Under the black fisherman’s hat, Duan Hongwen’s eyes were a little shifty.
He looked at the person in front of him, named Zhu Huan. A round face, a very friendly smile. At first glance, he gave people a sense of security. It was also because of this that Duan Hongwen felt at ease to say that sentence—he really couldn’t stand it anymore!
“Who is Wei Zhenzhu?” Zhu Huan asked.
“My wife.”
“Why do you want to kill her?”
“My wife is crazy,” Duan Hongwen said, looking around nervously as he spoke. “She won’t let me go out, she controls my phone usage. When I go to the bathroom, she won’t even let me close the door. I can’t live with her anymore. Us, me and her, one of us has to die!”
“If you can’t live together, get a divorce,” Zhu Huan suggested.
“She won’t divorce me. A woman with no money, no job, and a deaf-mute daughter, how can she live?” Duan Hongwen said coldly. “She sees me as her savior, so she would rather die than divorce me—or maybe she wants me to die. When I’m dead, she can inherit all my property!”
The man in front of him said his wife was crazy. In fact, as Zhu Huan saw it, this man was pretty crazy himself, his words incoherent and illogical.
“You can make a will,” Zhu Huan suggested again.
“Don’t worry, I did. If I die, she has to die too.” A strange smile appeared on Duan Hongwen’s lips. “I’m here to place an order with you. Just tell me if you can kill her or not. Why are you asking so many questions?”
“Who referred you?”
“Dr. Zhuo.”
“—Dr. Zhuo?”
“Dr. Zhuo Cangying,” Duan Hongwen added. “A doctor at the health hospital.”
“Oh…” Zhu Huan said. He didn’t know this name. So the strange smile moved from Duan Hongwen’s face to his. “Then, ten thousand yuan. A deposit of one thousand yuan first.”
He took out his phone and showed his payment code.
“So cheap?” Duan Hongwen was taken aback.
“What, you’re not happy that I’m charging you less?”
“No, that’s not it…” Duan Hongwen quickly scanned the QR code and made the payment. After confirming the payment was received, he urged, “When can you kill her? You have to hurry. I can’t stand another day of this life!”
“Mr. Duan, have you ever heard of the dark web?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Do you know that anonymous killings on the dark web are all…”
“Scams.”
“You know quite a lot,” Zhu Huan chuckled. Then he shook his phone, his round face smiling warmly. “Then in a society ruled by law, why do you believe that the person who talks to you about murder isn’t a scammer? —Oh, don’t even think about calling the police. I have a recording of you saying you want to kill your wife.”
The location where the bodies were burned was not on the main peak. From the scenic area entrance highway, it would take about 45 minutes to drive to this location.
However, Mo Nai did not burn and bury them on the spot. After burning them, he collected the skeletal remains and took them away again.
Tan Mingjiu, who had thought the search mission could be over, was in a state of shock. He asked on the channel, uncomprehendingly, “What is this killer thinking? The steps are too troublesome!”
But the good news was that this gravel path burning site was not far from the main road. Huo Ranyin judged that Mo Nai’s physical strength might not be enough to carry two bodies very far. From this, he deduced that the burial site should also be not far from the road.
With a direction, everyone searched again.
It wasn’t until 3 AM on the sixth day of the new year that they finally found the two buried bodies. At the same time, they found the abandoned sports car in the jungle on the other side of the mountain.
Gao Shuang’s body was wrapped in a bedsheet. The pit was dug about one meter deep and was well-covered. Zhuo Cangying’s body was not in the same place, but about 200 meters further along the road. Perhaps he was too tired. Mo Nai’s handling of the husband’s body was rather sloppy. The pit was very shallow, and the body was only simply wrapped in a garbage bag.
Both bodies had their eyes and internal organs removed. In addition, after being burned, the skin was split open and the flesh was turned inside out, a mixture of black and red. The visual effect was extremely shocking.
The first to discover these two bodies were still Wen Yangyang and Hu Yuan. Perhaps tonight, luck was really on their side. But too much luck was not necessarily a good thing.
At least when Ji Xun arrived, Wen Yangyang was squatting by the side of the road, retching. As she retched, she stubbornly looked at her phone screen—in the dark night, the bright light of the phone screen could be clearly seen from three meters away.
Ji Xun hadn’t paid much attention to Wen Yangyang at first.
But as he passed by her, he heard her mumbling, “He… he touched the brown chalcedony embedded in the eyes… She lay there, starting to look like a beautiful doll… and the doll would turn into a crane… a crane soaring high… a crane that would never fall…”
Ji Xun’s scalp tingled.
He recognized these as the sentences he had written in “The Eternal Crane.”
You don’t have to publicly execute me at a time like this, do you? Besides, throwing up while reading something he wrote, that just wasn’t right. He stopped his forward steps, his gaze also turning to Wen Yangyang, and said righteously, “Isn’t it inappropriate to be reading leisure books at a crime scene?”
