Chapter 2

I sat down opposite Wang Cheng again.

The air in the interrogation room seemed to have congealed.

I pushed the DNA report across the table.

“Explain this.”

My voice was dry.

Wang Cheng glanced at the report. He did not look surprised. If anything, his smile deepened.

“Officer, technology has come a long way. But sometimes, seeing isn’t believing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…”

He leaned forward a little and lowered his voice. Something flashed in those calm eyes, something that chilled me.

“I did go into that villa. And I did do those things. But have you ever stopped to wonder why my DNA wasn’t there?”

I watched him without interrupting.

“Because…”

He spoke slowly, each word like a sliver of ice driven into my ear.

“Before I went in, someone had already taken care of almost everything that needed ‘taking care of.’”

My head began to buzz.

“Taken care of? You mean…”

“I mean they may already have been dead when I arrived. Or… almost dead.”

Wang Cheng settled back in his chair, detached once more.

“I was just… following instructions. Completing a ‘procedure.’ Making the scene a little messier. Leaving the ‘evidence’ that needed to be left. That bloodstained jacket, for instance. And… putting the weapons where I was told to put them.”

Cold sweat soaked my back.

If he was telling the truth, what did that mean?

Someone else had committed the murders. Someone skilled enough to find a scapegoat and stage this whole performance of turning himself in.

Wang Cheng was an actor. A puppet pushed onto the stage.

“Who put you up to this? What were you trying to achieve?”

I fought down the turmoil inside me and demanded an answer.

Wang Cheng shook his head, a peculiar, almost pitying look on his face.

“Put me up to it? No one put me up to anything. What was I trying to achieve? I told you. I was just completing a ‘procedure.’ As for why…”

He pointed at his head.

“Have you people become so dependent on technology that you’ve forgotten to use this?”

“Are you playing games with us?”

Anger surged through me.

“I wouldn’t dare.”

Wang Cheng stopped smiling. His eyes grew unreadable.

“I’m only reminding you not to fixate on a small fry like me. Think about it. Who would need to make a family massacre look this convincing? Why would they need a ‘perfect’ killer like me to confess? Someone who knows the scene so well that everything could even have been arranged in advance?”

He paused, then dropped something worse.

“And another thing… have you checked? Those four bodies in the morgue… are they really the Zhang family?”

4

The question hit me like lightning.

Were the victims’ identities in doubt?

After the massacre, we had all assumed the dead were Zhang Baolin, his wife, and their children. Our initial findings had seemed to support it: the villa itself, the victims’ clothes and personal effects, and preliminary identifications by the estate’s security guards and a few acquaintances. Then Wang Cheng had “confessed.” We had concentrated on reconstructing the crime and identifying the killer, overlooking the most basic requirement of all: establishing exactly who had died.

The Zhang family kept to themselves, and their immediate relatives lived elsewhere. We had notified them after the murders, but they were still on their way. No formal DNA kinship testing had been carried out. Identification by distant relatives, based only on photographs of disfigured bodies and the possessions found with them, was hardly conclusive.

Wang Cheng’s words had turned a key, opening a door onto something darker.

If the dead were not Zhang Baolin’s family, who were they? Why had they died in his villa? Where was the real family? Alive or dead? If they were alive, this entire massacre had been staged. To what end? To fake their deaths and disappear? To collect a vast insurance payout? Or to hide something more terrible?

And what part did Wang Cheng play in this enormous conspiracy? Not only was he not the real killer; he might be more than a scapegoat. He had surrendered voluntarily, given a chillingly convincing confession, and led us to the weapons. Then he had used the DNA mismatch and that devastating question to send the investigation in an entirely different direction. He seemed at once an observer on the sidelines and a chess player who had arranged every move.

I issued orders at once.

First, the DNA mismatch and Wang Cheng’s suspicions were to remain strictly confidential. Only the core task force was to know. We could not risk a leak alerting whoever was behind this.

Second, we were to contact the parents of both Zhang Baolin and his wife immediately and arrange urgent DNA kinship tests to establish the victims’ identities.

Third, we would investigate Zhang Baolin’s company again: its finances, recent activities, and connections. Particular attention was to be paid to substantial debts, a business crisis, or any secret he could not afford to have exposed.

Fourth, we needed a thorough investigation into Wang Cheng’s background—his contacts, finances, and recent movements. He could not be some anonymous pawn.

The investigation had changed direction completely. The mood in the task force grew grimmer. We all understood that we might have stumbled onto a conspiracy far beyond anything we had imagined.

