Death Notice

by Zhou HaoHui

  “So you checked the address linked to his shopping account?” Han asked impatiently.

  “Bingo,” Zeng said, smirking. “His default shipping address was set to the apartment in Dongming Gardens. I got in touch with the local police station. They gave me the number for his landlord. He confirmed that someone named Sun Chunfeng moved in half a year ago. The new tenant’s most distinguishing trait? Bleached hair.”

  Han smiled. “Good work. Still, I hope you realize that you could have just contacted me when you obtained the address. My people could have taken care of the legwork.”

  Zeng responded with a snicker and a shake of his head. “Geez, Captain, I thought we worked for the same team now.”

  “Yes,” Han said, “and that means that you report to me now. Remember that the next time you feel the temptation to give orders to your IT team.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll stay out of your hair when you follow up on this. Damn, I really have been up all night! I have to get some sleep.”

  Stretching, Zeng rose from his seat and walked out of the office. Han watched his retreating figure. The kid was too lax and unruly to be a proper cop, but at the same time, his investigative skills were nothing to scoff at.

  The captain considered his next move. He couldn’t afford to repeat the mistakes that his predecessors made eighteen years ago.

  He dialed a number on his desk telephone.

  Yin answered on the first ring, as usual. Han wasted no time.

  “Call Captain Xiong—I want the two of you in my office ASAP!”

  OCTOBER 22, 8:31 A.M.

  DONGMING GARDENS

  Dongming Gardens was one of Chengdu’s many old-fashioned residential communities. The lanes between the brick buildings were wide enough to accommodate two cars at once, although Han only spotted a handful of vehicles on his way to the apartment building. A group of men in their seventies and eighties were gathered around a long park bench, while several old men and women were exercising on the weatherproof exercise equipment set up between buildings. Han spotted a few younger tenants hurrying out of their apartment buildings, their movements a flurry of crisp white shirts, suitcases, and dark skirts. The older tenants squinted curiously at the police vehicles entering their neighborhood, while the younger ones in white-collar dress appeared too busy to notice them.

  A few unfamiliar faces were outside Building Twelve, which rose to a modest height of six stories. Dressed in street clothes, they had spread out around the building. Contrary to their nonchalant manner, these people were keeping watch over all nearby roads and alleyways. They were all top-notch officers of the criminal police force and the city SPU team who had been urgently summoned for a covert raid.

  Another batch of officers entered the building. Some of them dropped back along the way to keep watch. Each floor housed four separate apartments; in addition to a standard wooden door, each apartment was further protected by a grated metal door. The members of the core unit worked their way through the building’s cramped stairway until they finally arrived at the door of room 404.

  Once Han and Xiong’s SPU officers had concealed themselves against the wall, they ordered a flustered old man, the landlord, to approach the door. He rang the doorbell, called Sun Chunfeng’s name, and shouted that he was collecting the month’s rent. After an agonizing wait, however, no response had come from inside the room.

  Han signaled to Yin, who escorted the landlord away. A burly SPU officer immediately stepped out from behind Xiong and crept over to the door.

  Chengdu’s SPU team contained specialists of almost every variety. Officer Liu Song knew his way around locks better than any burglar in the city. He tried the protective metal door first, which swung open. Smiling, Liu Song then slid a fine iron pick into the lock of the wooden door, and a soft click sounded from inside. He raised his left hand and signaled that it was open. Guns drawn, Han and the other officers waited to spring into action.

  Xiong echoed Liu’s signal. Nodding, Liu pushed gently against the door with both hands. The door glided open silently, and the police dashed inside.

  They found themselves within an old single-bedroom apartment. The dim, cramped living room was unoccupied, save for a faux-leather sofa and a small television set. The officers fanned out through the room. One raised his hand to signal the others to stop. They listened. A faint rustling was coming from behind the door that presumably led to the bedroom.

  Captain Han rushed in front of the others and charged into the room. The light coming through the open doorway hit the bed first, and Han shone his flashlight through the room. When he spotted the figure wriggling below the window, he raised his gun.

  “Freeze!” he roared.

  Xiong and the others rushed inside to join him.

  A man with bleached blond hair was sitting below the window and leaning back against the wall. A black cloth was tied around his eyes, and thick tape covering his mouth muffled any sounds trying to escape.

  Han tensed. Something was very wrong here. He holstered his sidearm and loosened the cloth from Sun’s face. The young man gaped at him, twisting in hysterical panic. He was handcuffed to the radiator.

  “Don’t move! We’re the police!” Han yelled.

  The terror in Sun’s eyes gave way to hope. He shouted something against the tape covering his mouth.

  Han reached out and began to tear the tape away. Liu approached from across the room. Taking out his set of iron lock picks, the officer prepared to use his talents to unlock the cuffs around the young man’s hands.

  “No! Don’t touch them!” Sun immediately shouted as soon as the tape was gone from his mouth. “Bomb! There’s a bomb!”

  Xiong’s nerves snapped tight. He held Liu firmly back, and crouched to study the handcuffs. Just as he had feared, two thin wires protruded from the keyhole and disappeared through the front of Sun’s shirt, at chest level.

