The sound-activated light in the hallway was out, and I was using my key to find the lock hole in the dark.
As soon as I entered the door, I received a strange phone call from "Guangzhou", ringing three times, I pressed the answer button.
"Is that Mr. Donovan?" A female voice asked.
I have a style of doing things where every time I change jobs, I come up with a new pen name.
When I was a paparazzo in Hong Kong, I was called "Donovan", which is no doubt how he met me, "You read my story?"
"I used to read your blog before." The other said.
The blog is low on views and I haven't updated it in a long time, but did leave a phone number on the bulletin board for paid celebrity leads, "Sorry, I'm no longer a reporter, please look elsewhere for news."
"Not news," the female voice said, "I have something on my side that I'd like to ask you for, please do help me."
"Sorry, I'm not available right now." I was ready to hang up.
"Please at least hear me out." The voice was mournful, "Trouble."
I turned on the speaker and put the phone on the coffee table, "What's the name, please?"
"My name is Rong," said the other.
On Children's Day 2012, there was a car accident on National Highway 106 in Guangzhou.
Rong's husband, James, drove a Peugeot into a stone sidewalk wall, dislocating his spine and paralyzing him from the waist down, and his five-year-old son, who was in the passenger seat, died at the scene.
Today, two years later, Rong woke up and realized her husband James was gone, she immediately called the police, "James must have been taken away by force."
"Why so sure?" I asked.
"Because he still has his wheelchair." Rong said, "He never left the house without informing me, and after being paralyzed, he was so depressed that he cut off all his friends and didn't use his cell phone, so there was no possibility of being picked up by an acquaintance."
Before marrying James, Rong was also married to Xi, her ex-husband, who was convicted of stabbing someone in a drunken fight seven years ago.
While serving his sentence, Rong and Xi agreed to a divorce, which Xi refused to grant, and it was only through court action that a judgment was forced.
Three years ago, Xi was released from prison, found his ex-wife's address, came to break down the door three times, painted "slut" on Rong's car with red paint, and James called the police before Xi gradually stopped.
The police targeted Xi as the "enemy".
After he was released from prison, he took a number of jobs, all of which did not last long, and now he has opened a dried seafood store at the Jinzhou Farmers Market in Guangzhou's Nansha District, doing business during the day, and then returning to his rented room in a nearby urban village to sleep at night.
At eight o'clock in the morning, the police went to Xi's house, asked him if he recognized James, he shook his head, but took advantage of the chaos to escape, urban village aisles piled high with debris, narrow and twisted, only one person over, many people chasing not advantageous, Xi jumped from the third floor into the garbage pile downstairs, running far away.
After a later search, a fruit knife was found under the toilet sink in his house.
"There were no fingerprints on the knife, but the blood left at the handle tested as James'." Rong said.
"Didn't catch Xi?" I asked.
"Nope. In the morning the police went to search where Xi had worked and lived after his release and didn't find him, or James," Rong choked, "Last year you had a story about a Hong Kong star who went missing in a strange way, you found him in two days, it turned out he was world-weary and ready to kill himself, and because of you, he was saved just in time, which made me admire him. "
"Right now I have no choice but to ask for your help. My husband is diabetic and needs to take his medication in time or his life is in danger. I will pay a handsome honorarium if I find him."
I didn't tell Rong that the case of the missing star in Hong Kong back then was orchestrated by me and my client, who was suffering from a decline in popularity and was "ready to make a news story", while I was able to make a fortune and gain fame in the industry, so why not?
The report was indeed a sensation in Hong Kong, but it did not make waves in the Mainland. It was also from then on that it became clear to me that the entertainment industry in Hong Kong was withering and I had no intention of going.
"Send me the address, I'm in Shenzhen right now, it'll take me a bit of time to get there." I told Rong.
May 11, 2014, Guangdong's rainy season, the rain has been falling for many days, the walls of the room covered with a layer of water fog.
Two months ago, I published my first full-length mystery under a new pen name, and the response was good, but no one knew where I came from except the editor-in-chief. One day, a man contacted me, saying he was "Fyren the Nightwalker," and asked if I would be interested in working with him.
"How did you find me?" I wondered.