“Teacher… Teacher Ji, I’m a little—ugh!” Wen Yangyang retched again.
“Go rest on the side,” Huo Ranyin spoke up. “Don’t force yourself.”
“No, I can do it,” Wen Yangyang said stubbornly. “I’m just a little… not used to it. It’s fine, Captain Huo. I’ll just look at Teacher Ji’s writing… ugh!”
“I think you’re making things difficult for yourself,” Ji Xun said, speechless. “Isn’t this part of my writing also a horror story about a crime scene? Are you trying to get a negative from a negative, hoping to overload yourself so your body’s fuse will blow?”
“The words… although it’s also a scene… are beautiful,” Wen Yangyang was also on the verge of tears. She had no choice. “I’ll start with the beautiful and gradually adapt… I’ll be fine soon, let me recite it one more time!”
Ji Xun was helpless and ignored her.
Huo Ranyin had already entered the quarantine zone ahead of him. He followed him forward.
Inside the cordon, the female forensic examiner in a white coat had already started her work at the scene. Huo Ranyin stood in the inner circle of the cordon, not going up for a moment.
His hands were in his pockets. There were some unusual small items in his pockets—tissues, candy.
These things turned over in his fingertips. He thought about the person following behind him. Should he take them out? Huo Ranyin hadn’t made a decision yet when Ji Xun had already come up from behind.
The other’s head leaned forward, his voice sounding right next to his ear. He glanced at the scene over his shoulder.
“It’s all black and mushy. I can’t see anything.”
“…Not acting up this time?” Huo Ranyin said. “Don’t you want tissues and candy?”
“It’s three in the morning. Let’s save some trouble if we can,” Ji Xun sighed. “Besides, I’m not going in. I’ll just look from the outer circle… But, the bedsheet wrapping Gao Shuang, it’s white, right?”
“Yes.”
“A bit strange, isn’t it?”
“Yes. What we saw in the villa was a blue-striped duvet cover. This should correspond to a blue-striped bedsheet. But the body is wrapped in a white one—just now Hu Yuan said there were traces of silk fabric residue at the burning site—which means that with two bedsheets, Mo Nai burned one and didn’t wrap Zhuo Cangying in it,” Huo Ranyin said. “So, as you guessed, there was something on that blue-striped bedsheet he didn’t want us to see.”
As soon as his voice fell, Hu Yuan’s voice sounded.
“The flesh was burned very thoroughly. Because the eyeballs and internal organs were removed, it’s impossible to determine the exact time of death through the vitreous humor and stomach contents. The specific cause of death will have to be determined back at the lab.”
After listening to Hu Yuan’s analysis, Ji Xun wandered over to the sports car. He looked at the car back and forth, then pulled open the car door and glanced inside.
Then, Huo Ranyin’s voice sounded.
“Found any clues?”
“There’s a problem,” Ji Xun said. “Why did he drive a sports car?”
“If we look at the gold and silver jewelry that also went missing from the house, Mo Nai probably made this choice because the sports car is more valuable than the Audi,” Huo Ranyin said. “But he abandoned it here, which means that’s not the reason. Then, for him not to choose the Audi, which has a larger capacity and is less conspicuous, is indeed unusual.”
Ji Xun was very satisfied that as soon as he raised a question, Huo Ranyin could quickly follow without needing much explanation. So he said again, “The dashcam inside was destroyed.”
“Hmm…” This time Huo Ranyin pondered for a moment, then took out his phone to search for the popularization time of dashcams. The first result on Baidu told him that they only entered the Chinese market around 2009, which was later than when Mo Nai entered prison in 2007. So he raised his eyebrows. “Are you trying to say that he didn’t even know how to use navigation at first, but now he knows how to accurately destroy a dashcam? His learning speed is amazing.”
“Exactly. It’s impossible for one person to learn such details so quickly unless he has an accomplice. We still don’t know how he got from the national highway to Chuncheng, and then how he came from Chuncheng to Ning City to commit murder. There’s no doubt he has a means of transportation, or can take transportation.”
Huo Ranyin nodded. “If we had the dashcam footage, we would know exactly when he disposed of the body and when he abandoned the car. From that, we could estimate how far he walked from here after abandoning the car.”
The footprints leading down the mountain from beside the sports car had already told the search personnel that there was no need to waste any more time on this mountain. Mo Nai had long since left.
Ji Xun sighed. He shook the phone in his hand. “He learns so fast. He probably called a Didi and left the city as soon as he got down the mountain.”
The various teams that had been scattered all over the mountain for a whole day descended in batches.
This time was better than the previous mountain search. At least they had found the bodies and the car, and had also done some analysis of Mo Nai’s next moves. Ji Xun, of course, went back to the police station with Huo Ranyin. At the police station, Wen Yangyang finally got to drink some hot water. She said with lingering fear, “We finally found the bodies and didn’t drag it out until Valentine’s Day. Otherwise, searching for bodies on a mountain on Valentine’s Day would be too pathetic…”
“What Valentine’s Day does a single dog have?” Tan Mingjiu passed by and sneered. “I, a family man, haven’t even complained yet.”
