by Gangxueyin
As he stood up, he felt his heel bump against something under the bed. He bent down and lifted the bedspread and saw a number of soda cans in a plastic bag.
“She knows a thing or two! Finds empty cans on the side of the road and brings them home. When she’s collected enough, she sells them at the scrapyard,” explained Wang Cheng.
Han Yin asked, “Where’s the scrapyard? How old is the man who runs it? Does he live alone?”
Wang Cheng grew tense and said, “Three streets over. He’s an old geezer who lives in a little house in the middle of the scrapyard. He seems to live alone. I just went there to ask, and he said he hadn’t seen the child.”
“Dammit! Now he’s been alarmed!” Han Yin’s heart pounded. “Quick! Take us there!”
At the scrapyard
A speeding police car arrived and came to a full stop. Han Yin, Ye Xi, and Wang Hong’s parents jumped out and rushed to the little building in the middle of the yard.
Pounding on the door. An old man looking like he was well into his sixties appeared in the doorway. A kind, grandfatherly face. Clothes simple and clean. Looked like the benevolent grandfather next door.
Seeing the old man, Ye Xi felt doubt and hesitation. Similarly, the child’s father found it somewhat hard to believe that this was some kind of beast. On the other hand, with several people blocking his doorway, the old man showed a composed and casual front. Unusual.
Han Yin didn’t hesitate at all. Ignoring respect for the elderly, he pushed the old man aside and barged into the house.
The layout was much the same as where they’d just been but a bit bigger. The outer room was very simple: a brick stove, a cupboard, a pile of various things. The inner room’s furnishings were few: a single bed by the window, a low table opposite it, and a small television on top of that. Directly facing the door was an old-style closet, tall and broad. Maybe something the old man salvaged.
Was the child in it? Was she still alive?
Han Yin’s heart beat in his throat, and he held his breath. The old man grew red in the face and started breathing heavily and quivering. Seeing this, Han Yin could be almost certain the child was inside. He was only afraid that he might find a corpse.
“Be alive, child!” he prayed as his trembling hand pulled open the door.
Suddenly, something happened that he would never forget. If only it had been a nightmare. A child in the bloom of youth. Why did you have to suffer such a terrible thing? What kind of evil could be more evil than this?
Little Wang Hong, stark naked and beaten black and blue, was curled up on her side, lying in the middle of the closet floor. A pair of innocent eyes bulged as they stared out. Her swollen face was almost unrecognizable. Her mouth was covered by tape, and her hands and feet were bound. Her lower body was all red, with traces of blood between her thighs.
A jolt ran through Han Yin. He lunged forward and tore off the tape. The girl’s eyes moved slightly, and she took a breath. “She’s alive! She’s still alive!” he exclaimed, turning around.
The parents shrieked and fell on their daughter, gently touching her. They then used their bodies to protect her, their mouths hanging open.
Ye Xi pulled out her cell phone and called the station.
Suddenly, Wang Cheng got up and charged over to the old man, who stood dazed beside the door. “You animal! I’ll kill you!” Wang Cheng threw the old man to the floor and ferociously grabbed his throat. Ye Xi hurried over to pull them apart.
Han Yin covered the child with his jacket, stared tenderly at her, and walked out of the room.
A large contingent of police officers rushed in with ambulances in tow. Wang Hong was put on a stretcher and placed in an ambulance. The old man was loaded into a police car.
Somehow, all of this seemed to have no connection to Han Yin, as if everything around him wasn’t real. In Han Yin’s present world, there was only him and the young girl in the closet. He stood in the center of the little courtyard, staring blankly at the gate. He seemed to see a little girl skipping along with a bag of empty cans in her hand. His pain was indescribable. One thing was certain: that child would never return to that kind of innocence.
He had no idea how long he’d been standing there when he felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned and saw Ye Xi. She patted him softly, handed over his jacket, and said, “Let’s go. There’re bigger things awaiting us.”
Han Yin nodded and mechanically followed her to the car.
