“…His head is buried by me near the cliff.” An Xinhe sat in the chair, her hands restrained. The bright light shone on her face, erasing the shadows, but the wrinkles left by life, the weariness from hardship, were all clearly visible.
“The specific location is about a twenty-minute walk up and forward from Lei Lei’s tombstone. There’s a very conspicuous crooked-neck tree there. Except for the roots, the entire trunk juts out from the cliff.”
“On the 19th, I used a syringe to inject Tang Jinglong with drugs in the parking lot of the unfinished building near the fellow-villager’s restaurant. I knocked him out and then put him in the trunk of my car and brought him back to the village.”
“How did you, a lone woman, have the strength to tie up Tang Jinglong and put him in the trunk?”
The questioner was a pre-trial interrogator.
“Other people helped me,” An Xinhe said. “Several other women left the restaurant with me.”
“When it was late and quiet at night, I dragged Tang Jinglong out of the trunk, tied him to a pushcart, and transported him up the mountain. I took him to the crooked-neck tree, tore the tape off his mouth, and asked him why he had to kill my daughter. At first, he denied it, but then he admitted to the murder, weeping profusely. He apologized to me, knelt down, and begged me not to kill him, saying he could give me a lot of money…”
By the time she confessed these words, An Xinhe was already at the Ning City Police Department. It wasn’t just her; the other women, including many men from the village, were also brought to the police station and questioned separately to prevent them from colluding on their stories.
After all the hustle and bustle, it was only two in the morning.
The sky was still dark, like a giant black cover trapping the mountain village inside.
The interrogation in Ning City needed someone in charge, and someone was also needed here in Xijia Village. Huo Ranyin did not return to Ning City with his colleagues but stayed in Xijia Village to oversee the work.
The mountain roads were difficult to navigate at night, so the search for traps was left until dawn. However, An Xinhe had clearly stated the location where she had disposed of the body, so Tan Mingjiu was assigned to take a team to that area to have a look. As for Wen Yangyang, she led another team to conduct a house-by-house search within the village.
In a short time, Wen Yangyang successively found old, rusted shackles, ropes, whips, and other simple torture instruments in the basements of various houses. Most were casually piled among junk, some still showing old bloodstains.
After the inventory of evidence was complete, she stood in silence for a long time before rushing into Xi Zhengping’s house with a blood detection lamp. Her target was clear as she shone it on the headboard. Unsurprisingly, it was covered in blood, large splatters of it.
Someone had brutally beaten a victim here time and time again, causing blood to spatter almost every part of this headboard.
This was not an isolated case. Just as every house had a basement and torture instruments, the bloodstains left in their homes were also largely similar. There was only one exception in the entire village—Cheng Zheng.
His house was the only place where these nauseating traces were not found.
Ji Xun lingered here. Even after the police had confirmed there was nothing else and had left one after another, he remained, observing and examining.
“What are you looking for?” Huo Ranyin waited by his side and glanced at his watch. “You were following me just now. I thought you didn’t want to take the police car and wanted me to drive you home.”
“A very good guess. You have to drive me,” Ji Xun pricked up his ears, not missing a second of his own benefit.
Huo Ranyin was silent for a moment, rubbing his temples. “If there’s nothing else, I’m leaving. I still have work to do. I’ll have another team member drive my car later. You can go back with them.”
“Going to search for the body? A job like searching for a body doesn’t need to be so busy. Bringing a dog might even be better than a person,” Ji Xun said nonchalantly. “At least their sense of smell is keen, so they won’t get the wrong body.”
“It’s a miracle you haven’t been beaten to death yet,” Huo Ranyin said with no small amount of sarcasm.
“Don’t misunderstand, I’m not mocking the police for being incompetent,” Ji Xun said with a smile. “I’m saying that such a simple task doesn’t require your labor. You should stay here and search with me.”
“Is there anything unclear about the case at this point?” Huo Ranyin said.
“Hmm—a little, maybe,” Ji Xun replied.
“Where?”
“I don’t know. I’ll know when I find it.”
“Then let’s review,” Huo Ranyin said flatly. “Before coming to the mountain village, I found Lu Ping. I was originally certain that Lu Ping was the killer, but An Xinhe came forward. This entire case—the Xi Lei case and the Tang Jinglong case—has indeed undergone a seismic shift at this moment.”
“Let’s start with the Xi Lei case. This case isn’t complicated. After investigating Xi Lei’s social circle, the person with the strongest motive and the strangest behavior was Tang Jinglong. The only difficulty in the case was that Tang Jinglong had no opportunity to commit the crime, which means that even if Tang Jinglong was the killer, he hired someone to do it—I later identified this hired person as Lu Ping.”
