Huang nodded and addressed the room. “Mr. Jinx here just said with all these neighbor conflicts, we were due for a murder, and here we have it.”

  “Wait . . . It gets better,” Big Bao said with a smile. “We think the rope around the victim’s neck was tied to some kind of anchor, but the rope broke and the anchor sank. So we have to dig out the guy’s well.”

  “That’s no problem,” Huang said with a surprising smile, motioning for the detectives to step in.

  The lead detective opened his notebook and said, “The victim is Jie Lijun, sixty-one years old, living alone. He never married, but has an adopted daughter who met a man while working in the city; they’re now married and live in Hubei Province. According to neighbors, she hasn’t been home for a year. Also, the victim has an older brother named Jie Liguo who lives about three-quarters of a mile north. They didn’t see each other much, but Jie Liguo’s daughter-in-law was very good to Jie Lijun and brought him food every day.”

  “Huh? A niece? Could she be relevant?” Big Bao rudely interrupted.

  “According to our investigation, the niece and nephew are very kind. Of course, the villagers are saying they might have an eye on the nephew’s inheritance from his father.”

  “So much gossip,” I said with a sigh. “Can’t even be a truly good son these days.”

  “And there’s a reason Captain Huang isn’t worried about digging up the well,” the detective said with a mysterious smile.

  27

  “Come on, out with it,” I urged.

  “It’s like this,” the detective said. “Jie Lijun’s nephew, Maomao, and niece, Liu Cuihua, have always been good to him. Liu Cuihua brought Jie Lijun all his meals, and Maomao did all the work around his house. Jie Maomao takes care of his uncle’s finances, using an account in his uncle’s name at the Union Trust Fund to manage his small income and to pay his living expenses.”

  “Okay, so?”

  “On the night of July sixteenth, Liu Cuihua brought food to Jie Lijun around six in the evening. When she came back for the dishes, she saw Jie Lijun was setting up the chessboard, saying he was going to play a few games, which lines up with our survey of the scene. We also learned that Jie Lijun had been studying chess for the last two years—he was completely addicted.”

  “Did he say who he was playing with?” I asked anxiously.

  “Liu Cuihua knew there were a few old villagers who liked to play chess and often spent evenings at Jie Lijun’s, so she didn’t ask. On the morning of the sixteenth, Liu Cuihua went back with breakfast and found the bed unmade and the old man gone.”

  “Let me step in here,” I said. “Jie Lijun doesn’t lock the door at night?”

  “The lock is broken. He was old and broke, so he didn’t worry about attracting thieves.”

  I nodded, indicating for the detective to continue.

  “Several days ago, Jie Lijun told his niece, Liu Cuihua, that he hadn’t seen his daughter’s new house since she’d been married, so he was planning on going to Hubei in the next few days. He was the kind of old guy who was always getting ideas in his head, so Liu Cuihua just told the old man he was a piece of work, and didn’t think of it any further.”

  “You still haven’t said who he was playing chess with,” I exclaimed, getting dizzy from the suspense.

  “I’m getting there!” The detective laughed. “Just now, the DNA lab came back with results from the cigarettes. They found a match for the man who called in the case: Jie Liwen.”

  “Oh!” I slapped the table. “Jie Liwen is now a prime suspect, so you’re not worried about digging up his well!”

  Huang smiled and nodded.

  “Where were his cigarette butts?” Big Bao asked.

  The detective took out the evidence list, opened photos from the survey on his laptop, and said, “By the outer stool.”

  “Black’s side.” Big Bao squinted to see the picture. “That makes sense! Red was about to beat black, which means Jie Lijun was going to win. Maybe Jie Liwen got angry and killed him.”

  “That’s what I suspected at first,” Forensic Scientist Gao said, “because Jie Liwen said he saw the feet sticking up after he removed the straw, but when we were getting the body out, I couldn’t see anything.”

  I nodded. “I thought about that too, but maybe the light was different, or reflecting in there differently.”

