Chapter 122
It looked just like a child’s drawing.
S province border, Tongshan.
Yan Xie got off the bus late at night and slept in a bed in the duty room of the county public security bureau. At dawn the next day, Gou Li, the chief forensic doctor, finally arrived with the technical team. A few people yawned in the early morning, lifted their spirits, and followed the only Santana police car in the police station up the mountain.
Qi Sihao’s frenzied brain might have been awakened by the freezing cold in the mountains, and he repeatedly said that he could just stay at the local police station and wait for them to come down the mountain to meet. Although Gou Li didn’t understand why the Captain Qi of Gongzhou appeared here, he was very envious that Qi Sihao could stay at the foot of the mountain to warm himself by a fire, and he couldn’t help but want to exchange places with the other party.
“I have such a thick layer of fat all over my body. I have been feeding and providing it throughout the spring, summer, and autumn, and in the end, that’s how it repaid me! Only when you are using fat do you regret not having more!” Gou Li was heartbroken and huddled in the car while wrapped in a blanket: “Old Yan!”
Yan Xie sat by the open car door, smoking: “Why?”
“You’re really not cold wearing this?!”
Yan Xie was wearing a police muffler uniformly distributed by the Public Security Bureau. The dark gray, slim-fit trench coat was worth a lot at first glance. The elegant tailoring outlined the sturdy outlines of his body: “Since muscle density is greater than that of fat density, the cold resistance index is different.”
Gou Li: “……”
Outside the car window was the steep and precipitous winter forest of the lofty mountains. The on-site technical team, local police, forensics, and more than a dozen police dogs were scattered, searching deep into the mountain in all directions.
“I’ve always had a question,” Gou Li used his butt to move closer, and gestured into the distance: “Our country is so big, and there are so many high-risk and unstable migrants like Teng Wenyan; if any criminal kills someone and throws the body into the remote mountains and old forests, as long as no one confesses it for ten or so years, will it never be found?”
Yan Xie glanced at him strangely: “How can that be?”
Gou Li returned an innocent stare.
“No matter how unstable the migrant population is, there will always be social connections. As long as there are traces left, someone will surely find out if they are missing. Furthermore, ordinary people cannot travel to remote mountains and forests to throw bodies. Objective conditions such as means of transportation, manpower restrictions, and corpse decay will form all-round constraints.” Yan Xie held the cigarette between his fingers and pointed to the dense forest where dogs barked in the distance: “Even for a criminal group with money, people, and firepower, like a drug trafficking organization, it is absolutely impossible to throw the corpse without a trace. Look at the place where we are now, although it is indeed relatively remote, it cannot be regarded as a primitive jungle at all.”
Gou Li hummed thoughtfully.
“The rut marks of the off-road vehicle, the great damage to the bushes on the ground, and the eyewitnesses among the local residents… The more corpses that are thrown into the mountains and forests, the more traceable clues are left.” Yan Xie threw the cigarette butt and crushed it under his feet: “There is no real crime without traces. It only depends on how much police force is invested and what stage of development the criminal investigation technology is at”
As if to confirm his words, the car’s walkie-talkie suddenly rattled, and the two turned their heads at the same time.
“Attention to all groups! Attention to all groups!” The voice of the on-site trace inspector came from the channel: “A large-scale man-made destruction of vegetation was found at 600 meters in the 3 o’clock direction in the search area No. 012. Repeat, the situation is located 600 meters in the 3 o’clock direction, in search area No. 12, please follow up! Over.”
Yan Xie and Gou Li looked at each other and said: “Understood, we’ll follow up immediately!”
………
The morning mist in the woods slowly dissipated, and the sunlight finally passed through the treetops, illuminating the gray forest hills. The police car was parked under the hillside not far away, and several local policemen surrounded the middle of the open space with shovels, struggling to excavate the soil covered with half-rotten leaves.
“Here, here!” Someone suddenly called out: “Where’s the forensic doctor? Quickly call Director Gou over here!”
A corner of the fabric was faintly exposed in the pit. The shovel stopped immediately, and Gou Li rushed over with two trainee forensic doctors. At this time, he didn’t even care about the cold. He took the shovel with his own hands and squatted in the pit, slowly digging out the hard objects under the soil—Sure enough, after a few shovels, a skeletonized hand suddenly appeared in everyone’s sight.
“Be careful! Lift it out gently!”
“One—two—three!”
After three years of injustice, the two bodies were finally pulled out one after another and exposed in broad daylight.
No one knew if they were like this when they were alive or deliberately placed like this after death. Teng Wenyan and Wang Rui lay flat on the plastic sheet, hand in hand. Their bodies were covered with mud, their hollow skeletons staring directly at the gloomy sky. The clothes they were wearing had been damaged beyond recognition. Wang Rui’s shirt could barely be seen to be blue. Teng Wenyan was wearing a round-neck dress of an indistinguishable color, and on her feet were rotten and tattered sneakers.