"You write something, Hong Kong's regional characteristics and detective experience are quite obvious, but do not want to disclose the real name and do not sign, certainly before in the dry is not what long face of the profession, either paparazzi or private detective.
Buy one of your e-books, analyze your habitual phrases and sentences, and then search for blog posts with a high overlap rate on the Internet, and you'll soon find your blog and get your number." Fyren said on the phone, "If you are free, I would like to invite you to Guangzhou for a chat."
We arranged to meet at the Hilton Hotel, I did not know what he looked like beforehand, but I spotted him in the glittering crowd at once: medium-length hair, wearing a hair band, black clothes, black pants, black sneakers, height looks to be one meter eight, straight and well-proportioned, from the muscle lines on the arms, there is the habit of working out.
After just one shrimp dumpling, we decided to work together. To be honest, I wasn't really interested in working for the Night Stalker, but I had my heart set on a new environment, and with Fyren's offer being good, and the fact that I could learn something from working with him, I had no reason not to say yes.
"By the way, the way I told you on the phone to find you, I made it up," Fyren said, "I got your phone number from your supervisor."
I then went to Shenzhen with Fyren to start a new job, listening to Fyren's stories at my place until I got a call from Rong, looking for James to be the first job of my nightwalker career.
That night, Fyren and I drove all night to Guangzhou.
"Did you tell her it's the same price for anyone you find, dead or alive?" Fyren asked me on the way.
"You'll talk to her when we get to her house later."
Drove over two hours to Rong's house.
After James became paralyzed, they sold their high-rise suite in the Yunshan Poetic District and bought a two-bedroom apartment on the first floor in the old city in order to make it easier to move around.
Rong wears light makeup and a gray jacket in this hot, humid weather, and because she's short, I can see at once a speck of gray hair growing at the top of her head.
The room was brightly lit, the house had seen several waves of people since James had disappeared: police, friends, relatives, and now Fyren and I. Judging by the tidiness of the floor, Rong had tidied up and mopped carefully before we arrived, and she had high hopes for us.
"Ms. Rong, we'll do our best to find someone, but there's one thing that needs to be said up front, Mr. James may have been killed, and if that happens, the final payment will still have to be made. If there's no problem, let's move on."
Just sitting down on the couch, Fyren opens the door and Rong looks surprised, tears suddenly dripping from her eyes as she reaches up to wipe them away, gets up and pulls out a paper bag from her room and pays half of the deposit as a default.
"Was there anything unusual before your husband disappeared? Did Xi, that ex-husband of yours, come around and harass?" Fyren asked, pulling out her book.
"No," Rong shook his head, "he came out of jail and harassed a couple times, and after James called the police, he never came back."
"Where did you live when you and your ex-husband weren't divorced?" Fyren asked.
"Lived in the Yellow Village, that place has been demolished." Rong brought on the dislike.
"He gambled and drank heavily and lost the house his parents left behind, I had planned to divorce him and in time for him to commit a crime and go to jail, I filed for divorce in court. The police asked me where he would be hiding, I don't know, but I assure you that before he went to jail, he had no friends, turned against his relatives, and no one would pick him up."
"Has Mr. James' room been cleaned up?" With Rong's permission, I pushed open the door to James' room to find the sheets flat, the wheelchair under the desk, and the floor spotless.
"No, the room was like this when James disappeared." Rong replied.
"Okay, that's it for today then, we'll come back if we have any questions." Walking to the door, Fyren says, "One more thing, Ms. Rong, don't tell anyone else about your visit to the two of us."
At 10:23 p.m., we arrived at "Yuecheng Car Repair Shop" on Huangbian North Road in Guangzhou's Baiyun District, where Xi found a job in May 2011 after being released from prison.
When we arrived, the store manager was about to close the store, Fyren went up to him, handed him a cigarette, and said, "There is still some unfinished business in the investigation, so please cooperate." The store manager mistook us for case officers and turned on all the lights in the store.
We asked the store manager if he remembered anything in particular other than the basics of Xi.
"Yes," the store manager nodded, "One thing I forgot to mention is that a couple of times I've come to the store late at night to pick up something and found Xi taking all the parts off of cars that were up for repair, when I asked him what was going on he said that he was learning and that he'd put them back on soon. It's something I've always found quite odd."
"He lives in the store?" I asked.