  “Isn’t this a case of toss far, bury close?” Big Bao said. “The killer threw the body into his own well. Afterward, he was afraid someone going by would see it, so he put straw on top. Then he was still afraid, so he called the police, thinking we wouldn’t suspect him.”

  Huang nodded approvingly.

  “But there’s one thing that doesn’t make sense,” Big Bao said. “We figured the killer was stronger than the victim, but Jie Liwen is a little old man.”

  “Who said the killer was strong? I don’t agree,” Lin Tao said, having just returned from his site survey. “I inspected Jie Lijun’s house and found a lot of tracks from a body being dragged. Are there drag marks on the corpse?”

  I nodded. “A lot, very clear.”

  “When the body was dragged, the killer stopped every ten feet or so to rest.”

  Lin Tao pointed at an image of the marks on the ground. “These blank spaces are from dragging the body and then stopping. Which means the killer struggled to move it. So it probably isn’t a very strong person.”

  “But when we examined the body, we found very little resistance,” Big Bao said. “There was no damage to the limb joints.”

  I flipped through the slides and stopped at a photo of the victim’s bed. “Hm. This can be explained. If the victim was sleeping, he probably had that blanket over him. Then suddenly, someone pressed down on his body and the blanket held him tight. With his arms trapped, there was no way he could resist. That kind of force spread out over such a large area wouldn’t necessarily leave marks!”

  Everyone nodded in agreement.

  Huang said, “If no one objects, let’s make the arrest. And dig up that well.”

  Digging up the well was a highly technical job. When we were standing there with no idea what to do, some smart officer called a well-digging company. They wore miner’s lamps and brought a crane.

  Thanks to the diggers’ neat, efficient work, a large pit soon opened around the well. Next, the bricks supporting the well were dismantled. The wellhead opened up, and the claws of the crane began dredging up debris.

  Our moods rose and fell with the roar of the diesel engine. Every time the crane went under, our hopes shot up, and every time it came up empty, they were dashed. And so we swung back and forth between hope and despair for over half an hour. The diggers just kept working silently.

  Finally, amid a burst of cheers, the machine claw grabbed something.

  I quickly put on gloves and ran over to examine it. With the lights of more than ten miner’s lamps on my hands, I suddenly felt like a star in the spotlight.

  It was a plastic bag, heavy and full, and tightly tied.

  “Wouldn’t a plastic bag that sank to the bottom be full of water?” Lin Tao said.

  I checked it over. “Look, there are a lot of little holes poked in it.”

  Slowly opening the bag, I saw stones inside.

  “You were right,” Big Bao said. “It was made to weigh down the body. Where does all this work get us, though? What’s the point of knowing there was something to weigh the body down?”

  “Of course there’s a point,” Lin Tao shouted. “This type of cement gravel isn’t found just anywhere. You usually see it around construction sites.”

  I nodded. “When the killer went looking for something to weigh the body down, he probably grabbed whatever was closest at hand. Is there construction anywhere near Jie Liwen’s house?”

  The detective shook his head, then paused and nodded. “Not right by Jie Liwen’s, but a few hundred yards north, there’s a house being built. We even saw a pile of gravel.”

  “I guess the disposal prep was done at the victim’s home,” Big Bao said.

  I shook my head. “The well’s south of the victim’s home, and the gravel’s to the north. It wouldn’t make sense for him to go north and then south again.”

  “Let’s not nitpick.” Big Bao laughed. “I want to hear the results of the interrogation first.”

  But the interrogation didn’t go as well as we’d hoped. Jie Liwen was agitated from the moment he was brought in.

  “Shit, you got me in here; meanwhile the real criminal’s out there living it up! I was unlucky enough to find a body in my well, and now I get dragged in here for questioning. You guys that clueless? Someone finds a body in their well, so they musta done it? Is that how you solve a case? Fucking unfair! Cops really are pigs!”

  Back in the conference room, Captain Huang said solemnly, “We may have made a mistake, but we don’t have a good reason to let him go. Jie Liwen admitted to playing chess with the victim that night, but said he went home at ten. And according to our external survey, Jie Liwen’s behavior hasn’t been strange recently.”