  After motioning to Han and the others to move back, Xiong cautiously lifted the front of Sun’s shirt. The wires ended at a square plastic box fastened to his waist.

  “That’s the bomb!” Overwhelming terror had turned Sun’s cries into hysterical sobbing. “It activated when you opened the door. The timer was set for ten minutes!”

  Xiong spotted the box’s electronic display screen. Red numbers counted down, and his blood turned to ice. Fewer than eight minutes remained.

  Xiong glanced at Han. “Evacuate the building,” he said.

  Without another word, Han rushed his men out from the room. Urgent cries echoed through the building’s narrow corridors.

  “There’s a bomb on the fourth floor!”

  “Evacuate all residents!”

  Xiong turned to Liu. “Go and assist with the evacuation. There’s nothing you can do here.”

  Liu looked back at his superior, his expression a mix of shock and shame. If he had touched that lock…But Liu had his orders. Captain Xiong had to focus all of his attention on studying the bomb.

  The sounds of footsteps and yelling reverberated from outside the apartment.

  Sun was a quivering wreck. His panicked eyes jittered from Xiong’s face to the bomb’s display screen and back again.

  “Be still.” Unexpectedly flashing a smile, Xiong patted the young man’s shoulder. “I’m going to disarm the bomb,” he explained.

  In that instant, Sun ceased shivering. A sliver of hope began to shine in his eyes.

  Xiong grabbed for his multifunctional utility knife, using it to open the bomb’s casing. The screws dropped one by one, and the case came loose in his hands. Holding his breath, Xiong gently pulled on the casing’s plastic tab. Just as he was about to pull the casing away, he sensed something resisting his movements. He froze.

  There was a wire connected to the casing. Despite his caution, the damage was already done. The device emitted a low beep, and the numbers on the d
igital display suddenly became a blur. He understood that he now had less than a minute to disarm the bomb.

  Sun let out a long moan. He twisted and struggled against the ropes binding his legs.

  Xiong ignored the sweat pouring down his forehead. With nothing left to lose, he tore the casing away from the bomb.

  The countdown on the display screen reached zero.

  A small puff of smoke burst from inside. Tiny pieces of silicon clattered to the floor. A faint but lively melody filled Xiong’s ears. He gasped as he saw a piece of paper slowly emerging from inside the shattered casing.

  It had never been a bomb at all, he realized. Just a music box with a switch.

  The SPU captain took in a deep breath, and felt a great weight had been lifted. Then he caught a whiff of a peculiar odor. As he looked for the source of the smell, he noticed a damp patch at the crotch of Sun’s pants. With a wry grimace, Xiong grabbed the slip of paper that had been spit out from the bomb’s casing. He glanced at its contents and dashed into the corridor. Han and the other officers were still busy coordinating the evacuation, and it took him a moment to get their attention.

  Once everyone had learned the truth about the false bomb, Liu returned to the apartment and helped Sun out of the handcuffs. It took some time for the young man to regain his nerves. Eventually the scene calmed, and he began to stutter through his account of the previous few hours.

  * * *

  The evening after Sergeant Zheng’s murder, Sun Chunfeng had been pulling an all-nighter at the café. It was dawn by the time he returned to his apartment, and he was asleep as soon as he collapsed into bed. When he awoke, he discovered that he was unable to move—his hands and legs were bound, and he had been blindfolded and gagged.

  An unfamiliar man’s voice explained that Sun was handcuffed to the radiator, and that a bomb had been attached to his body. The bomb’s fuse wire was connected to the keyhole in his handcuffs. If anyone opened the door, they would trigger a remote control, and the bomb’s timer would begin a ten-minute countdown. If anyone tried to unlock the handcuffs, they would trigger the bomb.

  Sun then heard departing footsteps. He was left with no other option but to wait in fear and darkness until someone arrived.

  * * *

  Han was furious. Sun’s account had seemingly confirmed that their suspect was indeed male, but with the exception of that detail, their investigation had made essentially zero progress.

  “We’ve been set up. The day after he murdered Zheng, he came here and set this trap for us.”

  “You’re saying that those deleted photos were a deliberate trail left for us?” Xiong asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious? He knew we were bound to try to retrieve those images, and that doing so would bring us running right to him.”

  Xiong shook his head in anger. “Why go through all this effort just to give us a note?” he asked, referring to the slip of paper Han was now gripping in his hands. The captain had already read it so many times that he could recite the words with his eyes closed.

  That perfect, mechanical handwriting.

  DEATH NOTICE

  THE ACCUSED: Ye Shaohong

  CRIMES: Road rage, second-degree murder, abuse of the legal system

  DATE OF PUNISHMENT: October 23

  EXECUTIONER: Eumenides

  Han’s hands shook with rage. The killer’s threat was clear.

  It wasn’t fear that made his hands tremble, but rather uncontrollable anger.

  Eumenides was intentionally revealing the names of his targets and the dates of their murders. He was taunting the police. Trying to humiliate them. What else could be his intention?

  Han was like a cocked pistol. The slightest amount of pressure, even unintentional, would be enough to set him off.

  * * *

  A man toyed with an electric sensor. He was quiet, serene—the polar opposite of Han. He stared at the digits on the device in his hand, which displayed a series of recorded times, like a stopwatch.

