Inside were a basic exam table and two chairs, plus a scale, eye test chart, etc. Behind the table was a curtain, which was pulled back, revealing a cot pushed up against a wood-paneled wall that partitioned off a smaller back room. The room was very messy, filled with all kinds of medicine.

  The bloodstains were mainly on the table, the doctor’s chair, and the floor nearby. So the victim was sitting down when he was suddenly attacked with a knife. The blood spatter was very messy, indicating a struggle.

  Under the chair for patients there was a thick red floor mat. Based on the dust pattern on the ground, it was clear the mat had originally been under the doctor’s chair. There was also a pair of leather shoes under the doctor’s chair.

  “The victim wasn’t wearing shoes,” I said. “It looks like he sweated heavily, so he placed a mat under his chair and took off his shoes. When he was stabbed, he kicked the mat toward the patient’s chair.”

  “The mat’s all dirty,” Big Bao said. “There’s a lot of black and yellow stuff on it.”

  “Could be from the killer’s feet,” I said. “He would have stepped on it as soon as he got up. Because the mat has so much friction, the killer probably left shoe prints. Let’s be sure to take it back.”

  “Look, Old Qin guessed wrong.” Lin Tao stood in the doorway of the small room, shining his flashlight inside. “There are medicine cabinets in here, and next to them is a big spot with no dust. Something square-shaped in here was moved.”

  Lin Tao went into the small room, pulled out a tape measure, and added, “Exactly the size of a rolling GFTP bag!”

  “If the killer went in there to get the suitcase, maybe there are footprints,” I speculated.

  Lin Tao shook his head. “The floor’s bad for that. Even if there were some, they wouldn’t be useful.”

  Sadly, we didn’t find any clear footprints or fingerprints in the main room. And anyway, since so many patients passed through the clinic, even if we did find something, it’d be hard to determine whether it belonged to the suspect.

  “Hey, Bao. Let’s take a look at the doctor’s things and see if there’s anything helpful.”

  The exam table was a mess of prescriptions, medical devices, medical records, and wastepaper. After studying each and every scrap until I knew the doctor’s scrawl by heart, I started looking through the drawer. As soon as I opened it, I saw an exquisite red card. Inside, written in the victim’s handwriting, was a poem or song titled “The Touch of Never.”

  Longing

  May never meet again

  Love

  May not last forever

  Our wishes put us together

  Our words made us suffer

  Only through fate

  Will you come my way

  Only our bond

  Will keep us fond

  Your love waters my fields

  And truth beats sweet words

  I never touched your smiling face

  Never gave your eyes a kiss

  But your shadow’s in my heart

  Tearing me apart

  The grass watches the moon

  The moon reflects the grass

  Your sweet lips

  My fingers’ fingertips

  Only together

  The touch of never

  “Lyrics from a pop song? Sounds catchy.”

  Lin Tao shook his head. “No, it’s probably original.”

  “Whoa, a poet too,” I said. “Can you get what it means?”

  Lin Tao was the “cultured” one. He read it carefully a few times. “As far as I can tell, this is a poem of love gone wrong, probably about an affair.”

  “Li Kehua wasn’t married,” a detective informed us.

  Big Bao laughed. “Come on, Lin Tao.”

  Lin Tao said, “Hey, why couldn’t it be the woman who’s married?”

  “If there really was an affair, this sudden murder and moving the body would make a lot of sense,” I said. “We got the ID, and now we have a story. I think we can break this soon!”

  Then I noticed something next to the doctor’s seat.

  “Strange,” I said. “This trash can’s lid is open.”

  I shone my flashlight inside. “And there’s a piece of gauze in here.”

  “This is even stranger,” I said, pulling out the gauze with tweezers. “There’s blood on here, but it’s very fresh and only covering a small area. If the patient was injured a while ago and needed his dressing changed, the blood would be dark yellow. And if the patient was just injured, there should be a lot more blood.”

  “So you mean the killer pretended to need a fresh dressing in order to take the doctor by surprise?” Big Bao asked.