  “I don’t think he’s our guy,” I said. “If the murder had been incited by the chess match, the response would have been spontaneous. But we determined the victim was already sleeping, so the killer snuck in from outside. We may have missed something important here. Why don’t we let him go tonight, and when it gets light tomorrow morning, we’ll keep working.”

  On his way out, Jie Liwen sprawled on the floor of the entryway, making a fuss. “I’m not leaving! You dragged me in here, and you won’t get rid of me this easily! I want reparations! Emotional damage! Reputation damage! You don’t pay, I don’t leave!”

  Depressed by the spectacle, I went back to the hotel, turned on my computer, and started looking over all the photos of the scene and autopsy from the very beginning.

  My attention kept returning to that plastic bag. There was something familiar about it, but I couldn’t think what it was. I lay down heavily in bed and quickly fell asleep.

  That night, I dreamed of myself as a child, holding my grandfather’s hand on the way to the market to buy groceries. My favorite dish was his mapo tofu, so I begged him to make it. At the tofu stall, the vendor took out a black plastic bag and used it to fish out a chunk of tofu from a basin of water. When the bag came up, all the water flowed out of little holes.

  I woke up in surprise—it was almost eight already. I rolled out of bed and went to the bathroom to wash up.

  “Hey!” Lin Tao yelled. “I’m showering in here!”

  “No one’s looking at your body, gorgeous. Don’t be so uptight. I need to wash up so I can get to the task force and tell them what I figured out.”

  “I’m heading back to the scene myself. Last night I was thinking how there’s so much straw in the well, but the straw heap is dozens of yards away. No one could have moved all that without some kind of vehicle.”

  As I brushed my teeth, I replied, “The corpse was miles away, so of course there was a vehicle.”

  “Ooh! Really? Well, I’ve got an ace up my sleeve too. Don’t want to tell you now,” Lin Tao said, playing coy. “First to the scene to get more evidence, then I’ll tell you. But you should tell me what you figured out! How do you know the corpse was far away?”

  “Okay. Why did that black bag have holes?”

  “Don’t know, maybe the killer thought stupidly that water would make it float?”

  I shook my head. “The killer didn’t make the holes. He was nervous throughout the whole process—dumping straw in the well shows his thinking was a bit off. Taking the time to poke a hundred perfect, tiny holes doesn’t make sense.”

  “So then, what was it?”

  “You go to the scene,” I said, laughing. “I’ll tell you at the station. You want to play hard to get; I will too. This breakthrough is something my grandpa told me in a dream.”

  28

  “Our killer recently went to town to buy tofu,” I announced. “That’s a tofu bag. And, don’t forget, Jie Lijun didn’t cook his own food, so it wouldn’t be from his place. That means the killer probably did prep work at his own home, gathering the bag, rope, vehicle, and picking up stones from the side of the road.”

  “The side of the road?” Captain Huang asked. “Are you saying the killer lives north of the gravel pile?”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “The killer and the victim knew each other, so it’s very possible there was some kind of grudge. Recently went to town to buy tofu, lives a little north of the victim, small, not very strong, could drive a vehicle, has a vehicle. It shouldn’t be hard for you to find someone in the village who meets those criteria, right?”

  “Sure,” Huang said, “but we don’t have any hard evidence. Even if we identify someone, we can’t make the arrest, can’t bring them in for interrogation without evidence. If that weren’t enough, Jie Liwen is still sleeping in the vestibule, refusing to leave until we pay him for his troubles.”

  “Who says there’s no evidence?” Lin Tao declared from the doorway, a photograph in his hand.

  Everyone looked at Lin Tao expectantly. In cases without DNA evidence, trace evidence is a lifesaver.

  “The straw we found in the well was thin and small, not bundled. That kind of straw isn’t something someone could carry a lot of at once. The killer needed a vehicle to transport it. Last night, I realized a motorcycle or a scooter wouldn’t do the job, so the killer probably used a pedicab or truck.”

