Human memory is unreliable—except mine, Ji Xun thought, and Huo Ran thought the same, so they checked the surveillance without hesitation.
The footage showed that at 7:15 p.m. on March 7, Luo Sui came out of the elevator, passed the nurses’ station, and went toward the ward. At 11:15 p.m., she left the ward and got back into the elevator.
There were no cameras in the ward itself; it was a private area.
A full four hours.
The very next morning, Old Hu’s condition suddenly took a turn for the worse, and he died after resuscitation failed.
After getting the surveillance proof, the two of them left the hospital and went to the crematorium.
The crematorium was crowded. In this world, where life is born, death must also occur; this cycle of balance is unavoidable, and humans cannot escape it just by covering their ears and closing their eyes.
They found a staff member at the crematorium, showed their credentials, and explained why they were there.
Most of the staff were young or middle-aged men. Toward Ji Xun and Huo Ran’s purpose, they were somewhat indifferent, but also faintly hostile. That was understandable. In the past, there had been procedural mistakes, and now the crematorium enforced cremation rules very strictly. If the two of them picked out a flaw, the staff here would be the ones taking the blame.
In the end, the one assigned to deal with them was a young male employee from the crematorium.
He wore old white gloves with split seams. The ten fingertips of the gloves were stained with green, purple, pink, and other powders mixed together, making the white gloves look dingy and mottled, which in turn made his dull, listless face look mottled too.
He was the embalmer who did corpse makeup.
“Do you remember a person named Hu Kun who was cremated here on March 10?” Huo Ran asked.
“March 10 had quite a few cremations,” the embalmer deflected. “It was a week ago. I don’t remember. Maybe yes, maybe no.”
Ji Xun had a way for situations like this.
He took a pack of cigarettes from the nearby table and handed one to the embalmer. “Bro, have a smoke. How long have you been working here? Busy?”
“Not even two years. Of course it’s busy,” the embalmer’s expression softened a little.
With the cigarette and that universal topic of “how busy is work,” the two of them opened up the conversation. When they had talked enough, Ji Xun suddenly changed tone and said, with a sympathetic air, “Since you’re so busy, you probably don’t have much time online, so you definitely haven’t heard of the so-called ‘Crematorium Locked by Cigarette Smoke’ case, one of the three major strange cases that made the news, right?”
“What…” the embalmer frowned. “What Crematorium Locked by Cigarette Smoke? Three major strange cases?”
“You really don’t know?” Ji Xun sighed. “Bro, this is a case that went all the way up and directly changed the crematorium’s rules and procedures!”
“What case exactly?”
“Overall, it’s a bit complicated. I’ll just tell you the part relevant to you: staff at the crematorium used blank cremation slips to send the person they had killed into the furnace and burn them to ashes. So we’re also suspicious about Hu Kun’s body…”
“Wait!” the embalmer jumped up. “You investigators can’t just casually suspect people. The crematorium system has already been reformed now—you must produce a death certificate before cremation, and there’s surveillance to prove it too.”
“Then let’s look at the surveillance,” Huo Ran calmly concluded.
“You wait here!”
The embalmer left in a hurry, and Ji Xun and Huo Ran stayed where they were.
Ji Xun tossed the cigarette to Huo Ran.
Huo Ran threw it back onto some unknown person’s desk.
“Wouldn’t it have been better to do that from the start? What a waste of time,” Ji Xun clicked his tongue.
Huo Ran gave a soft chuckle.
Perhaps because of the mention of that “Crematorium Locked by Cigarette Smoke” case, the crematorium cooperated very well afterward and actually found the surveillance footage from that day for Ji Xun and Huo Ran.
Old Hu was lying in a white coffin, dressed in a blue burial suit, surrounded by flowers. His face looked peaceful.
His gray-white hair was neatly combed into a side part. Blush gave color to his cheeks, covering the bluish-gray pallor specific to the dead.
The wrinkles, the aging lines unique to time, covered every inch of the exposed skin.
Compared with the portrait on the funeral hall wall—a middle-aged man in his forties—this version of him looked even more different.
This should have been his last trace of color belonging to the human world, but his family did not care. They did not even value preserving it.