  I nodded. “Which tells us this was probably a premeditated crime. Use a little injury to fool the doctor, then sneak an attack.”

  “In that case, it really could have been the cheating woman’s husband,” the detective said.

  “Very possibly,” I said. “Let’s get DNA testing on the gauze. I suspect the doctor may have been attacked immediately after he threw it in the trash. Some medical waste can spread disease, so a doctor would probably be careful about keeping the lid closed.”

  “Lots of new possibilities!” Big Bao said. “What should we do next?”

  I shrugged and walked toward the exit. “Nothing we can do but send our new info to the task force and wait for the DNA results. Plus, it’s still a holiday today. After last night, I want to go home and catch up on sleep.”

  Chief Hu came in and said, “The physical and chemical test results are back. The fire had an accelerant: gasoline.”

  “Did they test for the origin?” Big Bao asked.

  “There’s some staff looking at surveillance video from gas stations nearby,” Hu said. “Others are asking around to see if anyone suspicious bought gas.”

  “Don’t forget, the killer had a vehicle,” I said. “Couldn’t he have just siphoned the fuel out of it?”

  “Nowadays, cars have curved filler pipes,” Han Liang said. “It’s really not easy to get the gas out. You could get the fuel out of a truck, but they use diesel.”

  “What about a motorcycle or moped?” I asked.

  Han Liang nodded. “Yeah, you can get fuel out of bikes.”

  53

  After a nap, I went to the task force meeting in high spirits.

  The atmosphere was animated as they discussed the progress of the case.

  “Seems Li Kehua did have an affair with a married woman,” a detective said. “The woman’s name is Ruan Fang. You noticed that poem had the character ‘Ruan’ in it, right?”

  “Her husband is a company president named Wu Lixue,” another detective said. “Chasing boys instead of being content as a rich man’s wife causes trouble for everyone.”

  “President?” I frowned and thought for a moment. “Did you arrest him?”

  The detective nodded. “The squad leader is questioning him now. Doing a DNA test too.”

  “Does this Wu Lixue keep birds?” I asked.

  The detective raised his eyebrows. “Sure don’t think so.”

  “I think you arrested the wrong man. The DNA won’t match.”

  “Why?” He looked as shocked as if I had thrown cold water in his face.

  I took out a transparent evidence bag. “We sent the floor mat for chemical and physical testing, and the test results came back with this.”

  “What the heck is it?” the detective said, frowning and leaning closer.

  “The yellow things are a small grain often used to feed pet birds. The black thing is a chip of charcoal from a coal stove. In other words, the killer lives near bird feed and a coal oven. This company president doesn’t raise birds, so where’d the bird feed come from? People in the city don’t cook over coal, so where’d the charcoal come from?”

  Just then, a DNA lab assistant came in and announced, “The suspect isn’t a match.”

  “Isn’t it possible that the blood on the gauze and the material on the floor mat don’t belong to the killer?” Director Zhang said. “Your reasoning makes sense, Qin, but we can’t be certain. We shouldn’t let him go yet, right?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “But who would want to murder that doctor besides him?” the detective said. “It doesn’t seem like a robbery, right?”

  “There’s another possibility,” Lin Tao said. “The killer may have seen something inside the clinic that he had to have, that he had to kill for.”

  “Like what?” the detective said, looking uncomfortable.

  Lin Tao hadn’t gone home for a nap. He’d been at the clinic, surveying. Seeing how charged up he was told me he’d made a discovery.

  Lin Tao sat casually down at the conference table. He took a sip of water and popped a USB drive in the computer, then opened a slide show of photos he’d just taken.

  “This afternoon, we focused on surveying the little back room,” Lin Tao said. “Though the flooring there isn’t conducive to holding traces, the dust distribution inside the medicine cabinet appeared to indicate recent movement.”

  “Did you rule out that the doctor moved things himself?” I asked.

