You're a US police officer, what are you thinking about going back to the East for?

Seattle's East Side, the middle-class neighborhood where Bill used to live.

The two-story wooden house, which had been cordoned off with yellow tape just a few days ago, has now returned to its lifeless, empty state.

A black Chevrolet Suburban with no markings silently slid onto the driveway.

The car door opened, and two well-dressed men stepped out.

The man walking in front was Victor, in his forties, wearing a well-tailored dark gray bespoke suit. He was formerly a senior agent in the FBI's counterintelligence department and is now a senior executive in Raytheon's internal security department.

Following behind him was Carter, a man in his early thirties with a strong build, short, rugged hair, wearing a black tactical jacket, and carrying a heavy Perricone waterproof security case.

Before retiring, he was an intelligence officer in the Air Force Special Investigations Service (OSI), specializing in shady dealings.

Both men exuded a cool and professional aura befitting elites within the system, making them completely different from the patrol officers who had previously vomited in the corridor.

Victor stood on the porch, looking at the front door that had been smashed by the police's battering ram and was now barely held together with planks, and gave a cold laugh.

"That's the efficiency of the Seattle Police Department."

He put on a pair of light blue nitrile gloves, effortlessly pushed aside the wooden board, took out shoe covers from his pocket and put them on to prevent contamination of the site, and went inside.

The body and most of the filth in the house had been hastily disposed of by the outsourced cleaning company called by the police, but a strange smell of industrial disinfectant mixed with the stench of corpses still lingered in the air.

Carter followed him in, closed the door behind him, and took out shoe covers from his pocket and put them on.

He skillfully pulled out a small blue round box, unscrewed the lid, scooped out a dollop of white Vickers ointment with his finger, applied a thick layer under his nose, and then tossed the box to Victor.

Victor took it and applied it; the pungent mint scent barely masked the nauseating smell of the biochemical contamination.

"Have you seen the case closure report submitted by the SPD (Seattle Police Department)?"

Victor looked around at the dust in the living room and asked without turning his head.

"I've seen it."

Carter opened the Perricone case in his hand, took out a high-intensity ultraviolet flashlight and several testing tools, his tone full of sarcasm:

"The report reads like a third-rate horror novel. Two homeless men, who had taken a mixture of bath salts and fentanyl, died in a bedroom from hallucinations by cannibalizing each other. One of them was carrying a gun."

"No traces of a third party were found at the scene, nor were there any signs of a burglary. It is recommended that the case be closed as an isolated case of drug overdose."

Carter scoffed, "These idiots can't even measure the trajectory of the bullets at the scene, and they just assume the footprints on the ground were left by a homeless person. I think they just don't want to write those troublesome case files and want to close this disgusting case as soon as possible."

"That's normal, after all, the dead person was a homeless man, and it would take a lot of effort to find out who fired the shot."

Victor walked to the corner leading to the corridor, squatted down, and looked at the messy footprints on the floor, trampled by the police's tactical boots.

"But they're blind, we can't be blind."

Victor gestured in the air with his gloved fingers:

"Old Bill used to be a senior calibration engineer in our company's outsourced lab, and he had experience with military inertial navigation systems."

"If he violated regulations by taking the data home, and now someone else has taken it, then he's in big trouble."

"In the first photos of the scene taken by the police, the dust in the study was clearly unusual."

Victor stood up and patted his trouser leg:

"Those drug-addicted good-for-nothings certainly wouldn't be interested in the tattered documents in the study. This means that someone else was obviously here. And that person's purpose was very clear: they went straight to Old Bill's study."

Carter finished adjusting the testing equipment in his hand and sighed:

"Boss, to be honest, old Bill is just a low-level cog in an outsourced lab. Even if he did break the rules and take a few strings of broken code home, he'd probably already been sold as scrap by some thief from who-knows-where."

"Do we really have to come to this stinking house to rummage through the trash?"

"You still don't quite understand what those suit-and-tie boardroom bosses are thinking."

Victor turned to look at Carter, his expression a mixture of helplessness and shrewdness:

"Whether the item was lost or whether the secret was leaked is not important."

"The important thing is money, you know? Those bloodsuckers in the legal and M&A departments are eyeing that outsourcing lab where old Bill used to work."

"That lab has several patents, and the company has long wanted to acquire them at a low price. Now that old Bill is suspected of taking classified data out of the secure area without authorization, it's practically a God-given excuse."