8
A CHILD-ABUSING DEVIL
Han Yin registered very little of the ride back. Ye Xi drove to the child abuse temporary command post—the Southern Tombs Subbranch.
The car stopped. Ye Xi opened the door. She saw Han Yin still sitting there in a daze and knew the events still bothered him. She got in, closed the door, and sat there with him.
He recovered a few minutes later. He sighed deeply and said, “Please forgive me. I’m behaving badly. You don’t usually see cases like this in my field of work. This was the first time I ever encountered it. I’m still a little shaken.”
“Yeah. What do you think could possess a man to do that to a child?” she asked. “You’re not the only one. In all my time as a criminal investigator, I’ve never dealt with a case like this. But this has given me a lot of understanding about how to crack the case faster. Give me your thoughts so I can learn more.”
“In terms of practical experience, I’m far behind you. It was just a coincidence that the case had a connection with my specialty, so, in this sort of investigation, it appears I have more experience than you do.” Han Yin knew Ye Xi was distracting him so he would recover faster. Forcing a smile, he said, “If you really want to hear it, I’ll tell you. When dealing with cases of missing children and adolescents, there are four motives: abduction and trafficking, kidnapping, retaliation against the parents, and rape. In this case, the child was older, so we could eliminate abduction and trafficking. Another point: the child’s household conditions were nothing special, so kidnapping was unlikely. The child’s parents got along with people in the neighborhood, so retaliation could be excluded, too. So, we’re left with rape. Considering the girl’s appearance, I felt the perpetrator might be a pedophile.
“Pedophiles are almost always male. Perversions are mainly caused by acquired abnormal psychological development. There are those whose targets range from four years old to seventeen years old. Some of the targets are purely male, others only female, and some don’t differentiate. The perpetrators who choose boys have often been the subject of sexual abuse themselves or anal rape. After reaching adulthood, they want revenge or have a thrill-seeking mentality. Then they became pedophiles. Social pressures, complicated home environments, or disgust and horror at the chaotic infidelities of adult interpersonal relationships cause them to seek simple and secure exchanges and may turn their interests toward children. Some, because of low social standing, disharmony at home, repeatedly suffering humiliation at the hands of their spouse or other women, feel rage against women or an extreme revulsion toward them, so they turn to males. Other deviants are genuinely homosexual but can’t find any suitable partners, so they use boys instead . . . but I won’t go into details.
“The key point here is the profile of pedophiles who violate young girls. In this case, the victim either tends to be young or thinks childishly and is easily tricked or intimidated. Most criminals have retarded intelligence, are chronic addicts or alcoholics, have disabilities, are old, and so on. Of these, single middle-aged to old men are the most prevalent. They have relatively few opportunities to encounter normal women, or they have a slight chance of being seen favorably. Also, sexual dysfunction may prevent them from having normal sexual relationships. So they transform the object of their sexuality into young girls. The starting point might be to fulfill normal sexual needs. Once they’ve experienced their thrills with a little girl’s body, it becomes a habit. Over time, they lose interest in women. They usually hunt neighbors, friends, relatives, and children the
y often come in contact with.
“At the beginning, pedophiles trick the child by promising to give something he or she would want, deceiving the child into trusting them. They peer at or fondle the child’s genitals for their own sexual satisfaction. Subsequently, the frequency of contact increases, and psychological satisfaction turns into physiological satisfaction, which creates a demand for sexual intercourse. In our case, a young girl who looks childish and is mentally simple goes missing. The perpetrator is very likely a middle-aged or older male. He’s single and lives alone. He has contact with the child and is someone the child’s familiar with. He takes the child around, gives her presents, and frequently haunts the areas of her daily activities. Naturally, I particularly worry that some pedophiles have aberrant tendencies for violence. I call these aggressive pedophiles. For various reasons, they have to torment children to get their release. An aggressive pedophile will use all kinds of vicious means to ruin the child’s genitals or brutally kill the child, mutilate the corpse, and so on. I especially worry about little girls encountering this sort of person. Most pedophiles aren’t capable of murder. When the victim suddenly resists and threatens to tell the parents, a pedophile doesn’t know what to do and instinctively ties the child up to keep her from going free. Only then will pedophiles consider how to deal with the situation. They might decide to kill the child, but considering this takes time. Once they feel pressure, it increases the chance of murder.”