The technical team reviewed all surveillance footage from the estate and the surrounding area, looking for suspicious cargo, vehicles, or people entering and leaving around the time of the crime. Another team quietly examined the Zhang family’s communications, bank transactions, and travel records.

The investigation into Wang Cheng soon produced results.

He had no steady job. In his youth, he had studied acting and worked as an extra before drifting into an aimless life. He had convictions for petty theft, but no serious criminal record. He was short of money. A month before the murders, 50,000 yuan had suddenly appeared in his bank account. The payment came through an online account registered under a false identity and could not be traced. Further investigation showed that he had recently been using a foreign encrypted messaging app, but we could not decipher the messages.

Then came the most important result of all: the DNA kinship tests.

Old Zhao walked into my office holding the report. His hands were shaking.

“Captain Li… the results… the results…” He swallowed, his face bloodless. “We compared them with blood samples from Zhang Baolin’s parents. It’s confirmed. The four bodies in the morgue… none of them are related to his parents.”

I had tried to prepare myself, but hearing it confirmed still made the room seem to spin.

The dead really were not Zhang Baolin’s family.

Then who were these four people? Why had they been killed? Had the Zhang family vanished? Or had they been murdered and their bodies destroyed, with substitutes brought in to make it appear that they had died in the villa?

5

The case had changed completely. What had looked like a brutal family massacre was now an elaborate, chilling conspiracy built on substituted identities.

Wang Cheng remained our best chance of a breakthrough. He knew far more than he had told us.

For our third interrogation, I brought no files. I simply sat across from him and watched him in silence for a long time.

“We’ve established that the victims aren’t Zhang Baolin’s family,” I said, coming straight to the point.

He barely reacted.

“Oh.”

“Can you tell me who you really are now? What part are you playing in all this?”

My voice was perfectly calm.

He smiled. There was less mockery in it this time, and something more complicated.

“Me? Someone who was always meant to take the blame. Or, more accurately… someone who wasn’t willing to take it for nothing.”

Then he told me an even stranger story.

About two months earlier, he had accepted a “private job” through a secret online channel. The pay was high, but the requirements were peculiar. He was to imitate a particular man—they had shown him photographs and videos of Zhang Baolin—and learn his speech and mannerisms. At a specified time, he would enter Villa 7 at Splendid Garden Estates and perform a series of “preset actions.” These included striking dummies with special tools, leaving traces, placing weapons, and then leaving. Once he had finished, they would pay the balance and arrange for him to go abroad. They insisted it was only a “prank” or “some sort of test.” No real person would be harmed.

“I needed the money,” Wang Cheng said. “It was strange, but I thought, if nobody was getting hurt, it was just another acting job. That night, I followed their instructions and slipped into the villa. It was dark inside. I could see human shapes on the floor, and there was… a smell of blood. I was terrified, but they kept hurrying me through the earpiece. They said these were expensive special-effects dummies and fake blood. I just had to stick to the plan. I… I don’t know what came over me. I did it. I hit the ‘man of the house’ with the pipe. I stabbed the ‘wife’ and the ‘child’… The way it felt when I hit them… thinking about it now, it wasn’t like hitting a dummy at all…”

Pain and fear crossed his face. They did not look feigned.

“Afterward, I left and disposed of the weapons as instructed. Only later did I find out they were real people. I’d become the killer in a family massacre. I was so scared I couldn’t think. I wanted to run, but they threatened my real family if I didn’t do as I was told and ‘turn myself in.’ They gave me a detailed script and made me memorize everything, including things only the killer would know. They said it was the only way I’d stay alive. They might even get me out afterward.”

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I only ever had one contact. Everything went through the encrypted app, and the voice was altered. But I got the feeling… they had real power. They seemed to know police procedures inside out. That’s why they set up the DNA problem. I think the plan was for me to ‘confess,’ but for the mismatch to leave the case unresolved. The contradictory evidence might make a conviction impossible, or I’d get the benefit of the doubt. They’d have established that the Zhang family had been wiped out, without actually keeping me—the ‘killer’—in prison for life and risking complications. They didn’t expect… that I’d make you question who the dead people were.”

His account filled in one piece of the puzzle, only to expose a larger mystery. Why had whoever was behind this gone to such lengths? Simply to make the Zhang family “dead” to the world so they could live on under new names? The cost and risk seemed far too great.

Meanwhile, the deeper investigation into Zhang Baolin’s family produced a major breakthrough. After sifting through vast quantities of data, the technical team discovered that his company had long been drowning in debt. He was also suspected of involvement in an enormous illegal cross-border fundraising scheme that was on the verge of exposure.

