Death Notice

by Zhou HaoHui

  Even after so much time had passed, his memory was clear. When he lowered his hands, a spark of light returned to his eyes. He was ready to tell his story.

  “Back in 1984, I was weeks away from graduating from the provincial academy with a major in criminal investigation. By then, everyone in my class had already begun training with the police here in Chengdu. We were all excited at the prospect of doing real police work, and a lot of us were eager to see the opportunities that a degree from the academy could afford us.” Pei paused here and took a deep breath.

  “The eighteenth of April was on a Wednesday. I was at the local precinct that afternoon working on some extra training exercises. My roommate Yuan left campus earlier that day. He told me he had a date with a pen pal. The whole thing sounded a bit quaint, but I knew how far Yuan would go to get a date. I was more concerned with the dinner that Meng and I were going to have later that day. She had a set of keys to my dorm and was supposed to come by ahead of time to wait for me. I headed back to my dorm around three. When I arrived, the entrance to the building was unlocked, and Meng was gone. She’d left a note near the door, in a place that was easy to spot.”

  “This note?” Han held up a small sealed plastic evidence bag containing a slip of paper. Pei nodded, and the captain read aloud: “ ‘Get in touch with me on the radio ASAP.’ ”

  “Telephones weren’t as common back then as they are now. And forget about pagers and cell phones,” Pei went on. “I knew a bit about radios, though. I’d set up a transmitter-receiver and linked two handsets to it. The signal range maxed out at about six miles, and Meng and I typically used them as walkie-talkies to keep in touch with each other. I’d left mine at home when I was out doing fieldwork, and I was worried there was an emergency and Meng needed to talk right away. Without wasting another second, I picked up my walkie-talkie and tuned it to our frequency. But I couldn’t get through to her.”

  “Why not?” Han asked.

  Pei shook his head slowly. “The gear we were using was old, and the signal was pretty unstable. We’d run into problems every now and then—we might lose the signal or there’d be interference and someone else would be using our frequency. I didn’t have much of a choice, so I sat and waited for her to reach me. That was when I spotted a second letter on the table. Someone had already opened it.”

  Yin pressed a button, and an enlarged photograph of the letter popped onto the screen.

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  The writing on the letter was familiar to everyone in the room. Just like the one recovered from Zheng’s apartment yesterday, it consisted of several lines of perfectly composed characters.

  DEATH NOTICE

  THE ACCUSED: Yuan Zhibang

  CRIMES: Serial philandering; emotional abuse and abandonment of an innocent woman, causing her suicide

  DATE OF PUNISHMENT: April 18

  EXECUTIONER: Eumenides

  “Another death notice?” Zeng muttered incredulously.

  “What was your reaction when you saw this letter?” Han asked. “Were you aware that Vice Commissioner Xue Dalin had been murdered that morning?”

  “No. I didn’t have any knowledge of the murder,” Pei said, and he paused. “However, the combination of the threat and Meng’s strange absence instantly gave me an ominous feeling.”

  “Yet you did nothing,” Han remarked as he leafed through the case materials in front of him. “You sat in your room and waited until you were able to reach Meng. According to the file, you waited thirty minutes.”

  Pei nodded slowly.

  “Thirty minutes and you reported nothing to the police. Thirty minutes, despite your supposedly ‘ominous feeling.’ ”

  “I didn’t think it was worth reporting.”

  Pei had a point, Mu thought. If he hadn’t been aware of Xue’s murder, this anonymous letter might have looked like an attempt at a practical joke. A dark one, perhaps, but still a joke.

  “I see,” Han said. “Tell us what happened after you found the letter.”

  “I left the radio on and waited. After about half an hour, the signal came back. I heard her voice.”

  “What did Meng Yun say?”

  Pei shut his eyes and furrowed his brow. He stayed quiet for several heartbeats. “She sounded anxious. She said she was with Yuan, that he was trapped inside an abandoned warehouse. He was handcuffed to the floor, with a timed explosive strapped to his chest.”

  Mu interrupted. “What were they doing together?”

  “I believe that Meng entered my room and discovered Yuan’s anonymous death notice. She got worried, and she went to help him.”

  “You believe so?” This response didn’t satisfy Mu. “Did Meng tell you this, or is this your own speculation?”

  “My own speculation.”

  “What was the nature of the relationship between Meng and Yuan?” she asked.

  Pei didn’t answer.

  “Let me be more specific. Who was closer to Yuan: you or Meng?”

  “I was, of course. Yuan was my closest friend at the time. Meng only knew him through me.”

  “Then why did she go looking for Yuan? You both saw the same letter, yet you—Yuan’s best friend, as you just emphasized—stayed in your room. That seems odd to me.”

  Mu held Pei’s gaze and waited for his explanation. Pei stared blankly, as though this question had caught him off-guard.

  “I…I don’t know. Maybe it was intuition—she might have subconsciously picked up on whatever danger there was.”

  Mu’s face twisted at that. “Then why didn’t she report it to the police?”

  “I don’t know,” Pei said, avoiding eye contact with Mu.

  “And how did she find Yuan?”

  Pei shook his head. He offered a sad, reluctant smile before giving the same reply as before. “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t ask her? These are all very basic questions.”