After the camera had finished taking pictures, Gou Li asked people to lay out a survey board and asked all non-technical personnel to stand far away from the pit and not come in. Then he put on a new pair of gloves and took the forensic kit brought by the assistant, squatted beside Wang Rui’s body, and checked for a moment.
“The victim’s head was hit, and the occipital part of the corpse’s skull has both concentric circles and radiating fracture lines, which are typical features of depressed comminuted fractures. The center point of the concentric circles is very clear, and there is no truncation between the radiating lines, and they extend all the way to the top of the head; therefore, it is preliminarily inferred that the murder weapon should be a stone or metal blunt weapon, and there was only one strike.”
Gou Li signaled his assistant forensic doctor to help him turn the body over, and after a while, he raised his head and said, “Although there are also C6 to T1 vertebral spinous process fractures, they should have been caused by the victim falling on his back when he was pushed into the pit, and the direct cause of death was the head injury.”
While he was doing the inspection, the assistant quickly recorded. There were so many people at the autopsy site, but no one moved or spoke except for the birds in the forest.
“The murderer’s attitude towards the victim was quite rough. After hitting his skull, he immediately pushed him into the pit. Either he was very confident that the victim was killed on the spot, or he didn’t care about the possibility of being buried alive.” Gou Li stood up and exhaled: “All in all, it was a one-hit kill, and the murderer was cruel and cold-blooded with great arm strength. Judging from the length of the feet and the length of the shin bone, the victim was 1.723 meters tall when he was alive, and then the height of the murderer calculated from the angle of the blow should be… um…”
“Less than 1.85 meters, about 80 kilograms, and a rare person who can use both hands.” Yan Xie said lightly.
Gou Li said, “Huh?” “How do you know?”
Yan Xie’s eyes were gloomy, and he didn’t answer.
Not only did he know, but he also fought with the perpetrator three times.
Seeing that he didn’t want to say anything, Gou Li shrugged and stopped asking. He walked to Teng Wenyan’s corpse and half-knelt down. He first took a sample of the soil and fabric attached to the corpse for preservation and suddenly let out a small murmur.
“What’s wrong?”
“…very clean, too clean.”
The local police at the scene did not understand, and they all showed confused expressions.
“The skull is intact, which excluded the possibility of being hit; the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage are intact, so she wasn’t strangled either. The ribs, long bones, pelvis… and even the spinous process bones are not significantly damaged.” Gou Li looked at Teng Wenyan’s body and said suspiciously. : “She was not roughly pushed down the pit like the male victim, but was carefully transported to the bottom of the pit and gently laid flat on the ground.”
The assistant couldn’t help but ask, “What was the cause of death?”
Gou used pliers to carefully remove the attachments, and gestured between the brows of the corpse: “Here.”
The assistant was stunned—the round hole was clearly a bullet hole.
“The way the murderer killed the female victim and handled the body is completely different from the way he treated the male victim, which clearly shows a clear emotional connection.” Gou Li shook his head and said, “It’s really weird, probably in the top three most weird psychological murderers I’ve ever seen.”
It’s not weird at all, Yan Xie thought to himself, but there was no emotion on his face.
For the King of Spades, the executed male figure projected himself—the one he hated, regretted, and hoped to eliminate—and the executioner was Jiang Ting’s stand-in as a youth.
He carefully selected beautiful and outstanding girls to perform plays that filled his inner shortcomings, and it was normal to have an emotional connection with the actor who played Jiang Ting, even for a failed stand-in like Teng Wenyan.
But the most crucial question had not been answered: why did he choose Teng Wenyan?
At what point did this shampoo girl with only an elementary school education overlap with the image of Jiang Ting in the heart of the King of Spades?
“What happened, Old Yan?” Gou Li raised his voice and asked, “What do you say now?”
Yan Xie came back to his senses: “You took the trace inspectors to find out if there are any clues around, preferably the bullet casings left at the bottom of the pit, etc. I’ll go back to the car and call the bureau to report.”
Gou Li waved his hand.
………
Perhaps because he made too many calls to Chief Lu during this time, the contact number of the chief’s office was in the list of recent contacts. Xie didn’t think much about it. This task was handed down by Chief Lu personally, so it was nothing to report to him directly. He just dialed it out. Who would have guessed that it was transferred to the voicemail after the long, blind tone.
“?” Yan Xie thought for a while, then turned to the secretariat and asked, “Is Zhang Mi there?”
Zhang Mi was the lead secretary of Chief Lu. For some reason, the on-duty staffer who answered the phone sounded a little nervous and said, “Zhang Mi… Zhang Mi has something to do.”
