Chapter 1

In ten years working homicide, I had never encountered a case this bizarre.

An affluent family had been wiped out, yet the killer had turned himself in.

He described the entire crime in detail—even the hiding places for the weapons were exactly right.

But the DNA test results showed that he had never been at the scene.

More frightening still, he smiled and said to me:

“Officer, are you sure… it was really that family who died?”

Outside the window, the city’s neon lights streaked across the night sky like splashes of color. It was three in the morning. The criminal investigation office was thick with cigarette smoke, mingled with the smell of instant noodles and cheap coffee. I had just stubbed out a cigarette and was about to slump over my desk for a nap when the radio crackled to life.

“West side of the city, Splendid Garden Estates, Villa 7, Block B! The caller reports a large amount of blood at the scene! Repeat, Villa 7, Block B, Splendid Garden Estates!”

The urgent voice was distorted with panic.

Splendid Garden Estates was the most prestigious neighborhood in the city. Its residents were either extraordinarily wealthy or powerful. My heart tightened, and my drowsiness vanished at once.

A large amount of blood?

In a place like that, it couldn’t be an ordinary break-in.

“Technical team and forensics, get to the scene immediately! Move!”

I grabbed the coat off the back of my chair and shouted. The office erupted into chaos: chairs scraped, footsteps pounded, equipment was packed. All the sounds blurred together.

The police cars tore through the night, red and blue lights trailing along the empty highway. I sat in the passenger seat, tapping my fingers unconsciously against the edge of the window.

In ten years on homicide, I had seen plenty of bloodshed. But my instincts told me this case was different.

It felt as though an invisible hand were squeezing my heart tighter and tighter.

Our convoy entered Splendid Garden Estates, passed its carefully tended gardens and artificial lake, and stopped in front of the ornate iron gates of Villa 7.

The local officers who had arrived ahead of us were keeping watch at the entrance. Every one of them looked grim.

“Captain Li…”

A young officer stepped forward, his voice trembling.

“Inside… you should see for yourself.”

The villa was brightly lit, and the crystal chandelier cast a cold glow.

But no amount of luxury could hide the thick, nauseating smell of blood.

The first-floor living room looked like a slaughterhouse.

The male homeowner lay beside the leather sofa in silk pajamas. His head had been smashed by a heavy object, and his face was mangled beyond recognition.

The female homeowner was curled at the foot of the stairs leading to the second floor. A pool of dark red blood beneath her had not yet fully clotted.

Worst of all were the two children, who looked to be about ten. They had fallen in front of the children’s bedroom. Their small bodies had been stabbed repeatedly with a sharp weapon, leaving horrifying wounds.

Old Zhao, the forensic examiner, was crouched beside the boy. After a preliminary examination, he looked up at me, his face grim.

“Estimated time of death was between eight and ten last night. More than one kind of weapon was used—a blunt object and a sharp knife. The method was… exceptionally brutal.”

I scanned the room.

The windows and front door were intact. There were no signs of forced entry.

There were signs of a brief struggle in the living room, but nothing too violent.

The valuables did not seem to have been taken. The safe was untouched.

Revenge?

A murder to silence them?

Or… some kind of ritual sacrifice?

“Captain Li, the computer tower from the study is missing,” Wang from the technical team reported.

“Find it! Search every inch of this place. Don’t leave anything unchecked!”

A mass murder like this was far too serious. The pressure from the authorities would come down on us like a mountain.

We had to find a breakthrough quickly.

By dawn, the preliminary examination of the scene was finally complete. We had collected a large amount of blood, fingerprints, and suspicious biological samples. But the killer had clearly been careful: he wore gloves, and someone had deliberately dealt with the footprints.

Our only clues were half of a faint shoeprint in the mud in the backyard—it did not belong to anyone in the family—and security footage from the estate showing a figure in a baseball cap and face mask climbing over the wall into the neighborhood around the time of the murders.

The face was impossible to make out.

The pressure was immense.

The bureau immediately formed a special task force, and I was appointed its leader.

For days on end, we investigated the social connections, business dealings, and enemies of the deceased: construction-materials tycoon Zhang Baolin and his family. We found almost nothing.

Zhang Baolin had made his fortune in construction materials. He was a private man, and no one had heard of him having any deep-seated grudges.

The case hit a dead end.

Just as the entire team was tearing its hair out, on the morning of the fifth day after the murders, a piece of news struck us like a bolt from the blue.

