Chapter 3

Zeng Jianjun had disappeared alone that afternoon.

His family said he too had gone out to work.

All three had accepted a job.

It was probably a trap: lure them to a particular place, then act.

Whether any of them were still alive was impossible to say.

I volunteered for the investigation.

Yes. I suspected Zhong Jianbin.

I remembered him asking about the punishment for rape.

He hadn't been preparing to confess.

He'd wanted to know what punishment the perpetrators would face if he handed them to the law.

I had misunderstood him completely.

My answer had made one thing clear to him: the law's punishment couldn't quench his anger.

So he had chosen to administer "justice" himself.

After discussing the case with the other officers, we began investigating on two fronts.

One team worked with public order and traffic officers to trace the missing men's movements through CCTV.

The other worked with the telecommunications department to obtain their call histories.

It involved numerous complicated procedures and took some time.

Then I obtained decisive evidence.

All three had contacted the same number before disappearing.

It was the number in Yang Huiqiong's phone watch.

What an irony.

We also obtained permission to locate and monitor it.

The telecommunications staff said it had gone offline.

In other words, the SIM had been removed.

If it was subsequently inserted into a handset with a signal, they could detect it—even if the phone wasn't switched on—and would tell us at once.

We placed the SIM registered to Zhong Jianbin under the same monitoring.

For now, cell towers gave us only the last location before the signal disappeared.

The county's western outskirts.

Wild, wooded mountains. No settlements.

At the same time, the other team brought news.

The cameras showed all three men heading west too.

Once they reached the remote roads around the mountain foothills, there were no more security or traffic cameras.

We could establish the general area of their disappearance, but not where they had gone.

To solve that, perhaps we needed to answer a question.

What lie had Zhong Jianbin used to lure them so far out?

The crucial point was that all three said they had work.

We reviewed what they did: odd jobs, construction labor, mixing cement, carrying loads.

Then we contacted urban construction departments and related agencies. Had any such building sites existed in the western area? Even abandoned ones?

If so, that might be the "job" he had offered.

He needed a credible pretext. Men who had worked casual jobs for years and knew the ways of the world wouldn't be fooled easily.

Before we found it, something more shocking happened.

A villager reported receiving a horrifying recording.

The police listened and immediately alerted our unit. It reached us quickly.

Because it had clearly come from Yang Huiqiong's watch.

The complainant lived in Jianbin's village. The receiving device was his son's phone watch.

Fortunately, the message had been sent through the watches' built-in friend function.

It was private, not public.

Why did that distinction matter?

Because the recording was extraordinarily brutal.

It began with Zhong Jianbin's voice.

"How many times did you touch my daughter?"

Then a middle-aged man's sobbing pleas.

"Please, spare me, please... No, it wasn't mainly me. It was Wang. He started it. He took me along..."

That suggested Xie Zhongchao or Zeng Jianjun.

"Wang" would be Wang Biao.

A confused series of sounds followed. Something hard struck flesh. The man screamed.

"Aaah! Stop! Stop hitting me! I'll tell you... I... I..."

"How many times?"

"I... I don't... I can't remember! Please, I really can't..."

More disorderly noises. More agonized screams.

He was clearly being beaten again.

At last, his answer changed.

As though simply trying to stop the blows, he sobbed out a number at random.

"I'll tell you! More than ten, more than ten... Fifteen! Fifteen, that's it! Don't hit me... Please... Don't..."

"All right. Fifteen."

A few seconds later, the man screamed again.

"Ah! No! Don't... Didn't I tell you? I told you! Isn't that enough? Don't..."

From what Jianbin said next, I inferred he had drawn a knife.

Because he began counting.

"Fifteen, was it? Fifteen... One!"

"Aaah... No... Help..."

"Two!"

"Three!"

"Four!"

...

Gradually, the man's voice weakened.

From full-throated screams to the faint sounds of a dying man, it took less than a minute.

Listening, I felt as if a very long time had passed.

Throughout the counting and screaming, another sound was horribly clear.

A blade entering a body.

"Fifteen."

Jianbin had forced him to give a number, then stabbed him that many times.

I didn't know where the wounds were. Wherever they were, they must have been agonizing.

At last, all sound faded.

The recording ended.

We hadn't held much hope for the missing men.

Now we could be almost certain they had been killed.

Even if we could infer that these were the men who had repeatedly assaulted Huiqiong over the years, got her pregnant again, and driven her to her death, we still had to find their bodies.

And their killer.

Zhong Jianbin.

Sending the recording meant Huiqiong's watch had connected to the internet.

But neither her SIM nor Jianbin's had become active. The telecommunications staff would have alerted us immediately if they had.

Without a SIM, the watch could connect only through Wi-Fi.

That meant Jianbin might have left his location in the western outskirts and come back.

Meanwhile, colleagues contacting the construction departments obtained a lead.

There really was a building on a western mountainside.

An auxiliary factory building had been put up more than a decade earlier, when the mountain was being quarried.

After the city banned quarrying, it had stood abandoned for years.

Many people didn't even know it existed.

With a map in hand, we hurried there.

We were far, far too late.

We found the missing men.

Their bodies.

No. More precisely, pieces of their bodies.

They were scattered through three separate rooms.

Chopped into sections.

In that moment, I realized my interpretation of the recording had been wrong.

Jianbin probably hadn't stabbed them to death.

He had chopped them apart.

We found the weapon too.

A large cleaver.

Perhaps each man had watched his own body being cut into a certain number of pieces.

The man in the recording: fifteen.