“What about Chief Lu?”
“Chief Lu didn’t come today.”
—Didn’t come?
Yan Xie was a little stunned and asked, “Did Chief Lu go out for a meeting? When will he come back to the office?”
“No, I don’t know.” The person on the other end of the phone stammered for a while and then asked, “Is there anything urgent, Captain Yan? Do you have to say it right now?”
In fact, it was common for Chief Lu to go out to meetings with his secretary, but for some reason, a certain nerve in Yan Xie’s mind moved slightly, and a trace of inexplicable panic gradually spread up.
“…No, it’s nothing.” He coughed and said, “I’ll call you later.”
The person on the other side hung up immediately.
Yan Xie sat alone in the car for a while, rubbing the phone repeatedly, feeling a little uneasy. Through the car window, Gou Li and the others could be seen busy around the pit. The police dog was being dragged by the police, and no one paid attention here for the time being.
He hesitated for a moment, then sent a WeChat message to Jiang Ting:
[Are you awake? What did you eat?]
A few minutes passed, but Jiang Ting didn’t reply back.
“Old Yan—! There is a discovery!” Gou Li stood up straight and waved to the police car from a distance.
Yan Xie looked at the time. It was less than nine o’clock in the morning, maybe Jiang Ting hadn’t woken up yet.
He exhaled, deleted the WeChat message he sent just now, put the phone back in his pocket, and got out of the car.
………
“Mineral water bottle.” Gou Li held his waist, with fine sweat beading on his forehead. Standing at the bottom of the pit, he lifted up an empty plastic bottle that was covered in dirt and had turned yellow, and shook it at Yan Xie: “Sure enough! The ‘traces’ of a repeat murderer may be found late, but it’s not that they won’t be there—alas!”
Although he sighed, the local police did not know the details of the June 19 serial kidnapping case, and they were very surprised when they looked at the empty water bottle. Gou Li didn’t explain much. He put the plastic bottle in the evidence bag and signaled to the assistant to save it, then continued: “There is no bullet, no cartridge casing; the forest weather and humidity have caused great damage to the scene, and no footprints or bioassays of identification value have been found. There is no other way, two people come and help me lift the bones up to do a further autopsy once we get down the mountain. “
The local police responded quickly, and several people went to help. Yan Xie took off his jacket and tugged up his cuffs, and he also put on gloves and shoe covers to go down the pit. He instructed the local policemen to hold the corners of the plastic sheet and try to lift Teng Wenyan’s corpse as flat as possible.
Rustling—
As soon as the plastic sheet moved, the dust and sand rustled down. Yan Xie’s eyes unconsciously fell on the clothes on the surface of the corpse, and suddenly his whole body froze: “Wait.”
The policemen didn’t hear him and kept walking.
“Wait! Stop!” Yan Xie shouted, “Put her down!”
Everyone turned their heads, one after another. The policemen were taken aback and were at a loss. They put the plastic sheet back on the ground.
Gou Li came over and said, “What’s the matter with you, Old Yan?—Hey! What are you doing!”
Yan Xie was about to turn over the corpse, but Gou Li pulled him away and almost slapped him directly: “Are you looking for trouble?! What do you want?!”
“Turn her over for me, quick!”
Gou Li didn’t know the reason at all, but seeing Yan Xie’s stern expression, he immediately asked the assistant forensic doctor to come over and carefully turn over the bones, exposing the back.
When Yan Xie got back to the car to make a call, Gou Li had already glanced at the back of the corpse. After cleaning the floating soil on the surface, only the dried and condensed mud remained. Therefore, after the corpse was turned over, the back of the clothes was exposed to all eyes, and Yan Xie’s pupil suddenly tightened——
Teng Wenyan was wearing a two-piece dress. The top was light-colored with a round neck and short sleeves. The fabric on the back was printed with a light red pattern that was almost indistinguishable.
——It was a semicircle on a horizontal line, and a few faint red lines radiated from the semicircle.
Even to the most associative adults, this was just a child’s sketch of the rising sun. However, as soon as it came into view, Yan Xie suddenly closed his eyes, and another identical T-shirt appeared in his mind—the children’s bloody T-shirt left at the scene after A-Jie sniped at the 502 anti-drug scene.
The cloth Jiang Ting wore in the orphanage that year.
“What’s the matter with you, Old Yan? Did you find something?”
Yan Xie’s chest rose and fell rapidly under his shirt. He waved his hand to indicate that he was fine, took a few pictures of the corpse, and then walked out of the pit without saying a word. Gou Li was quite worried, so he chased after him and asked loudly, “Are you alright, hey!”
