Chapter 4

Before Little Yu could be given a hasty burial, police took her body down the mountains to the bureau.

They also assigned officers to keep searching for Zhou Xi.

Naturally, everyone learned I had called the police. For my safety, from then on I had to stay with them.

The search for Zhou Xi was agonizingly difficult.

The terrain was complex. There were no surveillance cameras in town. Without a single lead, it was like searching for a needle in the sea.

On the afternoon of August 9, I saw Xia Cheng's furtive figure again. He was moving quickly, as though hurrying somewhere.

My anger peaked. I ran straight toward him.

Two officers followed.

Leaving the main party, we pursued him up a mountain.

Dense trees surrounded us, barely penetrated by the dark-red sunset. As night approached, pursuit grew harder.

In an instant, the figure ahead vanished.

We lost him and slowed, feeling our way along possible routes.

For more than an hour, we circled the mountain without direction. It was almost completely dark.

Then a faint sound came from nearby. Following it, I heard crying.

Zhou Xi.

She was alive, burning with fever. She too bore signs of beatings and abuse.

Crying in a nightmare, she kept muttering the same word. Her speech was too unclear for me to understand.

Xia Cheng had vanished again. Perhaps he had noticed us following and had not had time to act.

Zhou Xi, the survivor, became our most important witness.

11

After rescuing her, the officers immediately asked whom I had been chasing.

I hesitated, then named Xia Cheng.

It felt like making one of life's great decisions. I had severed every remaining feeling for him.

I showed his photograph. A resident cried out, “That's him! The last time I saw Little Yu, she was with that man!”

Motive, opportunity, and a witness. Though the evidence remained incomplete, Xia Cheng could essentially be identified as a suspect.

Police sealed off the town and searched for suspicious people. After two days, they found nothing.

“Sealed off” was easier said than done in that terrain. He had already left.

They took Zhou Xi back to the bureau. I went down the mountains with them and left the town.

12

At this point, I believed I knew the truth.

We only needed Zhou Xi to recover and Little Yu's autopsy to be completed. With the evidentiary chain filled in, an arrest could follow.

But I had forgotten one crucial detail: Little Yu's lower body was still missing.

Most of what happened next was told to me by Wu Hui after the case ended.

Once they left town, police formally opened an investigation.

First, Little Yu.

She had died of suffocation, then been cut in half after death. Why had the killer done that? Why were the upper and lower halves in different places? Both were suspicious.

Heavy rain had fallen the night she died. Another day passed before her body was found. It had been washed so clean that almost no useful hair, skin, bodily fluids, or other traces of the suspect remained.

The cut had been made with the kind of woodcutting axe common locally. The weapon was missing too.

A team was sent back to Yanyun to search for the rest of her body and the axe.

For now, her case offered no direct evidence.

Then there was Zhou Xi.

She had been taken immediately to a children's rehabilitation center. As the survivor, she should have been able to provide crucial testimony.

But she was only eight. The abuse had left her profoundly traumatized, almost out of her mind. She repeated only an incomprehensible phrase.

“Lady Guanyin… Lady Guanyin…”

There were no temples in Yanyun, nor any worship of Guanyin. Her parents did not understand either.

Recovery would take time. The doctors could make no promises. They could not rush her, still less worsen her condition by pushing her for the sake of the case.

So she too offered no direct evidence for the moment.

Finally, Xia Cheng, the chief suspect.

A month earlier, he had been accused of abusing the two girls. His entire former criminal investigation team could attest to it. He had tacitly admitted it and ended his police career. A month later, one girl was dead and the other injured. He had been in Yanyun at the relevant time, behaving suspiciously, with no alibi.

Police from both cities coordinated the investigation. His former team joined the case.

The day after he fled home, Wu Hui arrived with officers.

His mother was stunned at first. Then she fought to stop them, weeping and refusing to let them take him.

Wu Hui explained that he was being summoned to assist with inquiries. Everyone understood that an arrest was only a matter of time.

They took their former colleague away.

13

Police hoped his account would lead them to Little Yu's missing lower body and the weapon, completing the chain of evidence.

But throughout questioning, he said nothing, as though he knew they lacked proof.

As a former criminal investigator, he understood interrogation methods. Now, as a suspect, he was not easily broken.

He neither cooperated nor defended himself. Whatever happened, he sat with his head bowed in silence.

He was even “stubborn” enough to refuse food and drink, as though in silent resistance.