  “Yes. This doctor was disciplined. He had a chart labeling the position where each medicine was kept. If he wanted something specific, he could go directly to the chart and find it. But the movement traces we found were very chaotic, and many drugs were out of place. So the killer probably moved them. That also explains why the clinic looked ransacked.”

  “Was there something missing?” I asked, my eyes lighting up.

  Lin Tao smiled. “Methadone.”

  “A lot of heroin users use it as a replacement,” I said. “And as we’ve seen all too recently, an addict committing murder to get a fix is certainly plausible.”

  “Send Wu Lixue home,” Director Zhang ordered. “Time to look for evidence related to drug users.”

  “I think the main line of investigation should follow from the trace evidence we found,” I said. “We really have a lot of criteria now. Think about it: a drug user familiar with the area who keeps birds and has a coal oven and a small injury. With all these criteria and DNA, how could we not break this today?”

  Still, I kept wondering why a drug addict would go to so much trouble with the suitcase and quarry and burning the body, all for a couple bottles of methadone.

  Investigators dispatched officers from two stations, who searched the surrounding five villages and quickly found our bird-keeping, coal-burning, drug-addicted man. By eight p.m., Wu Biao was under arrest.

  “Before we began,” the detective responsible for the arrest said, “we looked at methadone clinics in the area that had been robbed previously, then used a crime map to determine possible whereabouts of the suspect, then followed your criteria to find him. It only took two hours to figure out where he was. When we searched his home, we found methadone pills that matched the ones missing from the clinic and—get this—one hundred thousand yuan.”

  “Huh?” Big Bao said. “A hundred thousand bucks? Then why would he have to steal methadone? Just go buy some drugs and you’re done. None of this stabbing and shoving bodies in suitcases.”

  “He admitted that he pretended to need a new bandage from Dr. Li, then took him by surprise and stabbed him, but then he got scared and wanted to hide the body. So he took a suitcase from the back room, drove the body on his motorcycle to the quarry, siphoned out gas, and burned the body.”

  “That does fit perfectly with our hypothesis,” Big Bao said smugly.

  “We asked him why he didn’t just go buy drugs,” the detective said. “He said because of the big crackdown recently, you need really good contacts to find them, even if you have money.”

  “But where did the money come from? Did he have a job?” I asked. “Usually addiction drains all their money away.”

  “He couldn’t explain the cash no matter how hard he tried,” the detective confessed.

  “I smell a rat!” I said.

  “What do you think, Qinny boy?” Big Bao said, playing Sherlock.

  I looked down and thought a moment, then smiled. “What do I think? Ha. I think we were wrong again.”

  “Wrong how?” Big Bao asked.

  I turned to the detective. “There aren’t a lot of people around here with the surname Wu, are there? What’s the relationship between Wu Biao and Wu Lixue?”

  “Wu . . . Wu Lixue? Didn’t we release him? Oh shit. I get it.”

  54

  The detectives quickly learned that Wu Biao was unemployed, apart from doing some dirty work as a hired thug, principally for Wu Lixue, his cousin.

  Wu Lixue had a good career; he was worth over ten million before he turned forty. As you’d expect, his relatives and friends from the villages always came to him for jobs. The most useful one was his tough, reckless cousin.

  Wu Biao was a junkie, so he needed a constant stream of money, which became the chain that bound him to Wu Lixue.

  Wu Lixue doted on his wife, Ruan Fang, who was fifteen years younger than he and repulsed by the man she’d married. Her only job was shopping, but all that spending didn’t fill the emptiness she felt inside.

  Ruan Fang frequented bars, nightclubs, and gyms, hoping to find “true love.” She soon met a handsome man at the gym who made her heart beat fast—Li Kehua.

  Li Kehua wasn’t tall, but he had a wonderful face and chest. He had retired from the provincial hospital at twenty-seven and started a private clinic in a busy town. That kind of courage made Ruan Fang melt. Similarly, Ruan Fang’s beauty and charm drove Li Kehua wild. They’d been seeing each other for about a month when Wu Lixue caught on, but he decided to keep quiet.

