat died down, or maybe never return.

He had saved tens of thousands over the years, kept in a shoebox in his room, not in a bank.

He had his gun. With money and gun, he could go elsewhere, start anew, or return to old ways.

Without hesitation, ignoring the children in the dormitory, he went back to his room, retrieved the shoebox from among worthless junk, packed some personal items, and slipped out at night.

He thought no one noticed, but a few older kids saw him.

After he shot a child in the thigh yesterday, the seemingly subdued kids secretly grew feelings even he hadn’t realized.

Within a minute of his leaving, several older kids armed with kitchen knives and sharpened steel rods “picked up” from a construction site chased after him.

At the same time, Lynch reached nearby, thinking how to silently handle the informant when he saw him running with a bag, followed by several hurried short men.