Rewind a few hours to the Upper East Side Manhattan.
The last rays of the setting sun streamed into the kitchen of the private clinic.
Hannibal wore a white linen apron and held a long, thin Germany- made boning knife.
He was slicing a piece of meat with an unusually pale color. With a slight twist of his wrist, the paper-thin slice of meat fell into a chilled, floral-patterned porcelain plate.
The freezer still holds the remainder of Senator Stern, but today's appetizer requires the most tender muscle fibers.
Misty Knight Knight sat on a high stool opposite the island counter, holding a glass of sparkling water with ice in her hand.
She hadn't even bothered to change out of her police uniform; she looked exhausted, and her eyes were bloodshot.
"That warehouse is right below an abandoned auto repair shop on 125th Street in Harlem."
Misty Knight rubbed the glass with her fingers. "It's full of unregistered firearms and extremely high-quality powder. Rattlesnake used that place as the central nervous system of his entire distribution network."
Hannibal took a towel and wiped the grease off the knife handle, his tone gentle. "It sounds like you've found what you needed. This was a very fruitful investigation."
"But this is completely useless!"
Misty Knight slammed her water glass on the table in frustration. "The clues you gave me last time were dubious. I can't include them in the Internal Affairs Department's report to apply for a search warrant. The judge will reject the application as soon as he sees a missing piece of evidence!"
"If I insist on doing this, those bastards in the Ministry of the Interior will drag me in for questioning tomorrow, and the whole case will be dismissed due to procedural violations. That bastard will then be able to swagger around the streets again!"
Hannibal placed the sliced meat into the preheated brass skillet, the butter sizzling pleasantly.
"The original intention of the law is to protect the innocent from harm, right?"
"That's what it says in all the textbooks at the police academy..."
Misty Knight gave a self-deprecating sneer, "If the law has now become a bulletproof umbrella only used to protect criminals, leaving all the victims to suffer and be slaughtered at will."
Hannibal smiled, picked up a wooden spatula and turned the meat slices over, the aroma of the meat immediately filling the entire kitchen.
"Then what's the point of this tattered umbrella? Are you upholding justice, or are you protecting a piece of toilet paper?"
Misty Knight stood still, her eyes fixed on the piece of meat that was slowly turning into an enticing golden color.
"Every day Rattlesnake lives, bags of drugs flow into the Harlem, and teenagers shoot each other in the head with guns on street corners."
Hannibal elegantly plated the meat slices and drizzled them with a spoonful of freshly cooked black truffle sauce.
He picked up the plate, walked around the island counter to Misty Knight, and arranged the cutlery neatly.
"If a police officer, paid by taxpayers, knows that evil is having a party in the basement, but chooses to turn a blind eye because of a stamped piece of paper, wouldn't that inaction itself be an unforgivable crime?"
Misty Knight looked at the exquisite dishes and kept swallowing.
The fragrance wafted wildly into her nostrils, but it couldn't suppress the indescribable sense of moral vertigo churning within her.
These past few days, whenever she closes her eyes, all she sees in her mind is Rattlesnake's arrogant smile as he walks out of the courtroom, and the old informant who was chopped into pieces and stuffed into a gasoline drum for leaking information.
The words "procedural justice" made her feel a sharp pain in her chest, even when she was breathing.
"Why would you help me? You're a high-end psychologist living in a mansion on the Upper East Side. The money you spend on a single meal could feed a family of five in Harlem for a month. What benefit would you get from helping a low-ranking cop?"
Her instincts as a detective were still making a last-ditch effort; the man before her was simply too perfect, so perfect that he didn't seem like a human being living in a quagmire.
Hannibal took off his apron and draped it over the back of the chair, then sat opposite her, sizing up the woman with an admiring gaze.
"Because you are the most honest law enforcement officer I have ever met in this rotten city, Misty Knight."
"Is your suffering really because the world is unfair? No, it's because you know better than anyone just how dark this world truly is."
He leaned forward, closing the distance between them.
"Those judges sitting in air-conditioned offices have no idea what color the blood flowing in the streets looks like in the sewers, but you do know, you walk through blood every day."
Hannibal reached out and pushed the knife and fork toward Misty Knight.
"Eat up, eat it while it's hot. You'll have the energy to do the real work when you're full."
Misty Knight sat in her chair in silence for a few seconds, then grabbed her fork, cut off a large piece of meat, stuffed it into her mouth, and began to chew it. The meat was surprisingly tender.
In less than five minutes, the plate was scraped clean.
Misty Knight stood up, pushed open the door, and rushed into the night. Her figure was much more upright than when she came in.
Hannibal stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, watching the old Ford sedan drive away from the street corner completely.
He turned around and went back to the kitchen, carefully washing all the dishes that Misty Knight had used.
After washing all the dishes, he took out a miniature recording device from his pocket, pressed play, and the conversation he had just heard was crystal clear.
Why did you help me...?
"Because you are the most honest law enforcement officer I have ever met..."
Hannibal listened to his own voice echoing in the empty kitchen, a morbid satisfaction on his face, and casually tossed the recording device into the nearby combination lock drawer.
He walked to his desk, picked up the phone, and dialed a number. The phone was answered after only one ring.
"The fish has completely swallowed the hook, so there's no need to bother scattering bait in the water anymore. Next, she'll bite through the net and swim into our cage."
After hanging up the phone, Hannibal picked up the decanted red wine beside him and took a small sip. The high-quality ingredients were being consumed much faster than he had expected, and he should take advantage of the night to find some new prey to fill the gap.
11:30 p. m., apartment building in Queens.
Misty Knight sat on the edge of the hard bed, using the light coming in from the window.
She pulled open the bedside table drawer, and under the messy documents lay a silver Smith & Wesson revolver.
This was a self-defense weapon her father secretly gave her the year she graduated from police academy. It had no registration number on the gun and was the most common headless gun on the black market.
Misty Knight took out the gun, and the touch on the grip cleared her feverish, throbbing head considerably.
She stared at that revolver for several minutes, thinking that all she had to do was put it in her pocket and go to 125th Street in Harlem to kick down that broken iron door.
Then, if you smash the heads of all those drug-selling scumbags inside and dump all those boxes of drugs down the drain, will this shitty world become a little better?
But once she pulls the trigger, she will no longer be a police officer; she will become the very kind of vigilante she once loathed and wanted to arrest.
The words Hannibal had said in the clinic were now acting like highly concentrated poison, taking effect wildly in her mind.
"Bang!"
She slammed the revolver onto the bedside table, then lunged at the laptop and pressed the power button.
The fluorescent light from the screen illuminated her eyes, and her hands flew across the keyboard, directly accessing the NYPD's internal database.
By entering the street code of the area surrounding the repair shop, all civilian surveillance cameras and traffic violation monitoring data from the five nearby blocks were forcibly retrieved.
The surveillance footage was densely packed on the screen, the constantly flickering black and white images dazzling the eyes.
Since she couldn't legitimately use a search warrant to knock on the door, she had to find an excuse to force her way in without following any rules.
A lost child?
A stray dog darted into the backyard?
Or the escape route of any suspicious armed robber...
If even the slightest flaw is revealed in the surveillance footage, she can easily uproot the door that conceals evil.
Misty Knight grabbed the instant black coffee on the table, took a swig, and casually ripped off the police badge from her chest and threw it into the trash can.