“I understand. So when you found out that Wang Hong’s father had confronted the old man at the scrapyard, you feared he might do something rash.”
“Correct. I was especially worried that, after being questioned by the father, the criminal would kill the child to ensure nobody found out.”
“It’s a good thing you’re here; otherwise the girl would probably be dead.” Ye Xi paused. “So in the East Red Flag Street child abuse cases, the first target the culprit picked was a young girl. Does this mean he’s a middle-aged or older male?”
“Not necessarily. What I said earlier was general. A specific case requires specific treatment.” Han Yin thought for a moment. “In the East Red Flag Street case, the culprit had to have been a pedophile. After he abducted a girl, he then took four boys, and it’s very possible he brutally murdered them. Therefore, the reasons for his identity and the formation of his pedophilia habit are quite complex. There are more than a few people with pedophilia habits around today, but it’s uncommon to see them turn into murder and rarer yet for them to evolve into sadistic murders. As I said, pedophilia really doesn’t lead directly to killing people, and in those extremely rare cases of aggressive pedophiles, their motivations for molesting, abusing, and murdering children reflect multifaceted personal defects. Here, we definitely have problems of sexual release. At the same time, there could be problems in their social and family environments or from issues experienced when growing up. You could say the reason these people are attracted to children is just that they’re a weaker, vulnerable group and easy to dominate. In earlier cases, we found that where the proportion of the sadistic murders of male and female children did not diverge greatly, more often than not it meant the killer was sexually repressed. Where boys were mostly killed, there was a connection with living environment and childhood experiences.
“In the East Red Flag Street case, I tend toward the latter theory. The first victim, a girl, represented an unbearably painful experience in some previous period in the killer’s life, perhaps related to an emotional experience. I’d be willing to bet that the girl was killed shortly after being abducted and that the killer quickly got rid of her—a serious revenge psychology. But the boy victims represent his deep frustrations that continue to the present and into the future. The male victims cast light on the killer or his childhood—the weak, helpless version of him. Some psychologists call this identifying with the strong. I’ll explain it this way: when someone who’s stronger than you oppresses you and you can’t extricate yourself from the predicament through your mental feedback filter, you actually rationalize this type of behavior as the inevitability of the strong oppressing the weak. So, when your mental dam is on the verge of bursting, you’d rather hurt someone weak than resist someone strong. The way I see the East Red Flag Street case, the brutal killings are meant to kill his own weak position, thereby giving him the mentality of the strong person.”
Han Yin’s lengthy analysis fascinated Ye Xi. “Excellent. Do you have any other ideas about the killer’s background?”
Han Yin smiled. It was clear he’d already thought this out. “Let’s first say a word or two about where he is located. In America, the FBI’s behavior analysts have, based on crime scene behavior and the criminal’s lifestyle, separated killings into the ability and inability to organize. Although this method of categorizing was later determined to be too one-sided, with more serial killers actually between these opposites, some category indices still have research value. This method of categorizing says that organized killers will select an area to commit the crime far from their life and workplace. Naturally, this doesn’t mean they will be unfamiliar with the area. The unorganized killers commit the crime in an area they can control. They normally reside near the site. To be blunt, people with high IQs commit crimes in other places. People with low IQs or who have mental illnesses commit crimes close to home.
