Chapter 5

Suicide out of fear of punishment would have made sense.

But why go to such lengths to make it look like murder?

The forensic examiners found the answer.

16

They discovered dense red marks across Xia Cheng's upper abdomen, as though it had been squeezed.

Finding something abnormal on palpation, they decided to dissect.

Inside his abdomen, they found a plastic bag. This indigestible object was lodged between his stomach and duodenum. It must have caused excruciating pain while he was alive.

He had not refused food out of “stubbornness.” Days earlier, he had swallowed the bag. The pain made eating impossible.

Xia Cheng had killed himself.

He had been my senior in the same course, an outstanding criminal investigation student.

He knew how to stage a murder scene.

Signs of a struggle could be fabricated. Injuries could come from blunt impacts. He had even lain on the toilet floor to smear urine on his face.

These signs of an “unnatural death” did not need to be perfect. They only had to mislead the officers examining the scene.

He needed to die. But if they identified suicide immediately, his body would go straight to the funeral home. That was not what he wanted.

He wanted a suspicious death, a body taken back for examination, and forensic examiners to discover the secret hidden in his stomach.

While alive, he had not simply chosen silence.

He had something to say.

But only after death.

17

It was all too late. Yet things were beginning to make sense.

I took a photograph of Xia Cheng's mother to the children's rehabilitation center and showed Zhou Xi.

As I expected, she immediately panicked and screamed.

I felt deeply guilty for distressing her. But it was the quickest way to confirm it.

On the night of August 15, there was a breakthrough in Yanyun too.

Liu Qi, the primary-school principal, went out at midnight with several men carrying spades. They began digging in a valley. Such a reckless, conspicuous act could hardly escape the investigation team's notice.

Xia Cheng's death was like a crucial gear set in motion. Everything that had stalled began moving.

As the investigation continued, a tangled, heartbreaking story emerged.

18

I had been right about one thing.

The Yanyun case did involve child trafficking.

The child beneath the tree and Little Yu's baby brother had both been abducted.

There were others in places I had never seen.

As though there were two Yanyun Primary Schools: one in the light, one in darkness.

Let us go back to the beginning.

Where might life lead a woman who had spent years selling children?

In the winter of 1985, Xia Rongying received a baby boy. She intended to sell him. Then her conscience stirred, and she felt pity.

She liked the child, adopted him, and named him Xia Cheng.

For his sake, she resolved to turn away from crime and find honest work. After several jobs, she entered a family-planning agency. Life gradually settled.

But that stability did not last.

The work was secure. The pay was low. Giving her son a better life and education required more money.

Her old trade was the quickest way.

In 1992, Xia Rongying returned to it. With Liu Qi, she established a secret transit point for abducted children in remote Yanyun. Residents benefited from this criminal industry too and kept its secret together.

She made a fortune selling children. With bloodstained hands, she raised an innocent child.

Under his mother's protection, he grew up comfortably, free of worry.

Upright by nature, devoted to justice, he entered police college with excellent marks.

Optimistic and principled, he volunteered at orphanages and taught in mountain schools. Those experiences gave him a deep hatred of child abandonment and trafficking.

On July 5, 2008, he followed a trafficker to Yanyun.

There, in that remote place, mother and son unexpectedly met.

Xia Rongying had not opposed his becoming a policeman. She even thought a son on the inside might prove useful.

She had intended to tell him everything at the right time.

Since they had met, she might as well tell him now.

But the upright young officer could not accept it.

His world collapsed.

He had always pursued justice. Now he discovered his own life had been built on money from trafficking children.

On July 9, 2008, he saw his mother kill someone and dispose of the body.

A five-year-old boy had escaped the transit point and broken his leg. He could no longer be sold. Furious, Xia Rongying broke his neck and buried him there.

Seven-year-old Zhao Yu saw it too.

Xia Cheng could not bear it. He urged his mother to surrender.

She called him ungrateful. Then, through Liu Qi, she forced two local children to accuse him of molestation, using the charge to threaten him.

He offered no defense. He resigned.

Not because he could not bear the disgrace, but because he had failed to report his mother and no longer deserved to be a policeman.

He broke with me decisively.

Then began a prolonged struggle between him and his mother.

I had misunderstood so much.

I thought she was giving him medicine for a mental illness. In fact, she gave him antipsychotic drugs every day to control his mind.

I thought she had arranged his job at her agency. In fact, he had gone there to watch her.

I knew none of this.

Then I went to Yanyun.

…

On my first night, Liu Qi meant to drug me and sell me as a wife.

But I did not drink the water.

Once he learned what I was trying to do, he told Xia Rongying.

Xia Cheng overheard and came to Yanyun at once.

That night, he appeared in my room to protect me.

I drove him out.

He stood outside my door all night.

…

Two crucial questions remained.

1. Why had Little Yu been cut in half?

Because her lower body contained evidence incriminating Xia Cheng.

Xia Rongying had previously collected and preserved her son's semen, then used it to frame him.

If he reported her, she would produce the evidence.

If he remained silent, the body would never be found.

2. What was in the plastic bag in his stomach?

His mother's Guanyin earrings.

He swallowed them to keep police from finding the clue to his mother.

At the same time, he ensured an autopsy would be necessary—and the truth would emerge.

He did not speak while alive.

He left the truth to speak after his death.

19

In the interrogation room, Xia Rongying wept.

“He was disappointed in me… He gave up on me…”

She told them, “When I first saw him, I thought a god had sent me that child… I wanted to be good, but I couldn't. I raised him to be the best person, then destroyed him with my own hands…”

She confessed.

Years later, I read Xia Cheng's notes.

He had written about Akutagawa's story, “The Spider's Thread.”

The spider's thread was a good thought.

Fragile, yet capable of saving a person.

But so easily broken.

Do not cut that thread.

20

This was the case I could never forget.

It was also the story of the man I loved: Xia Cheng.

I once thought I needed only the truth.

But once I knew it, I could not forget him.

I had regretted going to Yanyun.

Yet what I regretted most was driving him from my room that Qixi night.

Not looking at him once more.

Not saying one more word.

Because after that night…

We never had another chance.

The End.