“I’m going to make a call to confirm something.” Yan Xie said hoarsely, “You guys do your work.”
The buzzing doubts and discussions quickly faded away. Yan Xie’s brain was in chaos. He hurried to the police car in the distance and took out his mobile phone. Almost reflexively, he dialed Jiang Ting’s number—
Did you know that Teng Wenyan was from the same orphanage as you?
The place where you and the King of Spades were kidnapped, the information about the orphanage—how much can you recall after so many years?
Countless questions turned into sharp knives tearing at the sulcus in the brain. The phone screen just showed the number being dialed, and before the dial tone sounded, Yan Xie was suddenly woken up by the throbbing pain in his forehead and suddenly pressed hang up.
The air seemed to freeze, and after an unknown amount of time, the noise and footsteps of the crowd infiltrated and gradually came from the distant scene.
Yan Xie lowered his sharp eyes; his gaze was cold, staring at his own reflection on the surface of the mobile phone screen.
After a while, his Adam’s apple twitched. He turned on the phone again and called up Ma Xiang from the WeChat list:
“Help me check if there was an orphanage near Tongshan, S province, twenty years ago,” Yan Xie pressed the voice message button and said in a low voice, “Send me the detailed address after you find it.”
……….
The bones of the victims, who had been wronged for three years, were carried out of the pit, wrapped up, and ready to be loaded down the mountain by truck to a nearby county funeral home for a further detailed autopsy. Gou Li took the trouble to instruct the new trainee forensic doctor to maintain a balanced strength and move as carefully as possible, then covered the bones in the back of the truck with a white cloth, recited Amitabha Buddha, and slammed the door of the truck.
The assistant rushed over: “Gou Director*, your phone is ringing!”
[*T/N: A pun that refers to Gou Li as a dog.
苟头 (Gǒu tóu): Gou director, where Gou is a surname.
狗头 (Gǒu tóu) means doghead.]
“How many times have I told you that “director” comes before my name!” Gou Li took off his gloves and answered the phone, “Hello, Chief Wei?”
The call signal in this place was very average, and the background on the other side was very noisy. Gou Li walked around the open space for a few steps, only to hear Deputy Chief Wei asking in a deep voice on the mobile phone: “Are you alone? “Is Yan Xie not with you?”
Gou Li stood on his toes and looked ahead, only to see Yan Xie standing more than ten meters away, his eyebrows knitted and his head lowered, not knowing who he was texting with.
“He’s on the side; I’ll go call him?” Gou Li casually raised his feet and walked over there, but the voice on the phone stopped him as soon as he finished speaking: “Don’t, stop!”
“What?”
Deputy Chief Wei took a deep breath before he stabilized his unusually sharp tone:
“Remember, you’re not allowed to tell Yan Xie a word of what I’m going to say next. Don’t let him know anything before returning to the city bureau.”
“I’m in the hospital now, and something happened to Chief Lu.”
Gou Li’s eyelids jumped instantly!
“Chief Lu was attacked near the community where Yan Xie lives. Because the neighborhood was remote when the incident occurred, it was delayed until the early hours of this morning when the sanitation workers found out and called the police. All of us are now in the hospital, and he is just out of danger.”
“……” Gou Li’s lips trembled as soon as he opened his mouth: “Who did it?!”
In the corridor of the hospital, Deputy Chief Wei looked at the open door of the ward. Several experts from the Criminal Investigation Team of the Provincial Office and Yu Zhu from the Municipal Bureau were surrounding the bed, watching Chief Lu slowly open his cloudy eyes. Everyone’s faces couldn’t hide their anxiety.
Chief Lu seemed to have aged more than ten years overnight. There was an oxygen mask on his gray and swollen face, and every time he made a sound, he exhaled a burst of white breath: “…I saw his face, no…absolutely not mistaken…”
Before he finished speaking, a cough broke out in his chest. Everyone screamed, and the faces of several experts turned pale: “Who was it? Who was it?!”
“Hu, hu, hu…” Chief Lu gasped, barely said: “From Gongzhou, the one who died in Gongzhou’s anti-drug operation——”
“That Jiang Ting.”
Time stopped abruptly, and the clock’s hands quickly retreated, returning to ten hours ago——
The world was constantly rustling, and the remote back alley was invisible on a rainy night. Vehicles passed by on the street in the distance; the blurred lights flickered, and the shiny puddles were instantly trampled apart.
The hem of Jiang Ting’s black coat rose with his footsteps, and his icy, white face was hidden under the black umbrella. When he hurriedly turned around, a clear sound of “Ding bang!” was heard.
The folding knife he always carried with him was thrown beside the trash can. The blade fell to the ground, and a trace of blood slowly dissolved with the dirty water and gurgled down the sewer not far away.
