Chapter 1

This was not an especially horrifying case, but it was a very strange one.

A man died in a late-night road accident, his body charred and his bones made brittle by the fire. The scene examination suggested that it was probably an accidental crash.

But he had a life insurance policy worth millions of yuan.

Suddenly, "accident" no longer seemed such a simple word.

What we uncovered as the investigation continued shook my view of the world.

Of all the families I have encountered, his may be the one that left me with the most complicated feelings.

One day in late autumn, 2016, a burned-out light truck was found in a ravine beside a village road on the outskirts of our county.

A villager gathering firewood called the police shortly after six in the morning.

That put the crash sometime the previous night.

The truck had plunged into the ravine, caught fire, and eventually burned itself out.

There was, of course, a body inside.

Captain Xu and I hurried to the scene and immediately secured everything that remained.

The remains of the vehicle.

And the remains of a human being.

The "person" in the driver's seat scarcely resembled one anymore. The body looked more like a monkey curled into a ball.

It had been burned to charcoal. The fire must have been ferocious.

There were no documents or belongings in the truck that could establish the body's identity. I had it taken back for the forensic team.

Traffic officers were there too.

While checking the registered owner, we examined the scene together.

Fragments of a beer bottle remained inside. The bottle material was silicon dioxide, commonly known as quartz sand, with a melting point as high as 1,700 degrees Celsius. That explained why they had survived the fire.

Perhaps he had been driving drunk.

The skid marks suggested the driver had made an emergency evasive maneuver. He might have swerved too sharply and gone into the ravine.

What had he been avoiding?

We couldn't say yet.

But alcohol could account for it. Drunk drivers didn't necessarily behave rationally.

As for the subsequent fire, a problem with the fuel tank might have caused the petrol to ignite.

That still needed clarification, but the manufacturer could deal with it.

The number plate quickly gave us the name of the dead man.

Zhang Mingxiang.

Thirty-one, a local villager. He mainly hauled goods, taking odd jobs in town when he had time.

His only family was his wife, Xu Xiaofeng, whom he had married in 2014.

We called her to the mortuary in the judicial building.

She took one look inside and began sobbing.

She recognized the iron belt buckle on the charred body as Zhang Mingxiang's.

The forensic examiner raised no objection.

The body had been burned too severely for identification.

The human body was fragile. A fire at around 800 degrees Celsius could destroy DNA beyond extraction.

Under normal temperature and pressure conditions, burning petrol produced a flame of roughly 800 to 1,000 degrees.

Iron, meanwhile, melted at 1,538 degrees.

So it was perfectly plausible for the man to be charred while the metal survived.

Xu Xiaofeng also confirmed that he had delivered a load out of town that day.

He had set off from a neighboring city after dinner.

He'd even sent her a WeChat message saying he would probably be late. She should go to sleep rather than wait up.

No one had expected that a single night would separate them forever.

The traffic officers believed he had taken a shortcut along the unlit village road to save time, then crashed because he was speeding.

Once we obtained the manufacturer's report confirming the cause of the fire, we could close the case.

Everything proceeded routinely, as though it were a simple accident.

Then one complication followed another.

First, the manufacturer pointed out that no matter how badly their truck was damaged in a collision, a fire that intense was highly unlikely.

It was an extremely common light truck, one of the country's best-selling models.

It had specific fire-prevention features. The manufacturer wouldn't accept that the entire incident should be blamed on the vehicle's quality.

They proposed taking the wreckage back to the factory for examination with an independent third party.

We could appoint the third party ourselves.

Captain Xu naturally agreed.

Then an insurance claims manager named Chen came to see him.

Zhang Mingxiang had a life insurance policy with a payout of approximately two million yuan.

The reason Manager Chen had taken an interest was rather suspicious.

The day before, the company's customer service department had received a call.

Someone had made very detailed inquiries about the claims procedure for that type of policy.

When Chen learned of it, he pulled up every customer who held one and called them individually.

Only Zhang Mingxiang couldn't be reached.

Chen made inquiries and learned about the crash.

Of course, he had his own interests to protect.

The best claims officer, after all, was one who didn't have to pay a claim.

Provided he could prove insurance fraud.

After seeing him out, Captain Xu asked me, "Wasn't Xu Xiaofeng's identification of the body a little too straightforward?"

"Straightforward? She identified him from a belt buckle. It was almost cursory."

I was beginning to feel something was wrong too.

On the principle that the person who stood to gain the most was the most likely suspect, every question pointed toward Xu Xiaofeng.

"Look into her. I'll work with the insurer and the phone company to find out who made that call."

"Right."

I immediately asked colleagues at the station for her household registration records.

She and Zhang Mingxiang had been married only two years.

He had been thirty at the time, already considered an aging bachelor in the village.

He hadn't come from a well-off family either.

His parents had died of illness early on. The three brothers had fallen out over land and inheritance, and he had ended up with very little.

Which raised the first question.

Why had Xu Xiaofeng married him?

Then I found something stranger.

They had had a child after marrying.

A year earlier, the seven-month-old baby had died unexpectedly.

The file on that accidental death left me incredulous.

The boy's name was Zhang Lijun.

He had only just begun learning to walk. In his baby walker, he had wandered out of the house onto the grain-drying yard.

At that moment, Zhang Mingxiang drove home and prepared to park.

He pressed the accelerator by mistake. The light truck shot straight at Zhang Lijun.

The child and his walker were shoved against the outside wall.

There was a tremendous impact. Trapped between truck and wall, the little body burst like a watermelon dropped on the ground. Blood and flesh covered the scene.

That alone wasn't what astonished me.

What followed was truly extraordinary.

Zhang Mingxiang hired a lawyer and sued his own motor insurer.

The insurer had refused compensation because Zhang Lijun was a member of the driver's family.

After several months of litigation, the court held that the refusal had no factual or legal basis.

The principal cause of the damage was the driver's improper operation of the vehicle. Inadequate supervision was only a secondary fault. In light of the circumstances, the court assigned 80 percent of liability to the vehicle's side.

The final judgment ordered the insurer to pay the plaintiff 110,000 yuan within the compulsory liability cover, plus 80 percent of one million yuan under the voluntary third-party liability policy.

In other words, after running over his own son, Zhang Mingxiang not only faced no criminal liability, but received 1.11 million yuan in insurance money.

Xu Xiaofeng's failure to supervise the child had, of course, inadvertently helped bring that about.

Had I not seen it recorded in an actual case file, I would have found it almost impossible to believe.

It was astonishing.