  On Mid-Autumn Festival, when Ruan Fang left to rendezvous with Li Kehua, Wu Lixue called Wu Biao and laid out the murder plan. Wu Biao had taped the call to protect himself, and the detectives were excited to submit the recording as evidence in court.

  “One hundred thousand yuan to take a life,” I said, shaking my head. “These rich people have no morals.”

  “That poem must have been a present Li Kehua was going to give to Ruan Fang the night of Mid-Autumn Festival,” Big Bao said. “Seems like she was all about material things, but I guess something from the heart could still reach her.”

  “Right,” I said. “And that young doctor really had some literary talent.”

  “Now moving and burning the body makes sense too,” Chief Hu said to us.

  “Yeah? I still haven’t untied that knot.”

  “Wu Lixue hated Li Kehua so much for stealing his wife,” Hu said, “that he told Wu Biao to stab the doctor more even after he was dead and then feed his body to dogs.”

  “Feeding it to dogs wasn’t realistic, so he went and burned it,” I said, following Hu’s logic. “Wow. This Wu Biao is a pretty thorough hit man.”

  Lin Tao sighed. “If only people could just be honest with one another.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Big Bao said, “especially single hunks like you. Don’t give in to temptation, man. Married women are to be avoided at all costs.”

  “Well, we cracked this one fast, so everyone can take a breath before we go back to investigating Eleventh Finger,” I said. “This case should remind us that criminals don’t always act alone. They can be hired. Our perspective was too narrow, and we nearly missed it; we have to do better next time.”

  55

  The first thing I saw when I arrived at work in the morning was Big Bao telling a story to some young female colleagues from the DNA lab.

  “Ten years ago, on a dark and stormy night, when I was still in college, a rustling sound suddenly came from the washroom. My roommates and I stiffened and went to look. One of our classmates was in there, scrubbing a uniquely shaped machete. When it was clean, he chopped up a cantaloupe for us.”

  Big Bao nodded to me before continuing. “While everyone was eating, he gave the machete an admiring look and said, ‘Knife’s not bad, huh?’ We didn’t care about his knife—we were stuffing our faces with the cantaloupe. But then he added, ‘I stole it from the anatomy department! No worries, I washed off all the meat that was stuck on it.’”

  “Eww . . . ,” the girls chorused.

  “That knife was used for autopsy training, to cut open those disinfected, preserved cadavers the school uses. We all knew no one ever cleaned those knives. People just stuck them back in the supply box with fat and muscle fibers all stuck on. Now you know why your mom told you never to accept food from strangers.”

  DNA technicians generally haven’t studied medicine or anatomy, so Big Bao’s vivid description made them squeamish. One of the girls said, “Forget about food from strangers. I’m never eating cantaloupe again.”

  “You sure?” Big Bao grinned. “I just saw a couple cantaloupes in your office. Should I take them?”

  “What a jerk,” I said. I knew Big Bao always had a motive for telling his stories. “Trying to trick these girls out of their snacks.”

  It was another slow week. Every day we just collected injury assessments, did bone age assessments, or wrote petition review reports. But with the still-open Eleventh Finger case constantly on our minds, we could never fully relax.

  Feeling lazy, I turned on my computer and got ready to write a letter requesting two new survey kits, but as soon as the Word document opened, I got a call.

  Big Bao was slurping down his ill-gotten cantaloupe, and his eyes widened. He gestured at the phone, asking me to answer it.

  “Hello?” I said. “Hello, Chief Sun, how are you? What? Four?”

  Big Bao stopped chewing.

  I hung up the phone and said, “Qing District, four family members killed.”

  “Murder?” Big Bao slurred, his mouth full of cantaloupe.

  “An explosion case, maybe an accident. But since so many people died, we have to go to the scene. I’ll call Lin Tao and Han Liang.”

  Big Bao smiled as he slowly swallowed the cantaloupe. “All right! Finally a case! I’ve been growing hemorrhoids sitting around here.”