by Lei Mi
Two other suspects, one Qu Rui and one Jiang Dexian, have been legally detained. Due to its profound suspicions that these two people are heavily involved in a criminal organization, the task force on duty has filed a formal request that their periods of mandatory detention be extended to 30 days.
Tan Ji lay on the bed in the Medical University Hospital's intensive care unit, an oxygen mask covering the bottom half of his face and his body bristling with protruding tubes of varying thicknesses. Fang Mu stood at the side of the bed looking at him for a while, and then turned to Zheng Lin, who had been standing behind him with arms crossed. "So what's the prognosis?"
"He came out of surgery not long before you got here." Zheng Lin sighed. "As you can see, he suffered a severe head injury. But it doesn't seem to be life-threatening anymore."
"When do you think he'll wake up?"
"The surgeon said there's no way to know; could be three days, could be thirty years." A disheartened expression darkened Zheng Lin's features. "Apparently it's quite possible he could end up a vegetable."
Fang Mu thought about the implications of this. Currently there was not enough hard evidence against Qu Rui and Jiang Dexian, and given the fact that Huang Runhua had died, Tan Ji's potential testimony had been the only thing that might have kept them from being released at the end of 30 days. Now, because there was no telling when Tan Ji might regain consciousness, their only hope was to capture Luo Jiahai as soon as possible.
A buzzing noise woke him from his thoughts. He retrieved the vibrating phone from his pocket and glanced at the incoming number. It was Bian Ping.
"Get your butt back to the Bureau this instant," the captain's voice rasped. "They found something inside that van!"
Although the van had been severely damaged in the crash, forensic investigators had still been able to recover a great deal of material evidence from it. The most important piece of evidence had been a corpse.
The deceased was male, between 35 and 40 years in age. His body was found completely naked and stuffed inside a gunny bag. The medical examiner determined the time of death to have been some time between 8:00 and midnight the previous evening, and the cause of death to have been mechanical asphyxia. Based on findings during the autopsy, it appeared someone had strangled the victim with his bare hands.
The deceased had extremely rough skin, but tests of some chemicals extracted from his face revealed them to be residue from skin care products. This, as well as the hair styling gel found in the victim's hair, seemed to indicate that he had been a man who cared a great deal about his personal grooming.
Fang Mu bent down and sniffed the air above the corpse, then wrinkled his nose. "He still smells great even after being dead for so long."
"Uh-huh," the medical examiner grunted, looking up from his work. "This guy must've used a ton of cologne."
Fang Mu nodded and turned to one of his task force colleagues. "Any word yet on who this guy was?"
"Not yet. He didn't have any ID on him, but we've already issued a body identification notice."
"Mm-hmm." Fang Mu nodded again. "Go make inquiries at any large- or medium-sized entertainment venues you can find, especially ones that might put on stage productions like plays and musicals and so on."
The detective saluted and left. Fang Mu turned back and pointed at the red circles drawn at various places on the corpse. "Why did you guys draw these red circles? Are they to mark out places that you've swabbed for testing or something?"
"No." The medical examiner shook his head, looking up from his work. "We didn't draw those."
"What?" Fang Mu exclaimed. "You mean they were already on the corpse when it was brought here?"
"Correct."
Interesting, Fang Mu thought, suddenly revived by the new development. He looked closely at the red circles. There was one around each eye, and several on the victim's torso.
"There are two more on his back." The medical examiner pointed at his lower back. "Here and here."
"What's under there? What organs are in those positions, I mean?"
"Oh, I hadn't thought of that." The examiner raised his brows with sudden interest and looked over the body a moment. "This one's over the heart, this one's the liver, this one's the small intestine, this one... Let's see... This should be the pancreas, and those two on the lower back are where the kidneys are...” He chuckled. “Interesting."
"Why is that interesting?"
