I pointed at the subgaleal bleeding on one of the girls. “Someone grabbed her hair and repeatedly banged her head against the ground or wall. Probably the ground, because the water in the shower only reached four or five inches high, and we didn’t find blood marks on the wall. Don’t forget, all a contrecoup injury needs is deceleration, and impact counts.”

  The autopsy continued. We inspected the abdominal cavity but found nothing abnormal. Xie Linmiao’s chest and pelvis showed only mild postmortem damage—the results of Liu Jie’s molestation.

  “Looks like Liu Jie wasn’t lying,” Lin Tao said. “What a sicko.”

  Both victims died of their severe brain injuries. Judging by the contents of their stomachs, the murders took place four hours after their last meal. And the curly noodlelike substance in their stomachs told me their last meal was instant noodles.

  When our work was finally done, I took off my jumpsuit and looked at the clock. I couldn’t believe how late it was.

  “Let’s go back and get some sleep,” I said. “Tomorrow morning we’ll have the results of the physical evidence tests.”

  “What do you think so far?” Big Bao asked.

  “Seems pretty simple actually. We can reconstruct the scene now.”

  “Oh?” Lin Tao said. “Do tell.”

  “Based on the subcutaneous bleeding on Huang Rong’s knees and the hair in her mouth, the killer forced her to give him oral sex,” I said. “Then he killed both of them by grabbing their hair and smashing their heads into the ground. The whole time, he didn’t turn off the shower, and after he killed them, he left. The water ran for one day and two nights until this morning when Liu Jie entered the scene, molesting and moving the bodies. The dirt in the nostrils is infuriating, but it could provide more clues. Liu Jie’s flipping their faces into the water may have destroyed that evidence.”

  “Not completely destroyed,” Lin Tao said. “We have to trust the city’s trace evidence department. Maybe they can still detect the components even with such a small sample.”

  “You’re saying the killer sexually assaulted Huang Rong, but what about Xie Linmiao?” Big Bao asked.

  “There’s no evidence of that,” I said, “but the killer’s murder method seems a little strange.”

  “Strange how?” Big Bao asked.

  “Hard to say.” I closed my eyes. “Let me think about it.”

  I spent all night plagued by nightmares about teenaged girls being raped and murdered in bathrooms. It reminded me of the serial murder case that tested my skills in Yuntai. After we started dating, Ling Dang had cried as she told me how her cousin Xiaoxiao was killed seven years earlier in her high school bathroom. There was evidence of rape, but the case went unsolved for years.

  I looked through the archives and found that, in the intervening years, there’d been several similar cases, also unsolved due to lack of evidence. The bound victims were killed, raped, and dumped in bathrooms. There was a break in the killings, but they started again, and this time there was sperm. This led the forensic team to think the killer was someone with retrograde ejaculation syndrome, which causes sperm to go into the bladder instead of out through the urethra. We suspected the killer had suffered from the disorder and then been treated. We checked medical records of local hospitals, which led us to the killer, Shui Liang, a bank security guard. In my dreams, there he was again. I couldn’t escape his eerily innocuous eyes or the look of disbelief and rage on the face of his young, beautiful wife.

  I’d never forgotten the way he shouted her name when he was captured. “Pond! Pond!” It was a moment of great professional triumph, but that voice, that name . . . Something about it made my blood run cold.

  I remembered walking into Shui Liang’s apartment the night after we made the arrest. In the dim light, I saw a long-haired humanoid shadow. The sight, coupled with the windy weather outside, nearly made me faint.

  As my eyes adjusted, I realized the monstrous form was just Shui Liang’s wife brushing her hair.

  “Miss, we’re going to need you to cooperate with our investigation,” I said brusquely to cover my fear.

  The young woman put on lipstick as she slowly turned her head. There was no longer any sign of tears on her pale face, and she looked like a completely different person than she had earlier in the day when we’d arrested her husband. For some reason, that bloodless face made my spine go cold. There was an incredible toughness there, and something I didn’t understand.