Two days passed. He still would not eat. His body weakened rapidly. His mental state worsened too, with symptoms of schizophrenia.

Police had to take him to hospital.

A crowd was already gathered outside the bureau gates.

“Is that the pervert policeman from television?”

“Looks human. Acts like an animal!”

“Disgusting! Execute him!”

In the uproar, people picked up stones and pulled off shoes to throw.

Crowds were so easily inflamed. No one knew who had leaked the story, but outrage spread.

Xia Cheng had been known from television. Now the story caused a sensation, with newspapers rushing to cover it.

An outstanding police student with a limitless future, suddenly exposed as a pedophile, even a sadistic murderer, and reduced to a prisoner—the contrast stunned everyone.

The internet was less widespread in 2008. But at least in our city, his story was everywhere.

Listening to those vile curses, I suddenly felt a strange disconnection.

Things had moved so quickly in Yanyun. Before I could think, I had been forced to absorb too much.

Now the case belonged to the police. Cut off from its progress, I gradually calmed down and had time to think.

Two years together was neither a lifetime nor a moment. In my memories, had Xia Cheng truly been so terrible?

I thought I had stopped loving him. Thought I could calmly watch him punished.

Yet these past days, I kept dreaming of our time together.

The library, the training ground, our conversations about life and ideals, crime and human rights. He had been so upright, intelligent, and open.

How skilled at concealment would someone have to be to reveal no flaw over all those years?

Perhaps the last two months were not as simple as they seemed.

But where was the problem?

I had a premonition. Unless I found the truth soon, it would be too late.

14

His mother hired an experienced lawyer with a strong record of winning cases.

The police investigation had almost stalled.

Little Yu's lower body remained missing. Zhou Xi had not recovered.

Xia Cheng spent two days in hospital, sustained entirely by intravenous fluids. He still refused to eat or drink, still spoke not a word.

If one did not erupt in silence, one perished in it.

Every day, I stood beneath the inpatient building and looked up at a ninth-floor window.

Sometimes he stood there. Too far away to read his face, he seemed to be looking at me too.

Had the distance between us truly become so great?

On the evening of August 14, I went again.

As usual, several friends from police college were gathered on the ground floor. Unable to visit him upstairs, they stayed below with his mother.

She had aged terribly in a month. Looking at her, I felt something was missing.

Her spirit?

No. Nothing so abstract.

Something concrete.

An odd feeling rose in me. I had overlooked something.

She told everyone, “Xia Cheng is a good boy. The best boy in the world…”

I watched her in silence, replaying everything.

The last time I saw her, she bought me a farewell meal and said her son was ruined. She did not want him to waste my future.

Now she called him the best boy in the world.

Almost the same expression. Two utterly opposite judgments.

A month apart, the images overlapped.

I seemed to know what she was missing.

In the next instant, blood rushed to my head. Countless disordered images flooded my mind.

Something flashed through it. I could barely think.

Then a terrified scream rose outside the building.

“Someone jumped! Someone jumped!”

15

A cordon went up. The crowd surged. The long night erupted into chaos.

Beside the inpatient building, a rubbish bin had overturned. White medical waste littered the ground.

Xia Cheng's upper body was bare. His face lay buried in the waste, half smeared with filth and urine.

Blood spread from the back of his head. He was dead.

His mother broke past those trying to stop her and threw herself over his body, sobbing.

I looked once, stepped back, then back again.

“Why… Xia Cheng… How did it come to this…”

Tears fell as I murmured.

I had been wrong from the beginning.

…

He had fallen from the ninth-floor men's toilet.

It happened during the change of police guard. At about 9:25 p.m., he entered alone. At about 9:35, he fell from the window.

The doctor said he had been calm and lucid that day.

The toilet was in disarray, showing many signs of a struggle. His blue-and-white hospital clothes lay on the floor, stained yellow and gray.

Drag marks surrounded them, as though the clothes had been used to wipe away footprints.

The apparent struggle clearly suggested a second person.

His body was taken to the bureau that night for autopsy.

Early on August 15, police obtained hospital surveillance footage and began checking for suspects.

But around 9:30 the previous night, no one other than Xia Cheng had entered or left the men's toilet.

Reviewing the previous day found no one who had remained hidden there either.

The scene was on the ninth floor of a sheer-sided building. No one could have entered from outside.

So no one had the opportunity. There was no suspect.

Or, to put it another way, there was no killer at all.

From beginning to end, there was only Xia Cheng—the most suspicious person of all.