"Have a look," the medical examiner said, pointing at the red circles drawn around the victim's eye sockets. "These correspond to his corneas. Heart, liver, small intestines, pancreas, and kidneys, plus the corneas—these are all common donor organs. If you add to those the skeleton, skin, arteries, and hematopoietic stem cells..." He gestured up and down the cadaver. "…Then this chap's entire body is a veritable gold mine," he decided with a chuckle.
But instead of laughing, Fang Mu frowned, suddenly lost in thought.
According to testimony from the two on-duty policemen, when they discovered the van it had been parked in front of the Medical University Hospital. The killers had drawn red circles on the victim's body where donor organs were located. Had they been planning to dump the body in the hospital morgue so that people would think it was a donor organ cadaver?
The notion was ludicrous. Sure, it was conceivable that even an unidentified body could be used for medical experimentation and teaching purposes; however, no doctor in their right mind would cut out a random body's organs for transplant just like that. Meaning, the killers' true objective could not have been simply to force the victim to donate his organs, but rather to use the victim's body to express an emotion of some kind.
This had been another ritual.
The question now was which of those three people had been the ritual's protagonist?
Fang Mu's gut told him it had been Huang Runhua. If his guess was right, the ritual with Tan Ji as its protagonist had already been completed; furthermore, if the protagonist of this one had been Luo Jiahai, then everything would point to the victim as having been the man who had raped Shen Xiang all those years ago. From what he could see, however, there were no clear signs that this had been a retaliatory murder.
After a detailed inspection of Huang Runhua's body, he discovered several scars in addition to the hole left by the gunshot that killed him. Based on their positions, they appeared to have been the result of self-harm. People who knew Huang Runhua had not described him as one who was dealing with an excessive amount of anxiety; perhaps he had had a masochistic nature, or had loathed himself for some reason, and thus felt a need to physically abuse himself. The thought gave Fang Mu an idea: What if the one who had wanted to donate his organs had been Huang Runhua himself?
Without delay, he arranged for someone to go and interview Huang Runhua's wife. Meanwhile, Fang Mu took a photograph of Huang Runhua around to the major metropolitan hospitals. After two long days of groundwork, he learned from two of the hospitals (one of which was Medical University Hospital) that Huang Runhua had approached them with a request to donate his organs. Judging him to be too emotionally unstable to make such a decision and therefore not suited to be an organ donor, officials at both hospitals had turned him away. In the interview with Huang Runhua's wife, she had verified that she had witnessed her husband cutting himself with a knife in their home on multiple occasions.
It seemed Huang Runhua had hated his body with a passion and had wanted desperately to destroy it. From a psychological standpoint, the cause of such an intense emotion was often intense guilt. And with the possibility that Huang Runhua had been planning to leave his victim's body in the hospital as an organ-donating cadaver hinted at a deep psychological crisis, and a need to transfer guilt.
So it seemed there could be a light at the end of the tunnel for at least one of the questions that had been plaguing the task force; perhaps the reason for the establishment of this fellowship of murderers had been so that they could cure themselves of certain psychological disorders.
>
Fang Mu stared at the photograph in his hand of Huang Runhua's corpse. Dead from a gunshot wound, his brow was tightly knit and his mouth was wide open; he looked like a man unwilling to take his fate lying down. Perhaps he had been convinced that after ridding himself of what afflicted him, he would be able to start life anew.
Fang Mu closed his eyes, exhausted. It was a pity; Huang Runhua most certainly had taken many secrets with him into the land of the dead, secrets that he would never utter again.
The identity of the deceased was soon discovered. Nie Baoqing, 33-year-old, university graduate. Profession: actor. Actually, his career had comprised of a handful of vulgar skits performed at various entertainment venues around the city. On the day he was killed, Nie Baoqing had been planning on going to the Jinda Hotel for a performance. At around 6:00 p.m., a neighborhood security guard saw him leave his apartment building; however, by 8:00, when the performance was supposed to start, Nie Baoqing had still not showed up at the hotel. The tentative conclusion was that Nie Baoqing was kidnapped during this time.
