Chapter 3

We learned that Huang Zhijian’s daughter had died by suicide a year earlier.

What a coincidence.

Just like Li Jiancheng’s daughter.

But we had no evidence that she too had been harmed by Lin Shuming and the other two animals.

Even Zhang Jun, the one still alive, could not remember whether she had been one of their victims.

There was no trace of her in his filthy collection of files either.

Li Jiancheng’s obsession with “evidence” had left us unable to find any, at least for the time being.

Huang Zhijian himself was equally unyielding.

Whatever we asked, he gave only two answers.

“I don’t know anything. I don’t know any of these people. I went there looking for somewhere to pickle vegetables, found a body when I went down into the cellar and called the police.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Stop bringing up my daughter. Mention her again and I’ll curse your whole family.”

Beyond that, he said nothing.

He would not budge.

The investigation had stalled again.

At times, we even wondered whether Huang Zhijian really was innocent, because one thing made no sense.

If he was Li Jiancheng’s accomplice, part of a meticulously planned revenge, why had he called the police?

If he had not reported the body, Lin Shuming might not have been found so soon.

If the body had decomposed further, the clues at the scene might never have led us to the dog that killed him, let alone to his identity.

We would never have found Zhang Jun and made him disclose the other crimes the three had committed.

In other words, Huang Zhijian had inadvertently saved Zhang Jun’s life.

That was completely at odds with the way Li Jiancheng worked: never leaving evidence behind.

Li Jiancheng would have chosen to have Zhang Jun torn apart, not delivered to us and placed in detention.

What were we missing?

Only when we found the answer did we understand.

The three men were not the only targets of Li Jiancheng’s revenge.

This was a much larger game than we had imagined.

In the end, we decided to return our attention to Li Jiancheng.

The officers watching him had found nothing. The security footage from his home really did show that he had had no opportunity to commit the crimes over the past month.

Even so, he was very unlikely to be innocent.

We simply lacked the evidence.

If we could get a full confession, we would surely find weaknesses in his account and the evidence to go with them.

In particular, his statement and Huang Zhijian’s might overlap or contradict each other.

That would be our best chance of breaking the deadlock.

Li Jiancheng readily complied when we summoned him.

But in the interview room, his attitude was almost identical to Huang Zhijian’s.

Nothing got through to him.

Whatever we asked, most of his answers began with:

“I don’t know.”

Even our tricks failed.

For example, we told him:

“Huang Zhijian has told us everything you asked him to do. You’d be better off coming clean and seeking leniency.”

It was a verbal trap.

Whether Li Jiancheng admitted or denied giving Huang Zhijian instructions, he would fall into it.

The point was to find out whether the two knew each other.

Either a yes or a no would implicitly acknowledge a connection.

But Li Jiancheng answered calmly.

“I don’t know any Huang Zhijian. I’ve never even met him.

“Why don’t you produce some evidence that we know each other first?”

He denied the acquaintance outright and avoided the trap entirely.

While we were spending so much time investigating those two men and getting nowhere, something even more astonishing happened.

Zhang Jun died.

The entire Criminal Investigation Unit was stunned by the news.

We had put him in detention ourselves.

How could he be dead?

But he was.

And he had been murdered.

It was hard to believe.

At first, Zhang Jun had been perfectly safe in the detention center.

Then his family suddenly applied for his release on medical bail.

They produced his medical records.

He had viral hepatitis A.

Under Article 67 of the Criminal Procedure Law, the public security authorities could release someone with an acute infectious disease on bail pending investigation.

Hepatitis A did fall into that category.

The Criminal Investigation Unit knew nothing about it because once Zhang Jun entered detention, he came under the custody unit’s supervision.

The custody unit handled detention and operated alongside ours. With different responsibilities, neither needed the other’s approval for its decisions.

Most astonishingly, Zhang Jun’s bail application had been approved in just one day.

Normally, it took at least three.

There had to have been a procedural violation.

After he was taken to the designated hospital for treatment, tragedy struck.

A nurse slit Zhang Jun’s throat with a scalpel.

He had been congratulating himself on avoiding detention and getting a clean hospital bed instead.

He could never have imagined that the nurse approaching to take his temperature would suddenly draw a blade and kill him.