"We want to see where he lives again." Fyren added immediately.
It was a cubicle in the store, according to the store manager, Xi was a good learner, made rapid progress and had no bad record, for convenience, the store manager built this cubicle in the store for him to live in, after Xi resigned, this cubicle became a utility room, which was piled with auto repair tools and parts.
"What did he hang here?" I saw an iron nail nailed to the wall, surrounded by a rectangular blank, which, judging from the height at which it was hung, must have been Juniper.
"Oh, he was a Christian and hung a statue of Jesus here."
After I left the auto shop, I called Rong and learned that Xi was not religious before he went to prison.
We then went to Harvest Mall, which is four kilometers away from Yuet Shing Repair Shop.
From March to June 2012, Xi worked as a janitor in the underground parking lot of this mall and lived in a room on the same floor.
Speaking of Xi's impression, people who worked with him recalled that Xi was quiet, punctual and meticulous, and that although the company required uniforms, the hats were too hot for them and were generally not worn, while Xi wore them every day.
In the basement where Xi lived, a rectangular blank space is still visible on the wall, undoubtedly where the statue of Jesus was hung.
Driving all the way south from Baiyun District, after an hour or so, we arrived at the urban village located in Nansha District.
Into the village, you need to walk a 500-meter narrow dirt road, no streetlights, rain clouds cover the moon, flashlight light on the ground, refracted bright crystal puddles, we dripped with water, shoes quickly soaked.
Xi's house was the first on the third floor stairs to the left, the door was cordoned off, Fyren crouched down to unlock it, and in less than a minute we were in the room.
Inside the twenty square meter space, the facilities are readily apparent, with a single bed with a mosquito net against the wall, a toilet to the right of the bed, and a table, a chair, and a long cabinet in the room.
A wire was attached to the center as a clothesline, with a few clothes hanging from it, the siding was soaked with moisture, revealing spots of mildew, and a colorful image of Jesus hung on the east wall, framed in a mirror.
Fyren rummaged through drawers and closets while I pulled out my Ricoh gr camera and took pictures of the room.
"Xi was released from prison in April 2011, worked as an auto mechanic at Yuecheng Auto Repair from May to September 2011, and worked as a parking lot attendant at Golden Harvest Mall from March to June 2012, and has opened a seafood restaurant at Jinzhou Farmer's Market in Nansha District from July 2012 to the present." From July 2012 to now, he has opened a dried seafood store in Jinzhou Farmers Market in Nansha District." Fyren concludes as he lights a cigarette in the darkened room.
"That means that for six months, from September 2011 to March 2012, no one knows what Xi did. Based on his financial level, it's unlikely that he didn't work for six months, so it's possible that he took on illegal jobs where he didn't have to register his ID, and these are the places where he could have been hiding and committing crimes."
"Look here." I pointed my flashlight at the Jesus statue on the wall, "Xi was a Christian and hung this Jesus statue in every place he ever lived. The cubicle in the auto repair shop, the single room in the underground parking lot, and this windowless room in the middle of the city, these three places have one thing in common, that is, there is no light during the daytime, but now on the portrait and the frame, there is an obvious fading mark, which is only after a long period of fixed exposure to the sun's rays, so this painting must have once been hung in a place where the sunlight could reach it. During the six-month period of 'disappearance' he lived in a well-lit room."
"Narrowed it down," Fyren opened the door and flicked his cigarette outside, "we're going to Xi's dried seafood store now to find out if there are any other leads."
The Jinzhou Farmer's Market is within walking distance of Xi's residence.
At 2 a.m., the entire market is dark and silent, the concrete floor is pitted with puddles, and the blood and feces of the domestic animals slaughtered there during the day emit a foul odor.
Piles of rotten fruits and vegetables or pig's offal next to some stalls have attracted rats, cockroaches and flies to gather.
We found Xi's store - a bright yellow caution strip around the outside of the roller shutter - and Fyren used a tool to open the small door, pushing it open and a fishy smell hit us.
The store is filled with blue light, the source of which comes from an electric mosquito lamp on the wall.
Ground piled with bags of dried seafood, the innermost set a tan-colored cash register, the table items cluttered, next to the wall hung a small whiteboard, handwritten with source information and prices.
