Chapter 4

Naturally, Xu Xiaoai rushed to defend herself.

That was exactly what I wanted.

I laid the printed evidence in front of her.

“You knew perfectly well what happened to Li Mengqi that night, but you lied to us. We've uncovered everything. All the tenants from that building are here tonight. Sooner or later, we'll get to the bottom of it. What happens to you will depend on how honest you're prepared to be from this moment on.”

Exposing her lie was not the objective.

Getting her to tell us everything we still did not know was.

Xu Xiaoai grew more frightened.

And she told us the whole story.

She had indeed bought the recording of Li Mengqi's assault. She had planned to release it and destroy her reputation.

But she knew distributing such videos was illegal.

If she spread it widely and the victim went to the police, she would very likely be caught.

So she circulated it on a smaller scale, sending it to selected people.

She chose them carefully and used secondary WeChat accounts with no real personal information attached.

Yes.

The recipients were the same three men who lived in Li Mengqi's building—the three suspects we had identified that evening.

Zhang Zicheng, Liu Shenghua, and Peng Hui.

Our investigation had been heading in the right direction. Its findings matched the truth.

More appallingly, Xu Xiaoai had deliberately used a location filter to find and add those three men. They were the only three she added.

Had she found more, she would have sent the video to them too.

She wanted other people to spread the recording and ruin Li Mengqi for her.

What a wonderful friend.

But she had not expected her actions to have such devastating consequences.

After the murder, she tried to hide what she had done and get away with it.

Why did she hate Li Mengqi enough to want to destroy her?

Once she had confessed, Xu Xiaoai seemed almost relaxed, as though she had decided that since it was all out, she might as well stop caring.

When I asked why she had targeted Li Mengqi, she laughed and answered as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“Because I couldn't accept it. Why her? I don't understand. What did she have besides a pretty face?”

“I have a proper university degree. She only went to a secondary vocational school, and she wasn't even especially good at her job. Yet we did exactly the same work. Do you think that's fair?”

“And that wasn't even the worst of it.”

“Do you know why they sent her to the city last week? She was about to be promoted. Transferred straight to the city office. What had she done to deserve that? Could being pretty really get her that much special treatment?”

She went on and on.

Every word was self-righteous, as though reason was entirely on her side and everything she had done was justified.

That alone was chilling.

She felt no guilt at all about her part in Li Mengqi's death.

To help us catch the killer among the three men, I quickly reached an agreement with Xu Xiaoai.

She would cooperate.

In exchange, she would not be implicated in this case.

We had considered it carefully.

Her behavior was reprehensible, but she had not directly taken part in the attack on Li Mengqi.

It would also be difficult to establish a direct link between her circulation of the video and the killer's decision to assault and murder Li Mengqi.

A charge of distributing pornography would carry a comparatively light penalty.

It was less that we were offering her a chance to help solve the case than that we had little legal basis for securing a harsher punishment.

And catching the murderer was our most urgent task.

Under our supervision, Xu Xiaoai took her phone and met each suspect in turn.

She was to tell them:

“I've been caught. The WeChat account you added, the one called XX, is my secondary account. They've found the video I sent you too. The police know everything.”

I had just one message of my own.

“Confess and cooperate, and you'll be treated leniently. Keep refusing, and once the evidence is complete, we'll ask the procuratorate to pursue the harshest possible punishment. That could mean death.”

The police had no authority to recommend a sentence, but that did not stop us from having preliminary discussions with the procuratorate when we handed over a case.

In practice, prosecutors did take the investigating officers' views into account to some extent when assessing a suspect's attitude toward confession.

With Xu Xiaoai's cooperation, the killer could no longer hold out.

It was Liu Shenghua, just as we had suspected.

He had secretly admired Li Mengqi for a long time. In his mind, she had been a goddess.

He had surrounded her with such a special glow that he had not even dared to introduce himself.

Then he saw the video of her being assaulted.

By three men at once.

His image of his goddess shattered.

He bought protective clothing and gloves, stole a safety harness from the construction site, and lowered himself from the roof into Li Mengqi's room.

In a fury, he strangled her.

