Chapter 2

Angry as he was, Zhao Jun had not forgotten the job at hand.

He handed me a file.

“From the information on their computers, this is the person most likely to have access to the controlled drug.”

I took it and looked through it.

She was a young woman, just twenty-four, named Li Jie. A nurse.

“Have you contacted her?” I asked at once.

Zhao Jun shook his head.

“We checked the household registration records. She died a month ago. Suicide. Before that, she’d spent at least a year in a psychiatric hospital. Ah…”

“According to the records, her father was her only family. A single-parent household. But I haven’t been able to reach him either.”

I thought for a moment.

“Her father? Do we know what he does?”

Zhao Jun had clearly been thinking along the same lines.

“He’s a doctor. Li Jiancheng. His employer granted him unpaid leave while keeping his position open. We can’t contact him at the moment.”

“Understood. I’ll find him.”

I took the file and set off at once.

It was reasonable to suspect a father taking revenge for his daughter.

Perhaps, after Li Jie’s death, he had turned all his fury on those animals.

But, of course, it was not that simple.

Finding Li Jiancheng was not particularly difficult.

In modern society, a person leaves countless traces wherever they go. Nobody can avoid leaving any at all.

By tracing the movements of the car registered in his name, we located a villa on the outskirts of the city. As it happened, he owned that too.

Since I could not reach him by phone, I decided to visit.

To my surprise, Li Jiancheng showed no resistance.

Once he learned I was a detective, he welcomed me warmly.

Only after he had made the tea did I understand why.

The first thing he said was:

“You’ve come alone, Officer. That means you’re not carrying out an official operation, are you?”

I nodded without speaking.

It was indeed only an informal visit.

An official operation required at least two officers.

Li Jiancheng asked another question.

“You’re here about my daughter, then?”

That put me on my guard. I nodded and answered with a question of my own.

“So you’re well aware that the people who hurt your daughter are now becoming victims themselves, one after another?”

“Are they?”

He handed me a cup of tea, looking interested.

“I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that my daughter was a victim.”

I intended to get down to specific questions—his recent movements, for instance, and whether they fitted the killer’s timeline.

Instead, he stayed a step ahead and left me reacting to him.

He took a sip of tea and smiled.

“I’ve been living here for a long time. It’s isolated, so I installed plenty of security cameras. They record my activities every day. There’s no need to suspect me.”

He was remarkably composed.

“Officer, would you like to hear about my daughter?”

I let him continue.

I did not know what lay behind all this unusual behavior.

But one thing was certain: it was deliberate.

By the time I understood what he was really trying to do, it was too late.

According to Li Jiancheng, his daughter Li Jie had been assaulted two years earlier.

She had never been the same since.

She developed severe depression and persecutory delusions, repeatedly harmed herself and attempted suicide.

Eventually, she died by suicide.

“For those two years, I couldn’t do a thing.”

Li Jiancheng continued to drink his tea and speak calmly, as though none of it concerned him.

But what he said grew more chilling with every word.

“I went to the police. But you… you said there wasn’t enough evidence. You couldn’t open a case.

“Weren’t her injuries evidence? My daughter was so badly hurt. Wasn’t that proof enough of what had happened?

“But you still said a case had to stand up in court. And in court, there’s no truth. Only evidence.

“Fine. You wanted evidence.

“So, with my heart breaking, I went looking for the video of what they did to my daughter…

“Do you know what that was like? I couldn’t bear to watch it. Looking at it even once hurt more than dying myself…

“But you needed evidence. So I had to find it and give it to you.

“And even after I submitted the video, you still wouldn’t open a case.

“You couldn’t verify its authenticity. You couldn’t determine whether it had been staged…

“Fuck you!

“My daughter was drugged and brutalized beyond recognition, and you still said those things!”

I hurried to explain.

“No, sir. Could there have been some misunderstanding—”

“Shut up.”

He slammed his cup down.

“See for yourself.”

With shaking hands, he took several sheets of paper from his pocket and threw them at me.

I picked them up.

They were acknowledgments of police reports.

A whole stack.

The dates ran from two years earlier to just a few months ago.

Our colleagues had indeed mishandled the matter.

“I once heard something…”

“When society drives someone into a corner, don’t forget there’s still one road behind them. Crime. And there’s no shame in it.”

With those words, Li Jiancheng had all but told me he was the killer.

But I also understood how everything he had said connected to what had happened to him over the past two years.

Evidence.

From beginning to end, he kept returning to evidence.

We had been unable to help his daughter because we had none.

Now, he was using that same lack of evidence to challenge us openly.

Unfortunately, I really had nothing to prove he was the killer.

The cameras here could also establish his innocence.

For a moment, I did not know what to do.

After a few seconds of silence to steady myself, I had to keep trying to reason with him.

“That isn’t the answer, sir. Crime won’t solve anything. It’ll only drag you down too. Do you think your daughter would want that?”

Li Jiancheng laughed.

He looked genuinely delighted, the corners of his eyes creasing.

“And relying on you would?”

“Before someone died, did you know a single thing those animals had done?”

Again, I had no answer.

If no one had died, if Zhang Jun had not told us himself, we would never have uncovered their crimes.

At last, he looked up and added with a smile:

“My daughter very much wants to see this outcome.”

At the time, I did not understand the full weight of those words.

I was thinking only that someone else must be helping Li Jiancheng kill these men.

Who was it?

And where was Chen Zhikang?

Had something already happened to him?

After all, this revenge had been planned with extraordinary care.

