Chapter 151 I'm worried about you!

After hanging up the phone, Mu Xin sat back on the sofa and continued watching the news on TV.

A reporter was interviewing a middle-aged woman living nearby; she was wearing a bathrobe, looked pale, and was rambling incoherently into the camera about useless information.

"I heard a sound, I thought it was an earthquake, I thought the Ohio River had burst its banks."

"..."

Mu Xin turned off the TV.

He finished brushing his teeth, rinsed out his water cup, and took a look at himself in the mirror.

He looked exactly the same as yesterday, a Chinese international student studying mathematics and statistics in an Ohio town.

As for those steel coils, they had nothing to do with him.

...

Before twelve o'clock noon, everyone in the grey power circle of Ohio knew about it.

Someone running a grey power cartel, controlling thirty-two megawatts of distributed power assets, along with his entire family, had been crushed from three dimensions into two by several thirty-ton steel coils.

This incident spread through the power circle faster than any news.

By noon, from Cleveland to Louisville, everyone in the grey power business knew two things:

One, Derek Warren was dead; two, the last thing Derek Warren did before he died was to send people in a few paper-thin Japanese cars to ram the convoy of that person in Oxford Town.

No one dared to link these two things together, but everyone had connected them in their minds.

...

Jessica pushed open the door of the Morris Building so fast that the hinges groaned in protest; she was clutching her phone, and her face was deathly pale.

Victoria followed behind her, her expression relatively calmer, but the screen of the calculator in her hand was filled with garbled characters from her pressing it too hard.

"Derek Warren is dead." Jessica slammed her phone onto Mu Xin's desk; the screen showed a news notification from WLWT.

"I know." Mu Xin leaned back in his chair, reviewing the load data updated by PJM yesterday. "It was the morning news."

"You knew? It's been several hours since the morning news, and you're just sitting here looking at load data?" Jessica asked.

"What should I look at if not load data? Derek's death is news, but the power market in southwest Ohio won't stop operating just because he died."

"The distributed power network under his control is now leaderless, and his former clients have lost their power supplier. Who do you think they should go to now?"

Jessica looked at Mu Xin, opening her mouth twice but failing to say anything.

It wasn't that she hadn't seen Mu Xin's calmness in the face of a crisis before—he had been calm during the car accident last time—but today's calmness was different.

Today's calmness was a kind of certainty that sent a chill up her spine, as if Mu Xin had known from the very beginning how Derek would die, when he would die, and in what manner he would die.

"Mu Xin." For the first time, Jessica didn't call him Mr. Mu. She closed the office door and lowered her voice to the lowest volume.

"That truck, do you know where it came from?"

"The news says the source is still under investigation." Mu Xin's expression was calm.

"The news doesn't know, but I do." Jessica swiped on her phone a few times and pushed the screen in front of him.

"I registered the license plate numbers and VINs of all the motor vehicles in the Ramaswamy warehouse, and now there is one missing!"

Mu Xin glanced at the table on the phone screen and then pushed it back. "Your database is well done, worthy of praise."

"I'm not discussing the database with you!" Jessica's voice lost its usual professional restraint, and her eyes reddened.

"That truck belongs to the Ramaswamy company. If the police trace it to Ramaswamy, what will Ramaswamy say?"

"Will he say he had no idea where the truck went, or will he say that the truck was parked at the back door of the warehouse last night and ask who had the keys?"

Mu Xin didn't answer. He looked at Jessica, showing neither nervousness nor guilt.

"Jessica, do you think I did it?"

"I don't know." Jessica's lips were trembling. "But I know that Derek threatened you before."

"Then you had John raise the security level to the highest, and yesterday afternoon, Derek's men ambushed your convoy on the road just as you left Oxford Town."

"And then... and then Derek and his whole family were crushed by a steel coil into... crushed into that state..."

"I am worried about you!" Jessica seemed to have exhausted all her strength after saying the last sentence.

"Everything you just said is a fact." Mu Xin didn't evade.

"But you missed one fact. Derek operated in the Cincinnati grey power market for ten years; he didn't just offend one or two people."

"He controlled a large number of illegal power-tapping users, and every small supplier that wanted to enter this market was driven out by him using various methods."

"Have you ever thought about how many of these people were driven to a dead end by Derek?"

"Those small business owners who were extorted by him for years and didn't dare to call the police, those factory owners who were forced by him to accept a price of thirty-two hundred dollars through threats of power cuts, those business partners who had commercial disputes with him—any one of them had a motive."

Jessica stared into his eyes.

"Besides." Mu Xin picked up the water cup on the table and took a sip. "That truck belongs to the Ramaswamy company."

"I had an appointment to meet with Ramaswamy yesterday afternoon, but before I even went, his truck had an accident in the early morning. This matter can't be linked to me in any way."

"Ramaswamy knows you." Jessica said.

"Does knowing someone count as evidence? If that were the case, the people in the entire Cincinnati grey power market who knew Derek would be enough to fill half a football stadium. Are they all suspects?"

Jessica opened her mouth, but couldn't find a reason to refute him.

"Fine." Jessica took a deep breath. "Then what about Ramaswamy?"

"The truck is his; he will have to face police questioning sooner or later."

"If he says the car was stolen, we don't know who would steal his car, but if he says the car was borrowed by someone—" Jessica's words were interrupted by Mu Xin.

"He won't." Mu Xin's voice was very calm.

"How do you know?"

Just then, Mu Xin's phone rang.

The caller ID on the screen was a name: Vivek Ramaswamy.

Mu Xin glanced at Jessica and then pressed the speakerphone.

"Mr. Mu." Ramaswamy's voice came through the speaker, devoid of his usual mockery, replaced by a tone Jessica had never heard from him on the phone before.

It wasn't anger; it was some kind of intense emotion suppressed to the throat but not yet completely covered up.

"We need to meet. Now. Meet immediately!"

"Of course, no problem." Mu Xin's voice was very gentle. "I was already planning to go to Liberty Township today to see that newly renovated power generation module of yours."

"What time? Where?"

"You don't need to come; I'm downstairs right now!"