The Untouched Crime

by Zijin Chen

  “Really? Just a few more months?” Luo opened a desk drawer and shuffled through a pile of papers.

  “Most dogs are fully grown by twelve months. And they said you studied medicine,” she teased.

  “Huh.” Luo grabbed some documents and put them in his bag. “Well, the dog will be all grown up by the time I get back,” he said offhandedly.

  His wife pouted in half-seriousness. “How long will you be gone this time?”

  “The Ministry of Public Security invited me to attend a few meetings in Beijing, and then I’ve got to stay for a few courses designed for young forensic scientists. It should only be two or three months.” He kept organizing papers as he spoke.

  “You’re always so busy.” She sighed, a trace of resentment in her voice. Still, she went through her husband’s things once more, making sure he didn’t forget anything.

  “There’s nothing I can do about it. It’s work.”

  “You got promoted to director of the Criminal Science department and then became a criminal investigation expert. I thought you would be able to delegate and spend more time with your family,” she said, making a face. “But you are busier than you were before. You have so many titles! Director of Forensic Science, director of the Material Evidence department. Can’t you quit one of them?”

  Luo put the last pile of papers in his bag and zipped it shut. He sat on the edge of the bed next to his wife. “Which one?” he asked her with a smile.

  She knew he wasn’t serious, but she went along with it. “Let’s see . . . Forensics. You can do everything for Material Evidence in the daytime. But when you’re on a big case, Forensics calls you out in the middle of the night.”

  “But I studied medicine in college; that’s what I do!”

  “OK, then resign from the Material Evidence department,” she said.

  “But I have a doctorate in material evidence studies and patents in my name for micromeasurement. Only a handful of people can do that in this country,” he said with a smile.

  “I know you’re proud. You probably remind yourself of those two doctorates every time you get up in the morning,” she said, pushing him playfully.

  Luo looked at his daughter and gave her a hug and a kiss. “Is Daddy awesome?”

  “Daddy’s not awesome, Mommy is,” his little girl said stubbornly. “I want Doggie to grow up fast.”

  “It’s OK. As soon as Daddy comes back from this business trip, he’ll be all grown up.”

  “Remember to buy snacks for Doggie.”

  “I will; I promise. Should I buy you some snacks too?” Luo asked, taking his daughter gently by the shoulders.

  “Yeah! I want juice! I want juice right now!” she said.

  “That’s not for me to decide; we have to ask Mommy.” He spun his daughter around to face her mother.

  “No, sweetie, it’s bedtime. You can’t have any juice before bedtime.” Luo’s wife was firm.

  The girl ran to her mother and started using every trick she could think of to make her say yes.

  Luo smiled.

  “Another coincidence! Hi, Luo!” A familiar voice interrupted his memory.

  Luo came back to reality as Yan smiled at him.

  “We meet again, Professor Yan!” Luo approached Yan and shook his hand. “So are you visiting your friend who lives nearby again?”

  “No, I’m working on a case and I happened to walk through this area.”

  “A case?” Luo was surprised.

  “Yes, a case,” Yan said, nodding. “I’ve decided to give old Zhao a hand and help him investigate that big case.”

  “So you’re back in law enforcement?”

  “No, no, no,” Yan said. “I’m still at the university. I think I’ll stick to it.”

  “Why did you suddenly change your mind about this?” Luo asked.

  “Because of you, I think.”

  “Me?” Apart from his constricted pupils, Luo showed no sign of surprise.

  “After we talked I thought of something you said several years ago. You said committing a crime is shameful, no matter the reason. I was really impressed by that idea.”

  Luo let out a hollow laugh. “It’s good that you’re giving back to society and helping with the case; I know you have a lot of free time as a professor.”

  Yan smiled again. “Does that mean you want to help?”

  “Oh, well.” Luo shook his head. “I haven’t been keeping up with the news since I resigned. I just want to be an average citizen.”

  “That’s fine too,” Yan said. “Oh, by the way, you know that restaurant where we ate yesterday? Do you know the girl who works there? Zhu Huiru?”