Chapter 122
It looked just like a child’s drawing.
S province border, Tongshan.
Yan Xie got off the bus late at night and slept in a bed in the duty room of the county public security bureau. At dawn the next day, Gou Li, the chief forensic doctor, finally arrived with the technical team. A few people yawned in the early morning, lifted their spirits, and followed the only Santana police car in the police station up the mountain.
Qi Sihao’s frenzied brain might have been awakened by the freezing cold in the mountains, and he repeatedly said that he could just stay at the local police station and wait for them to come down the mountain to meet. Although Gou Li didn’t understand why the Captain Qi of Gongzhou appeared here, he was very envious that Qi Sihao could stay at the foot of the mountain to warm himself by a fire, and he couldn’t help but want to exchange places with the other party.
“I have such a thick layer of fat all over my body. I have been feeding and providing it throughout the spring, summer, and autumn, and in the end, that’s how it repaid me! Only when you are using fat do you regret not having more!” Gou Li was heartbroken and huddled in the car while wrapped in a blanket: “Old Yan!”
Yan Xie sat by the open car door, smoking: “Why?”
“You’re really not cold wearing this?!”
Yan Xie was wearing a police muffler uniformly distributed by the Public Security Bureau. The dark gray, slim-fit trench coat was worth a lot at first glance. The elegant tailoring outlined the sturdy outlines of his body: “Since muscle density is greater than that of fat density, the cold resistance index is different.”
Gou Li: “……”
Outside the car window was the steep and precipitous winter forest of the lofty mountains. The on-site technical team, local police, forensics, and more than a dozen police dogs were scattered, searching deep into the mountain in all directions.
“I’ve always had a question,” Gou Li used his butt to move closer, and gestured into the distance: “Our country is so big, and there are so many high-risk and unstable migrants like Teng Wenyan; if any criminal kills someone and throws the body into the remote mountains and old forests, as long as no one confesses it for ten or so years, will it never be found?”
Yan Xie glanced at him strangely: “How can that be?”
Gou Li returned an innocent stare.
“No matter how unstable the migrant population is, there will always be social connections. As long as there are traces left, someone will surely find out if they are missing. Furthermore, ordinary people cannot travel to remote mountains and forests to throw bodies. Objective conditions such as means of transportation, manpower restrictions, and corpse decay will form all-round constraints.” Yan Xie held the cigarette between his fingers and pointed to the dense forest where dogs barked in the distance: “Even for a criminal group with money, people, and firepower, like a drug trafficking organization, it is absolutely impossible to throw the corpse without a trace. Look at the place where we are now, although it is indeed relatively remote, it cannot be regarded as a primitive jungle at all.”
Gou Li hummed thoughtfully.
“The rut marks of the off-road vehicle, the great damage to the bushes on the ground, and the eyewitnesses among the local residents… The more corpses that are thrown into the mountains and forests, the more traceable clues are left.” Yan Xie threw the cigarette butt and crushed it under his feet: “There is no real crime without traces. It only depends on how much police force is invested and what stage of development the criminal investigation technology is at”
As if to confirm his words, the car’s walkie-talkie suddenly rattled, and the two turned their heads at the same time.
“Attention to all groups! Attention to all groups!” The voice of the on-site trace inspector came from the channel: “A large-scale man-made destruction of vegetation was found at 600 meters in the 3 o’clock direction in the search area No. 012. Repeat, the situation is located 600 meters in the 3 o’clock direction, in search area No. 12, please follow up! Over.”
Yan Xie and Gou Li looked at each other and said: “Understood, we’ll follow up immediately!”
………
The morning mist in the woods slowly dissipated, and the sunlight finally passed through the treetops, illuminating the gray forest hills. The police car was parked under the hillside not far away, and several local policemen surrounded the middle of the open space with shovels, struggling to excavate the soil covered with half-rotten leaves.
“Here, here!” Someone suddenly called out: “Where’s the forensic doctor? Quickly call Director Gou over here!”
A corner of the fabric was faintly exposed in the pit. The shovel stopped immediately, and Gou Li rushed over with two trainee forensic doctors. At this time, he didn’t even care about the cold. He took the shovel with his own hands and squatted in the pit, slowly digging out the hard objects under the soil—Sure enough, after a few shovels, a skeletonized hand suddenly appeared in everyone’s sight.
“Be careful! Lift it out gently!”
“One—two—three!”
After three years of injustice, the two bodies were finally pulled out one after another and exposed in broad daylight.
No one knew if they were like this when they were alive or deliberately placed like this after death. Teng Wenyan and Wang Rui lay flat on the plastic sheet, hand in hand. Their bodies were covered with mud, their hollow skeletons staring directly at the gloomy sky. The clothes they were wearing had been damaged beyond recognition. Wang Rui’s shirt could barely be seen to be blue. Teng Wenyan was wearing a round-neck dress of an indistinguishable color, and on her feet were rotten and tattered sneakers.
