Chapter 2

Zhou Yongdong's claim that he had “stabbed him once” wasn't quite accurate.

He had stabbed Zhou Jianhua several times.

Yet Jianhua hadn't reported it to the police, supposedly out of consideration for a fellow villager.

That struck me as odd.

He'd been hurt that badly and hadn't reported it?

At least we had confirmed that Yongdong hadn't made up the incident.

After we left Jianhua's house, the other officers came to report their findings to Xu.

The result was, of course...

Nothing.

No one had reported anyone missing in the village for years. Nobody knew who the dead woman was.

The villagers were tight-lipped. Almost no one would tell us anything.

From the middle-aged heads of households to the old men, they were all uncooperative.

But while reporting back, one colleague happened to ask Xu:

“Could she be someone who came here from outside, years ago...?”

To my surprise, Xu nodded in silence.

I didn't understand.

We didn't even have the autopsy results yet. We hadn't identified the victim. How could they jump to a conclusion like that?

An investigation couldn't run on guesswork.

I found a moment to ask Xu what was going on. He looked at me.

“You don't know about the rotten things this village used to do?”

That only confused me more.

“How long have I been here? What would I know?”

Xu sighed.

“This godforsaken place used to be even poorer. The men had no ambition and wouldn't venture outside. They couldn't find wives, so women were trafficked in and sold to them... This body could well be one of those women.”

I was stunned.

“It's 2015. How can that still happen?”

He sighed again.

“It doesn't now. Hasn't for the past few years, either. You know my temper—I'd have burned the damn village down. But we don't know how long she's been in that salt. The body could be much older.”

I felt sick at heart.

If the victim really had been trafficked here, identifying her would be even harder.

There might be no one to claim her.

Even her killer might not know who she was, because her killer wouldn't have cared.

She only needed to be a woman.

That was enough.

Another day passed without any progress.

5

Desperate for a lead, we went to see Dr. Zhong, who was conducting the autopsy.

Examining a body preserved in salt was much more difficult than a normal autopsy, but she had managed to establish a few preliminary findings.

They made me clench my teeth until my jaw ached.

There were injuries all over the body.

The skin had shriveled after so long in salt, but the marks were still discernible.

Both wrists, for example, bore deep restraint marks, gouged into the flesh.

There were numerous injuries on the torso too, all inflicted while she was alive.

The ankles also showed signs of prolonged confinement, most likely in heavy iron shackles.

Taken together, these marks suggested that she had been held captive and subjected to violence for a long time before her death.

There were abnormalities in the lower body as well.

Dr. Zhong couldn't establish whether she had been raped. But her examination suggested that the tearing injuries to the lower body had very likely been inflicted while the victim was still alive.

In other words, when the killer dismembered her, he had also inflicted severe injuries on her genitals.

What those findings suggested went far beyond sexual assault alone.

It was no exaggeration to say she had lived through hell.

Even those of us who had seen countless crime scenes listened with our teeth clenched in rage.

Dr. Zhong also estimated that the remains had been in salt for at least two years, but no more than three.

That put it somewhere between 2012 and 2013.

Now we had a problem.

Our only suspect, Zhou Yongdong, could practically be ruled out.

He had fled in 2010, five years earlier, and hadn't returned to the village once.

It was extremely unlikely that he had killed someone elsewhere and brought the body all the way back to hide it.

“Fuck!”

Xu slammed his fist on the table.

The anger was real.

So was the helplessness.

So was the despair.

The investigation had hit a dead end.

That, too, was real.

6

Identifying the victim was crucial to solving the case.

Dr. Zhong would continue her examination and try to extract DNA from remains that had spent so long in salt.

But even if she succeeded, that might not tell us who the dead woman was.

At the time, the DNA database primarily held STR profiles used to identify individuals and establish biological relationships.

Put simply, most of the samples came from criminals or people subject to special monitoring.

The database was designed to fight and prevent crime: to identify suspects quickly from evidence recovered at a scene, and to link different cases.

We didn't have a database covering the entire population. We couldn't simply compare her DNA and put a name to her.

All we could do was keep going from house to house and press the local station for more information, hoping to turn up a lead.

Xu said our first priority was to establish whether she had been trafficked into the village and, if so, when.

Even he was beginning to doubt his earlier claim.

“There hasn't been any trafficking in the past few years.”

Perhaps that wasn't true.

Once we established that point, we could narrow the investigation. We might even find the killer directly.

Whoever had bought her was the killer.

But if trafficking really had continued here in recent years, how could the police have known nothing about it?

That was what made Xu so angry.

He took it all out on the local station.