He vented all his rage on her.

Then he cleaned everything and left through the window without leaving a trace.

He also told us where he had hidden the implements used in the crime.

We went out that very night and recovered the evidence.

The killer was in custody.

At last, we could close the case.

That long night was finally over.

But as we continued questioning Liu Shenghua, we discovered further malice so suffocating it was hard to bear.

All of it directed at Li Mengqi.

One question stood out.

Li Mengqi had been a victim from beginning to end. She had not even known what had happened to her.

Why had that destroyed Liu Shenghua's image of her? Why had it enraged him enough to kill?

Then we discovered that the video he received was not the same as the one Zheng Jie sold.

Zheng Jie's version was explicitly labeled as a recording of drugging and sexual assault.

The title on the version sent to Liu Shenghua, however, clearly stated:

“All performers in this video participated voluntarily. No illegal activity took place.”

The information Liu Shenghua received had been grossly distorted.

He believed Li Mengqi had willingly made pornographic videos for money.

That was what had shattered his view of her and led him to commit murder.

This was unquestionably Xu Xiaoai's handiwork.

She was vicious beyond words.

My colleagues were furious. Some even began looking for a way to implicate her in the murder.

I stopped them.

Was there no legitimate way to punish her?

Of course there was.

We went back over everything Xu Xiaoai had done and uncovered something even more repellent.

She had bought only one video from Zheng Jie.

The video of Li Mengqi's assault.

She had no established habit of buying such recordings.

Li Mengqi's video had been her goal from the start.

Which raised a question.

How had she found this secret distribution channel so precisely—and then found that particular video?

Something was wrong.

I reported our findings to the city officers investigating Zheng Jie and personally asked them to look into it thoroughly.

They soon got back to me.

They were treating Zheng Jie's offenses as a major case.

As more victims were identified from the recordings, the potential sentences facing the group kept increasing.

The city officers were working toward life sentences.

Zheng Jie was frightened.

He was telling them everything he knew, hoping for leniency.

In his statement, he said that someone who had been on his WeChat contacts list for a long time had sent him a photograph of Li Mengqi, her personal details, and her location in the city that day.

The contact had added a note.

“She's very frugal. Offer her a cheap shared ride and she'll be an easy target.”

Yes.

That WeChat account was another of Xu Xiaoai's secondary accounts.

She had disclosed Li Mengqi's business-trip itinerary to Zheng Jie.

She had even turned Li Mengqi's thrift into a vulnerability to exploit.

Whatever else might be said, her involvement in the crime against Li Mengqi was more than enough to establish her as an accomplice.

The city officers wasted no time. They came and took her away.

Prison awaited her.

Later, I accompanied Li Mengqi's family to her rented room to collect her belongings.

Sadly, her parents and younger brother did not take everything.

It was not that they could not carry it.

There were three of them, after all.

They simply did not want it.

They took her bank card, a little jewelry, and one or two electronic devices.

Anything with no monetary value, they left behind.

As though Li Mengqi herself, now dead, was no longer worth anything to them either.

After seeing them off, I stood in her room with a weight in my chest.

I opened one of the notebooks on her desk.

There were notebooks full of study notes.

Her handwriting was exceptionally neat.

She had recorded things she learned at work, mistakes she made, and reflections on where she needed to improve.

Beside them was a stack of textbooks for a part-time college diploma.

In another notebook, she had written out her plans for her life.

She meant to save some money, finish her diploma, then go on to earn a university degree.

Something else was clear from those pages.

She had not resisted her family's constant demands on her earnings.

She wanted to better herself.

She wanted to lift her family out of poverty.

It broke my heart.

Every line she had written seemed to hold a little of her warmth, all of them telling the same story.

She had wanted so badly to make a good life for herself.

Yet her whole life had been a nightmare.

A photograph of her with her family still stood on the desk.

No one had wanted that either.

As I turned to leave and pulled the door closed, I thought, for a fleeting moment, that I could see her sitting there.

Her head bent over a book, pausing now and then to write something down.

Then looking up at the photograph.

Still dreaming of a beautiful future.

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