“In this case, the killer committed serial crimes in an extremely limited area, meaning that his IQ was average and that he lived near the crime site. But merely relying on whether an IQ is high or low is insufficient and too generalized. Can we be more precise? Let’s first pin down a few locations. There are two Internet cafés to the south of the East Red Flag Street Route 2 bus terminal, one called the Friends Internet Café and the other called the Everyday Internet Café. They aren’t even fifty feet apart. The arcades the kids frequented are in front of the Friends Internet Café. But the home of the first girl to disappear, Liu Xiaohua, was in the shantytown north of the bus terminal, less than a quarter mile from these two Internet cafés. Overall, this is an extremely small area. So where did the killer probably live? Actually, cases two, three, four, and five don’t have a basis for precise judgment. The most direct indication is Liu Xiaohua’s place of residence. As I’ve already said, this girl belongs to the ‘opportunity’ type of victim. Her violation was not premeditated. At that point, she was going home from school and encountered the killer purely by coincidence. It may have been her pleasant, pretty looks or her innocent friskiness that suddenly aroused the killer’s furious desire for revenge. So, the place of the encounter should be quite close to where the killer lived and not too far from where the girl’s home was. The statistics show they did not live more than a few hundred feet apart. So the general location of the killer’s home was in the shantytown north of the bus terminal, and the distance from the Internet cafés and arcades where he abducted the other children was about five to six hundred yards.
“The second point, my judgment of the killer: He’s an ex-con. Even though he displayed an average IQ, he’s clearly had criminal experience, perhaps something learned in prison. He knows how to abduct his target when children are closely gathered. He knows how to establish a relationship with his target. The one he picked out would have been the most solitary child coming in and out of the Internet cafés and arcade. The most important evidence is that he plotted to abduct a child and fabricate a hostage-taking to extort ransom money from the family and confuse the police about the nature of the crime.
“The third point is that the killer has a fetish tendency. Five disappearance cases definitely resulted in five murders. But up until now, no bodies have been found. It’s clear he chose not to dump the bodies in public. The victims may have been buried near his home. And the children’s clothing will be found where he lives.”
Han Yin went into another long analysis. Suddenly, Ye Xi’s cell phone rang. After listening for a while, she exclaimed, “The Red Flag Street station has just received another missing
child report!”
9
HELL ON EARTH
The missing person was eight-year-old Guo Xin, a boy enrolled in the second grade of the Third Primary School. He went missing around seven o’clock after leaving home for school. The little boy had excellent grades and a kind demeanor. He had never set foot in the Internet cafés or the arcade and had no record of being late or missing classes. After first period, the school authorities contacted his parents. They searched the areas around his home and school, then reported him missing to the police around noon. The three of them lived in a rented place in the shantytown north of the East Red Flag Street Route 2 bus station. The boy walked to school using the same route as Liu Xiaohua, the missing girl from the first case.
This background information on the missing boy made Han Yin even more certain of his conclusion about the location of the killer. Obviously, the incident of the missing West Red Flag Street girl, Wang Hong, aroused the perpetrator, and he couldn’t repress his urges. Thus, early this morning, he kidnapped Guo Xin.
Again they were racing against time. In view of Han Yin’s quick success in solving the case of the missing West Red Flag Street girl, the bureau chief ushered him forward to put together a rescue plan.
The Southern Tombs Subbranch meeting room was relatively cramped and held all ranks of officers. Han Yin stood at the front of the room by a whiteboard, where he pointed at a detailed map with a very large black dot. “This is the home of the first missing child, Liu Xiaohua. I need a team to surround this point within a hundred-yard radius and conduct an intensive search. I also want a team in this area.” Han Yin drew another circle on the map. “This area includes the two Internet cafés and arcades to the south of the East Red Flag Street Route 2 bus terminal. I need you to search for a man twenty-five to forty years old, who began living in this area approximately a year and a half ago. Because he started committing serious crimes in March, anxieties and fear may have changed his external appearance. He has likely become noticeably thinner and weaker. He also looks honest and calm and is a man of few words who seldom has exchanges with adults but likes to be in contact with children. He’s an ex-con but doesn’t mention this to others. If he ever mentions it, he presents the terms as tragic, gains sympathy, and gets people to lower their guards. In addition, I need a team to search the vicinity of where these children live and go to school. And a team needs to be at the children’s homes in case of extortion attempts.”