  “Examiner Qin, of course I will cooperate with your investigation,” she said, leisurely walking over. Her mouth was nearly on my ear when she added, “I’ll definitely cooperate with your investigation.”

  She walked toward the door and disappeared into the darkness of the corridor.

  As I slowly regained my senses, I wondered how she knew who I was. And what in the world was all that about?

  The next morning, I was exhausted as I pushed open the door to the conference room.

  “There’s good news and bad news.” Captain Nie’s eyes were swollen, but he somehow managed to look suave as always. “Which do you want to hear first?”

  “The good news,” I said. “I had a shit night.”

  “We were able to get a clear genotype from the hair in Huang Rong’s mouth. It’s from a man,” Captain Nie said. “So this case now has a starting point for screening suspects.”

  “As expected,” I said. “What about the bad news?”

  “We spent all night trying to figure out the victims’ last movements, but it hasn’t led us anywhere really useful. And DNA testing ruled out all the men from the property management company. So how are we supposed to find the hair’s owner?”

  I thought for a moment. “There isn’t a large migrant population around here, is there?”

  “There’s a market town a mile away. It’s fairly well-off, but there are a lot of migrants. But the property management company is in a pretty remote spot, so it’s unlikely that a lot of people know about it, and no one would go there without some reason. I can’t imagine how an outsider would know that two young girls were there alone.”

  “Then do you think the killer had an accomplice on the inside?” Lin Tao asked.

  “We’re working on that right now, pinning down all the workers’ whereabouts and relationships,” Captain Nie said, “but it’s like a needle in a haystack.”

  I rested my head on my fist, thinking. Everyone in the room wore a desperate expression.

  “Oh,” I said, “what about the results from the nose swab?”

  “It seems to be some kind of carbon ink,” the trace evidence lab director said.

  “Carbon ink?” I said. “Why would there be carbon ink in the shower room?”

  “The girls got ink on their faces, so they went to shower?” Captain Nie theorized.

  I shook my head. “The Internet-addicted generation has long forgotten about ink. Is it ink from a disposable pen?”

  “No. Our chemical analysis pointed toward bottled ink that’s barely on the market anymore.”

  “Uh . . . Captain Nie, you said you pinned down the victims’ last movements. What’d you find?” Big Bao asked.

  “Right. According to the street surveillance video, at six p.m. on the twenty-seventh, the two girls rode a moped into town,” Captain Nie said. “They went to buy instant noodles. I know what you’re thinking: Could someone have trailed them back to the compound from town? Our people scoured the videos for evidence of someone following on foot or in a vehicle and determined we could rule that out. So we’re still focusing on the people who had specific information about the company or knew people on the inside.”

  “So the victims died after ten p.m.,” I concluded. “Their stomach contents were consistent with instant noodles, and they died four hours after their last meal.”

  “Got it. Having a better estimate of the time will help us rule things out.” Nie picked up his pen and wrote in his notebook.

  I randomly clicked on the photos of the victims on my laptop, zoomed in, zoomed out.

  “I just thought of something we could try,” I said, breaking the silence.

  19

  “First, there’s the carbon ink.” I shifted uncomfortably under everyone’s eager gaze.

  “Come on, Qin, out with it,” Captain Nie urged.

  “After we first surveyed the scene, we thought Liu Jie had committed the murder, so around midday, we all went to Big Bao’s grandmother’s funeral.” I swallowed. “It was a very long funeral, about three hours, because of all the local customs.”

  Big Bao sat next to me, nodding avidly.

  I continued. “Big Bao told me that since Qingxiang is at the junction of several provinces, it’s influenced by the customs of multiple regions. He said if a child dies, the body’s placed at a fork in the road for three days; and some people don’t let the deceased see light, so they wrap a white cloth around the head or cover the face in mud—or ink?”