The deceased worked in the performing arts at various entertainment venues, so his day to day interactions tended to involve people from all walks of life. However, Huang Runhua's wife and colleagues all insisted that Huang Runhua had been one to keep to himself, and thus had never set foot in these sorts of venues. So what was the relationship between the deceased and the killer? What connection did he have with Huang Runhua's extreme dislike of his own body?
The riddles were piling up one after another, and of the five people who knew the answers, one was dead, one was in a coma, one was on the run, and the remaining two still would not talk.
Ten days passed in the blink of an eye, and Tan Ji still showed no signs of waking up. It was less than two weeks from the end of the 30-day mandatory period of detention; if no further hard evidence turned up, they would have no choice but to change the criminal detention sentence to a release from custody, subject to provision of a surety, or possibly even residential surveillance. At most, they would be subject to monitoring for 12 months. The task force was under an enormous amount of pressure.
After Jiang Dexian and Qu Rui had been detained, they were immediately sent to separate interview rooms. Both suspects, however, declared their intention to apply to be released from custody subject to provision of a surety, and since then had endeavored to keep their mouths shut. But after the prosecutor's office denied them bail, they had acted differently. Jiang Dexian sat in his cell every day resting with his eyes closed, and during each interrogation session he only answered questions that were absolutely insignificant and had nothing to do with the case. Qu Rui, on the other hand, used every chance she got to ask the investigators how Tan Ji was doing. Though no details of the case had been divulged to either suspect, it seemed obvious that they had already guessed that Tan Ji was still in the hospital unconscious, which was probably the reason Jiang Dexian was able to remain so calm while waiting for his period of detention to end.
A total of four cell phones had been found at the scenes, and their call logs had yielded six different numbers. According to the technical surveillance division, two of the numbers belonged to Tan Ji and Huang Runhua, and the other four calls had last been made from locations that included the teahouse (and so were likely to have been from the phones used by Jiang Dexian and Qu Rui), the vicinity of the bridge where the accident had occurred, and a bar in the north part of the city. Based on these records, the task force came to the tentative conclusion that after Luo Jiahai had escaped on foot, he must have called an unknown individual in the bar, and then that person had probably instructed Luo Jiahai to turn off his phone, extract its SIM card, and throw the phone away. After that the unknown individual had contacted Jiang Dexian and Qu Rui and had probably told them to get rid of their phones immediately, and he would have done the same. But no prints had been found on the two cell phones discovered in the teahouse, so there still was no admissible evidence that could be used against Jiang Dexian and Qu Rui.
It was entirely possible that the mysterious individual in the bar was the head of the organization, but with no clear way of pursuing him, the only hope was to capture Luo Jiahai as soon as possible.
The Municipal Bureau reported Lu Xu's deed to the provincial government and put in an application for the glorious title of "Martyr of the Revolution" on his behalf. The provincial government did not approve it, however, giving the reason that Lu Xu had "abandoned his post" to participate in the police operation to apprehend the suspects, and that he therefore was not worthy of being treated as a revolutionary martyr. It took a fuming Xin Zhisen, with Zheng Lin in tow, making a special trip over to the provincial government offices to hoot and holler and threaten resignation before those in charge finally approved the Municipal Bureau's request.
Lu Xu's funeral was held in the Dragon Peak Cemetery. Apart from a skeleton crew left behind to run things, practically the entire city police force was there to pay their respects to Lu Xu.
In the main hall of the funeral home, Lu Xu's body lay peacefully among enormous bouquets of flowers, dressed in full uniform. A plastic police training pistol had been stuck inside the holster at his belt; this had been Fang Mu's parting gift to him. He had sacrificed his life to get his gun back, so it made sense to let him take a gun with him into the afterworld. As Fang Mu kowtowed to Lu Xu's body three times, hot tears in his eyes, he noticed the hands. They looked exactly the same as they had looked when Lu Xu had grasped Fang Mu's hands in the little street-side eatery that time.
