Chapter 3

Once I put her account together with Zheng Jie's confession, a chill ran down my spine.

That night had indeed been a nightmare for Li Mengqi.

But it bore little resemblance to the one she remembered.

Under the influence of the anesthetic, she had been unable to distinguish dreams from reality.

Every moment she remembered “waking up” had actually been a dream.

What she had taken for a dream had been real.

There were no ghosts. There had been no sleep paralysis.

Instead, three monsters more terrifying than any ghost had been beside her.

They had pressed an ether-soaked cloth over her nose and mouth, rendering her unconscious.

Then they had brutally assaulted her.

She may have remained asleep for a while, but the three men's violence eventually made her struggle toward consciousness.

They had pinned down her limbs hard enough to leave bruises.

She had mistaken that for “sleep paralysis.”

Then they had pressed the ether-soaked cloth to her face again.

That was the “cool breath of air.”

In her mind, she had finally woken up. Trembling, she had switched on the light and searched the room.

Tragically, none of that had happened.

It had been a dream.

Zheng Jie and his accomplices had been careful, afraid to use too much ether. That was why she had been able to dream.

Her survival instinct had made her search her surroundings in that dream, convincing herself she was safe.

But soon, when she “fell asleep” and the paralysis returned—

The ether was actually wearing off. She was beginning to wake again.

This time, she had almost managed to call for help.

It was useless.

This was not sleep paralysis.

The words she heard—

“Not even the gods can save you.”

—had not been a hallucination or a ghost's voice.

They had been Zheng Jie's.

The men were filming. He had said it deliberately for the video.

Then they had covered her mouth and face with the ether-soaked cloth again, and she had slipped back into unconsciousness.

Li Mengqi, meanwhile, had believed she had woken once more.

This time, she left the light on and huddled in a corner, afraid to sleep until morning.

In reality, none of it had happened.

She had simply been lying on the bed, drugged, while this terrible injustice was done to her.

That explained why, the following morning, she found the light off and herself lying neatly in bed rather than curled in a corner.

She had never turned on the light or huddled against the wall.

Those scenes had existed only in her dreams.

Amid my grief and pity, a strange thought crossed my mind.

Perhaps, in some small way, it was a mercy that Li Mengqi had never learned what really happened that night. Not even before she died.

Let it have been a nightmare.

The poor woman had suffered enough.

We had established what Zheng Jie and his accomplices had done, but we were no closer to solving Li Mengqi's murder.

They were not her killers.

They readily admitted rape, unlawful confinement, and a series of other offenses, but adamantly denied killing her.

For a start, they had no real motive.

Their only connection to Li Mengqi was that they had assaulted her and profited from it.

They had got what they wanted. Criminals though they were, they had not become so reckless as to return a week later and murder their victim.

As Zheng Jie put it:

“Why would we kill her? She didn't matter. She was just like all the other women in those videos. Once we'd had our fun and filmed it, that was it. We didn't give her another thought. Why would we go back and kill her?”

His words were beneath contempt. No punishment seemed too cruel for what he had done.

But his argument did make sense.

Perhaps, in the minds of men like these, those women were nothing more than lifeless commodities.

There was no humanity in them.

Besides, Li Mengqi had not realized she had been assaulted. She had told no one and had certainly not gone to the police.

There was no reason for them to return to silence her.

Most importantly, they had a clear alibi.

On the night Li Mengqi was murdered, they had been carrying out another attack, again using a shared ride and an anesthetic to assault a woman who lived alone.

They had filmed the entire thing.

For the sake of their video, they had even recorded their preparations before drugging her.

Grotesquely, evidence of one crime also happened to clear them of Li Mengqi's murder.

Their offenses would have to be dealt with as a separate case.

We quickly contacted the city's criminal investigation unit and handed it over.

Following every lead, we also asked the city's technical specialists to investigate the channels through which the men sold their videos.

Li Mengqi had been drugged, assaulted, and filmed.

A week later, she had been murdered.

The timing was a little too convenient.

We had grounds to suspect that the murder was connected to the recording.

There were signs of sexual assault on her body as well.

Perhaps someone had seen the video and recognized her in real life.

Desire might then have led to this tragedy of murder and exploitation.

According to Zheng Jie and his accomplices, they distributed the videos through websites and various WeChat and QQ groups.

Even if we obtained every sales record, many buyers would have used false phone numbers or even false identity details.

Tracing them would take a great deal of time.

Only the city police's technical unit had the resources to do it.

All we could do was wait for news.

Meanwhile, we continued our broad search.

Experience told us that in cases like this, if there was no major breakthrough within three days, the investigation would become increasingly difficult.