After the camera had finished taking pictures, Gou Li asked people to lay out a survey board and asked all non-technical personnel to stand far away from the pit and not come in. Then he put on a new pair of gloves and took the forensic kit brought by the assistant, squatted beside Wang Rui’s body, and checked for a moment.
“The victim’s head was hit, and the occipital part of the corpse’s skull has both concentric circles and radiating fracture lines, which are typical features of depressed comminuted fractures. The center point of the concentric circles is very clear, and there is no truncation between the radiating lines, and they extend all the way to the top of the head; therefore, it is preliminarily inferred that the murder weapon should be a stone or metal blunt weapon, and there was only one strike.”
Gou Li signaled his assistant forensic doctor to help him turn the body over, and after a while, he raised his head and said, “Although there are also C6 to T1 vertebral spinous process fractures, they should have been caused by the victim falling on his back when he was pushed into the pit, and the direct cause of death was the head injury.”
While he was doing the inspection, the assistant quickly recorded. There were so many people at the autopsy site, but no one moved or spoke except for the birds in the forest.
“The murderer’s attitude towards the victim was quite rough. After hitting his skull, he immediately pushed him into the pit. Either he was very confident that the victim was killed on the spot, or he didn’t care about the possibility of being buried alive.” Gou Li stood up and exhaled: “All in all, it was a one-hit kill, and the murderer was cruel and cold-blooded with great arm strength. Judging from the length of the feet and the length of the shin bone, the victim was 1.723 meters tall when he was alive, and then the height of the murderer calculated from the angle of the blow should be… um…”
“Less than 1.85 meters, about 80 kilograms, and a rare person who can use both hands.” Yan Xie said lightly.
Gou Li said, “Huh?” “How do you know?”
Yan Xie’s eyes were gloomy, and he didn’t answer.
Not only did he know, but he also fought with the perpetrator three times.
Seeing that he didn’t want to say anything, Gou Li shrugged and stopped asking. He walked to Teng Wenyan’s corpse and half-knelt down. He first took a sample of the soil and fabric attached to the corpse for preservation and suddenly let out a small murmur.
“What’s wrong?”
“…very clean, too clean.”
The local police at the scene did not understand, and they all showed confused expressions.
“The skull is intact, which excluded the possibility of being hit; the hyoid bone and thyroid cartilage are intact, so she wasn’t strangled either. The ribs, long bones, pelvis… and even the spinous process bones are not significantly damaged.” Gou Li looked at Teng Wenyan’s body and said suspiciously. : “She was not roughly pushed down the pit like the male victim, but was carefully transported to the bottom of the pit and gently laid flat on the ground.”
The assistant couldn’t help but ask, “What was the cause of death?”
Gou used pliers to carefully remove the attachments, and gestured between the brows of the corpse: “Here.”
The assistant was stunned—the round hole was clearly a bullet hole.
“The way the murderer killed the female victim and handled the body is completely different from the way he treated the male victim, which clearly shows a clear emotional connection.” Gou Li shook his head and said, “It’s really weird, probably in the top three most weird psychological murderers I’ve ever seen.”
It’s not weird at all, Yan Xie thought to himself, but there was no emotion on his face.
For the King of Spades, the executed male figure projected himself—the one he hated, regretted, and hoped to eliminate—and the executioner was Jiang Ting’s stand-in as a youth.
He carefully selected beautiful and outstanding girls to perform plays that filled his inner shortcomings, and it was normal to have an emotional connection with the actor who played Jiang Ting, even for a failed stand-in like Teng Wenyan.
But the most crucial question had not been answered: why did he choose Teng Wenyan?
At what point did this shampoo girl with only an elementary school education overlap with the image of Jiang Ting in the heart of the King of Spades?
“What happened, Old Yan?” Gou Li raised his voice and asked, “What do you say now?”
Yan Xie came back to his senses: “You took the trace inspectors to find out if there are any clues around, preferably the bullet casings left at the bottom of the pit, etc. I’ll go back to the car and call the bureau to report.”
Gou Li waved his hand.
………
Perhaps because he made too many calls to Chief Lu during this time, the contact number of the chief’s office was in the list of recent contacts. Xie didn’t think much about it. This task was handed down by Chief Lu personally, so it was nothing to report to him directly. He just dialed it out. Who would have guessed that it was transferred to the voicemail after the long, blind tone.
“?” Yan Xie thought for a while, then turned to the secretariat and asked, “Is Zhang Mi there?”