Finally, Li Jiancheng’s tone softened a little, but his words were still a provocative dismissal.

“Officer, if you think I’ve done something, bring the evidence and arrest me.

“That’s what you said yourselves. There’s no truth in court. Only evidence.

“But if you don’t have any…

“Get out.”

I looked at those police-report receipts and could not find a response.

There was no point arguing with him.

He had prepared too thoroughly.

As soon as I left his house, I called Zhao Jun and told him everything that had happened.

I also asked him to send two colleagues over immediately to take Li Jiancheng’s formal statement.

It needed to account for his movements over the past two weeks in detail.

I did not have him brought back to the unit because I wanted the two officers to remain nearby afterward and keep him under discreet surveillance, to see who came to meet him.

I also asked Zhao Jun to check every SIM card registered in Li Jiancheng’s name and find out whom he had contacted recently.

If he really had stayed inside the villa the whole time, he must have an accomplice.

Li Jiancheng might have covered his own tracks perfectly, but his accomplice was bound to leave something behind.

By now, the direction of the investigation was clear.

We had to concentrate on Li Jiancheng.

Whatever had driven him to it, however cruel the victims had been, we still had a case to solve.

Then Zhao Jun gave me some news.

“Get back here as soon as you’re done. Director Long from forensics says he’s found something.”

I knew at once it had to be important.

I headed straight back.

When I reached the Criminal Investigation Unit, Captain Long had just arrived and was preparing to announce Lin Shuming’s autopsy results.

First, the canine bite marks on the body matched Lin Shuming’s husky exactly. Our initial assessment had been correct.

Captain Long also confirmed that Lin Shuming had most likely been alive to watch the dog eat his face.

Closer examination showed that the killer had calculated the dose of muscle relaxant with extraordinary precision, even adjusting it for Lin Shuming’s weight.

The drug had not killed him, but it had left his entire body unable to move.

In other words, he could open his eyes and see everything happening in front of him, but could not even part his lips, let alone call for help.

He had been forced to watch his pet dog bite away his face, piece by piece, and swallow it.

Until the dog bit through his neck, he had endured that appalling terror again and again.

It was perhaps the most horrifying death I had ever heard of.

This was most likely revenge, driven by a hatred that ran very deep.

Without a hatred that intense, the killer would never have gone to such lengths to arrange so dreadful a death for Lin Shuming.

What grudge could they have had against him?

Why was killing him not enough? Why make him suffer such a terrible punishment as well?

Perhaps his two business partners could give us the answer.

Captain Long continued.

“There’s something else. After cleaning the dirt from the dog’s claws, we found blood underneath. We analyzed the soil too. It’s a rather distinctive black mud.”

He held up a small sealed evidence bag.

“High salt content, very sticky. You generally only find this kind of black mud in certain coastal areas. And there’s one not far from here.”

I sprang to my feet.

“I know the place! Let’s search it right away!”

10

There, on the coast, in a dilapidated wooden hut near a stretch of woods, we found Chen Zhikang’s body.

The ground around the hut was covered in the black mud Director Long had described.

Chen Zhikang’s body was badly decomposed. He had clearly died well before Lin Shuming.

Even so, Director Long, who had come with us, could still identify the bite wounds as canine.

It all fitted.

Chen Zhikang had been the first victim, followed by Lin Shuming.

Only because Lin Shuming’s body had been discovered in time had the last man, Zhang Jun, escaped with his life.

Otherwise, given the fury Li Jiancheng had shown, he would surely have had Zhang Jun torn apart too.

But Zhang Jun was now in detention.

Had the killer lost their last chance?

It was precisely because we thought so that what happened next seemed so unbelievable.

After finding Chen Zhikang’s body, we held a short meeting to pool every useful lead we had.

The investigation into Li Jiancheng had made a little progress.

He had said nothing unusual in his formal statement, but the phone numbers registered in his name had yielded a clue.

Li Jiancheng had four numbers in total, none of them canceled.

He regularly used only one.

Two of the other three had been in contact with his main number within the past week.

But by the time we discovered this, both were inactive.

Our technical colleagues said they would continue monitoring them. If either came back online, cell-tower data would let us narrow down its location.

Then, after thinking for a long time, Zhao Jun raised a point.

“If Chen Zhikang was also killed by Lin Shuming’s dog, doesn’t that mean Lin Shuming must have been abducted at the same time as him?

“Otherwise, how could the killer have used Lin Shuming’s own dog to kill Chen Zhikang?”

We had overlooked that.

Zhao Jun continued.

“If the two men were taken together, then killed by the dog one after another… why separate them?

“Why dump Lin Shuming in that village?

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to leave them both in that stinking, isolated hut by the sea?”

“You think there was a particular reason they left Lin Shuming in the village?” I was beginning to have doubts too. “Zhao Jun, are we absolutely sure the man who reported Lin Shuming’s body had no connection to him?”

Zhao Jun frowned in thought. Then it struck him.

“When we looked into that, we hadn’t questioned Zhang Jun yet. We didn’t know what disgusting things they’d been doing… But when I checked Huang Zhijian’s family circumstances, I found he’d had a daughter.”

“Had?”

I was startled.

Zhao Jun nodded.

“Yes. Had. The household records showed she was dead. I didn’t look into how…”

Was Huang Zhijian the reason Lin Shuming had been left in that village?

Because he wanted revenge too?

Could he be Li Jiancheng’s accomplice?

We acted immediately.

First, we would summon Huang Zhijian for questioning.

Second, we would establish how his daughter had died.