"My brother, my brother."
If there is such thing as an afterlife, we'll be brothers there, too.
After Lu Xu's body was cremated, the ashes were buried in the Revolutionary Martyrs Plot. For days an endless stream of people had come to pay their tributes, including policemen who had not been able to make it to the funeral as well as city residents who had spontaneously come to visit upon hearing news of the now somewhat famous motorcycle cop's death.
Fang Mu had kept watch in the Dragon Peak Cemetery the entire time, but his attention had not been on Lu Xu. He was waiting for Luo Jiahai to appear.
January 23 was Shen Xiang's birthday. If Luo Jiahai was still in the city somewhere, then perhaps he would come to the cemetery in the next few days to pay homage to Shen Xiang. The police had installed hidden video surveillance equipment near her grave and had placed several undercover officers around the cemetery posing as grounds workers, ready to arrest Luo Jiahai as soon as he showed his face.
For a few days nothing happened. On the morning of the 23rd, the surveillance equipment captured a man and a woman visiting Shen Xiang's grave, but they were soon identified as the girl's parents. Patiently, the elderly couple swept and pulled weeds around her grave, then set out offerings and murmured prayers while kneeling before her headstone. Finally they left, arm in arm and with tears running down their cheeks. No one else was spotted by the cameras, and the only news transmitted by the various undercover officers from their positions around the cemetery was the simple message, "everything's normal." Bian Ping ordered everyone to remain on high alert in case Luo Jiahai was planning a night time visit.
The sun set and day gradually gave way to night. Upon Bian Ping's repeated insistence, Fang Mu, who had spent the entire day in front of the surveillance camera monitors, finally picked up his long-cold box lunch and began stuffing bite after bite of it into his mouth. As he chewed, the officer who had taken over in front of the monitors suddenly perked up and shouted that someone was there at the grave.
Fang Mu tossed his meal aside as he stood to lean close to one of the monitors. Although it was now quite dark outside, the camera's night vision function had kicked in, and the image of the area around the grave was very clear. In front of the marble gravestone a white-haired old man was slowly bending at the waist, bowing deeply to Shen Xiang.
"That's not Luo Jiahai," Bian Ping drawled, his voice thick with disappointment. "Damn. I was just about to put ou
t the order to arrest him."
Fang Mu did not move and his eyes remained glued to the image on the monitor in front of him. The sight of the elderly figure bowing before Shen Xiang's grave sent an icy jolt straight through his heart.
CHAPTER
32
Skinner's Box
Even though the knock on the door came with the familiar pre-established sequence, Luo Jiahai still peered through the peephole cautiously. Distorted by the fish-eye glass, Mr. Z's anxious face and knobby nose stared back at him from the apex of a weirdly arced hallway.
Luo Jiahai unlocked the door, sheathing the dagger he had in his hand.
Mr. Z dashed inside, placed the cake box he had been carrying on the table, and sat in a chair, chest heaving.
"What happened to you? You look beat."
"Oh," Mr. Z gasped, wiping sweat from his forehead. "I took the stairs."
"What's wrong with the elevator?"
"Some elevators have surveillance cameras in them. They're not safe."
The two sat in silence for a few moments. Finally Luo Jiahai asked, "So, what's the situation?"
"J and Q are still at the detention center, and T's still bed-ridden in the hospital." Mr. Z lowered his voice. "H was cremated yesterday morning."
"He must've been trying to protect me," Luo Jiahai groaned, hugging his head and pulling at his hair. "He had plenty of opportunity to get out of there."
"Don't dwell on it. It was an unforeseeable mishap." Mr. Z placed a hand on Luo Jiahai's shoulder. "Besides, H always felt like he owed you one."
Luo Jiahai shook his head forcefully and shrugged Mr. Z's hand off.
"The rest of us are safe. We should count our blessings." Mr. Z paused. "Assuming T regains consciousness, I have faith he will keep his trap shut. Otherwise Q will be finished, and he knows it."