  Captain Nie slapped the table, startling me. “Right! Why didn’t I think of that? But didn’t that material come from inside the nose? The custom is to cover the face, not block the nose.”

  “When we got to the scene, both victims’ faces were submerged in water. The water could have washed their faces clean or pushed something into their nostrils.”

  “Do you mean if Liu Jie hadn’t flipped the bodies, we could tell whether Xie Linmiao’s face was covered?” the lead detective said. “Fucker didn’t mention that.”

  “The security guard was disturbed, and the bathroom lights were dim. He may not have noticed,” Captain Nie suggested.

  “Either way, that piece of trash needs to be held responsible for defiling corpses and destroying evidence,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Well, if whoever killed them covered their faces, what’s that tell us?” Captain Nie asked.

  I took a deep breath and answered. “First, it’s something older people care about. A young murderer wouldn’t worry about burial customs. So I think the killer is older, but not too old for sex drive and physical violence—maybe between forty and sixty. And probably single.”

  “Makes sense.” Captain Nie made a quick note.

  “Next comes a more important question.” I took a sip of tea. “Where did the ink come from? Surely the killer didn’t commit the crime and only then go get the ink? If he just wanted to cover their faces, he could have used the slurry from the warehouse.”

  “So he must have had it on him,” Big Bao said.

  “And how do you carry ink on you?” I asked.

  “In a fountain pen,” Big Bao said.

  “Exactly. That’s critical. Not a lot of people use fountain pens anymore, which also supports the theory that the killer is an older person. Plus, blue-collar workers aren’t usually big on fountain pens, so the killer is probably someone who works with language, like a teacher, clerk, writer.”

  “Older, single, works with words,” Captain Nie said. “What a brilliant characterization. This definitely narrows things down.”

  “Thank you.” The compliment helped my rhythm. “And I have another idea.”

  Everyone looked even more expectant than before.

  “During the autopsy yesterday, I kept thinking there was something strange about the victims’ skull damage,” I said. “They both have severe blunt injuries consistent with being struck over thirty times. That means the murderer smashed their heads into the ground over thirty times. With that level of force, three to five times would be lethal, so why did he keep going?”

  “Hatred?” Captain Nie shook his head. “No, can’t be. We haven’t found any evidence that the girls had enemies, so it’s fundamentally a sexual assault case.”

  “Hatred is one explanation,” I said, “but I’m thinking more along the lines of drunkenness.”

  “Drunkenness?”

  I nodded. “A key characteristic of drunken crimes is recklessness. The excessive injuries could reflect the mad state of the killer’s mind.”

  “Then why not say it was a madman who did it?” Lin Tao jumped in.

  “The drunk and insane both do crazy things, but the insane are less likely to weigh future outcomes. An insane person probably wouldn’t have bothered to cover the faces in ink.”

  “This analysis is excellent,” Captain Nie said. “Based on what you’ve deduced, I don’t think the killer could be too far from the scene. We’ll look for older single men who like fountain pens.”

  “One more key point,” I added. “Look at local restaurants and bars to see if someone fitting that description visited on the night of the twenty-seventh, got drunk, and left alone.”

  “Perfect,” Captain Nie said. “We’ll have a suspect in the next eight hours.”

  Restless as I was, I couldn’t just accept that the forensic work was over and wait for results from the detectives, so I went along with them into town.

  It hadn’t been long since my stint with the North Central District Squadron, but I’d already forgotten how exhausting regular detective work was. We dragged ourselves out under the scorching sun to yet another little restaurant, the twelfth we’d tried.

  “Night of the twenty-seventh?” the owner said. “We do good business here. How am I supposed to remember every customer?”

  “Please try to think.”

  “Okay, let me look at our receipts from that night. See if I can remember anything.”

  I lit a cigarette while the restaurant owner shuffled to the back; I wasn’t expecting much.

  “Oh yeah,” he called just moments later. “That old secretary in the local government, what’s his name? Old Luo. He had a bit too much that night, was talking nonsense.”

