Inside the rental apartment, the traces of the crime had clearly been cleaned up by someone, allowing the room’s original appearance to be taken in at a glance. It was a small single room of over fifty square meters with sparse furniture. The original owner had a habit of tearing off calendar pages, yet the date on the desk calendar had stopped at a month ago.
On the foldable, simple plastic table, there even sat a bowl of takeout with a third of its contents remaining.
The red oil soup base had congealed, with a layer of mold spots floating on top. The remaining bean sprouts and yuba in the soup were faintly visible. Chopsticks were set aside, and scattered paper wads stained with lipstick marks lay on the table.
The room was actually quite messy. The deceased probably didn’t know how to tidy up very well. Coats were piled on the sofa chair, a heap of brightly colored overcoats and jackets.
The “refrigerator” Su Xiaolan spoke of was actually an old-fashioned chest freezer. It looked like it had been hauled over from a second-hand market, very similar to the freezers used to store ice cream in small convenience stores. The freezer was square-shaped, with a piece of thermal insulation cloth draped over it.
This was a room as ordinary as could be. The deceased, like thousands of other girls, lived alone in this room. Through these traces of life, one could almost picture the girl returning home from work and ordering herself a takeout meal.
—That is, if they hadn’t lifted the lid of the freezer and seen a completely naked corpse curled up inside.
The girl’s brown hair draped over her shoulders, her knees pressed against her chest. Her body was slender, and she could only rely on this posture to compress her volume as much as possible. There were obvious pressure marks on the corpse’s neck, chest, and thighs, severe enough to turn purplish-brown, indicating subcutaneous hemorrhaging. A layer of frost had frozen on her eyelashes. She had died with her eyes open, her eyes widened in agony, the eyeballs almost bulging out.
Anyone who made eye contact with her could feel that despair and terror from right before her death.
As the first person to discover the body, the landlord was still ordering people to move things one second, and the next second she was so frightened she collapsed onto the floor.
She never would have imagined that the person she thought had disappeared had been quietly curled up inside this old-fashioned freezer for the entire past month.
Half an hour later, in the interrogation room.
Su Xiaolan filled in the name “Xue Mei” in the victim column.
“She only lived at my place for a few months. We signed the contract directly.”
“You didn’t use an agent?”
“I listed it before, but then I thought about how expensive the agency fee was—they charge 50% of the first month’s rent. The young girl also came here from out of town to work, so dealing directly could save us both a lot of money.”
“So your housing lease contract only has you two as Party A and Party B, with no third party?”
“Yes, I put the contract away. If you need it, I’ll have someone bring it over later.”
The landlord was in her forties, a local who owned several properties. Her usual life consisted of collecting rent and playing cards.
“Did she interact with anyone normally?”
“I’m not clear on that,” the landlord said. “She seemed to work at a cosmetics counter, she really knew how to dress up. Left early and came back late every day. She and I only contacted each other occasionally on WeChat. Last month the water pipe broke, and she reported it to me for repairs once. Other times we rarely chatted, we weren’t really close.”
“You know how it is, it’s better not to interact too much with tenants. If she says money is tight or that her life is very hard or something, do you push her for rent or not? I’ve encountered that kind of thing before, so I never talk much with them.”
The buzz surrounding the female corpse discovered in Yangyuan a few days ago hadn’t even faded yet, and immediately another corpse was discovered in the neighboring complex just a street away. The severity of the incident skyrocketed instantly, with overwhelming news reports scrambling to cover it: Suspected serial case. Female. Living alone.
These three keywords stimulated the masses’ infinite imagination.
For a time, the entire Huanan City was in a state of panic.
Everyone started discussing the safety issues of women living alone.
— I heard neither case has signs of forced entry. That’s the most terrifying part.
— You definitely have to change the passcode on your smart lock regularly!! If you notice someone around when entering your passcode, you must be vigilant!
*— If you’ve ever lost your keys, don’t be lazy, just change the locks. Don’t gamble with your own safety.*
— It’s been so many days, isn’t the police releasing too few clues? Could it be that this case can’t be solved?
The continuously fermenting public opinion gradually piled pressure on the police investigation.
Municipal Public Security General Bureau.
The conference room was dead silent.
Question after question smashed against the silent atmosphere: “What do you mean the killer left no clues?”
“…”
A second question: “Two cases, with crime scenes so close to each other—it’s impossible for there to be no connection between the crime locations and the killer’s living areas. I told you all to investigate, what the hell have you been investigating.”
The person speaking was surnamed Yuan, whom everyone was accustomed to calling Bureau Chief Yuan. Bureau Chief Yuan was getting on in years. Even with the continuous year-round use of black hair dye, he still couldn’t cover the wisps of white hair growing out. He was tall and thin, sitting there looking exceptionally upright, his upper body as stiff and straight as the police uniform he wore.
Bureau Chief Yuan swept a glance over them and called out by name: “Zhibin, you’re leading the team this time. This doesn’t seem like your style.”
Both cases occurred within the jurisdiction managed by the Yongan Police Station. As the veteran detective leading the team, Wu Zhibin was also among the personnel in this meeting.
Wu Zhibin sat below in silence for a long time, his black cane standing upright by his chair. When he spoke, he didn’t mention clues, didn’t mention suspects, and didn’t even mention the case at all. What he said was: “I am leading the team this time, and I want to ask for a certain person. I hope Bureau Chief Yuan will approve.”
Bureau Chief Yuan had been in office for over twenty years. All the cases that occurred in Huanan City over these twenty-plus years had passed through his hands. Although Wu Zhibin didn’t mention a name, a certain name instantly surfaced in Bureau Chief Yuan’s mind.