An electric freezer in the room made noises from time to time, and on the lid of the freezer was a piece of sticky fly paper, which was covered with flies. The ceiling fan on the ceiling is still spinning.
Fyren unlocked the drawer of the cashier's cabinet, which was strewn with some loose change, receipt slips and business cards, as well as a stack of A4-sized flyers with a golden cross on them, "Christian Flyers." Fyren pulls out the first one and skims it, then folds it and puts it in his pocket.
The drawer on the right side of the table cabinet was unlocked, I opened it in turn, all to no avail. At the bottom was a rusty mooncake box with a few miscellaneous items, the most numerous of which was a car label, I knew nothing about cars, but only recognized BMW, Audi and Volkswagen labels.
"Could Xi have secretly unloaded it from the car when he was a parking lot attendant?" I show it to Fyren.
Fyren picked up the mooncake box and displayed the decals inside on the table, eleven in all.
"Those decals weren't stolen from a parking lot." Fyren told me after a moment of identification.
"The owner is not stupid, the car label lost can certainly be found, the number of such a large number of accidents, it is unlikely. And these car label style are all old models, this crown car label is the 2003 model, 2007 BMW put the car label added three-dimensional effect, here two BMW label are not, Cadillac this label is even older, is the 1980 model. What place can collect so many old car label?"
"All abandoned cars?" I guessed.
"Possibly, scrap car dismantling plants are all open-air places with plenty of light." Fyren looked agitated, "Xi might have spent time in unqualified scrap car dismantling plants, which recycle old cars, unload the old parts and reassemble them before selling them as new cars."
"There are a limited number of scrapyards in each city, so we can spread out and look from the White Cloud area where we started." I suggested.
"The scope could be smaller." Fyren looks at me, "In a lot of kidnappings, the perpetrator chooses a location that was recently stomped on, and it doesn't take more than three months between stomping and committing the crime.
If we were to choose to hide people in a scrapyard, what else would the place need?"
"Illegal Scrap Car Factories Recently Shut Down in Guangzhou City."
Chentian Village is known as the automotive industry "Huaqiangbei", this is the country's largest car parts distribution center, car parts shipped from all over the world gathered here, rumor has it that some people spend 600,000 yuan here, put together a Rolls-Royce.
There, there is a scrapyard that was just outlawed in February of this year and is still in a derelict state.
Surrounding the store street, without exception are auto repair parts store, was wet by the rain on the street, the headlights shine through, reflecting the colorful motor oil glow.
We drove through a couple of back roads and into an open field, blocked in front by a large iron gate, with a chain between the two gates and a large lock strung open on the ground.
Pushing through the door, the road was lined with the iron shells of sedans, and two lightsabers shot out of our hands, drowning in the rain, which dripped on our raincoats and in the mud, adding to the silence and emptiness around us, and I had the illusion of being in a steampunk scene.
After walking about a hundred meters, we saw a bungalow standing in the open space, less than fifteen square meters in size, extrapolating from its length and width. The iron door shook slightly in the wind, as if there was something waiting for us to unveil.
Fyren had given me a precaution before entering, but actually seeing that scene still made me shiver uncontrollably.
Though I pride myself on being battle-hardened, it's the first time I've seen a bizarre murder scene, and just one look is enough to be the source material for nightmares.
After that, going deep into such a scene became part of my life, and I don't know whether it was because the first impression was too vivid or I had been desensitized, but in any case, there was never another time that I panicked like this - my body was like crawling with dense spiders, and people involuntarily backed away from the scene.
James, clad only in a pair of boxer briefs, was tied to an inverted cross made of iron plates, the man was dead, he was upside down with his face towards the door, supported by a crumbling wooden chair at the back.
There was a dollar-sized hole in the center of the body's forehead, from which blood trickled down, and along the iron plate it gathered in a pool on the floor, surrounded by two rats with knotted locks of hair, and in the hollow of James's chin another rat gnawing at his lips.
On his bare chest, an inverted pentagram was drawn, and carefully discerned inside the pentagram, filled with an upside-down bat.
On James' stomach, there were three stab wounds, and blood snaked down his skin. Because of his paralysis, his legs were shriveled up like dry twigs, bound by rope to the top end of the iron plate. On the floor lay his shirt and pants.