It might ultimately turn into a dead end.

By then, a day and a half had passed since Li Mengqi's body was discovered.

We had finally reviewed every available recording, including nearby security and traffic cameras.

No suspicious person had entered or left the building around the time of the murder.

We had also made some headway in determining how the killer had acted.

He must have used Li Mengqi's window to enter and leave, even though he had removed most of the evidence.

But we had ruled out his climbing up to it.

Cross-checking the surveillance footage from the area facing her window, we found no suspicious person scouting the location or appearing beneath it around the time of the crime.

If he had not climbed up, there was only one possibility left.

He had come down from the roof.

That led us to a conclusion.

The killer was very likely a resident of the building.

First, he could use the main entrance without attracting attention.

Second, he could familiarize himself with the roof without seeming suspicious.

For the moment, we could still keep track of all the tenants. We had also told them they might be required to assist us at any time.

But if we failed to solve the case soon, the killer might leave.

That would make everything harder.

Even if we found further evidence, we might no longer be able to find the suspect.

So that night, we made a major move.

We summoned all thirty-six residents to the criminal investigation unit to have their statements taken.

We had already spoken to each of them, but those preliminary inquiries had taken place at the building or at their workplaces.

This time, the scale of the operation was meant to tell the killer hiding among them one thing.

We knew he lived in that building.

It was also a considerable gamble.

If we failed to identify him within the twelve hours we could hold them for questioning, we would have to release everyone.

That would send him another message.

We had no actual evidence.

Our battle of wits would be fought within those twelve hours.

Merely summoning and questioning him would not make him slip up.

Anyone who could clean a crime scene so thoroughly must have remarkable composure.

But we had a backup plan.

In each interview, we briefly mentioned what we had uncovered about Zheng Jie and his accomplices.

To protect the victims' privacy, we did not disclose the details of their methods.

The implication, however, was clear.

Now that we had arrested those men, we would soon be able to identify the real killer through them.

Yes.

That was the crucial message we gave each resident.

The point of summoning them was not primarily to question them.

It was to keep them here while the evidence identifying the killer came in.

Within an hour, we narrowed the field to three men.

Zhang Zicheng, Liu Shenghua, and Peng Hui.

All three were migrant workers living alone.

Each had shown some change in his emotional state when we mentioned Zheng Jie's group.

Liu Shenghua was the most suspicious.

Our initial inquiries showed that he tiled building exteriors and was highly experienced in using safety ropes to work at height.

But we had no evidence. We needed another breakthrough.

Just then, the city police's technical unit sent us some preliminary results.

While examining sales of the illegal videos Zheng Jie and his accomplices had “created,” the specialists had prioritized leads relevant to our case.

They filtered for accounts that had contacted the group online and had IP addresses in our city or county.

The videos were distributed nationwide.

In a small place like ours, relatively few people would have come across them.

In the end, they identified just one account in our county.

It was anonymous, with no linked information that could identify its owner.

The user had also employed a VPN to try to avoid being traced.

That did not defeat the specialists.

Using the servers set up by Zheng Jie's group, they traced the VPN's IP and server address, then used server logs to locate the user's IP address and internet service provider.

This was a crucial lead. It was not direct proof, but it was enough to identify one person.

To our surprise, that person was not among those we had brought in.

Nor was she a tenant in the building.

It was Li Mengqi's closest friend.

Xu Xiaoai.

The news sent a chill down my spine.

We did not yet know what part Xu Xiaoai had played.

But even recalling her behavior when we took her statement was enough to make my skin crawl.

For one thing, she unquestionably possessed the video of Zheng Jie and the other two men assaulting Li Mengqi. She knew what had happened that night.

Yet she had deliberately emphasized Li Mengqi's account of a “nightmare.”

Her purpose was not difficult to guess.

She might have been trying to mislead us, keeping us from discovering what had really happened.

And she was the one who had called the police after Li Mengqi died.

Ordinarily, failing to reach a coworker for a single morning would not necessarily prompt a police report.

Clearly, she knew Li Mengqi might be in danger.

She probably was not the killer herself.

She had not appeared at the building on the night of the murder. Besides, the sexual assault was not something a woman could have carried out.

Then what had she done?

It was already nine that evening, but we went to her home and brought her in for questioning.

She panicked immediately.

At the company, she had been prepared and had spoken to me with perfect composure.

Taken by surprise and brought to the unit, she seemed like another person entirely.

Perhaps she knew we had probably discovered the secrets she had withheld.

With the technical unit's evidence in hand, we had the upper hand in the interview.

I began with a simple question.

“Why did you lie to us?”