Ji Xun’s figure disappeared from the doorway.
Huo Ranyin’s thoughts were a bit chaotic. He lowered his head in contemplation but saw something on the floor.
A keychain with a metal girl’s head avatar.
It was Ji Xun’s.
He had seen it on him once before—the time he went to Ji Xun’s house.
Huo Ranyin bent down to pick up the keychain and chased after him to return it. But not long after he left the room, he heard voices from the backyard—two of them, Ji Xun and Yuan Yue.
“Here, your chicken soup, brought by aunt,” Ji Xun was the first to speak.
“You could have just left it at the security office. Why wait for me here specifically?” Yuan Yue said. “You know, with the dismemberment case, there’s no set time for when we’ll be done processing the scene.”
“I was just afraid some clueless fellow would secretly get their hands on your aunt’s kind gesture.”
“Ji Xun—” Yuan Yue’s voice carried a sense of helplessness. “Stop fooling around.”
When it came to his good friend, Yuan Yue always seemed to be at a loss. Huo Ranyin thought with a hint of amusement.
“Is this fooling around? This is something that could very well happen,” Ji Xun said.
“You just came from Captain Huo’s interrogation room,” Yuan Yue said again, his voice calm this time. Huo Ranyin was surprised to find himself mentioned. “No matter what reason you have for coming here, your ultimate goal is him. You want to exchange case information with him. Otherwise, you would have already called a few friends and drunk the chicken soup—you’ve done that plenty of times in the past.”
Huo Ranyin’s footsteps stopped.
He suddenly realized that Yuan Yue wasn’t always helpless against his friend. Yuan Yue had plenty of methods—it’s just that he was a composed person by nature and didn’t like to expose people’s shortcomings easily.
Ji Xun was silent.
How rare. The one who was silent was actually Ji Xun. He had thought that no matter what disadvantage he was in, the other man could always talk his way out… perhaps that eloquence depended on the person. Towards Yuan Yue, Ji Xun became reluctant.
He knew he should walk out, make a sound, and interrupt the obviously private conversation between the two.
But Huo Ranyin’s feet remained as if rooted to the spot.
Everyone has secrets, and Huo Ranyin certainly did too.
For the sake of his own secrets, he desperately wanted to know what was in Ji Xun’s heart. If Yuan Yue could use emotion to break through Ji Xun’s shell and make him reveal his inner self, he would definitely give them ample space.
There was still no sound of talking from outside, but there was a dull thud.
Could it be… like Ji Xun had done to him just now, in a fit of agitation, Ji Xun had pushed Yuan Yue against the wall?
Huo Ranyin guessed for a few rounds in his mind but couldn’t resist. He took another step forward and glanced into the backyard through the window.
The scene was completely different from Huo Ranyin’s guess.
The two had no physical contact at all; they were even standing a bit far apart, with an empty space between them that could fit two or three more people. The sound had come from a piece of exercise equipment placed in the yard.
Ji Xun, bored out of his mind, was kicking it with his foot.
Huo Ranyin was greatly disappointed. He felt that he might not achieve his goal tonight.
However, the situation was not that bleak. Outside in the yard, Ji Xun spoke.
He dragged out his words, looking lazy. “You found me out again. I can’t help it. A riddle is half-solved, leaving me hanging. Isn’t it as choking as a fishbone stuck in the throat?”
“There are plenty of riddles here,” Yuan Yue said. “As long as you’re willing, you can come back anytime.”
“Ha, impossible. You know…”
“Don’t say ‘I know’,” Yuan Yue interrupted him sternly. “What happened in the past was not your fault. Don’t carry everything on your own shoulders. They would only want you to live a better and better life. Ji Xun, if you really don’t want to come back, I won’t force you. But in your heart, you want to come back.”
“Alright, I won’t say ‘you know’, I’ll say ‘you don’t know’,” he said listlessly, too lazy to argue with Yuan Yue. “You have no idea why I don’t come back…”
“Captain Yuan!”