“The situation is indeed more complex than we imagined. The crime scenes are too clean; it’s highly likely this isn’t the killer’s first offense. We are currently pulling related cases from other cities. The number of victims might be more than two.”
Wu Zhibin raised his eyes, looked at Bureau Chief Yuan, and said, “I want Xie Lin to come back.”
“…”
The already silent conference room became even quieter after the two words “Xie Lin” appeared.
The people sitting in the conference room at this moment had all been in office for over ten years.
No one had forgotten that case from back then.
“The kidnapping case has already passed for ten years,” Wu Zhibin said. “Even criminals have a day they get released. Relying solely on a single psychological evaluation report… Isn’t a ten-year observation period enough? No matter how dangerous he is, he hasn’t done anything in these ten years.”
After Wu Zhibin finished speaking, the silent one became Bureau Chief Yuan.
That old file seemed to surface before Bureau Chief Yuan’s eyes once again.
Every single word and sentence in the file was still vividly etched in his mind.
He couldn’t deny what Wu Zhibin said. It had been ten years. Back then, it was he who made the final call to oppose Xie Lin staying at the General Bureau. But ten years had passed, and his views on many things today had changed.
Bureau Chief Yuan thought of Xie Feng again: “My younger brother… he indeed had an inexplicably sharp intuition for cases. Sometimes his level of understanding towards criminals even astonished me. But I have confidence in him. I believe in him, and I ask that you all believe in him too.”
Now, times had changed. That Xie Feng—with his boundless prospects, who everyone had once placed high hopes upon, as bright and clear as the moon and breeze—had been sleeping eternally in the Martyrs’ Cemetery for ten years now.
Bureau Chief Yuan’s straight back hunched slightly, finally revealing a bit of old age; ten years had left quite a few marks on him as well. He finally sat in his seat and let out a deep breath: “If he is willing… let him come back.”
Since the incident occurred, the voices in Chi Qing’s ears had become mixed and terrified.
[I lost my key once before, I’d better change the lock.]
Countless deductions, paranoia of victimization—everyone felt that the next ‘accident’ could very well happen to them. No one dared to guarantee that the place they currently lived in was absolutely safe.
Home was originally a private place. It gave people a sense of security, bearing all the exhaustion of a long day.
When the private domain carried the risk of being invaded—many people began to be overly suspicious, just like how after watching a horror movie, one always feels there might be someone in the house.
[Changing the lock isn’t enough, I need to go online and buy a surveillance camera… This is too scary.]
[The camera needs to be installed more covertly. I’ll search for hidden micro-cameras.]
Late that night, a woman’s voice in the building kept chattering continuously.
She was extremely cautious, seriously and carefully picking out a camera, from the style to the model.
Chi Qing had already gotten into bed an hour ago.
An hour later, he opened his eyes again.
By this time, the minute hand on the wall clock had already made a full rotation.
He kept his eyes open and endured for a while longer. The voice of the woman picking out the camera gradually faded; it seemed she had fallen asleep while scrolling on her phone.
Chi Qing closed his eyes again.
The minute hand turned another half circle. Just as he was about to fall asleep, someone else in the building woke up.
[Coming home so late every single day, are you really that busy with work? How come no one else is busy but you?]
[…]
Chi Qing opened his eyes.
The night outside the window was very deep, and the hour hand pointed to “3”.
Chi Qing usually slept lightly, easily waking up at the slightest noise. There was truly no way he could ignore these voices that appeared from time to time in the middle of the night.
He had already been suffering from insomnia for nearly two weeks straight. At first, taking some sleeping pills allowed him to barely sleep for a few hours. But starting from the second week, unless he increased the dosage of the sleeping pills, it was very hard for him to rely on medication to fall asleep again.
Compared to this, what was even more headache-inducing was that he couldn’t be certain how long this out-of-control state would last.
After being woken up by the noise, Chi Qing went to the kitchen to pour a glass of cold water and sat on the sofa holding the glass.
Due to a lack of sleep, his mental state was exceptionally poor. His cold hadn’t fully healed either, repeatedly relapsing back and forth.
He already gave off a gloomy vibe to begin with. After developing dark circles under his eyes over this period, a patch of darkness lay under his eyes, looking like a large shadow cast by his eyelashes, making his whole person look even more obscure. The phone resting on the coffee table indicated a low battery.
It let out a “beep-beep” prompt sound.
Besides the low battery notification sound, there were also message vibration sounds coming through from time to time.
[You have a new message].
[…]
He hadn’t contacted anyone these past few days. His head was splitting with pain, and he completely lacked the energy to look at his phone.
The thing he did most often was curl up on the sofa. Sometimes, wanting to get a bit further away from those voices, he would go into the bedroom, lock the door, sit on the floor, and lean against the door panel for a very long time.
After a long time, he would sometimes think of Xie Lin.
Thinking of that momentary quietness.
Chi Qing’s eyelashes trembled. Finally, unable to control himself, he reached out to grab the phone on the coffee table.
He hastily scanned through the recent contacts list.
Ji Mingrui: Remember to eat the dumplings, lately I’ve been…
Agent: There’s a script recently, do you want to take a look…
He skipped over these incomplete sentences displayed in the list, his gaze landing on the two words “Xie Lin”.
Xie Lin: Is your cold any better.
Chi Qing stared at these few words for a while, his fingers touching the screen to type down two words.
– No.
He paused, then typed again.
– Do you still have medicine.