  “Captain Pei might not have had time to ask them,” Han said, breaking his silence. “According to the information we have, only three minutes were left on the bomb’s timer when Meng finally got in touch with Pei. Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Pei answered solemnly. “We only had enough time to discuss how to disarm the bomb.”

  “What kind of bomb was it?” Xiong asked. His mastery of bomb disposal was well known throughout the department.

  “I didn’t see it,” Pei said to Xiong, “but I suppose Captain Han’s files have enough detailed information pertaining to the explosion to tell you that.”

  After rifling through his files, Han took out a document pouch and handed it to the SPU captain. Xiong picked out several documents and began studying them.

  “I was only able to get a sketchy picture of the situation from my exchange with Meng,” Pei continued. “Yuan had been handcuffed to an iron pipe inside the warehouse. The explosive device was somehow wired to the handcuffs. If they tried to cut the cuffs or move the bomb, there was a good chance that it would go off.”

  “So their only option was to disarm the device,” Xiong said, nodding. “What did Meng and Yuan know about bomb disposal?”

  “Yuan and I had both taken a course in bomb disposal. By the time I was able to reach her on my walkie-talkie, Yuan had told Meng how to open the bomb’s outer casing. All she needed to do was pull the trigger wire connected to the timer.”

  Xiong’s brow creased. “It says here that the bomb had a dummy wire installed?”

  “That’s correct. Meng told me that there were two wires. A red and a blue, twisted around each other and leading into a sealed control box.”

  “Meng and Yuan would have had no way to tell the real trigger wire from the fake,” Xiong said.

  “Hell, why not just use all the colors of the rainbow?” Zeng chuckled, in stark contrast to t
he rest of the room’s dour mood. “It’s an intriguing dilemma, though. Like binary code. One or zero. Life or death. An impossible choice. Personally, I’d go with red. It’s my favorite color. Anyone else?”

  The other team members looked at the young officer in collective dismay. Han was nearly fuming. Pei’s eyes were vacant, and the unforgettable hiss of static filled his ears once more.

  * * *

  The noise was a metal file scraping against his eardrum. Her voice ebbed and flowed through the sonic chaos. It would remain forever etched in his mind.

  Meng. She was stronger than anyone else Pei had ever met. Yet in that terrible moment, her voice was bizarre and sob-choked, warped by panic into a hoarse, tearful parody of itself.

  “Please, Pei, tell me! Which wire? Red or blue? You need to tell me now!”

  “I don’t know…” Pei said weakly.

  “There’s no time!”

  “There’s no point asking him!” Yuan’s voice, tense yet helpless, was intertwined with the static. “You have a fifty-fifty chance either way!”

  “Pei, there’s only one minute left!”

  “Meng,” Yuan cried, “forget about me! Run away while you still have a chance!”

  “No, I’m not leaving,” Meng said, steel returning to her voice. The sound was muffled, as though she was pressing the walkie-talkie to her lips.

  “I don’t care if you don’t know which one it is, Pei. Just give me an answer.”

  Pei’s voice was almost as hoarse as Meng’s. “I can’t.”

  Meng made a noise that sounded like pained laughter, and then she began counting down. “Eight…seven…” Her breathing grew short and labored.

  “I’m sorry, Meng,” Yuan said.

  Each time she exhaled into the speaker, Pei felt a jolt in the pit of his stomach. His head was throbbing. Finally, he screamed into the walkie-talkie, “Red—Pull the red wire!”

  Pei waited. His thoughts slowed to a sudden halt. His mind was blanker than a snow-covered field.

  Endless hours seemed to pass. Then a sound—as quick and sudden as a cough—whispered through the walkie-talkie’s speaker.

  Pei had lost the signal.

  * * *

  “Captain Pei? Captain Pei?” Han raised his voice with each repetition, but with no success.

  “Pei Tao!” Mu repeated. Her hand squeezed the captain’s shoulder.

  Pei shook his head and promptly snapped to attention. He forced a smile. “My apologies, everyone.”

  Han scowled at Pei’s sudden lapse of attention. He looked at the documents in his hands. “According to our records, you used the radio to remotely instruct Meng how to disarm the bomb. She pulled the red wire at your prompting. When she severed it, she triggered the bomb. Is this correct?”

  Pei shut his eyes and grimaced. He nodded.

  “What grounds did you have for believing that pulling the red wire would disable the bomb?” Han asked.

  Pei froze. “None,” he said. “It was…a guess.”

  Mu raised her eyebrows at this.

  Xiong shook his head gravely. “It’s a nightmare scenario,” he said. “Captain Pei was forced to rely on a hunch to make a life-and-death decision. In a situation so desperate, did he have any other choice?”

  Zeng looked over to Pei. His expression shifted from cocky to sympathetic. “Let the record show that male intuition is a load of shit.”

  “Since you had no grounds for doing so,” said Han, eyes locked on Pei, “why did you instruct Meng? If you’d let her make the decision on her own, she might have ended up choosing the right wire.”

  “Is that what you believe would have happened?”