  “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.” A detective hurried to turn on a voice recorder.

  Another flipped open a notebook. “Old Luo, former town government secretary. Who was he drinking with?”

  “Himself.” The owner laughed. “He ordered kung pao chicken and crayfish.”

  I put out the cigarette and listened intently.

  “When did he arrive and when did he leave?”

  “Aw, guys, come on. How would I know that?” the owner said. “Pretty late, I guess. We’re open till ten. Oh, I remember something else. He fell on his way out the door; I had to help him up.”

  The detective nodded at me to say that the times matched up.

  “Do you know Old Luo well?”

  “Eh, he comes in sometimes,” the owner said. “Old guy is lonely—likes to drink alone. But you don’t think he’s a murderer, do you? That coal thing with the teenagers? No way, he’s a nice guy.”

  “No need to speculate, sir, and please keep today’s questions to yourself.” Saying this, the detective pulled me out of the bar.

  “Age, characteristics, timing, drunkenness, everything fits,” I said. “It’s too much to be a coincidence. Are you going to go make the arrest?”

  He nodded. “I’ll report to the captain. You can head to your hotel and wait for good news.”

  20

  Old Luo’s name was Luo Feng. He was forty-five years old, and had spent his whole life as a government clerk, but he was in no way a politician. He was introverted and didn’t make much. The women in town he liked didn’t like him. The women who liked him, he didn’t like. Really, he didn’t think much of women in general. He fancied himself a man of letters. He was also single and addicted to pornographic DVDs.

  On June 27, he went out for a blind date with a divorced woman the mayor had set him up with—but maybe she was warned off, because she stood him up. Depressed, Luo Feng went to his usual drinking spot and got wasted. He tried to follow a young woman home but got lost, disoriented by alcohol.

  Luo Feng walked aimlessly to the property management compound. In that quiet, empty place, he heard the sound of the showers. He was familiar with the company’s coal scam and PR methods. He knew they had some beautiful girls working for them. Could they be showering right now?

  Desire burned in his chest as he kicked open the bathroom door. The girls’ screaming just added fuel to the fire.

  Luo Feng recognized the two “bitches” who had flirted with the mayor on the company’s behalf. He made Huang Rong kneel down like the women in his porn movies.

  They were just sixteen, and unless they were doing what they had to for work, they were terrified to be naked in front of men, to the point of losing their will to fight. So they didn’t fight, but they did resist. Huang Rong knelt as she was told and started crying hard, refusing to open her mouth. Meanwhile, Xie Linmiao seized the opportunity to escape.

  When Luo Feng saw Xie Linmiao begin to run, he rushed over and repeatedly slammed her head into the floor. With the room soaked in blood, Huang Rong gave in to his demands with the hope that she’d be spared. Of course, she wasn’t.

  The sexual release and physical exertion left Luo Feng collapsed on the ground and limp for several minutes. Then the onset of tremendous fear made him painfully alert. He’d heard that wiping a body’s face with mud would trap its ghost inside, so he took out his fountain pen, spread ink on their faces, and fled the scene.

  Feeling haunted by the ghosts he’d tried to trap, Luo Feng thought about turning himself in, but feared he’d get the death penalty. The police didn’t have concrete evidence against him, but the interrogators insinuated they did. At first, Luo Feng tried to feed them some bullshit alibis, but when they suggested he might not face the firing squad if he cooperated, the disgusting man rushed to confess.

  My relief was enormous. Creeps like Shui Liang from Yuntai and Luo Feng, the company security guard who’d abused the corpses, deserved the harshest punishments society could offer, and I used every tool in my investigative arsenal to make sure they got them.

  21

  “My dog is normally very well behaved—never eats junk outside and doesn’t run away. As soon as I call him, he comes right to me.” The woman shot a resentful look at the creature.

  I’d seen that look before, from my mother when I didn’t do well on a test.