Chapter 147 The Truth Comes Out

"They've already been called," John responded quickly.

Mu Xin walked over to the only thug who hadn't passed out.

The man kneeling on the ground was in his thirties, with a scar on his face and a faded cross tattoo on his arm.

His lips were still trembling, whether from the collision or from fear, it was hard to tell.

He looked down at the man kneeling on the ground for a few seconds, then couldn't help but laugh.

These guys driving a few energy-absorbing Japanese cars to ram a cadillac escalade reinforced with half a ton of steel plates—the move itself was a joke.

"Throw him in the car, along with the others who haven't passed out, and take them all back to Oxford Town."

"Tell Tom's people to get here quickly and clean up the scene. If anyone asks, say it was a multi-vehicle accident caused by speeding and loss of control, and that our insurance company will cover all damages," Mu Xin said.

"Insurance coverage?" John paused for a moment. Did this kind of thing really need an insurance claim?

Mu Xin glanced at the wreckage of the toyota sienna. "Pay whatever needs to be paid. We have insurance, why wouldn't we use it?"

The collision had happened, and he had plenty of money anyway, but he would never give Derek a chance to make an issue of it on any legal level.

He wanted to make this attack that Derek had paid for look more like a shameful traffic accident, where eight cars were left overturned and battered by the cadillac escalade, without even scratching the other party's paint.

Within twenty minutes, John's reinforcement convoy arrived at the scene.

Tow trucks hauled away all eight totaled Japanese cars, and an ambulance took the injured thugs to the Oxford Town Medical Center.

Naturally, it was the security company's exclusive area, not a regular ward, but the newly renovated security company headquarters on the west side of town.

Additionally, there were three rooms in the basement of this place specifically used for interrogation.

This was something Mu Xin had asked John to prepare in advance, originally to deal with a potential counterattack from the Williams Family, though he hadn't expected it to be used on Derek in the end.

...

Thirty minutes later, Mu Xin was standing outside the underground interrogation room at John's security company headquarters.

Five survivors had all been locked inside.

The three who were seriously injured had already received basic medical treatment. It wasn't because Mu Xin was kind-hearted, but because dead men couldn't provide testimony.

John walked in, having changed into a combat uniform, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, revealing the crisscrossing old scars on his forearms.

He looked at the rooms on the surveillance monitor, his expression devoid of any emotion. "Which one should we start with?"

"The one standing," Mu Xin said, pointing to the first room.

The only thug who hadn't passed out but was trembling, now had his hands cuffed to the iron rings on the table, his eyes darting around.

When John entered the room, the thug's body visibly stiffened. It wasn't because John looked particularly fierce, but because his expression was too gentle.

...

"What's your name?" John sat down opposite him.

"Andy..." the thug's voice trembled.

"Andy, you chipped a front tooth. Does it hurt?"

"It hurts..."

"I'll have someone get you some painkillers in a moment. But before the painkillers, I'm going to ask you a few questions. You just need to answer them, okay?"

Andy nodded.

"Did Derek send you?"

Andy's eyes flickered, but he didn't answer.

John didn't press him. He simply reached for the dagger at his waist, then began, unhurriedly, to trim his nails. The blade made a faint, crisp sound as it scraped against his nails.

After finishing his left hand, he flipped the dagger over and pressed the side of the blade against the tabletop, slowly pushing it forward.

The tip of the blade scraped across the metal table, emitting a soft, sharp sound.

Andy's pupils constricted. For someone sitting in an interrogation chair, this action was a form of psychological pressure that couldn't be described in words.

The other person hadn't threatened you from start to finish, hadn't even looked at you, but the dagger was turning over and over between his fingers as if he were toying with a completely harmless tool.

And you didn't know if, in the next second, he would place the dagger on the table or on your knee.

Andy confessed everything.

Andy started talking much faster than Mu Xin had expected.

It took John only twenty minutes to extract all the information from Andy, and then he placed the confession record in front of Mu Xin.

"Derek Warren gave instructions to Andy and his accomplices late last night through a middleman. The exact instruction was to cause a serious accident for your convoy on the road out of Oxford Town."

Mu Xin looked at the sentence in the confession record, the muscles at the corner of his mouth twitching slightly.

Derek had never intended to target the power transmission lines from the beginning; his target had been Mu Xin himself all along.

Everything he said in the warehouse about the power transmission lines, the cross-river towers, and the 99.9% power supply guarantee rate was all a smokescreen.

He used a threat that seemed logically sound and filled with the color of business negotiations to completely divert Mu Xin's attention to the security and defense of the power transmission lines.

Then, while Mu Xin had deployed all his manpower to patrol the lines and reinforce the towers, he sent people to block the road leading out of Oxford Town.

He remembered what Ramaswamy had said over the phone: "If he's really pushed to the edge, he'll take your life."

At the time, he had dismissed that statement as an exaggeration to solicit business, but now it seemed that Ramaswamy understood people like Derek better than he did.

John continued to interrogate the other survivors.

The testimonies were highly consistent. Derek had paid each of them $10,000 through a middleman, promised another $10,000 upon success, and even promised to hire lawyers to fight the case if they got locked up.

The middleman's name was Vinnie Caruso, a guy in the Cincinnati riverfront area who specialized in contracting gray-market business deals.

As for Derek's plan itself, if the attack succeeded and Mu Xin died or was seriously injured, a power vacuum would emerge in the entire Oxford Town electricity business.

Derek would take advantage of the chaos to take over those power supply contracts and then re-anchor Cincinnati's electricity prices at $320.

If the attack failed, Derek would flatly deny any connection to the incident, destroy all evidence linking to the middleman, and then use his old methods.

The investigation would be shelved due to insufficient evidence, and he would once again go free.

This plan wasn't particularly ingenious, but it was logically self-consistent.

Mu Xin had to admit that Derek's plan was well-calculated, provided that a toyota sienna could actually ram a cadillac escalade.

"Organize the testimonies into three copies," Mu Xin said, handing the records back to John. "Give one to Tom and have him initiate formal criminal investigation procedures."

"Give one to Jack Harrison and have him prepare a comprehensive lawsuit against Derek at the federal level."

"Keep the third one in the safe. In case anything happens to Derek or to us, a scanned copy of this testimony will automatically be sent to the FBI, the State Attorney General, and investigative reporters at three media outlets."