A member of Team One ran over, interrupting the conversation between Ji Xun and Yuan Yue. In the darkness of the night, his expression was extremely serious.
“The DNA comparison results are out. The victim of the Wushan dismemberment case is Tang Jinglong!”
To be honest, the identity of the victim truly surprised Ji Xun.
Given the victim’s special identity, Yuan Yue went to meet with Huo Ranyin—coincidentally, the man was in the hallway. He had just entered the station from the backyard and ran into him after a few steps.
They stayed in Team Two’s office. The other two men sat properly in their chairs, shoulders back, in a military posture. It was already eleven at night, yet their spirits were incredibly high.
Ji Xun didn’t join in the formality. He slouched, his head down, his feet as heavy as if they were stuck in cement. He consciously placed himself on a cot in the corner of the office and lay flat, sighing like a dead fish. “Crime doesn’t close for the night.”
“From the first day I became a policeman, I’ve been hoping that criminals could evolve a bit, at least not cause trouble during the day, cause minor trouble at night, major trouble on weekends, and make the news during long holidays.”
The usually serious Yuan Yue rarely made a joke. Then he brought the topic back on track.
“Wushan is not the primary crime scene. Tang Jinglong’s dismembered body has not been fully recovered. I led a team to conduct a blanket search on Wushan during the day. Apart from the body parts in the woven bag that was first discovered, Tang Jinglong’s head, both hands, both feet, and a small portion of body tissue fragments are missing. It’s preliminarily determined that Wushan is just one of the dump sites. Also, it’s worth noting that when we untied the outer woven bag, we found that the killer had made certain…”
“Let me guess,” Ji Xun said casually. “Were they arranged in some kind of shape?”
“After cutting the body into small pieces, the killer arranged them into the shape of a sunflower,” Yuan Yue said, handing the crime scene photos to Ji Xun.
Ji Xun immediately closed his eyes, refusing to look, and also grabbed a book to cover his face—it happened to be his copy of Eros and the Serpent.
“What’s so good about bloody, dark photos? Draw the contents of the photos for me with stick figures, and I’ll take a look.”
Huo Ranyin, who had been flipping through files since he came in, looked up. Yuan Yue and Ji Xun, this former pair of partners, had their own tacit understanding. He had no intention of interfering, but at this moment, he glanced at the man with a critical eye.
Overly dramatic. This trait, at least, had been consistent from the moment they met until now.
But Yuan Yue actually started looking for a pen and paper, about to draw from the photos.
Huo Ranyin glanced at Yuan Yue incredulously and spoke up to interrupt, “Has the forensics department given a specific time of death?”
The speed of Yuan Yue’s drawing slowed. “The current conclusion from the forensics department is that the autopsy found organ congestion. After experiments, it was analyzed as acute boric acid poisoning. The victim was poisoned to death and then dismembered. The time of death is more than three days ago.”
“How was the body discovered?” Huo Ranyin stood up and picked up the projector’s remote control.
“It was discovered by a sanitation worker at the Wushan garbage dump. Every Saturday, the garbage piled up here is collectively transported out. The garbage bag containing the body parts was found during the garbage sorting process before being transported out.”
“The Saturday garbage transport is no secret. We know it, and the killer can know it too,” Huo Ranyin said.
“You mean…”
“We might as well consider that the timing of our discovery of the body was also part of the killer’s plan.”
The projector turned on. Huo Ranyin saw Yuan Yue cast a glance at him but said nothing, continuing to draw with his eyes on his paper—very good, Yuan Yue also felt that Ji Xun needed to be dealt with.
He turned to Ji Xun, who had the book over his face.
Riddles could indeed attract Ji Xun’s attention.
The book lying peacefully on his face moved, and a slightly muffled voice came from underneath.
“That’s a possibility, but it’s not logical. If possible, every killer would love to stuff the body into a cremator, grind the bones to ash, and then dump them into the sea to destroy all evidence—why would they put the body in a place where it’s bound to be discovered? Even if its discovery is delayed.”