However, although Tan Mingjiu didn’t show it, he was indeed the only one in the second team who had solved his personal problems. With a wife, a child, and a warm bed, he was a winner in life. But this had also led to some quirks—like becoming increasingly gossipy and motherly.
“You know I’m single again,” Wen Yangyang said angrily. “It’s just that the guy I was seeing kept telling me to transfer to a desk job for safety. I was just thinking about when to break up. If I wanted safety, wouldn’t I have taken the exam for other civil servant positions? I became a criminal police officer because I wanted to touch a gun!”
Hu Yuan took the bodies into the lab.
The mountain search work had come to an end. The other police officers could go home and get a good night’s sleep, but she had to work through the night to find out the residual information on the bodies as soon as possible.
Huo Ranyin said to Ji Xun, “I’ll take you back.”
“Hmm,” Ji Xun looked up at the time. They had found the bodies at three, and it was almost four-thirty now. “No need. I’ll go to your place. Your place is closer. I can shower and sleep anywhere.”
Huo Ranyin raised an eyebrow, said nothing, and took Ji Xun back to his place.
After the two of them left, Tan Mingjiu suddenly said, “Actually, I don’t really understand. Ji Xun has hands, feet, and a phone. Why does Captain Huo pick him up and drop him off all the time?”
Wen Yangyang gave him a big eye roll. “Maybe because Captain Huo is a decent person. Since he can’t pay Teacher Ji a salary, the least he can do is solve his transportation problems.”
“…You,” Tan Mingjiu hesitated. “You have a point, I guess.”
Huo Ranyin’s apartment was five minutes from the police station.
Returning to this spacious apartment again, the first time was strange, the second time familiar. This time, without needing Huo Ranyin’s invitation, Ji Xun automatically asked for a bathrobe from Huo Ranyin and went to the outside bathroom.
Huo Ranyin used the one inside.
He showered quickly and was done in a moment. When he walked out of the bathroom, his hair was wet, and his whole body was covered in steam. A white bathrobe was casually tied, loosely draped over his shoulders.
He poured himself a glass of water and was drinking it when there was a sudden knock on the closed bedroom door.
Ji Xun said, “Can I come in?”
Huo Ranyin subconsciously covered the open front of his bathrobe, then felt the action was very ridiculous. His fingers loosened. He glanced at his reflection in the window, then adjusted his belt, tying the bathrobe properly, covering a large part of his chest, and wiped the water droplets from his hair before saying, “Come in.”
“I have an idea about the case—” Ji Xun’s gaze lightly touched Huo Ranyin’s body, then immediately shifted away, landing on the bed. He noticed that the bedsheets and duvet cover were different from last time; they had been changed. “I’ll tell you about this first.”
It’s only natural to come in and talk about this.
Huo Ranyin hummed in agreement.
Ji Xun had also just showered. Perhaps the water was a bit hot. His neck and collarbone were tinged with a rare, hazy red. When he spoke, the movement of his trachea and vocal cords caused the skin on his neck to vibrate faintly…
Huo Ranyin turned his gaze away with some annoyance, fixing it on the doorframe next to Ji Xun.
“Before, we both thought that Mo Nai had escaped from prison after getting information from the outside. But the information from the outside is visibly limited. The Liucheng Prison side squatted on his aunt for half a day and didn’t find any useful clues.”
“Are you trying to say…”
“Thinking from another angle, is it possible that Mo Nai got the information from an inmate in the prison?”
Huo Ranyin focused for a moment.
“Indeed… We subconsciously thought that inmates’ movements were restricted, so we overlooked the fact that they also have ins and outs, and a certain source of information.”
“Those people have their own survival rules. But we can simply deduce that the inmate who could give Mo Nai information was recently incarcerated, and most likely a repeat offender. For the information to be important to Mo Nai, it was either a coincidence that he ran into a relevant person, or Mo Nai specifically asked someone to inquire. As long as it was a request, then he must have been in prison before and had contact with Mo Nai.”
Huo Ranyin nodded slightly.
After the official talk was over, a subtle silence fell between them.
They were wearing the same style of bathrobes. The bathrobes covered them well, but neither of their gazes turned towards the other.
It was precisely because there was a ghost in their hearts that in this supposedly proper atmosphere, they were thinking improper things, to the point that their gazes dared not look over properly.
“That’s about it,” Ji Xun concluded the conversation. “It’s too late. I’m going to sleep.”
“Okay.”
“You should also rest early,” Ji Xun said again.
“Okay.”
Ji Xun politely closed the door for Huo Ranyin. Then he let out a soft sigh, rubbed his nose, a little annoyed.
He didn’t dare to say a single flirty word.
If he did, they might… really do it.
