Chapter 1

I once worked a case that left me furious beyond words.

The victim was a woman. Her autopsy was horrifying. The injuries still visible all over her body suggested that she had suffered inhuman abuse while she was alive. Even after she died, her killer dismembered her, packed her into a jar, and disguised her remains as pickled vegetables.

But the most frightening part of the case was the evil it exposed in the human heart.

1

There was a village in our county perched on a southern mountainside. It had been there for over a hundred years.

As time went on, the young people all wanted to leave. Only the middle-aged and elderly households remained. Many of the houses were badly dilapidated; years of wind and rain had left some on the verge of collapse.

The salt-preserved body was discovered after a downpour, inside an old mud-brick house that had long stood empty.

Falling roof tiles had smashed the lid of a pickling jar nearly half a person's height. Rainwater ran inside and dissolved the coarse salt.

Only then did the remains rise to the surface.

Given the seriousness of the report, our superiors took an immediate interest. Captain Xu was sent to lead the team himself, accompanied by Dr. Zhong, our forensic pathologist.

The mountain road was winding and treacherous. The drive alone took forty minutes.

When we arrived, we cordoned off the scene and began our investigation.

What we lifted out of that jar was almost unbearable to look at.

The victim was naked and dismembered. Her head, torso, and limbs had all been separated; the internal organs had been left untreated.

The mass of coarse salt had dehydrated the remains, leaving them shriveled and rigid, like dried meat.

Then the rain had soaked the dried-out body, causing it to swell. The result was appalling.

It looked as though she had been tortured in hell.

Dr. Zhong said a preliminary examination was of little use now. All she could establish was the victim's sex.

A thorough autopsy back at the lab would be needed even to estimate the time of death.

Estimate. Nothing more.

Identifying her from the remains would also be extremely difficult.

Captain Xu immediately assigned three jobs.

First, contact the local police station and find out who owned the house. In these circumstances, the owner was an obvious suspect and had to be brought in for questioning.

Second, canvass the village and compile a list of all missing women.

Third, question the person who had reported the body and establish exactly how he had found it.

I took the third assignment.

The caller's name was Li Shihao. To my surprise, he was an outsider, twenty-seven years old.

I immediately understood why Captain Xu had made a point of treating this as a separate assignment.

The body had been hidden in a pickling jar. Even with the lid broken, it wouldn't have been easy to spot.

And there were hardly any young people left in the village.

What was an outsider like him doing there?

2

Back at the criminal investigation unit, I questioned Li Shihao with another officer, Zhao Jun.

My first question was simple.

“What were you doing in the village?”

Li looked nervous. Stammering, he explained that he was an amateur photographer who had come to the remote mountain village to take photographs with a nostalgic feel.

The mountain scenery in the area really was beautiful. Visitors often came to travel and take pictures, so his explanation sounded plausible enough.

“Why did you go into someone else's house?”

He hurried to explain.

“One side of the old house had collapsed. Naturally, I thought no one lived there... I was only going in to take a few pictures. Someone used to live there, after all. The interiors of these old houses are all so dated, with that nostalgic atmosphere. Especially when they're falling apart—there's a beauty to the ruins. I wanted to capture it...”

“You came alone?”

“Yes. I'm traveling alone, taking photographs. I'm staying at the XX Hotel here in the county... I can stay longer if you need me to.”

He took out his phone and showed us his bus tickets and itinerary.

He really had been to a lot of places. Over the past month alone, he had visited several other counties. Nothing suggested that he had specifically targeted this isolated village.

We questioned him for over an hour and learned very little.

Li was cooperative. There was almost nothing suspicious about him.

He also seemed genuinely shaken by discovering the body, rather than like someone who had deliberately gone looking for it.

But we didn't have enough information. Looking back, I missed several crucial points.

After the interview, I told Zhao Jun to follow up on Li's identity, occupation, social contacts, and so on.

Ideally, we would establish that he had no connection to the case at all.

3

That evening, the real drama began.

Captain Xu had identified the owner of the house: Zhou Yongdong.

Forty-eight, single, still registered as a resident of the village, but working in another city.

We hadn't moved sooner because his exact address wasn't on record. The local station had to use its contacts to track him down.

Xu led a team out that night, crossing provincial lines to find him.

We arrested Zhou without incident in a makeshift sheet-metal room on a construction site.

He was terrified, almost out of his mind with panic.

Exactly how you might expect a fugitive killer to behave.

Xu had also learned from the villagers that Zhou had abruptly left to find work five years earlier. He had never come back and had cut off contact with most people in the village.

Unless something serious had happened, why make such a clean break?

He looked very suspicious indeed.

Xu questioned him that same night.

It didn't take long for Zhou to break down and confess.

He really had been on the run.

Five years earlier, he had fallen out with a fellow villager named Zhou Jianhua.

Jianhua had three brothers. Yongdong was the only one left in his family, and Jianhua and his brothers bullied him without restraint.

After one dispute, they had beaten him up.

Yongdong had gone to the village committee for help, but all they offered was a perfunctory attempt at mediation. Nothing was resolved.

Cornered and furious, he had resorted to something drastic.

Late one night, he hid beside the road Jianhua would take home after drinking and stabbed him with a small knife.

Once he'd had his revenge, he was terrified. He thought he had killed a man and would certainly be executed.

He packed up and fled that very night.

He had been running for five years.

Later, of course, he had found out that Jianhua hadn't died.

But he still lived in fear of the police coming for him.

Now, at last, they had.

Xu wasn't the only one bewildered by this story. So was I.

Zhou had been talking all this time without giving us a single clue about our case.

There wasn't even a woman in his account of the feud with Jianhua.

So where did the dead woman fit in?

Losing patience, Xu slammed his hand on the table and spread a photograph of the salt-preserved body in front of him.

“Stop wasting our time! Why was this body in your house? Are you seriously saying you know nothing about it?”

Zhou stared at the photograph, eyes bulging.

He seemed even more bewildered than we were.

Then he began protesting his innocence.

Xu and I exchanged a look.

Had he really not killed her?

4

The next day, we went back up to the village.

Going from house to house was slow work, especially when the few dozen households were all middle-aged or elderly and not easy to talk to.

Xu and I headed straight to Zhou Jianhua's home.

He wasn't exactly well off, either. He had built a multistory house, but it stopped at a floor and a half, and the brick walls were still unplastered.

He was much younger than Yongdong—not yet forty—but unmarried too.

To be honest, finding a woman willing to marry you was difficult if you never left that mountain village.

At the mention of Yongdong, Jianhua ground his teeth in anger. He even lifted his shirt to show us the ugly scars on his body.