The walls of the entire room were covered in white and green mold, as if breathing in would catch a bad disease.
I stood in the rain with Fyren, shining my flashlight on everything in the room.
Fyren lit a cigarette, left hand curved palm on the smoke to block the rain, vigorously inhaled a few mouthfuls, walked into the room, the rats dispersed at the sound. He crouched down and looked carefully at the dead man's forehead wound, turned back to see me standing outside the door and called out to me, "What are you doing, come in and take a picture." I just came back to my senses.
"The wound on his head, the places where his hands and feet are bound, the patterns on his body, and three stab wounds." Fyren said a few photographic highlights before pulling out his cell phone and making a call.
"Ms. Rong, Mr. James has been found." After a pause, Fyren added, "I'm sorry for your loss, the man is dead, call the police."
As "friends" of Mr. James, we told the police the details of the search that night, and since Xi, the biggest suspect, was currently at large and we had a good alibi, we made some statements and left.
"Did you notice a problem?" Back at the hotel, I told Fyren about the doubt, "There were junk cars piled up outside the crime scene, so if Xi killed James, it would have been better to throw the knife into one of the random cars afterward than to hide it under the sink in his room."
Fyren nodded, took out the camera memory card, inserted it into the computer, clicked on the photo taken of the deceased, and pointed it out to me, "The fatal wound is this gunshot wound on the forehead, but look, the blood flow from this wound goes in two directions, and there's a stream of blood running down the right side of the face, which means that at the time of death, James was in a seated position, and after death, his head fell backward, and the blood flowed downward to his body, and afterward, the murderer Turned the body upside down and the blood flowed towards the head. However, with these three wounds on the body's stomach, the blood flowed in only one direction, toward the head in the opposite direction. What does that mean?"
"It's upside down followed by three stabs." I said indistinctly.
"The head wound was already fatal, there was no need for those three stab wounds, and by doing so, including choosing the murder scene inside the scrap car plant where Xi worked, and by placing the knife under the room's sink, the killer was, in my opinion, misdirecting and pointing suspicion toward Xi," Fyren said.
"But if Xi was framed, why did she run away?"
"I don't know, I'll only know if we catch him." Fyren fixed his hair with a headband and turned on the faucet to wash his face, "Anyway, if we find James, we're done."
"James disappeared in the early morning hours of the 11th, and that morning the police searched Xi's home for a fruit knife stained with James' blood; if the murderer wasn't Xi but wanted to plant evidence on Xi, he would have had to hide the knife under the room's sink after he committed the crime and before Xi woke up, and Xi's townhouse room was such a small space, with no windows, that it would have been very difficult to break in, even if he was sleeping without being detected.
Therefore, it is likely that the murderer sneaked into the room and hid the knife before the murder, taking advantage of the fact that Xi was selling goods at the market, and used the other one when he committed the crime. And the fact that the handle of the knife was stained with James' blood suggests that the killer was able to obtain his blood in advance of the murder." I was excited about the case and said to Fyren, "The killer was the one who had close access to James."
"I suspected Rong at first, too," Fyren wiped her face with a towel, "When I found her husband's body, I called her and said something like, 'Mr. James has been found,' and she replied to me, saying. 'Great, is he okay?' If she was the murderer or someone in the know, odds are she would have asked where it was first, and I don't think she's a strong suspect in the crime."
"Well, there's the neat James room, if Rong was involved, before calling the police, she probably would have messed up her husband's room, or at least pushed back the wheelchair, any way to minimize suspicion, but she didn't do any of that at all, it's illogical." I second that.
Is there another killer besides Xi and Rong?
We synthesized the clues so far and drew up the murderer's modus operandi. Late at night on May 10th, after James and Rong turned off the lights and went to sleep, the murderer sneaked into James' room and rendered him unconscious.
Drive him inside the scrapyard again, take out a prepared weapon to shoot James, undress the body, tie it to a cross made of two iron plates, turn it upside down, and finally use a fruit knife to make three cuts in the stomach and leave.
The pattern painted on the body's chest, Fyren had previously worked on a Discovery crime documentary and was exposed to a myriad of cult knowledge.