  “She had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right. The same odds as you. She was at the scene. You, on the other hand, had nothing more than her description to rely on. Even if we’re talking strictly about intuition, you should have trusted hers! Why did you tell her which wire to pull?”

  Pei avoided the captain’s furious glare. His mind was awash with a sense of panic he knew well. Which wire would Meng have chosen if the choice had been up to her? The unknown had writhed unanswered in Pei’s heart for eighteen years.

  “Let’s analyze this from a psychological perspective,” Mu said, after observing Pei with quiet intensity. “Captain Pei’s decision could be considered a fight-or-flight reaction. What prompts someone to make a decision in a situation as urgent and stressful as this one? Not logic or reason, but instinct. It’s simply a reaction decided by one’s own personality.”

  The storm inside Pei’s mind began to clear. The captain looked back at her gratefully, and their eyes locked. An eerie thought came to him—that her focused gaze was sharp enough to pry the secrets loose from the deepest corners of his mind.

  Han nodded. “All right. Let’s keep our focus on the details recorded in the case files. Statements taken from residents in the vicinity of the warehouse put the time of the explosion at precisely 4:13 p.m. The detonation’s concussive force had a radius of 650 feet, causing immense damage to a nearby produce market. According to the report, the blast was even heard from a hospital located more than five miles away. The warehouse stored chemicals primarily used for making cosmetic products. They were extremely volatile, and the fire was massive. Meng Yun and Yuan Zhibang would have died instantly. The conflagration also inflicted critical burns on a third bystander.”

  “You mentioned this third person earlier,” Pei said.

  “Huang Shaoping, a scavenger in his mid-twenties. He was camped in the warehouse when the explosion went off. Huang was interviewed at length several times after he recovered, but he wasn’t able to provide any information that could aid the investigation. It seems he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Han rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Let’s return to the present. Yin will provide you all with copies of the relevant documents and materials so that you can review them in detail after the meeting.”

  Han glanced at the team’s technological expert. “Zeng, please tell everyone what you know about the situation.”

  Grinning, Zeng pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Some of you might not be familiar with me. In that case, let me introduce myself. My name is Zeng Rihua. I’m the tech supervisor of the provincial department’s digital surveillance team.”

  Pei masked his surprise. This sarcastic individual was the last person he would have trusted with a position of leadership.

  “A week ago, on October fourteenth, Sergeant Zheng came to me and asked if I could help him run some surveillance. A few strange posts had appeared online around that time, and Zheng was hoping that I could dig up some information about the poster.”

  A screenshot of a page from an online forum flashed onto the screen. It was the same Eumenides post Pei had tracked down in the internet café. A Call for Justice.

  “What did you find?” Pei asked anxiously.

  “The original post was made at 2:11 p.m. on the fifth of October from a computer here in Chengdu, at the Qianghui Internet Café,” Zeng reported with mechanical precision. “It was posted on Chengdu’s largest online message board. By the time Zheng found me, the post had already been read 25,220 times, and had received 1,525 replies from a total of 1,330 users.”

  Zeng looked around the room. A host of blank faces stared back. He felt like a teacher explaining calculus to a class of elementary students.

  “That means a lot of people saw it,” he said.

  Yin tapped a button on his laptop, and a multitude of replies appeared on the projector screen. Some users derided the original poster, calling the person “deluded” or “psychotic.” Others wondered if it was a practical joke. Some had even submitted names in the hope that they would fall prey to the poster’s singular brand of “justice.” The crimes listed in these posts ran the gamut from petty thievery
to murder.

  After giving the other team members a moment to read the replies on the projector screen, Zeng continued. “The individual, ‘Eumenides,’ submitted this post from inside an internet café. Obviously, they wanted to conceal their identity. Network administration here in Chengdu is about as airtight as an open window. If you want to find out who used a certain computer ten or so days ago, you’d have better luck going door to door. So, at Sergeant Zheng’s request, I set up an online surveillance program. It would automatically detect and record the IP address of anyone viewing the thread. If that address happened to come from a café here in Chengdu, I would immediately notify Zheng; he would then go to the location to photograph any evidence.”

  “Zheng had the right idea,” Pei murmured. “Eumenides must have checked the forum regularly for new replies. This is a cautious individual we’re talking about—he wouldn’t risk accessing the forum from a private computer.”

  “Precisely. However, Zheng kept me in the dark about the case from eighteen years ago. I had no idea that the plan would lead to such grave consequences,” Zeng said.

  In the wake of this new development, Mu aimed a question at Zeng.

  “Could this be why Sergeant Zheng was murdered? Was he silenced after taking a picture of Eumenides?”

  “The sergeant’s camera was found at the crime scene,” Han said calmly. “Several of the images on it had been deleted. We have reason to believe that doing so was the killer’s primary objective, in addition to murdering Zheng.” The captain shot Pei Tao a deliberate look. Pei had come to the same conclusion at Zheng’s apartment.

  “Can we retrieve these deleted photos?” Xiong asked.

  “This guy may be a professional when it comes to murder and explosives,” Zeng said, snickering, “but he doesn’t know jack about digital technology. It’s possible to recover a deleted image as long as the space it originally occupied remains empty. Of course, this requires a bit of high-tech expertise.”