Zhang Mi was the lead secretary of Chief Lu. For some reason, the on-duty staffer who answered the phone sounded a little nervous and said, “Zhang Mi… Zhang Mi has something to do.”
“What about Chief Lu?”
“Chief Lu didn’t come today.”
—Didn’t come?
Yan Xie was a little stunned and asked, “Did Chief Lu go out for a meeting? When will he come back to the office?”
“No, I don’t know.” The person on the other end of the phone stammered for a while and then asked, “Is there anything urgent, Captain Yan? Do you have to say it right now?”
In fact, it was common for Chief Lu to go out to meetings with his secretary, but for some reason, a certain nerve in Yan Xie’s mind moved slightly, and a trace of inexplicable panic gradually spread up.
“…No, it’s nothing.” He coughed and said, “I’ll call you later.”
The person on the other side hung up immediately.
Yan Xie sat alone in the car for a while, rubbing the phone repeatedly, feeling a little uneasy. Through the car window, Gou Li and the others could be seen busy around the pit. The police dog was being dragged by the police, and no one paid attention here for the time being.
He hesitated for a moment, then sent a WeChat message to Jiang Ting:
[Are you awake? What did you eat?]
A few minutes passed, but Jiang Ting didn’t reply back.
“Old Yan—! There is a discovery!” Gou Li stood up straight and waved to the police car from a distance.
Yan Xie looked at the time. It was less than nine o’clock in the morning, maybe Jiang Ting hadn’t woken up yet.
He exhaled, deleted the WeChat message he sent just now, put the phone back in his pocket, and got out of the car.
………
“Mineral water bottle.” Gou Li held his waist, with fine sweat beading on his forehead. Standing at the bottom of the pit, he lifted up an empty plastic bottle that was covered in dirt and had turned yellow, and shook it at Yan Xie: “Sure enough! The ‘traces’ of a repeat murderer may be found late, but it’s not that they won’t be there—alas!”
Although he sighed, the local police did not know the details of the June 19 serial kidnapping case, and they were very surprised when they looked at the empty water bottle. Gou Li didn’t explain much. He put the plastic bottle in the evidence bag and signaled to the assistant to save it, then continued: “There is no bullet, no cartridge casing; the forest weather and humidity have caused great damage to the scene, and no footprints or bioassays of identification value have been found. There is no other way, two people come and help me lift the bones up to do a further autopsy once we get down the mountain. “
The local police responded quickly, and several people went to help. Yan Xie took off his jacket and tugged up his cuffs, and he also put on gloves and shoe covers to go down the pit. He instructed the local policemen to hold the corners of the plastic sheet and try to lift Teng Wenyan’s corpse as flat as possible.
Rustling—
As soon as the plastic sheet moved, the dust and sand rustled down. Yan Xie’s eyes unconsciously fell on the clothes on the surface of the corpse, and suddenly his whole body froze: “Wait.”
The policemen didn’t hear him and kept walking.
“Wait! Stop!” Yan Xie shouted, “Put her down!”
Everyone turned their heads, one after another. The policemen were taken aback and were at a loss. They put the plastic sheet back on the ground.
Gou Li came over and said, “What’s the matter with you, Old Yan?—Hey! What are you doing!”
Yan Xie was about to turn over the corpse, but Gou Li pulled him away and almost slapped him directly: “Are you looking for trouble?! What do you want?!”
“Turn her over for me, quick!”
Gou Li didn’t know the reason at all, but seeing Yan Xie’s stern expression, he immediately asked the assistant forensic doctor to come over and carefully turn over the bones, exposing the back.
When Yan Xie got back to the car to make a call, Gou Li had already glanced at the back of the corpse. After cleaning the floating soil on the surface, only the dried and condensed mud remained. Therefore, after the corpse was turned over, the back of the clothes was exposed to all eyes, and Yan Xie’s pupil suddenly tightened——
Teng Wenyan was wearing a two-piece dress. The top was light-colored with a round neck and short sleeves. The fabric on the back was printed with a light red pattern that was almost indistinguishable.
——It was a semicircle on a horizontal line, and a few faint red lines radiated from the semicircle.
Even to the most associative adults, this was just a child’s sketch of the rising sun. However, as soon as it came into view, Yan Xie suddenly closed his eyes, and another identical T-shirt appeared in his mind—the children’s bloody T-shirt left at the scene after A-Jie sniped at the 502 anti-drug scene.
The cloth Jiang Ting wore in the orphanage that year.
“What’s the matter with you, Old Yan? Did you find something?”
Yan Xie’s chest rose and fell rapidly under his shirt. He waved his hand to indicate that he was fine, took a few pictures of the corpse, and then walked out of the pit without saying a word. Gou Li was quite worried, so he chased after him and asked loudly, “Are you alright, hey!”