“Lu Ping also had ample evidence proving he was the one who actually killed Xi Lei: his secret crush on Xi Lei explained why he tidied her hair after killing her, his identity as a carpenter explained the nylon fibers left on the leaves, and his relationship with Tang Jinglong further explained his motive for the murder.”
“I agree,” Ji Xun said. “There’s indeed nothing worth questioning there.”
“But the police missed a small detail here, or rather, with so much evidence, this small detail became something that, while strange, was no longer important,” Huo Ranyin continued. “This detail is… at the scene of Xi Lei’s death, besides the DNA of Zeng Peng and Xi Lei herself, only a large amount of Tang Jinglong’s DNA was detected. No DNA from Lu Ping was found.”
“Now, coming to the Tang Jinglong case. Tang Jinglong was still active at 9 PM on the 19th, while An Xinhe had not left the village since returning to Xijia Village on the evening of the 19th. Apart from you and the lawyer yesterday, no other outsiders had come to the village and left by car. So how did Tang Jinglong’s body fly from Xijia Village to Wushan out of thin air?”
“Since it’s impossible for the body to have flown to Wushan out of thin air, and An Xinhe did indeed kill someone, that proves…
“The bag of body parts at Wushan didn’t belong to Tang Jinglong at all!”
“Found it, we found the body!”
“Be careful with the scene, move the body out bit by bit!”
Accompanied by a few shouts, Tan Mingjiu and Wen Yangyang, who were searching the back mountain, saw the true face of the body one after another.
They gasped.
Brought out from near the cliff, besides Tang Jinglong’s lone head, was a headless torso. Both were in a similar state of decomposition.
The left arm of this torso was still wrapped in a bandage. This was… this was Tang Jinglong’s body.
Tang Jinglong’s head and torso were all here!
“Two cases, three people dead. And the police, from beginning to end, overlooked the existence of the third person, always equating this third person with Tang Jinglong, getting tangled in the illusion set up by Tang Jinglong. Instead, it was An Xinhe who saw through everything from the start. It is indeed as you said, in this matter, a dog might have done a better job than the police,” Huo Ranyin’s tone was calm. When things are not done well, one can’t blame others for their mockery; there’s no need to get angry. “And to equate the third person with Tang Jinglong is not difficult, as long as one thing is accomplished…”
“Make the third person’s DNA = Tang Jinglong’s DNA.”
“Tang Jinglong acted as a middleman for surrogacy and was suspected of secretly changing the order of donated organs. He did so many illegal things and had long anticipated that he might not have a good end. For this, he prepared for a rainy day and quietly bought himself a life several years ago. He used his past experience in organ donation to find a leukemia patient who was a match for him and donated his bone marrow. A few years later, his DNA completely invaded this patient, and the patient became ‘him’.”
When they had investigated Tang Jinglong’s home earlier, an offhand comment by Rao Fangjie now became strong supporting evidence.
Rao Fangjie had said: “It seems he was sick a few years ago, and Tang Jinglong helped him.”
“After the surgery,” Huo Ranyin continued, “Tang Jinglong didn’t just let this patient go. He kept the patient under his watch and took care of him in many ways, eventually even helping the patient’s uremic son get a kidney transplant. So many people with uremia in this world wait in long lines at the hospital but can’t get a kidney source, and can only die in despair.”
“With both father and son’s lives saved in succession, the patient had no way to repay the kindness,” Huo Ranyin said coldly. “He could only help Tang Jinglong kill—he didn’t leave no DNA in the Xi Lei case; rather, he left countless traces of ‘Tang Jinglong’s’ DNA. And then, he was killed at home, his body dismembered and abandoned at Wushan to fake Tang Jinglong’s death, creating an alibi for An Xinhe—his name was Lu Ping.”
“…On the 18th, I first killed Lu Ping. He was Tang Jinglong’s accomplice in killing my daughter. I knew this because Lei Lei had mentioned the medicine Lu Ping took when we talked on the phone before. He was a leukemia patient who had received a bone marrow donation. His DNA was the donor’s DNA. Tang Jinglong saved Lu Ping, my daughter knew Tang Jinglong’s secret, and Tang Jinglong wanted to kill my daughter. How he killed her, it becomes clear when you think about it…”
“I went to Lu Ping’s house. Lu Ping was doing woodwork in the yard. I knocked on the door and told him I was sent by Tang Jinglong to give him money. Lu Ping didn’t suspect anything. After I went in, I even chatted with him for a bit. Then I used a syringe to inject boric acid into Lu Ping’s body, and then used the chainsaw in the yard to dismember Lu Ping and dispose of him at Wushan.”
