The Death Knell

"Okay, stop putting on a dead face and tell me what are you waiting for?"

After a brief exchange with Thousand Cats Dream, Su Ming still focused on the birthday party attended by Bat:

"At present, I can tell that this family must have come to Gotham from out of town, because the youngest child in the family celebrated his birthday and no relatives or neighbors came to participate, which explains the problem."

In fact, the situation in the United States is different from what is shown in most American dramas.

For example, calling parents by their first names, constant family problems, and the fact that children have to work to make a living at a very young age means that family relations are very poor. Many of these are artistic processing in order to add conflict to the story.

In fact, most Americans attach great importance to family, which is not much different from that of China. Although it has not yet reached the level of "family and country", if there is anything in a family, relatives will be happy to help.

So if Christopher is a native of Gotham, there is no reason for the five members of the family to celebrate their youngest daughter's birthday alone. This house is not small at all, and they can definitely invite more guests.

Therefore, on the day of the fire, their family must have just arrived in Gotham, and even the neighbors were not familiar with it.

But the specific situation is still unclear, because what Batman sees now is a dream. In this dream, there is only this house in the clearing in the forest, and there are no neighbors at all.

But this also reflects from the side. In Christopher's subconscious, those neighbors do not exist, and he has an attitude that it does not matter if they exist or not.

He didn't even suspect that those people were the perpetrators of the arson.

"Only half of the cake was cut, and the remaining half was put in the refrigerator." Batman said his findings and judgment, then added Deathstroke's words: "The three children are all girls, and they all have long hair. They are playing with fire. It's unlikely. There are no wrinkles on my wife's apron and she is a neat and serious person."

By implication, he ruled out the possibility that Christopher's wife and daughters committed suicide by arson.

The endless cake was obviously intended to be saved for the next meal, and someone who wanted to commit suicide would not do such a thing.

Among the three girls, the youngest one can't even walk very steadily. The two older sisters are also very well-behaved. Their hands are white and clean, and there are no scars on their exposed arms.

Batman had gone around the house before and found no buried dead bodies of cats and dogs. Although this was not a particularly solid basis, most arsonists, like serial killers, had a habit of abusing animals.

There was no body, which meant that they did not have this habit, or even if they did, Christopher did not find it and it was not in his memory.

And given the age of the little girls, even if they learned to bury the corpse, it would not be possible to bury it too deep, and the smell of decomposed protein would be impossible to hide from the father at home.

At the same time, there are no traces of domestic violence or abuse on their bodies. Generally, there are only a few reasons why preschool children are beaten.

First, he broke something that his parents liked; second, he engaged in dangerous behavior; third, he still wet the bed frequently even at his age.

Don't think that bedwetting is a trivial matter. It is a big problem for full-time housewives. If your child is ten years old, he wets the sheets several times a day, and this happens every day, 365 days a year.

It is said that there is no filial son beside the bedside of a long-term illness. Similarly, there will be no loving mother beside the bedside of a child who wets the bed every day.

When he was circling before, Batman didn't see any sheets hanging to dry behind the house, and there were no signs of 'education' on these children, so the two possibilities of bedwetting and engaging in dangerous behavior were basically ruled out.

For the same reason, bedwetting is a typical childhood psychological profile of serial arsonists.

The FBI has interviewed thousands of arsonists, and more than 70% of them admitted that they had habitual bedwetting experiences in childhood, so this profiling standard was written into the FBI's analyst manual.

When an arson case is discovered, first check to see if there is anyone in the victim's family who used to wet the bed as a child, and give priority to ruling out any suspicions.

Because many families will put wet sheets and bedding next to the stove or heater to speed up drying, children in childhood will feel that things that provide heat can cover up their own mistakes and represent the end of things.

Heat is easily associated with fire, which leads immature children to develop a primitive worship of fire. Once they make a mistake in their future lives, they will want to set a fire immediately to cover up their mistakes, and then transform into Simply wanting to see the fire.

Of course, this does not mean that all children who wet the bed will become arsonists in the future. This is just a psychological profile, and psychology is an applied discipline, not an exact science.

"Well, you have ruled out a few possibilities." Su Ming could naturally think of what Batman could think of. He took a puff of cigarette and said, "I think this family is doing well. They are basically suspected of committing suicide. It can be ruled out, unless he suddenly went crazy. Did the clown invent laughing gas at the time when this case occurred?"

Deathstroke doesn't have to look at as many clues as Batman does, and he won't use psychological profiling to eliminate other people's suspicions because it's too troublesome.

He only saw the four-burner oven for baking pies, and he knew that the stove would have cost about $4,000 twenty years ago. This clue alone was enough to prove that this family lived attentively.

Being willing to invest so much in their own home shows that the family had love in their hearts at that time, and the possibility of suicide was almost negligible.

So what's left now is Christopher's own suspicion, as well as the possibility of accidental fire, and then the possibility of arson by outsiders.

Yes, Christopher himself is suspect, because this is his dream. If he was unconscious at the time and set fire to his home, there is a certain probability that he will not have any impression.

For example, he drank too much that night, or he took drugs, or he was controlled by some high-level being.

These are possible.

Next, he and Batman will try to rule out these possibilities.

"There is no Joker at this point in time." Batman gave a very definite answer. He may remember the Joker's affairs more clearly than his own: "He was not famous at this time. He was just a person in Gotham. Little people.”

The Joker, who just debuted, even used the code name "Comedian". At the beginning, he focused on performing funny tricks for Batman, trying to make him laugh.

As time went on, Gotham became darker and darker, and the Joker gradually became Gotham's prince of crime and the spokesperson of chaos. The Dionysian factor may also be at work.

But what is certain is that the fire in this family is basically impossible to be related to the clown, because it is not funny at all and lacks the necessary comedy elements.