On that mountainside, foxes or birds had apparently come searching for food and fed on the remains.

Some pieces were missing irregular portions.

Their faces, in particular, bore clear bite and gnaw marks.

The scene was so dreadful that one of my colleagues vomited.

Yet all I felt was revulsion.

Not pity.

I only wanted to collect the remains and get them to the examiner.

But the scene offered more than that terrible mess.

Elsewhere in the abandoned building, we found the killer.

Zhong Jianbin.

Another body.

Perhaps, after killing his three enemies, he had hanged himself from a beam.

The first thing I did on seeing him was take out my phone.

There was no signal.

Back at the unit, I checked everything recovered from the scene.

Huiqiong's watch wasn't there.

The leadership called an emergency meeting and ordered us to close the case immediately.

Jianbin's fingerprints were clear on the cleaver. Traces of him were everywhere.

There was no doubt he was the killer.

Three men killed with such brutality made it a major criminal case.

Unless it was dealt with quickly, news might leak and the media might embellish it.

Once public attention settled on it, the situation could become even more dangerous.

The case had to be closed and an announcement issued immediately.

I understood all that.

But one thing troubled me most.

Jianbin couldn't have sent the recording. Who had taken the watch?

An accomplice?

That led to further questions.

He was still a strong man. But the victims were around their thirties and spent their lives doing heavy construction work.

How had he subdued at least two at once?

More importantly, I couldn't believe he had planned such a flawless revenge in only a few days.

For years, he hadn't even managed to protect his daughter.

Those doubts made it impossible for me not to believe he had an accomplice.

Perhaps we would never know who.

The case was closed.

I also began to understand why the recording had been sent.

It hadn't actually helped solve the case.

The people behind it—Jianbin and his accomplice—had wanted us to know the truth.

But truth wasn't what mattered.

Stability mattered more.

After everything had been smoothly concluded, Village Chief Zhong arranged the funerals for Jianbin and his daughter.

I had also asked the forensic examiner for another paternity test.

Who had fathered Huiqiong's unborn child?

Wang Biao.

Essentially, those three hadn't died innocent.

Once the chief had completed the paperwork and left, I went after him.

I wanted him to know.

My purpose was simple. I didn't want him to go on believing that something filthy had existed between Jianbin and Huiqiong.

Blood relation or not, they had truly been father and daughter.

His love had been profound.

So profound that, after her death, revenge was the only thing keeping him alive.

With that accomplished, he had ended his life at peace.

"Chief Zhong, about those two. I want you to know that the child Huiqiong was carrying wasn't actually..."

He cut me off.

"I know."

For a moment, I wasn't even sure what he knew.

Because I couldn't understand how he knew it.

Every sentence that followed invited further thought.

"Everyone in our village is surnamed Zhong."

"We're poor and backward. We work from sunrise to sunset. Everyone is busy. We can't stop outsiders coming into the village."

"Unfortunately, I gave Jianbin bad advice at the start. That led us here."

"She didn't understand. Didn't know how to keep evidence. Couldn't recognize people... I... I had no confidence... Back then, all I thought about was helping them escape their difficulties quickly, so they could live well."

"It's my fault. I should have taken more responsibility."

"You call me the head of the village committee. But to the people here, I have another title. Village chief."

"Since ancient times, a chief has had to shoulder more responsibility."

"So... I know everything."

At that moment, I was almost certain.

This man was Jianbin's accomplice.

I couldn't stop myself.

"You... How could you do this?"

He didn't answer.

He merely frowned and asked, "If the law's punishment can't match what a criminal deserves, what are we supposed to do?"

I froze.

I really couldn't answer him.

He turned and walked away without looking back.

Back at the unit, I gave Captain Xu a brief report.

Not too detailed. I knew the case was over. We couldn't stir up too much more trouble.

But I wanted his help assessing whether there was a serious risk.

If there was, we needed a contingency plan, or some measure of action.

So I mentioned the chief and what he had said.

After turning it over again and again, I had almost understood one particular sentence.

"Everyone is surnamed Zhong."

That little village had the cohesion of a clan.

In other words, everything the villagers had told me...

Might have been what the chief wanted me to hear.

From the beginning, their words had steered us toward a depraved father.

When the truth emerged, we were forced to release him. But every suspicion still centered on him.

We hadn't watched anyone else.

Then came the abductions and killings.

Even the recording sent from the watch: telling us the truth while forcing us to find the bodies quickly.

If that was really what had happened, this man was extremely dangerous.

Captain Xu listened, slowly lit a cigarette, and told me a story.

It had happened more than twenty years earlier.

In that same village.

A trafficker had tried to abduct a family's three-year-old child.

He had been caught in the act.

Every able-bodied man in the village came.

Punches and kicks were the least of it. Carrying poles and sledgehammers were what made it terrifying.

Before the police arrived, he was dead.

The villagers had been vicious. They'd had no intention of letting him survive.

What happened afterward was even more astonishing.

The police intended to arrest the ringleader and hold him responsible for the death.

But every able-bodied man in the village came to the unit to surrender.

Each said he was the killer.

Everyone was the killer.

So there was no killer.

What could be done?

In the end, there was only criticism and education. The matter gradually faded away.

The dead man was a trafficker, after all. Even the police hated people like him to the bone.

Captain Xu finished the story, said nothing more, and quietly left.

At last, I understood.

Village Chief Zhong wasn't the accomplice.

Because there wasn't just one.

Perhaps the whole village had been complicit.

I remembered his question.

"If the law's punishment can't match what a criminal deserves, what are we supposed to do?"

They had found their answer long ago.