Just a week before the murders, the waiting period on a substantial life insurance policy in his wife’s name had expired. The policy was now in force. Zhang Baolin was the beneficiary.

We also learned that, for the past six months, he had been moving assets abroad through a complicated network of underground channels.

Every clue pointed to the same conclusion.

Zhang Baolin had staged his family’s massacre to collect a huge insurance payout, escape with the money, and evade the law.

The four victims were very likely “substitutes” obtained through illegal channels. They might have been people on society’s margins, with no family and no one to ask questions if they disappeared.

6

The truth was chilling. For money, Zhang Baolin had devised a plan so utterly ruthless that four innocent lives became the means of faking his family’s death and escaping.

Two questions remained. Where was his family now? And who were the four people who had died?

We changed our strategy. We issued nationwide—and even international—wanted notices for Zhang Baolin and his wife. At the same time, we entered the victims’ DNA profiles into the national missing-persons database and circulated requests for assistance in identifying unknown bodies matching their descriptions.

We also placed Wang Cheng under protection and continued questioning him for leads. He could not identify the people behind the operation, but he gave us details about their communication channels and payment methods. Our cybercrime officers followed those threads, struggling to trace a shadow buried deep online.

Days passed. The pressure mounted. Our superiors wanted the case solved quickly and the public outcry quieted. But until we caught Zhang Baolin, the real mastermind, and secured justice for those four innocent victims, I knew the case was not over.

Just when we seemed to have run out of options, we caught a break.

After painstaking work, the cybercrime team narrowed down the IP address behind the encrypted communications with Wang Cheng to a particular area in a Southeast Asian country.

Almost simultaneously, Interpol notified us of a suspicious transfer from an offshore account linked to Zhang Baolin to a personal account in that country.

We had our target.

There was a strong chance Zhang Baolin was hiding there.

After urgent coordination and careful planning, a cross-border operation was quietly set in motion. As head of the task force, I went with the arrest team.

With help from the local police, we soon located the hideout: an isolated villa in a coastal resort city.

We moved in at dawn.

When we broke through the door, Zhang Baolin was having breakfast with his wife and children. At the sight of the armed officers, the entire family froze. Disbelief and despair filled their faces.

Zhang Baolin offered no resistance.

As we put him in handcuffs, he muttered, “Impossible… How could you find us so quickly…”

On the flight back under escort, confronted with overwhelming evidence, he finally broke and confessed to everything.

Our suspicions had been right.

With the illegal fundraising scheme about to be exposed, he had seen no way out and planned to fake his death.

Through an underground broker, he had found four homeless people or undocumented immigrants whose builds resembled those of his family. He lured them to the villa with promises of work and accommodation, then murdered them and arranged the scene to look like his own family had been massacred.

Afterward, using false passports prepared in advance, he fled abroad with his family and the assets he had already transferred.

Wang Cheng had been hired to make the “family massacre” more convincing and send the police down the wrong path.

Zhang Baolin had planned around the DNA discrepancy. He believed it would bring the investigation to a standstill, until the case dragged on and was eventually forgotten.

Once things had quieted down, he even intended to have plastic surgery and enjoy a comfortable life abroad under a new identity.

But he had underestimated modern investigative techniques. More than that, he had underestimated our determination to pursue the truth.

And he had never imagined that the “actor” he had hired, frightened and unwilling to take the blame, would turn on him at the last moment. One crucial question from Wang Cheng had exposed his supposedly perfect plan.

The four victims were eventually identified. All had led difficult lives and had few social ties. At last, justice was done for them.

Wang Cheng had participated in criminal acts, but the court took into account that he had been coerced and deceived, along with his substantial contribution to solving the case. He received a lighter sentence.

The case was finally solved.

At the press conference, camera flashes fired without pause as I presented the task force’s findings. Gasps and murmurs rippled through the audience.

Back in the office, I sank wearily into my chair.

Beyond the window lay the same familiar city at night. But I knew something had changed.

In ten years of police work, no case had left a deeper mark on me than this one, with its extraordinary twists and cold-blooded malice.

It had reminded me that evil could wear any disguise, and that the depths of human nature would always exceed our imagination.

Finding the truth took more than technology and logic. It took eyes that could see past appearances, and the most basic respect for human life.

I lifted my cold coffee and took a sip. Bitterness spread across my tongue.

On my desk, the Zhang Baolin case file was ready to be archived.

But my thoughts about human evil… had only just begun.

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