"Sickly sweet and pungent?"
John thought back and described what he had smelled.
"Like... cheap cosmetics, but much stronger. I swear, that smell definitely wasn't anything high-end. It was the smell of cheap, low-quality fragrance!"
Those burly kidnappers clearly weren't fond of wearing makeup. If only one of them had smelled that way, it might have been easy to explain, but John had said "those kidnappers." Clearly, it hadn't been just one or two of them.
"Could they have been around someone who smelled like that? Some pretty ladies, maybe?"
Miaomiao had sorted through Bruce's tabloid gossip, so she had naturally picked up a little about certain "adult matters."
During earlier night patrols, Miaomiao had also seen men with their arms around scantily dressed women. The women were clearly unhappy, yet they still forced themselves to smile at the men.
When Miaomiao had asked about it out of curiosity, Damian had said disdainfully that those men were "despicable people engaging in filthy transactions." Most of those women weren't doing it willingly, but in Gotham, they often had no better choice.
Or rather, most of the time, they had no choice at all.
John looked confused for a couple of seconds before realizing what Miaomiao meant. His face instantly turned bright red. "No, not that! If it had rubbed off on them from someone else, the smell should have been faint... but it was really strong on them. That's why I noticed it. A smell that strong definitely couldn't come from just a little while... or one night..."
He twisted his fingers awkwardly, struggling to recall his impressions at the time. "It was like they'd been staying in that place all along, steeped in that smell for ages. Their clothes, skin, hair-everything was saturated with it."
[An excessively strong odor of