A deep cut opened across his neck. Blood soaked the bed.

Even the emergency doctors who rushed over could not save him.

The nurse had acted with remarkable precision.

The cut had severed his vocal cords, windpipe and an artery in his neck, allowing a large quantity of blood to flood his airway.

Even if the blood loss did not kill him, he would soon suffocate.

She dropped the scalpel, took off her cap and stood there with her hair loose, laughing wildly.

When we brought her in, we discovered that she was not merely mad.

She was not even dead.

Because she was Li Jie.

She had been alive all along.

To be honest, we were more bewildered than ever.

Registering a death at a police station required several stages of verification.

First came the hospital’s death certificate.

Then the cremation certificate from the funeral home.

Only after that did the paperwork go to the police station.

But Li Jiancheng’s background happened to put every one of those documents within reach.

First, he was a highly capable doctor with a substantial income and plenty of contacts in medicine.

Second, his department regularly dealt with funeral homes.

In other words, Li Jie had never died.

He had made his daughter legally “dead” solely to serve this revenge plot.

But Li Jiancheng would certainly admit nothing.

When we told him what had happened, he said not a word.

His eyes reddened, yet a tender, fatherly smile spread across his face.

As though he were proud of his daughter.

Li Jie was far more forthcoming.

She gave us a full account of all three killings, every detail perfectly clear.

She could even hand over each piece of evidence.

The controlled drugs stolen from the hospital, for instance, and the implements used to restrain and torment Lin Shuming and Chen Zhikang…

At last, we had the killer.

But no one could feel pleased.

The entire justice system was about to be shaken.

The police station, the custody unit, the Criminal Investigation Unit—all of us.

After all, no one could bear the blame for a dead person turning up to commit murder.

Our superiors put pressure on us to close the case quickly.

Name Li Jie as the killer, secure a conviction and stop digging.

But first, we had to resolve the problem that Li Jie was not actually dead.

We had to bring her back to life on paper before the case could proceed.

We were not even allowed to investigate how her death had been faked.

The deeper we dug, the more of our own mistakes we exposed.

Nor could we investigate how Li Jie had appeared and worked at a hospital after her “death.”

We could not look too closely.

Every layer we peeled back revealed more gaps and procedural failures on our side.

But none of that was the worst part.

The worst part was that Li Jie had a severe mental illness.

Her lawyer had been ready for a long time, preparing to seek an acquittal.

At last, we understood why Lin Shuming had been dumped in Huang Zhijian’s village.

The whole point had been to get Zhang Jun placed in detention.

Not to save him.

To take revenge on us.

From the beginning, their targets had never been limited to those three men.

Zhang Jun was going to die.

They had arranged everything in advance.

But they had used him to expose the holes in our system, then strike us where it hurt most.

Looking back, Li Jiancheng had deliberately provoked me and focused my suspicions on himself to draw attention away from the real killer.

His daughter, Li Jie.

An avenger masquerading as a dead woman.

He had said:

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

At the time, I thought he meant that if his daughter could see him from the afterlife, she would applaud his revenge.

I had not imagined that he was simply telling the truth.

It was his daughter, Li Jie, who wanted this outcome.

Perhaps she had wanted all of it from the start.

She might even have planned the whole thing herself.

After all, we never found any evidence to prove that Li Jiancheng or Huang Zhijian was guilty.

Even if we brought them to court, neither could be convicted.

So the rest of the case proceeded with few further surprises.

Li Jie was doing well.

In detention, she was allowed no visitors except her lawyer.

Even their conversations had to take place with a police officer present.

Nothing they discussed could remain confidential.

Yet her lawyer was entirely serious. He even gave her a bold assurance.

“Don’t worry. Even if there’s a forensic psychiatric assessment, you’re very likely to be found to have severe post-traumatic stress disorder and to have been unable to control your actions over a prolonged period.

“You really are ill. We have solid evidence of it.

“Your father asked me to pass on a message. Personally, I agree with him completely.

“He said…

“‘Killing those people was the best way to see justice done.’”

Li Jie agreed with him too.

She not only nodded.

She smiled.

It was as though…

she had truly come back to life.