“Captain Li! Someone’s here to turn himself in! He says he killed them!”

Xiao Liu from logistics rushed into the office, panting.

The interrogation room’s harsh white lights fell across the face of the man sitting opposite me.

His name was Wang Cheng. He was about thirty, dressed plainly, even a little shabbily. He had the sort of face that would disappear in a crowd.

But his expression was terrifyingly calm.

There wasn’t a trace of panic in his eyes. If anything, there was a strange… interest.

“Name.”

“Wang Cheng.”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“I do.”

He raised his head and met my gaze. A faint smile seemed to hover at the corner of his mouth.

“I did it. The Zhang family at Splendid Garden Estates.”

I stared at him, trying to find a crack in that ordinary face.

“Tell me everything.”

For the next two hours, Wang Cheng’s confession flowed so smoothly it sent chills down my spine.

He described the crime in minute detail.

He explained how he had surveyed the scene in advance, chosen a rainy night to climb the wall into the estate, and used a homemade tool to pry open the latch on a rear window.

That detail matched the forensic examination exactly. We had indeed found tiny pry marks on the rear window’s lock, but we had never released that information.

He said he had first slipped upstairs, struck Zhang Baolin on the head with a heavy object, and then stabbed the female homeowner with a kitchen knife when she came out to investigate the noise.

Finally, he turned to the two children…

He told us everything in excruciating detail: the weapons—a length of iron pipe and a single-edged dagger—the motions he made while committing the crime, and even the victims’ reactions and their pleas before they died.

Some details could only have been known by the killer.

For instance, when the female homeowner fell, she knocked over the vase at the corner of the stairs. It held artificial plastic flowers.

Or the fact that after killing the boy, he had casually picked up a chocolate bar from the table and eaten it.

“Where are the weapons?” I asked, my heart heavy in my chest.

“I threw the iron pipe into the landscaped river behind the estate, near the third bridge pier. The dagger… I hid it at the abandoned highway toll station on the road into the city, in a crack in the second concrete pillar on the right.”

Wang Cheng’s voice was as calm as if he were telling someone else’s story.

I immediately sent officers to search where he had indicated.

The results shocked everyone.

Both the iron pipe and the dagger were found.

A preliminary test showed that the blood on the dagger matched the victims’ DNA.

The chain of evidence seemed airtight.

The entire task force was energized. The gloom that had hung over us for days lifted immediately.

We had caught the killer so quickly, and he had turned himself in and confessed everything. It felt like a gift.

Yet I felt more uneasy than ever.

It had all gone too smoothly.

Too smoothly to be real.

Wang Cheng was far too calm for someone who had just committed such a massacre.

The way he looked at me, as though he could see through everything, made my spine turn cold.

“Search his residence immediately. Collect his DNA and compare it with the biological samples from the scene!” I ordered, forcing down my suspicions.

This was the crucial step.

If his DNA matched, we could convict him even without a confession.

The search results came back quickly. Wang Cheng’s rented room was shabby and bare, but the officers found a jacket with a few bloodstains on it. The blood type matched the victims’.

They also found newspaper articles and documents about Splendid Garden Estates and Zhang Baolin’s family, suggesting that he had planned the crime in advance.

Everything seemed to point to Wang Cheng as the real killer.

Then, three days later, a phone call from the forensic center exploded in my ear like a bomb.

“Captain Li…”

Old Zhao’s voice was more serious than I had ever heard it. He even sounded confused.

“We have Wang Cheng’s DNA results… The biological samples from the scene—including skin cells on the doorknob, skin beneath the victims’ fingernails, and… semen… none of them match Wang Cheng’s DNA.”

“What?!”

I could hardly believe what I’d heard.

“Are you sure? What about the fingerprints on the dagger?”

“The dagger had been wiped very carefully. We couldn’t recover clear fingerprints. The blood on the jacket was dripped onto it; it wasn’t spatter from a crime. There was very little of it, as if it had been added afterward. Most importantly…”

Old Zhao paused.

“The biological traces at the key locations belong to someone else. Someone… whose DNA isn’t in the database.”

I held the phone and couldn’t speak for a long time.

Cold sweat ran down my back.

Wang Cheng knew the entire crime in detail. He had pointed us to the weapons that only the killer could know about. He even had clothes stained with the victims’ blood…

And yet his DNA wasn’t at the scene?

How was that possible?!