  Luo’s heart beat faster. “I’ve had noodles at their restaurant many times, but I’ve never spoken much to the owners. Did something come up in the investigation?”

  “That girl is considered a key suspect,” Yan said, carefully watching Luo’s face.

  He remained perfectly calm. “Really? To me she looks like a regular girl, not like someone who would commit a crime. Huh, I haven’t seen a case like that before.”

  “Yes, I know it sounds incredible. I’m not sure myself,” Yan said with a laugh. “Anyway, I need to go. I’ll see you later.”

  “See you later.”

  As Yan went off into the distance, Luo kept walking his dog slowly, making his way back to his apartment.

  Chapter 49

  Huiru received a phone call at 9:30 p.m. Luo wanted some noodles delivered to his house. She hurried to get it ready.

  The man with the glasses who came in at lunch and asked a bunch of strange questions had made her feel extremely anxious.

  Huiru had just reached the big gate that led to the man’s apartment complex when she heard a voice beside her. “Are you making a delivery to your friend?”

  Huiru stopped and looked for the source of the voice. It was him.

  She wanted to panic, but she acted like she didn’t see him and kept walking.

  “Are you making a delivery to your friend?” Yan said again, this time so close that she couldn’t avoid him. He smiled at her.

  She hoped he couldn’t hear her heart thudding and bit her lip. She nodded at Yan.

  Yan nodded back at her, then left.

  Huiru forced herself to act like nothing had happened and kept her pace just like it was before.

  As soon as she reached Luo’s apartment, she put the noodles down and told him everything, from the interrogation at lunchtime to the encounter at the gate of his neighborhood. When she finished, she burst into tears. “I’m so sorry! I’m not clever enough for this. I shouldn’t have told him that I was going to deliver the noodles to you! Now you’ll be in trouble too.”

  Luo patted her on the shoulder. “You did just fine,” he said. “If you said it was for someone else, they would have gone and checked the phone records and seen that it was me who ordered the noodles. Then they would know that you had lied, and it would make both you and me look suspicious. You did the right thing. Remember, except for that one part of your testimony, you should always tell the truth. Always.”

  “I . . . did the right thing?” Huiru asked hesitantly. “He’s not going to be suspicious of what I said just now? I can tell that he doesn’t believe anything I say.”

  “Well, of course he will be suspicious; he just spotted you at the gate to my apartment,” Luo said. “Do you think that was a coincidence? No, I think he was waiting for you. He might have even watched you all day long.”

  That sent a shiver down her spine. “Who is that guy?” she shouted. “He says he’s not a cop; he says he’s your friend . . . I don’t get it!”

  “He’s not a cop,” Luo said. “He’s a mathematics professor. But don’t let that fool you; he’s more dangerous than any police officer you’ve met, and right now he’s involved in the investigation. I’m not sure why exactly he thinks you should be a suspect, but I know him, and he wouldn’t investigate something unless there was a good reason. That means that he h
as discovered something, some inconsistency.”

  “What? What happened? Why does he think I should be a suspect? I followed all of your instructions, didn’t I?”

  “Don’t be nervous,” Luo said calmly. “I’ll admit that he is incredibly intelligent. He picks up on tiny details that most people never notice, then analyzes them in a brilliant way. But the police won’t use anything except evidence. So even if he correctly guesses what happened, he won’t be able to prove it.”

  “Really?” Huiru was still doubtful.

  “Really. All you need to do is follow my advice to the letter. Remember, the police need evidence, witnesses, or a confession: if they don’t have any of those things, they can’t make an arrest,” Luo said.

  Huiru thought for a moment. Her eyes widened as she remembered something. “But you left fingerprints on one of the cans!”

  Luo moistened his lips. He couldn’t tell her the truth about the prints. “It’s all part of the plan.”

  Huiru’s anxiousness gradually melted away. “So what should I do now?”

  “What we’ve been doing all along,” Luo said. “In a few days he’s bound to figure out that he can’t find any evidence against you, and he’ll stop asking questions, just like the other officers. No matter what he says, even if he describes exactly how the crime happened, don’t trust him. He doesn’t have evidence; he just has good guesses.”