“I’m going to make a call to confirm something.” Yan Xie said hoarsely, “You guys do your work.”
The buzzing doubts and discussions quickly faded away. Yan Xie’s brain was in chaos. He hurried to the police car in the distance and took out his mobile phone. Almost reflexively, he dialed Jiang Ting’s number—
Did you know that Teng Wenyan was from the same orphanage as you?
The place where you and the King of Spades were kidnapped, the information about the orphanage—how much can you recall after so many years?
Countless questions turned into sharp knives tearing at the sulcus in the brain. The phone screen just showed the number being dialed, and before the dial tone sounded, Yan Xie was suddenly woken up by the throbbing pain in his forehead and suddenly pressed hang up.
The air seemed to freeze, and after an unknown amount of time, the noise and footsteps of the crowd infiltrated and gradually came from the distant scene.
Yan Xie lowered his sharp eyes; his gaze was cold, staring at his own reflection on the surface of the mobile phone screen.
After a while, his Adam’s apple twitched. He turned on the phone again and called up Ma Xiang from the WeChat list:
“Help me check if there was an orphanage near Tongshan, S province, twenty years ago,” Yan Xie pressed the voice message button and said in a low voice, “Send me the detailed address after you find it.”
……….
The bones of the victims, who had been wronged for three years, were carried out of the pit, wrapped up, and ready to be loaded down the mountain by truck to a nearby county funeral home for a further detailed autopsy. Gou Li took the trouble to instruct the new trainee forensic doctor to maintain a balanced strength and move as carefully as possible, then covered the bones in the back of the truck with a white cloth, recited Amitabha Buddha, and slammed the door of the truck.
The assistant rushed over: “Gou Director*, your phone is ringing!”
[*T/N: A pun that refers to Gou Li as a dog.
苟头 (Gǒu tóu): Gou director, where Gou is a surname.
狗头 (Gǒu tóu) means doghead.]
“How many times have I told you that “director” comes before my name!” Gou Li took off his gloves and answered the phone, “Hello, Chief Wei?”
The call signal in this place was very average, and the background on the other side was very noisy. Gou Li walked around the open space for a few steps, only to hear Deputy Chief Wei asking in a deep voice on the mobile phone: “Are you alone? “Is Yan Xie not with you?”
Gou Li stood on his toes and looked ahead, only to see Yan Xie standing more than ten meters away, his eyebrows knitted and his head lowered, not knowing who he was texting with.
“He’s on the side; I’ll go call him?” Gou Li casually raised his feet and walked over there, but the voice on the phone stopped him as soon as he finished speaking: “Don’t, stop!”
“What?”
Deputy Chief Wei took a deep breath before he stabilized his unusually sharp tone:
“Remember, you’re not allowed to tell Yan Xie a word of what I’m going to say next. Don’t let him know anything before returning to the city bureau.”
“I’m in the hospital now, and something happened to Chief Lu.”
Gou Li’s eyelids jumped instantly!
“Chief Lu was attacked near the community where Yan Xie lives. Because the neighborhood was remote when the incident occurred, it was delayed until the early hours of this morning when the sanitation workers found out and called the police. All of us are now in the hospital, and he is just out of danger.”
“……” Gou Li’s lips trembled as soon as he opened his mouth: “Who did it?!”
In the corridor of the hospital, Deputy Chief Wei looked at the open door of the ward. Several experts from the Criminal Investigation Team of the Provincial Office and Yu Zhu from the Municipal Bureau were surrounding the bed, watching Chief Lu slowly open his cloudy eyes. Everyone’s faces couldn’t hide their anxiety.
Chief Lu seemed to have aged more than ten years overnight. There was an oxygen mask on his gray and swollen face, and every time he made a sound, he exhaled a burst of white breath: “…I saw his face, no…absolutely not mistaken…”
Before he finished speaking, a cough broke out in his chest. Everyone screamed, and the faces of several experts turned pale: “Who was it? Who was it?!”
“Hu, hu, hu…” Chief Lu gasped, barely said: “From Gongzhou, the one who died in Gongzhou’s anti-drug operation——”
“That Jiang Ting.”
Time stopped abruptly, and the clock’s hands quickly retreated, returning to ten hours ago——
The world was constantly rustling, and the remote back alley was invisible on a rainy night. Vehicles passed by on the street in the distance; the blurred lights flickered, and the shiny puddles were instantly trampled apart.
The hem of Jiang Ting’s black coat rose with his footsteps, and his icy, white face was hidden under the black umbrella. When he hurriedly turned around, a clear sound of “Ding bang!” was heard.
The folding knife he always carried with him was thrown beside the trash can. The blade fell to the ground, and a trace of blood slowly dissolved with the dirty water and gurgled down the sewer not far away.