This is how growing old is: photos cannot keep you, and names cannot keep you either. Once people get old, others usually just call them grandpa or grandma. The name once casually spoken in youth seems to drift farther and farther away from the aging body, buried early in the past.
Hu Kun.
Old Hu…
As Ji Xun watched the surveillance, his brows suddenly jumped. He said to the embalmer, “Wait. Stop here. Enlarge the image. Why are there scattered spots on the dead man’s right cheek, and does his temple look like it caved in a bit?”
The image was enlarged as Ji Xun requested.
Now the dead man’s face was clearly visible to both of them.
It was obvious that many tiny blood marks were concentrated on the right side of his face. As for the area by the right brow ridge—the direction of the temple—there was a distinct indentation from impact.
“A fresh blunt-force injury,” Huo Ran said clearly.
“No wonder Hu Zheng rushed to cremate his father so quickly. Even though there was an impact mark on the face, the hospital’s death certificate only said death from ineffective cancer treatment, without mentioning the injury at all,” Ji Xun thought aloud. Then he asked the embalmer, “When you cleaned him up, did you see anything embedded in the wound? Sand, stones, or something else?”
Looking at that face, the embalmer’s vague memory was also stirred. “It seemed like glass…”
“Are you sure it was glass?”
“…Yes, yes, I’m sure.” The embalmer’s tone became certain. “Because it was very troublesome to clean. I even complained to the family a couple of times, asking how they let the old man fall so badly, and the family got angry at me right away. I remember that clearly.”
“Then do you remember one more thing?” Ji Xun asked.
“What thing?”
“Whether there was a red scar on the back of the dead man’s neck.”
At this point, both Ji Xun and Huo Ran were already thinking the same thing.
It wasn’t impossible that the hospital had neglected supervision and Old Hu had accidentally fallen before death, triggering a worsening of his condition and ultimately leading to death. But—
After investigating all the way here, the many scattered clues had still made one suspicion rise to the surface.
Was the “Hu Kun” who had been treated in the hospital really the same “Old Hu” they had met twice?
That seemed like a more reasonable explanation for why the doctor, when issuing the death certificate, completely ignored the blunt-force injury.
“He…” Just then, the embalmer hesitated. “He…”
The two of them stared at the embalmer’s mouth, watching those thick lips move uncertainly.
“No, maybe not…?”
“You’re not sure?” they asked.
“I think I saw it, but then maybe I didn’t.” The embalmer thought hard and made a gesture around the back of his neck. After a long while, he hesitantly changed his answer again. “No, wait, there was one. I remember seeing a red wound, but you also checked the surveillance—it didn’t capture it. I’m afraid I’ll say the wrong thing and end up giving false testimony, then I’m doomed. Let’s just say I can’t answer that.”
Huo Ran didn’t give up and continued asking, “You hesitated so much because there were so many people coming and going here, and you weren’t sure whether that wound belonged to the same person?”
The embalmer froze for a moment. “The way you put it… maybe?”
Huo Ran decided to go straight for it. Starting from the day “Old Hu” was confirmed dead in the hospital, he planned to check backwards: “Show me all the crematorium’s incoming records and the makeup footage from March 8 until now.”
“Hey, wait.” Ji Xun quickly pulled him back. The captain had once again forgotten that his body still hadn’t fully recovered. “For something this good, we can’t forget our colleagues in Qin City.”
To be honest, when the Qin City team was brought in by the two of them, their expressions were blank, their faces covered in question marks. Every question mark could be broken down into these two sentences:
Wasn’t this just a simple retaliation provocation and disturbance case? How did it suddenly turn into a corpse-swapping murder case?
“You think the Hu Kun in the hospital wasn’t the real Hu Kun?” Zhao Wu asked.
“Yes.”
“What was the purpose?”
“If a ‘fake Hu Kun’ naturally died in the hospital, got a doctor’s death certificate, and then that death certificate was used to cancel the deceased’s household registration, then the real Hu Kun who was still alive would be legally dead. As for the real Hu Kun, however he died was fine—drown him, strangle him, crash him, suffocate him, poison him. The crematorium wouldn’t perform an autopsy anyway; they’d only verify the death certificate,” Ji Xun said.
