Around noon, the sunlight had been intensely scorching, but after the sun went down, the entire city became shrouded in a layer of grey fog.
The wind grew stronger.
A biting gale rattled loudly against the car windows with a sharp “clatter-clatter”.
The school uniform worn by the “kite” hanging in the tree was puffed up and deformed by the rushing wind, swaying even more violently.
Su Xiaobo hadn’t looked closely at first, but following Xie Lin’s words, he rubbed his eyes. This time, he clearly saw the “kite’s” two legs and its drooping head. Throwing all thoughts of his homeroom teacher and exam results to the winds, he said blankly, “It… it really is a person…”
The red light quickly turned green.
Since Xie Lin had stopped his car and remained motionless for so long, the driver behind them impatiently honked the horn to urge them forward: “Are you moving or what? What are you stopping there for—”
Car horns began blaring from all directions.
All the people on this street, busy with their commutes and rushing to get home after work, had no desire to pay attention to the scenery along the roadside. They had absolutely no idea what had just happened inside the school by the street, let alone that a corpse was conspicuously hanging in a place they could see just by lifting their heads.
Xie Lin dialed a call through to Su Xiaolan: “Hello, Officer Su, it’s me. Your nephew is in my car now. I’ve picked him up, but you might still need to come over here.” He glanced at his current location; this school was five kilometers away from Guangyuan High School, and its name was completely unfamiliar to him.
Chi Qing hadn’t heard of this school either.
There were many high schools in Huanan City. A high school with admission scores below the cutoff line for key schools was practically non-existent to top students. This school likely had a low score requirement and was a very ordinary institution.
Xie Lin continued, “…At the intersection of Huainan Road and Yangcheng North Road, inside the woods of a school named Honghai No. 6 High School, a corpse has been discovered.”
When Su Xiaolan answered the phone, she was rushing to finish a report that needed to be submitted soon. She tilted her head to wedge the phone against her shoulder, her hands typing away non-stop. Her typing speed slowed down slightly during the first half of Xie Lin’s words.
Upon hearing “a corpse,” her hands froze over the keyboard: “…”
Half an hour later, several police cars pulled up outside the gates of Honghai No. 6 High School, their red and blue emergency lights flashing in steady circles. Seeing the combination of “police cars” and a “school,” passersby stopped to watch, wondering what on earth had happened inside.
Honghai No. 6 High School was not famous in Huanan City. The students here had barely scraped past the score cutoff to get in. The annual college acceptance rate was worrying, and the school atmosphere was a far cry from Guangyuan High School’s.
When Su Xiaolan showed her police badge to the security guard, she encountered the last batch of students walking out of the school. Their school uniforms were worn loosely, and they boldly walked out with their arms around each other’s shoulders while operating their phones with one hand: “Let’s start another round when we get back. The class just now messed up my performance, I’ll keep playing when I get home.”
“Sure, where’s your backpack?”
“In the classroom.”
“Aren’t you going to copy the homework?”
“I’ll just come over early tomorrow morning to copy it,” the passing student said. “It’s a matter of a few minutes.”
“…”
The buildings of Honghai No. 6 High School were a muted greyish-beige. A small commendation newsletter posted on the bulletin board at the school entrance read: Congratulations to Student XXX of Class XX for winning an encouragement award in the XXX Essay Competition.
Everyone instantly formed a clear definition and understanding of this school’s standing.
The police cordoned off the scene very quickly. After examining the crime scene and confirming the corpse, they promptly sealed the area, strictly controlling the entry and exit of students as well as personnel from outside the school. The responding officers split into three teams. One team went to the security room to check the incoming and outgoing surveillance footage, searching in advance for any suspicious external individuals appearing recently to narrow down the scope of suspects.
Another team was responsible for investigating the deceased to confirm his identity.
Meanwhile, Su Xiaolan led Ji Mingrui to conduct the scene investigation in a hurry.
The “kite” that had been hanging high up in the tree half an hour ago was now laid flat on the ground.
The “kite” had a popular hairstyle—longer in the middle and shaved slightly closer on the sides. Judging by the length, it had likely been freshly trimmed. The face was bruised and swollen, and the eyeballs bulged out as if they were about to pop from their sockets at any moment. He must have been a fairly decent-looking male student in life, but at this moment, it was difficult to reconstruct his original features at first glance. Looking at the blood leaking from the dead boy’s external ear canals and nostrils, one could only feel that his state of death was gruesome.
“He died not long ago; rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet,” Xie Lin had done a preliminary examination of the body while it was still hanging in the tree before the others arrived. “The preliminary estimation is within an hour and a half, which means right around dismissal time or shortly after. Tell the screening team to focus on investigating suspicious personnel entering or leaving the school during this timeframe.”
Ji Mingrui faced the corpse with a complex expression: “…Weren’t you two supposed to pick up Xiaolan’s nephew?”
He directed these words at Xie Lin and Chi Qing.
Xie Lin: “We happened to see it while driving by.”
Ji Mingrui: “…”
Do you two have radar installed on your bodies?! You can even “happen” to spot something like this.
“Where’s the nephew?” Ji Mingrui asked again.
Xie Lin pointed to the side.
The nephew, Su Xiaobo, was standing far away, not daring to approach. He was clutching the hem of his good brother Chi Qing’s coat tightly, trembling all over as he babbled continuously, “Is he really dead? A student from this school? A mu-murder case?”
Chi Qing didn’t consider the massive psychological trauma an ordinary, average high school student might be experiencing right now at all. He glanced at the hem of his coat and said, “Let go.”