  Chapter 50

  “So what has Yan been up to lately?” Zhao asked Yang. It was early in the morning, and he held a large cup of coffee in his hand.

  “At lunch yesterday, Yan went to that noodle restaurant and had a meal,” Yang said. “He spoke to Ms. Zhu. In the afternoon he swung by the district bureau, then went to the university to teach a few lessons. After his last lesson, he had an early dinner on the university campus and then rushed over to the scene of the crime, where he met someone by chance who seemed to be a friend. This man here.” Yang pointed at the screen of his digital camera.

  “Luo Wen?” Zhao peered at the screen in disbelief.

  In the picture, Luo was wearing a cross-body bag and holding a dog leash.

  “That’s Luo Wen?” Yang had heard of the brilliant forensic scientist, but he didn’t know what he looked like.

  “Yep. He wrote the book on collecting evidence for police investigations.” Zhao looked at the screen again. “Is he walking a dog?”

  “Yes,” Yang answered.

  “I see,” Zhao said. “How long did Yan talk to Luo?”

  “Not for long, just a few words. But after they said good-bye, Yan didn’t go home.”

  “What did he do next?” Zhao asked.

  “If I had to guess, he was following someone.”

  Zhao’s eyes widened. “Luo?”

  “No,” Yang said, shaking his head. “He drove to the noodle restaurant, parked across the street, and stared at the entrance all night. Every time Ms. Zhu went out for a delivery, he got out of his car and followed her. The last delivery happened at about 10:00 p.m. Ms. Zhu was about to enter a neighborhood when Yan approached her and said something. Then he finally went home.”

  Zhao reviewed the case file in front of him. He thought quietly as he flipped to the section on Huiru and Guo Yu. He looked up. “Huh. I would say Yan is investigating Ms. Zhu.”

  “Definitely. He followed her for an entire evening,” Yang said.

  “But I’ve read that file plenty of times. There’s no way Ms. Zhu is the killer.”

  “I read the file again after I got home last night,” Yang agreed. “There is no way she is involved in the case; I’m sure of that. Do you think Yan didn’t read the entire case file?”

  “Impossible, in my opinion,” Zhao said, shaking his head. “He’s an incredibly meticulous person; now that he is unofficially involved in the investigation, I’m sure he knows every detail of the case backward and forward. Besides, he is actually a lazy investigator.”

  “Lazy?” Yang asked.

  “That’s right, lazy,” Zhao said with a grin. “He used to say it was best to determine the direction of the case before starting. That’s because he didn’t want to do any unnecessary work. He prefers thinking over action. So his behavior confuses me. There’s no way that Ms. Zhu could be the killer, but he’s spending all this time and energy following her. What does he know that we don’t?”

  “Why don’t you just ask him?”

  “If he’s not willing to talk, you won’t get anything out of him. Otherwise why would I make you follow him?” Zhao shot a glance at Yang.

  “So what are we supposed to do?” Yang asked.

  “Just keep following him,” Zhao said, closing the case file. “And let’s focus on the fingerprinting. We have police protecting Zhang Bing and his family twenty-four seven right now, but we can’t protect them forever. How many people have we fingerprinted in the past few days, Yang?”

  “We’ve collected fifty-three thousand sets of prints, but none of them match our killer.” Yang said.

  “That’s pretty fast. I’m still worried that the killer will go into hiding again,” Zhao said, frowning slightly.

  “I think we’ll catch him, sir,” Yang said. “As you instructed, we are comparing the prints of every adult male in the community. Everyone who answers the door gets printed, and if someone is not home, we get their details and come back. All the reserve forces and volunteers are pitching in—I think our work is even more thorough than the national census. Nothing is going overlooked. He won’t get away, sir.”

  “I know you’re doing a great job, but there’s a huge floating population that we can’t monitor very well. What if the killer is hiding in an apartment and making a friend answer the door? We aren’t going to get warrants to search all the apartments,” Zhao said.

