Chapter 1

The first murder case I handled involving coercive dating manipulation was in 2010.

A young woman from a village was deceived, controlled and degraded by her supposedly worldly boyfriend from the city. In the end, she lost her sanity and died by suicide.

Because she had taken her own life, the men who had abused her could not be held criminally responsible.

But that did not mean…

they would escape retribution.

The victim was Chen Linlin. She was only twenty when she died.

She had been one of the children left behind in the countryside. Her parents divorced, then both remarried. Neither wanted to raise her.

After graduating from vocational school, she went to work at a garment factory on the outskirts of the city. That was where she met her boyfriend, Zhang Bin.

He was twenty-six and had studied applied psychology at university. Four years after graduating, he was still unemployed. His family ran a business and had some money.

It was this terrifying animal who had pushed her, step by step, into the abyss.

Chen Linlin took her own life by swallowing pills, three days after the death of the grandmother she had depended on all her life.

The final straw was Zhang Bin breaking up with her.

Initially, the matter had not been treated as a criminal case, so it had not come to our Criminal Investigation Unit.

But a fellow officer found some deeply disturbing evidence: the chat history between Zhang Bin and Chen Linlin.

Some of it was almost unbearable to read.

They had communicated mainly through QQ. The records were exceptionally complete, documenting how a young woman had gradually been brainwashed and turned into a puppet.

At first, Zhang Bin used declarations of love and romantic attention to make her fall head over heels. On the surface, it looked like any ordinary relationship.

But before long, he went to work.

He began driving a wedge between Chen Linlin and all her friends, gradually taking over every moment of her day.

At work, after her shift, even during her breaks, he insisted that she stay in touch with him on QQ.

The more constant the contact, the harder she found it to break away.

And Zhang Bin solemnly called it love.

“It’s because I love you so much. I worry about you.”

Once she accepted that explanation, it was difficult to see anything wrong.

Then he began making more unreasonable demands, going beyond simply having a sexual relationship.

He wanted her to join him in all sorts of places in search of a thrill.

Dormitories, rooftops, stairwells, even public squares and cars parked by the roadside late at night…

At first, Chen Linlin refused.

But Zhang Bin’s relentless pressure gradually wore down her ability to resist.

By then, she had scarcely any friends left.

No one else to lean on.

She came to believe that Zhang Bin was the only person she could depend on.

He also tried to take over her inner world completely.

For instance, he made her address him by an assortment of strange pet names. “Big brother,” “husband,” “dear husband”—and then increasingly excessive titles such as “lord of the house,” “my lord” and “master.”

From the outside, it looked absurd.

Yet the chat records showed that as Chen Linlin sank deeper into it, she saw nothing unusual at all.

Like the frog in slowly warming water, she had grown accustomed to the temperature.

By now, the balance between them was gone.

Zhang Bin escalated his attacks, almost destroying her sense of self.

His methods were despicable.

Chen Linlin had had a previous boyfriend, so she was no longer a virgin when she met Zhang Bin.

But he repeatedly insisted that before meeting her, he had never touched another woman.

Thinking about her past, he said, left a “scar” on his heart.

It could hardly have been a more obvious lie.

If it hurt him so much, why not leave?

But he did not.

Clearly, he only wanted to use it to make Chen Linlin feel guilty and break down the last of her defenses.

Already trapped, she took it terribly seriously, afraid that her past would make Zhang Bin despise and abandon her.

After repeatedly tormenting her over it, he made an even more shameless demand.

He wanted to watch Chen Linlin have sex with someone else.

If she let him see it, he could forgive her.

It was incomprehensible.

It had nothing whatsoever to do with love.

Naturally, Chen Linlin fiercely refused at first.

But Zhang Bin earnestly explained his reasoning.

“Because you gave your most shameful self to your ex, not to me. So I need to see you do something even more shameful. Let me see it just once, and I’ll feel we’re even.”

After many arguments, Chen Linlin actually gave in.

Zhang Bin rented a room and invited a close friend.

Once he had had his fun, his attitude toward Chen Linlin changed completely. He grew colder and colder.

She, meanwhile, became ever more anxious, even panicked, living in fear from day to day.

Her terror showed in every line of the chat records.

But fate has a way of striking the unfortunate again, making their misery worse.

The grandmother Chen Linlin had relied on all her life died in an accident.

The funeral lasted several days. She cried throughout them.

Zhang Bin never appeared.

Most of the messages in their chat were hers, sent whenever she could find a spare moment.

She told him how sad she was.

She told him she had seen her parents, but both had their own families now, their own children.

She said that now…

she really was a child nobody wanted.

She chose her words carefully, almost timidly.

All Zhang Bin offered in return were cold replies.

“Busy.”

“Talk later.”

“I’ll message you.”

After the funeral, Chen Linlin wanted to see him.

He refused and told her plainly that he wanted to break up.

For days afterward, she sent message after message. He never replied.

Even when she threatened to kill herself and sent messages saying she would do it, he ignored her.

By this point, Chen Linlin had clearly broken down. Her mental state was extremely poor.

And no one gave her the care she needed.

So…

she died.

Yet these messages alone were not enough to hold Zhang Bin responsible for her death.

He had not incited her to suicide or directly committed an unlawful act.

Even regarding the abuse he and his friend had inflicted on her, with Chen Linlin gone, we could not establish whether it had been against her will.

Our unit became involved because of another case.

A young man named Li Zhihui had been murdered.

It happened around three in the morning, in an alley outside an unlicensed bar.

Someone had smashed his skull with a steel pipe.

Blood and brain matter covered the ground.

The sheer violence of the beating led us to rule out robbery or a spontaneous fight.

We believed it was a deliberate killing with a specific target.

The location was secluded, with no surveillance cameras. We found no useful shoeprints, fingerprints or other evidence at the scene either.

We checked everyone who had been in the bar but found no suspect.

Then Zhang Bin came to us of his own accord and said he knew who the killer was.

Yes.

Li Zhihui was the friend who had joined him in abusing Chen Linlin.

If our assessment was correct, this was a revenge killing.

Someone was avenging her.

Zhang Bin had come to protect himself, because he too had received death threats.

He thought going to the police would keep him safe.

But he did not seem to have considered one thing.

He was the main culprit.

If the killer wanted revenge, why had they not targeted him first?

Zhao Jun and I met Zhang Bin for the first time in a reception room.

Having already read his messages with Chen Linlin, we had unconsciously pictured him as rigid and narrow-minded.

So the man we actually met surprised me.

He was handsome, soft-spoken and refined, with an almost scholarly air. Both his appearance and his manners were excellent.

What frightened me most was his extraordinary composure.

Facing two tall men like Zhao Jun and me, he showed no fear. He began recounting the matter calmly.

“Officers, I have two suspects in my friend Li Zhihui’s murder. The killer must be one of them. The first is Chen Yongkang, a university student. The second is Huang Yong, a factory worker. Here are their details.”

He handed us an A4 sheet he had prepared in advance.

He could hardly have come better equipped.

Zhao Jun took the paper, and I asked:

“Why do you think they did it?”

He explained earnestly.

“Because they’ve threatened to kill me before. Li Zhihui received threats too. Now he’s dead. Doesn’t that make them very strong suspects?”

Then he took out his phone and showed us screenshots of a chat.

The exchange was more than a month old, from about two weeks after Chen Linlin’s death.

It was full of furious abuse and threats.

“You’re an animal. You’ll die a horrible death!”