Zhao Wu pondered this. “To confirm whether there really was a fake Hu Kun, it’s easy enough. The hospital surveillance must have captured the face of the ‘Hu Kun’ who came in and out for treatment so many times. Compare that face with the one on Hu Kun’s ID card and we’ll know immediately. It’s just that the hospital is very crowded, so finding something in the surveillance won’t be easy… And after so many rounds of treatment, if his identity information was wrong, wouldn’t the hospital have noticed at all?”
“Maybe they did notice,” Huo Ran said.
“What do you mean?” Zhao Wu was startled.
“When we went to the hospital before, we asked Hu Kun’s attending doctor about his condition. The doctor blurted out ‘a dead man rising from the grave,’ and then quickly found an excuse to leave. Thinking back, the attending doctor probably knew something about the patient’s special circumstances.”
“You mean the attending doctor was involved in the murder too?” Zhao Wu said in disbelief.
“The deceased had brain cancer. The treatment costs for brain cancer are enormous,” Huo Ran said calmly. “What I mean is, even if they suspected something, they might have chosen to turn a blind eye because of gifts or favors, that gray area of human relations. After all, in most cases it’s just using someone else’s insurance card for reimbursement. If a real homicide happens, they can just pretend to be confused and push it off as a procedural issue. They don’t have to take responsibility.”
“…Investigate it,” Zhao Wu finally decided. “First go to the hospital, pull the surveillance, and confirm the true appearance of Hu Kun in the hospital!”
This surveillance investigation aimed at the hospital produced results the next day.
The image of the hospital’s “Hu Kun” finally appeared before Ji Xun and Huo Ran.
That exhausted, weak, gaunt old man, as dry as a dead branch, mostly appearing in a wheelchair, already in the late stages of cancer and unable even to straighten his own clothes properly, dozing off listlessly.
He was worlds apart from the Old Hu they had seen before.
They were absolutely not the same person!
That day, while searching the surveillance until their eyes turned red, Zhao Wu—whose eyes were like a rabbit’s from exhaustion—brought them more than just that piece of evidence. He also told them:
“We checked this person’s real identity. We found it. His surname is Lan—Lan Cungang, from Sanzhou. ID number: XXXXXXXX. He has a son back home, but that son is indifferent to the old man’s well-being. We called to ask, and he didn’t even know when his dad had left his hometown. We also checked his relationship with Luo Sui, and so far we haven’t found any direct connection, but they definitely aren’t relatives.”
“Not relatives, and yet she took such painstaking care of him,” Ji Xun clicked his tongue. “I’m guessing if you check Lan Cungang’s local treatment records, you’ll also find he had cancer. Luo Sui took him in for a full-body checkup and then immediately admitted him to the hospital—clearly she knew something.
“Then, if this was a premeditated murder, Luo Sui specifically chose a person who was already near death, let him occupy Old Hu’s medical records, and finally killed a healthy Old Hu. I saw a news case a while ago saying that someone didn’t want their body cremated, so their family went out on the street, found a homeless man, knocked him out, and put him in the coffin. In the end, the crematorium burned him without even knowing the person in the coffin had been swapped. The people who thought of that trick were basically betting on the very last step of the funeral chain not being solid enough.”
The author’s note says: “Crematorium Locked by Cigarette Smoke” is a real case… a very bizarre one.
In simple terms: someone named Wang, because he was having an affair with the wife of a crematorium employee surnamed Zhang, decided to hire two men, Han A and Han B, to kill Zhang. But the two amateur killers repeatedly failed to finish the job. In the end, Wang thought it over and gave up on killing Zhang. Instead, he sowed discord between the two killers and let A kill B. Unfortunately, reality was more complicated than planned. At the same time, after Zhang learned that Wang had cheated with his wife and also wanted to hire killers to murder him, Zhang felt Wang had gone too far, so he killed Wang back and shoved the body into the incinerator to destroy the evidence… (.)
And the example Ji Xun mentioned at the end of this chapter is also a real incident.
