Chapter 384: The Riddle
If a murderer gets caught, even with overwhelming evidence, they aren't executed immediately.
They're imprisoned first. Then comes the legal process, the trials, the court hearings, and finally sentencing by a judge.
And when it comes to the death penalty, every country treats it with extreme caution. Multiple reviews and deliberations are required before an execution is approved.
It was never something that could be finished in just a day or two.
Which meant this creature had plenty of opportunities to escape.
But it didn't.
It stayed in prison obediently the entire time.
"This…" Sam frowned. "I can't figure out why the creature would do that."
"Maybe it was entertaining itself," Frank suddenly said.
"Entertaining itself?" The other three all looked toward him.
"Because it knew it wouldn't die," Frank explained. "Even if the body it possessed was executed, it would still survive. It could leave anytime and possess someone else."
"So it had no reason to rush out of prison."
As he spoke, Frank looked toward Officer Hobbes.
"This thing is probably a repeat offender. It's likely killed many people before without ever being caught."
"Then Hobbes arrested it."
"That caught its attention."
"If you listen carefully to what it said in the recording, it's obvious."
"The reason it stayed in prison was probably because it wanted to see Hobbes one more time—to tell him those things, those riddles…"
Frank paused.
"It was like a bored person finding something amusing to pass the time."
While Dean and Sam had been discussing the case earlier, Frank had mostly remained silent.
He was an outsider in all this.
The Winchester brothers were the professionals. Hunting monsters was practically their family business.
So Frank neither needed nor was particularly qualified to dominate the discussion. Listening quietly from the side was enough.
But that didn't mean he was useless.
He was still analyzing everything in his own way, trying to contribute however he could.
Dean and Sam approached the situation as hunters.
Years of fighting monsters had conditioned their thinking into a fixed pattern:
Identify the creature.
Discover its true nature.
Find its weakness.
Kill it.
Meanwhile, Officer Hobbes approached everything like a detective solving a criminal case.
They were viewing the situation from the perspectives of hunters and police officers.
But Frank was different.
He had never considered himself a hunter.
And truthfully, he wasn't one.
At most, he was an ordinary man who had seen far too much of the supernatural world.
In fact, Frank could arguably be described as one of these monsters' victims.
Because of that, his perspective differed completely from Dean's and Sam's.
From the viewpoint of a victim, Frank could actually understand the twisted, chaotic mentality of creatures like this.
And once Frank explained it that way, Dean and Sam quickly grasped the logic too.
"Have you experienced anything strange recently?" Dean asked Hobbes.
"Strange things…" Hobbes thought for a moment.
"Actually, yes," he finally said. "My house phone rings in the middle of the night all the time. But whenever I answer, nobody speaks."
"And lately, whenever I'm walking outside, I keep feeling like someone's watching me…"
"This creature really has targeted you," Dean said as he exchanged a glance with Sam.
Sam picked up the remote again and carefully replayed the recording from the beginning.
"Right now, the most important thing is identifying what this creature actually is," Dean said.
No matter how much they analyzed its motives, the final goal remained the same:
Destroy it.
But to kill a monster, they first needed to understand its true nature.
Every kind of creature had a different weakness.
Modern firearms could handle most monsters these days.
But there were still many supernatural entities against which bullets were completely useless.
For those, you had to rely on the ancient methods passed down through generations.
And judging from the clues so far, guns probably wouldn't work on this creature at all.
It appeared to be a non-corporeal entity—a parasitic spirit-type monster.
Something like that couldn't simply be shot to death.
"What the hell is this thing…" Dean muttered while flipping through a notebook. "A spirit? A possessing entity? There are way too many monsters with possession abilities…"
Frank glanced at the notebook in Dean's hand.
It looked strangely familiar.
Then he realized—
It was probably John Winchester's journal.
John's notebook was practically an encyclopedia of monsters.
Every creature he had ever encountered—or even merely heard rumors about—was recorded inside it.
"It might not necessarily be possession," Sam reminded them. "It could also be some form of mind control."
The problem was that they had too few clues and no concrete evidence.
There were simply too many possibilities.
"We still need to focus on the creature's behavior," Dean said. "That's our best lead."
"The way it kills… those incomprehensible words it spoke… and that riddle it gave Hobbes. They all have to be connected somehow."
"I'll push the linguist to speed things up," Officer Hobbes said. "As for the riddle… I honestly have no idea what it means."
"About the riddle," Frank suddenly spoke up, "I think the creature was talking about names."
"'Lyons' and 'Spakowsky' are obviously names, not ordinary words."
"And the 'blank space between Lyons and Spakowsky' that it mentioned…" Frank paused thoughtfully. "Most likely refers to another name positioned between them."
"That makes sense," Dean nodded.
"Looking at the arrangement in the crime scene photos," Sam added while examining the pictures on the table, "they really do resemble names in some sort of list or sequence."
"Even if that's true," Hobbes said helplessly, "I've never heard either of those names before. I don't know anyone called Lyons or Spakowsky."
"Look carefully at this section of the recording," Frank said as he rewound the video to the moment before the riddle was spoken.
The killer's voice echoed through the room once again:
> "You remind me of someone, Hobbes. Really. I'm not lying."
"Do you like riddles? This one's a good one."
"Why is there a blank space between Lyons and Spakowsky?"
"You definitely know the answer. Open your eyes and look carefully."
"Before mentioning the riddle," Frank explained, "the creature specifically said Hobbes reminded it of someone."
"That person it mentioned… might be the missing name in the riddle."
There was always a connection between words spoken in sequence.
The creature first said that Hobbes reminded it of someone.
Only afterward did it suddenly bring up the riddle.
That progression mattered.
Which meant the creature likely thought of something—or someone—because of Hobbes, and only then improvised the riddle on the spot.
In other words, the creature probably hadn't intended to mention the riddle at all.
It had been a spontaneous thought.
And because of that, Frank concluded that the answer to the riddle was most likely the person the creature had suddenly remembered.