  “We can’t control everything,” Yang said helplessly.

  “Keep up the good work, anyway. We’ll get as many as we can,” Zhao said with a sigh.

  Chapter 51

  Lieutenant Lin clicked a file on the computer screen. A voice said, “Let’s have lunch tomorrow, OK?”

  A smug smile appeared on Yan’s lips. “Exactly as I predicted.”

  “You’re a genius,” Lin exclaimed. “We found that sentence recorded in Xu Tianding’s phone on his messaging app, WeChat. People use it to send text and voices messages to each other. Mr. Xu was chatting with a girl on the afternoon before his death, and he sent that voice message to her.”

  “After Xu was killed, someone took his phone and found the message. He played it and recorded it with his own phone, then sometime after 10:50 p.m. called Zhang Bing and played it for him. He probably added the struggling sounds himself. The killer wanted us to pinpoint the time of death at 10:50 p.m., when in reality the time of death was earlier.”

  “What if that message hadn’t been on Mr. Xu’s phone?”

  “Even if the victim didn’t have WeChat, I think our killer would have thought of another way to falsify the time of death,” Yan said confidently.

  “But we have plenty of other evidence to prove that Mr. Guo and Ms. Zhu didn’t commit the crime,” Lin said.

  “Well, let’s take each reason one at a time. Let’s assume that there is a third person helping Mr. Guo and Ms. Zhu. That person helped them fabricate multiple pieces of evidence. First, the killer spent a considerable amount of time making long incisions on Mr. Xu’s body, and at that point in time, Mr. Guo and Ms. Zhu were already at home. Mr. Guo went to a convenience store, so a witness saw him there. So if there was a third person involved, that eliminates their alibi. Then the autopsy found fried rice in Mr. Xu’s stomach and esophagus, which would suggest that he was attacked after the two young people left the park, in the middle of his meal. That’s logical—Mr. Xu wouldn’t start eating rice while Ms. Zhu was standing there. But according to the autopsy, he had had grilled meat with his friends and had had several beers before going to the park. He was already stuffed by the time he ordered the fried rice; why would he actually eat it?” Y
an asked.

  “But . . . what happened?” Lin asked, his eyebrows knitting together.

  “I have a theory that Dr. Chen thinks is feasible. Mr. Xu was not eating at the time of his death. Someone forced food down his throat after he died. It’s a disgusting process—the killer would have to stuff rice down the victim’s throat, one bit at a time, push it down the victim’s throat with his fingers, and then push it all the way down to his stomach using a stick or something else long and straight.”

  Lin grimaced—his throat hurt just thinking about it. “Well, that takes care of the alibis,” he said.

  Yan pulled out his notebook. “Reason number two. You said that in order to destroy the crime scene, the killer scattered tens of thousands of yuan on the ground. Neither Mr. Guo nor Ms. Zhu have the money to do that. But the third person is not only rich but fiendishly clever. He wouldn’t mind throwing away twenty, thirty, even forty thousand yuan.”

  Yan didn’t wait for Lin to answer. “Reason number three: the paring knife in the noodle restaurant was brand new. It was bought by the third person. Reason number four: there weren’t any inconsistencies in Mr. Guo’s or Ms. Zhu’s testimonies. The third person taught them how to deal with the police. Reason number five: Ms. Zhu, her brother, and Mr. Guo all have alibis for when the threatening letter was delivered to Zhang Bing. The letter was delivered by the third person. Finally, reason number six: the fingerprints found on the beer can at the park match the ones left by the serial killer. The third person is the one who killed the other five victims. So you see, if you add a third person to the mix, the evidence that proved Ms. Zhu’s and Mr. Guo’s innocence is no longer reliable.”

  Lin was flabbergasted. Still, after thinking about it for a while, he felt that something was not quite right. “Professor Yan, I . . . I think this is all based on educated guesses.”

  “That’s true; technically it’s all conjecture,” Yan answered, without looking the least bit perturbed. “I can’t find a shred of evidence to support my theory.”