“The next day, on the 19th, I went to see Tang Jinglong… I was very disappointed,” An Xinhe said in a flat tone. “Before he died, Tang Jinglong kept talking about money. If money could buy back his life, then money could surely buy back my daughter’s life.”
“An Xinhe chose Wushan as the disposal site to mislead us with the timing of trash collection at Wushan. She knew the body would definitely be discovered on the 23rd. From the 18th to the 23rd, five days, the degree of decomposition of the body could not be precisely determined to a specific day during the initial forensic examination.”
“The DNA from the Xi Lei case left at the police station led to the immediate identification of the body at Wushan. We were negligent and did not use other methods to confirm the deceased’s identity. For example, the killer took the head and fingerprints but forgot to take Lu Ping’s left arm, which had no fractures. This should have been a flaw.”
“After Lu Ping killed Xi Lei, he was originally going to flee. This is why the neighbor saw him packing his luggage early on—this also misled us, making us think until now that Lu Ping had committed the crime and fled, and we were preparing to issue a wanted notice in conjunction with various units.”
“But in fact, Lu Ping was found by An Xinhe long before he prepared to escape. The day the neighbor last saw ‘Lu Ping’ throwing out the trash, she didn’t see ‘Lu Ping’, but An Xinhe disguised as Lu Ping after killing him. The trash bag in An Xinhe’s hand was Lu Ping—already dismembered by a chainsaw.”
“When the living Tang Jinglong appeared before others on the 19th, he passively helped the killer complete a perfect alibi. The killer used Tang Jinglong’s own supposedly clever methods, and also exploited the police’s blind confidence, giving him a taste of his own medicine to complete her own murder plot.”
Huo Ranyin stated the reflective conclusion, which included a critique of himself, without a care: “At this point, the method of the crime is already very clear.”
“Indeed clear,” Ji Xun did not deny.
“Then what’s left is the motive.”
He stopped, walked to the window, and looked at the dark, endless mountains.
These mountains surrounded the village, and under the moonlight, they looked like a cage made of thorny railings.
It wasn’t actually far from here to Ning City, but the mountains were too deep. Even with the expressway, it still took four hours. This expressway was built seven years ago, and the beautiful new asphalt road from the expressway exit to the mountain was only finally built two years ago due to the implementation of the “village-to-village road access” policy.
Only after the road was built did the small villages nearby start small businesses like selling podocarpus pines and tea, their lives gradually becoming more prosperous, and they slowly connected with the rest of the world.
But before, there were no roads.
Facing this impenetrable darkness, Huo Ranyin finally lowered his eyes and said, “An Xinhe’s motive for killing Tang Jinglong, or rather, the motive for the women of this village to conspire to kill Tang Jinglong, is…”
“My daughter… Lei Lei, was the only girl to survive in the village over all these years. We can’t get out anymore, only she successfully left this village. She left with the hopes of all the women here. But Tang Jinglong killed her. He snuffed out our hope.”
“He had to die. Anyone who kills our hope must die.”
“I cut off his head and finally buried them all.”
A long silence. The interrogator asked, “Is there anything else you want to say?”
“Nothing more,” An Xinhe said. “Give a swift judgment. No need for leniency, and no need for a lawyer.”
“They have no way out,” Huo Ranyin stated flatly, his tone seemingly without fluctuation. “Their lives were cut short when they were trafficked into the mountains. This village is a cage full of sharp thorns for them. They should have tried every means to escape, and they did so once. But as you experienced tonight, the women who tried to escape back then were treated as prey, chased, laughed at, and then pushed into a pit, their fate unknown. Later, they could only resign themselves to staying in the cage. After staying for a long time, this damn, terrifying cage also became their only place of rest. So even if the cage door was opened, they no longer had the ability or the courage to go out.”
He thought of the bird in Xi Lei’s home and made an analogy: “They are birds with broken wings in a cage. Some birds died. Others survived. There is actually no difference between living and dying, and it’s even more painful than death, because they have been killing their own daughters. With every baby girl they kill, their pain and numbness intensifies by a degree. The difference was Xi Lei.”
“Xi Lei was not just An Xinhe’s daughter. From the moment she survived, she became the daughter of all the women in the village. She was the continuation of their lives, their lamp of life. Now this lamp has been extinguished. They have no way out.”
“So they had to commit murder.”