Su Xiaobo: “I’m scared.”
Chi Qing: “If you’re scared, go home quickly.”
“You all have to stay for the investigation,” Su Xiaobo said. “It’ll be even scarier for me to go back alone.”
Chi Qing couldn’t tolerate it anymore: “You’re a grown ma—”
“I’m not a man,” Su Xiaobo interrupted. “I’m still just a kid! What kind of kid do you know who gets forced to stumble upon a murder scene just from getting dismissed from school?!”
Chi Qing thought to himself: Without even needing to be as old as you are now, going back a few years earlier, a murderer was already whispering right into my ear back in middle school.
Accidentally remembering that case from many years ago, Chi Qing fell silent for a moment. Recalling the events that had occurred in that serial case, he uncharacteristically continued to let Su Xiaobo clutch the hem of his coat.
As he endured it, he thought that, sure enough, whenever he realized doing something would be incredibly troublesome, he should resolutely refuse.
Love makes people lose their minds.
Even if it was for Xie Lin’s sake, he shouldn’t have wasted so much time.
Chi Qing’s patience ran out completely when Su Xiaobo, after wiping away the tears drawn out by fear, wanted to continue touching his clothes.
Then, he pointed at the hem of Xie Lin’s coat for Su Xiaobo and said, “See that person over there? Go grab him.”
“…”
Soon, the group handling the deceased’s background check came over with their logbooks, leading a teacher to identify the body. The female teacher wore high heels, avoiding the crooked tree branches scattered all over the woods as she walked. Her face turned pale upon seeing the corpse.
“Do you recognize him?”
“I… I do.”
“Is he a student in your class?”
“Yes,” the female teacher instinctively took two steps back. “His name is Wang Yuan. Classes were reshuffled during the first semester of the sophomore year, and he was assigned to my class. How could he… how could this…”
“Did he usually have conflicts with anyone? Have there been any unusual behaviors recently? Tell us everything you remember regarding him.”
For a student, how complex could his social relationships really be?
In just a few sentences, the female teacher laid out the relevant information about the male student named Wang Yuan clearly. His father was an alcoholic, his mother played mahjong all day long, and the boy was highly rebellious in his adolescence, defying discipline, skipping classes, and neglecting his studies. He belonged to the group that just “loafed around” in school, and his most out-of-line behavior was occasionally fighting with students outside the school.
Compared to many societal cases, this relationship web was indeed far too simple—so simple that it was difficult to initially pinpoint a suspect.
“The deceased only had a phone on him,” Su Xiaolan placed the evidence into a sealed bag. “And a power bank.”
“What do you think?” Unexpectedly, Xie Lin looked toward Su Xiaobo, who was also a student.
Suppressing his nausea, Su Xiaobo’s teeth chattered as he said, “A phone and a power bank are standard equipment for a high schooler.”
Su Xiaolan knew her nephew’s personality very well: “In your school, probably only you consider it standard. How many times have I told you not to bring your phone to school to play?”
The items found on the deceased were also very ordinary, just as ordinary as his social background. The students at this school never let their phones leave their sides. After ruling out this item, no useful clues had been left at the scene whatsoever.
“It was handled by someone,” Xie Lin evaluated. “And handled very cleanly. No matter who the killer is, this person’s psychological resilience must be extremely strong.”
“How so?” someone asked.
Xie Lin pointed to the teaching building opposite them: “That teaching building over there—have you counted how many windows it has? Six on each floor, a total of 36 windows across six floors. Under circumstances where it’s so easy to be discovered, after killing someone, they didn’t rush to leave immediately, but instead stayed behind to clean up the criminal traces at the scene. If this were changed to you, would you be able to pull it off?”
They certainly wouldn’t be able to.
With so many windows opposite them, even if no one was looking out from them, in a person’s subconscious, they would instinctively feel that someone was watching them, or that someone would see them very soon. This kind of anxiety was very difficult to dispel.
An ordinary person under these circumstances would often choose to finish up hastily and leave the scene immediately while no one had discovered them yet after killing the person.
It was precisely because of the existence of this psychology that crime scenes easily left behind critical clues.
But this scene was too clean.
For a male student with a relatively clean social background, who only had a phone and a power bank even in his pockets, nothing had been left behind at the scene, nor could any fingerprints be detected. There were too many broken twigs in the woods and too many people coming and going, making it difficult to leave intact footprints.
Xie Lin asked the female teacher, “Is there no surveillance here? Or rather, the surveillance doesn’t work at all?”
The female teacher said, “Yes… the students at our school… frequently climb over the walls to go out. They don’t want to get caught by the teachers, so even if the surveillance is fixed, it gets smashed by them. Over time, the school just turned a blind eye and stopped managing it.”
“Let’s focus the investigation on the students who were close to him first,” Xie Lin said finally. “The killer understands the characteristics of this school very well. Currently, I personally lean more toward… this being an on-campus homicide case.”
The task had initially been quite clear; the members of the investigation team did their homework beforehand, intending to question Wang Yuan’s friends thoroughly. However, after just one night, things developed in a direction that caught everyone off guard.
The next day, before the sky had even turned bright, the police station received a report call: “Hello? Is this the police?”
The enthusiastic citizen on the other end of the line said, “I got up early this morning to walk my dog, and I found a person lying on the ground here in our neighborhood garden—it scared me half to death! It looks like he’s already stopped breathing, and the body is stiff. Please send someone over to take a look right away. Do you want me to describe it specifically? Oh, it’s a male high school student wearing a school uniform, and the uniform colors are a mix of red and black.”