  Lin Tao took a sip from his cup of tea and went on. “This morning, I went to look at the area between the well and the straw heap. The area’s a mess, most of the traces are damaged, but pedicab tracks are distinct: three equidistant tire marks from the one in the front and two in the back.”

  Lin Tao showed the photo to everyone. “You guys find a suspect meeting Qin’s criteria, and if he has a pedicab with treads that match these, I believe we can break the case today, right?”

  “We have to!” Huang said, slapping the table. “Men, head out. I want you back with a suspect in three hours.”

  Before the three hours were up, the detectives were back—empty-handed.

  “We found twenty-seven homes north of the victim’s, with a total of thirty-two people fitting the body type.”

  “We checked all the tofu stands in town, and two of them use plastic bags similar to the one found at the scene. And the shopkeepers remember eleven of our thirty-two buying tofu from them recently.”

  “Of those eleven, seven do have pedicabs, but after comparing the tire treads, none matched.”

  “None?” I was a little surprised. “So you’re saying we don’t have a single suspect?”

  The detective nodded.

  “What about the other four? How did you confirm they don’t have pedicabs?” I went on.

  “There wasn’t one when we looked.”

  “Then did you even ask them if they had one? They might have lent it to someone or something.”

  “We can’t ask that. We’d reveal our investigative angle.”

  “Give me a break here,” Captain Huang said. “You’re going door to door looking at people’s pedicab tires. Don’t you think that might leak your investigative angle just a little bit?”

  A detective sitting in the corner suddenly spoke up. “You guys? On the day the case was called in, I went to Jie Liguo’s house to talk to the victim’s family, and I think there was a pedicab in the yard.”

  I felt blood rush to my head. “Are you sure?”

  The detective tapped a pen on his forehead. “I think so.”

  “But Jie Liguo is Jie Lijun’s older brother,” the lead detective said.

  “And?” Huang said. “How many people have been killed by family members this year?”

  “We didn’t find any evidence of conflict between them. They just don’t get together very much,” the detective said.

  “Well,” Huang said, “Jie Liguo’s son and daughter-in-law are awfully good to his little brother—maybe that’s his problem. We just haven’t had enough time to look into it.”

  “Does this Jie Liguo fit our criteria?” I asked.

  “Yup,” the detective said. “Skinny, bought tofu, he lives about five hundred yards north of the victim.”

  “Lin Tao, let’s pay big brother a little visit,” I said.

  Jie Liguo was smoking in the doorway, a glimmer in his eyes. “What are you doing back here? My little brother died, so now you think I did it? Fuck off!”

  I smiled, not responding.

  Lin Tao walked back and forth in the yard, suddenly lay down on the ground, and then looked up at me. The slight crimp at the corner of his mouth told me he had it.

  Lin Tao stood up, patted the dust off his knees, and walked over to Jie Liguo, bummed a cigarette, and said, “Dude, where’d you hide your pedicab?”

  The casual question seemed to strike Jie Liguo square in the face. “What . . . what? What pedicab?”

  “Your pedicab,” Lin Tao said calmly, smiling at him.

  “Pedicab?” Jie Liguo scoffed. “I don’t . . . I don’t have a pedicab.”

  Lin Tao didn’t argue with him, just gave the detectives a look that said, Take him away.

  His daughter-in-law, Liu Cuihua, came out of the kitchen. “What’s going on?”

  Lin Tao said, “Your dad’s pedicab, where’d it go?”

  Glancing at Lin Tao’s uniform, Lie Cuihua seemed a little confused. She straightened her clothes and smoothed her hair as she lowered her head and said, “Last night he rode it off toward the fields.”

  We left an officer to keep an eye on the old man and headed toward the fields. I glanced back and noticed Liu Cuihua staring at us—no, at Lin Tao—in a trance.

  When we got to the edge of Jie Liguo’s field, we noticed a freshly smoothed section of the mud. Lin Tao said excitedly, “Is there a shovel in the survey van?”

  A technician took a small shovel from the van. Lin Tao gave it a dismayed look and said, “I guess it’ll do. Let’s dig.”