This was a point of suspicion, but there was no conclusion to be reached now.
Ji Xun continued speaking, listlessly and without much thought.
“Tang Jinglong being killed at this juncture, his body dismembered and then arranged, with the arrangement’s flower pattern related to the ‘Lei’ in Xi Lei’s name… no matter how you look at it, it’s a retaliatory homicide. But I’m a bit curious. With the police still focusing on Xi Lei’s case, why was the other party in such a hurry to kill, and so certain that Tang Jinglong was the real culprit?”
The crime scene photos were successfully displayed on the wall via the projector. Huo Ranyin did all this without a change in expression. Just as he was about to speak, Yuan Yue spoke first.
“Don’t limit it to Xi Lei,” Yuan Yue, who saw everything but pretended to have noticed nothing, continued his deadpan conversation with his friend. “As a medical representative, Tang Jinglong had complex social relationships and a wide range of contacts. Plus, he was previously attacked by Zeng Peng, and his involvement in the murder case is widely known. We can’t rule out the possibility that the killer already had a grudge against Tang Jinglong and deliberately chose this time to strike to interfere with the police’s investigation direction.”
“That’s true.”
Ji Xun agreed. Having spoken so much with the book on his face, he also felt quite stifled. He simply raised his hand and pulled down the book covering his face… and then, caught completely off guard, he saw the crime scene photos of the body parts projected on the wall!
It was a sunflower made of giant garbage bags. The center of the sunflower was a black plastic bag, tied with hemp rope into square grids; the edges were yellow plastic bags, with long, tied-up bags forming the sunflower’s petals; the remaining green bags formed the sunflower’s stem and two leaves.
These plastic bags had already been torn by stray cats and dogs, revealing their contents.
There were mottled green mold spots, yellowish turbid corpse fluid, white maggots breeding on it, and the carrier of these things—the grayish-white, lifeless, and only filthy and ugly, gnawed and fragmented foot bones—which formed the sunflower’s leaves.
A piece of rotten meat.
A pile of rotten meat.
A pile of strangely dressed, pieced-together rotten meat.
“—!”
Ji Xun shot up from his seat, and a curse almost escaped his lips as he faced Huo Ranyin, who was still holding the remote.
“You did that on purpose!”
“What on purpose? It’s perfectly normal to use a projector to display crime scene photos when discussing a case in the office,” Huo Ranyin said coolly, a wicked smile flashing briefly at the corner of his mouth.
“Yuan Yue?”
“I… uhm…” Yuan Yue looked at the ceiling. “I also use a projector to display crime scene photos when discussing cases in the office.”
Damn it!
The curse was still uttered in his heart. Ji Xun glared at Yuan Yue and stood up.
“You two captains can continue discussing the case. I, an idle person, will head home first. If anything comes up—don’t even think about calling me. I won’t answer!”
Ji Xun’s departure left the office briefly quiet. Huo Ranyin put away the hint of teasing that was born only because of Ji Xun.
“Considering the special nature of the case, I propose that the Tang Jinglong case be temporarily merged with the Xi Lei case for investigation.”
“Okay, I will transfer all the files to Team Two,” Yuan Yue nodded, crumpling the stick-figure drawing into a ball and throwing it into the trash can.
“You finished drawing it, not going to take a picture for Ji Xun?” Huo Ranyin added.
“No need. That guy has a great mind, a photographic memory. Once he sees something, he won’t forget any of the details.”
At first, Yuan Yue had a slight smile on his face, but as he spoke, for some reason, the words seemed to trigger something. He failed to manage his expression, and a sense of dejection surfaced on his face.
Huo Ranyin didn’t probe further. After Yuan Yue left, he organized the files alone in the office. When he was done and about to lock up and go home, he suddenly felt something in his pocket.
The keychain with a peace knot tied to it.
He had forgotten to return it to Ji Xun.
