Chapter 1

There is a joke that goes like this:

“What kind of animal has neither ancestors nor descendants?”

The answer?

“Human traffickers.”

Years ago, I worked on a case involving human traffickers. There was one unusual thing about it, though.

The trafficker was the victim.

The killer was cunning, and the methods were exceptionally cruel.

Perhaps, if you looked at it as revenge, there was something about it that felt…

Satisfying.

It began as a dispute over medical treatment.

The first officers sent to the scene were not from our criminal investigation team at all. They were our colleagues in public order.

The patient, Zhang Delin, came from a village in our jurisdiction. He had no job and was fifty that year.

He had been admitted with food poisoning.

At first, everyone thought it was an ordinary case. Several days of treatment failed to help, however, and his condition kept getting worse. With no other option, the hospital carried out a full examination.

The eventual diagnosis horrified his family.

This was not ordinary food poisoning. It was paraquat poisoning.

His family immediately flew into a rage. They insisted they had never bought that herbicide. Zhang Delin himself thought back over everything and swore there was no way he could have drunk any.

An accidental ingestion, then, was out of the question.

He began arguing with the doctors, calling them quacks. Eventually, he even accused the hospital of poisoning him. The confrontation nearly turned into a fight.

Seeing things getting out of hand, the hospital administration called the police.

At first, the responding officers thought they could settle what appeared to be a routine medical dispute. The longer they spoke to those involved, the more serious it seemed.

They took a detailed statement from Zhang Delin, then had his family accompany him home as part of the investigation.

Using his account of everything he had eaten and drunk on the day before he fell ill, the officers searched the house thoroughly.

Eventually, they narrowed it down to a bottle of baijiu.

For one thing, it was expensive liquor. Given the family's circumstances, it was hardly something Zhang Delin could afford to drink regularly.

For another, everything else he had consumed was either no longer available for testing or had been shared with his family.

The officers sent the bottle for analysis.

Three days later, the results came back.

There was indeed something wrong with it.

Alongside the normal constituents of baijiu, the bottle contained a chemical called methyl viologen.

Methyl viologen, also known as paraquat dichloride, has the molecular formula C₁₂H₁₄Cl₂N₂. It dissolves readily in water and is soluble in alcohol.

It is the principal ingredient in the notorious herbicide paraquat.

Paraquat is an extremely powerful weedkiller. But it is also so toxic to humans, with virtually no specific antidote, that it has been banned.

There is a saying about it:

“It gives you time to regret it, but no chance to put it right.”

Even a small mouthful can kill.

But it does not kill you at once.

Your body gradually breaks down. You die slowly, in agony.

And the worst part…

There is almost no way to save you.

The officers concluded that this was a deliberate poisoning and referred it to our criminal investigation team.

We formally took over the case.

Our first lead was that bottle of baijiu.

But when we traced where it had come from, we discovered that Zhang Delin was not the killer's only target.

And behind it all lay a heartbreaking story.

Zhang Delin told us that the liquor had been a gift from an old friend in the same village, Lin Zhijian.

Lin was forty-eight, a lifelong bachelor who farmed in the village.

Naturally, we put him at the top of our list of suspects and went straight to his house to investigate.

Unfortunately…

He was not the killer.

There was an identical bottle in his house.

He did not like drinking, so he had never opened it.

That was what had saved his life.

Of course, the first thing we asked was where it had come from.

“An old friend asked Chen Jianzhong to bring a bottle for each of us,” Lin Zhijian said.

Chen Jianzhong was another bachelor in the village. Fifty-five, with no family.

While the bottle was being sent for testing, we went straight to Chen's house.

No one answered.

The neighbors said they had not seen him for days.

Realizing something was wrong, we forced the door.

Sure enough…

The moment we entered the living room, we smelled a powerful stench.

Chen Jianzhong had not gone anywhere.

He was lying motionless on his bed.

His body had begun to decompose. The smell filled the house. A thick, dark brown liquid had run off the edge of the bed onto the floor.

There were already maggots on him.

Taking the temperature into account, the forensic examiner's initial estimate was that he had been dead for at least three days.

In the kitchen at the back of the house, we found leftover food he had eaten with his drink, along with a bottle identical to the other two.

This one was empty.

According to the examiner, drinking an entire bottle would certainly have left him drunk. Then the poison would have taken effect.

He had probably died less than twenty-four hours after drinking it.

The creases in the bedding showed that he had struggled for quite some time before he died. There were even scratches in the headboard where he had clawed at it with his fingernails.

It had been an agonizing death.

An appalling one.

Was that what the killer had wanted?

Of the three victims, only Lin Zhijian remained unharmed.

We had no choice but to go back to him and see whether he could give us a lead.

Lin had said that when Chen delivered his bottle and asked him to pass the other one on to Zhang Delin, Chen had described it as good liquor from an “old friend.”

That old friend…

Was very likely our suspect.

We told Lin about Chen's horrific death and Zhang Delin's unbearable agony in the hospital.

It scared him out of his wits.

And he immediately started talking.

The old friend was a woman named Kong Meilian. She was from elsewhere and was probably in her fifties by then.

She had been the three men's “boss.”

Yes.

Lin Zhijian told us everything.

Decades earlier, the three of them had been in “business” together.

And that business…

Was selling children.

They had been a trafficking gang.

Specifically, Lin and the other two men would go to other villages and abduct children themselves. Once they had a child, they handed the child over to Kong Meilian.

Kong would sell them elsewhere. She also distributed the money among the three men.

She was their contact at the top.

They had stopped ten years earlier. But now someone had committed this terrible crime, and all three of them had been targeted…