  “Twenty-one hours and fifty minutes to reach the apartment. Then four minutes and eleven seconds to dismantle the ‘bomb,’ ” he murmured, amused. “Not a bad performance. This might be interesting after all.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PEI’S SECRET

  OCTOBER 22, 10:40 A.M.

  CHENGDU CRIMINAL POLICE HEADQUARTERS, CONFERENCE ROOM

  Zeng had barely gotten two and a half hours of sleep before he was summoned back to the conference room. He was a mess; his eyes were bloodshot and swollen, his hair unkempt.

  “Shit! So this guy Sun Chunfeng is a dead end?” Zeng exclaimed in dismay. “We’ve got nothing.”

  Han’s response was abrupt. “We’ve investigated his family background, personal history, social life, and recent activity. He’s just a typical high school dropout who fell into Eumenides’s hand when he stumbled upon his ‘call for justice’ online. The whole thing was a setup. Sun had nothing to do with it.”

  The fruits of Zeng’s labor—the entire IP-tracing scheme that he and the late Sergeant Zheng had coordinated—had come to nothing. Zeng grimaced as a cold realization came to him. “The plot thickens. I was wrong. This guy has been stringing us along the whole time. He’s no Luddite. He’s a hardened pro.”

  Yin had been taking down the minutes for this meeting, but now his pen froze on the page. Zeng’s about-face in attitude was surprising.

  “If the missing photographs were only part of the killer’s ploy, then it’s just as likely that our original speculations regarding his motives are groundless,” Han said. “So, let’s go back to the beginning. Why did he murder Zheng?”

  Yin returned to his minutes, trying to ignore the feeling that he was sinking deeper and deeper into darkness. There were more layers to this case than he had expected. He decided that his best chance was to listen to the other team members’ analysis of the situation and do his best to absorb their expertise.

  Xiong spoke up. “Actually, it isn’t that difficult to figure out the killer’s motive. Let’s not forget that Zheng was killed after digging back into the 4/18 investigation. The most likely scenario hasn’t changed: Zheng found a new lead, and he was murdered to cover it up. You’re right. The real question is, why jerk us around? That’s the one thing I don’t understand.” The SPU captain clenched his fingers into a fist.

  “The killer’s behavior was completely contradictory,” Mu said.

  Pei, who had been lost in his thoughts up until now, looked up at the academic. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “His actions demonstrate a psychological contradiction. If the motive behind Zheng’s murder was to cover up something that the sergeant had discovered, then he should be avoiding police attention. However, by setting this trap for the police, he did the exact opposite.”

  “That’s all well and good,” Pei said, “but it doesn’t bring us any closer to knowing why Eumenides did what he did.”

  “There’s a new development,” Han interrupted. “We discovered a transmitter while examining the device in Sun’s apartment.” He motioned to Yin, who tapped a button on his laptop’s keyboard. A digital photograph of the transmitter appeared on the screen.

  Zeng snapped to attention. “Of course! That fake bomb was another trick!”

  “Do we know what kind of signal it was sending out?” Xiong asked.

  “It was a simple transmitter connected to the timer of ‘that fake bomb,’ ” Han said. “It was capable of transmitting the timer’s current status to a receiving device.”

  Zeng burst into laughter. “What the hell was he doing? Timing us?”

  Pei suddenly raised his eyebrows in a pensive look. He tapped the surface of the table with the tip of his finger. Han noticed.

  “Something on your mind, Captain Pei.”

  “There’s an issue wi
th our line of thinking. Actually, it would be more precise to call it an issue with our collective attitude.”

  Pei ignored the offended looks in the room.

  “We’re asking ourselves the wrong questions. ‘What do we already know?’ ‘Where has the killer slipped up?’ We need to be straight about one thing first: We know absolutely nothing except what the killer wants us to know. We’re his audience! He posted his manifesto online, murdered Sergeant Zheng, and left a trail of bread crumbs for us to follow. He even told us the date of his next murder and the name of the victim!” Pei narrowed his eyes. “He’s been leading us by the nose.”

  As Pei laid out the collective failures of everyone in the room, he watched the embarrassment burn on their faces. All except for Zeng, who let out an unimpressed chuckle.

  “Then what are we supposed to do now? Feel sorry for ourselves?”

  “Captain Pei made an excellent point,” Mu added. “The killer’s goal is far larger than the murder of Sergeant Zheng. He’s challenging the police. This is all a game to him.”

  “That’s exactly it,” Pei said. “It’s a game—one that he’s gone to painstaking lengths to put together. He has spent the last eighteen years planning it. Now it’s begun, and he has his prey. Something is still missing from the game, though. And without this one thing, regardless of how masterful his plan, he won’t find the thrill he craves.”

  Zeng let out an exaggerated sigh. “I’ll bite. What’s he missing?”

  “A good game requires a skilled opponent,” Pei said with a wry smile. “Sergeant Zheng’s murder may be simpler than it actually seems. Remember, the 4/18 investigation lay forgotten for eighteen years. It was classified. Buried. Perhaps our killer wishes to start the game anew.”