The most famous of these is Satanism, the inverted cross and the inverted pentagram are their symbols, which highly overlap with James's death shape, the only difference is that the inverted pentagram is usually a goat's head, but the inverted pentagram on James's body is an inverted bat.Fyren speculates that this may be a cult based on the Satanism derivation.
Fyren carefully analyzes the gunshot wound on James' forehead; a gun of that caliber would have had a large impact, but it didn't create a headshot, and it's hard to find a counterpart on the market that would match.
From the indentation around the wound, it was deduced that the killer pressed the gun against his forehead before pulling the trigger, but the area around the wound was flat, with no gunpowder burn marks, and "probably a modified tethered-spring gun, the kind used by the killers in No Country for Old Men, which relies on high-pressure gas to shoot out the spikes and then retract them without leaving a bullet in the body."
After finding James' body, I looked into Rong's movements in the week before James' disappearance.
She goes to work on weekdays, buys groceries, goes home, takes James to a rehabilitation center for the disabled on weekends, and picks him up at four in the afternoon. She had someone check her phone records and there was nothing out of the ordinary, and she didn't have an affair with one of her coworkers at work.
For the other half of the honorarium, we came back to her house.
The car accident two years ago was devastating, and now that James has died in such a tragic way, it has completely broken her - when we first arrived at her house, the rooms gave a sense of simplicity and comfort.
The room was much more disorganized this time.
The sink was full of paper balls and stains; the dining room table was littered with unpacked lunch boxes, some of the dishes barely touched, and in such a humid environment had bred mold and emitted a rancid smell; and the floor was covered with all kinds of visitor's shoe prints.
This self-loathing posture also showed in her body, as she wore her gray hair up with a greasy sheen that had obviously not been washed for several days. Her waxy face, with its sagging features, was much older. Sometimes it took a few seconds to respond when she was asked a question.
She told us to wait on the couch and brought out a paper bag from her room and placed it on the coffee table, "Thank you for your help. Inside is a hundred thousand dollars in cash. You guys count it."
"One hundred thousand dollars?" Fyren questioned, "You put down half a deposit earlier, just pay another fifty thousand."
"Uh-huh." Rong nodded, "The other fifty thousand is a new deposit, and do me another favor, the murderer is still out there, and I want you to help me catch him."
The "murderer" she is referring to is undoubtedly Xi. "The police have put out a wanted notice, so I'm sure they'll catch him soon." Fyren said.
"With more help, the progress will be faster. Even if the police catch him in the end, the fifty thousand dollars won't have to be returned." Rong insisted.
"Let's go outside and discuss this." Fyren tapped me on the shoulder and I followed, getting up.
"Still picking up?" Fyren asks me as he lights a cigarette outside the door.
"There's no reason not to answer it."
"The deeper you go, the more dangerous it gets."
"Even if she doesn't come to me, I'll personally keep looking into it." I said bluntly, "Don't you think it's a shame to look into it and give up now?"
"Get paid to do the job, one question at a time, plain and simple, and never cross the line." Fyren says, "In the nightwalker business, you have to get used to never minding what doesn't work, and you can't be too curious."
"Pick it up," I said, "it's all under control now."
"Okay." Fyren stomped the cigarette out and returned to the house, "Ms. Rong, please tell us everything about your husband, including what you learned from the police."
From Rong, we learn an important new piece of information - the coroner confirms that James was not in a coma before he died by examining the food residue in his stomach, respiratory mucosa and blood.
This confirms our assumption that James could be held hostage in a moldy bungalow and killed while he was awake, and that there were no signs of struggle at the scene, suggesting that James knew the murderer and even trusted him. It's definitely not the work of Xi, the enemy.
"At the risk of asking, why do you sleep in separate rooms?" Fyren asked Rong again.
"Well ... it was James' idea," Rong paused, "he said he was too dependent on me and would lose his autonomy, and with the study empty, he wanted his own space. He did it because he didn't want to stress me out, and with work, I'm used to going to bed early, and he felt guilty all the time for sharing a room with me, because he thought it would reduce the quality of my sleep."
"When did he suggest this?" Fyren asked.
"Two months ago." Rong said thoughtfully.
"Does Mr. James usually go out?" Fyren asked.
Rong shook his head and added, "Sometimes early in the morning or late in the evening, he'll go outside by himself for a walk."
"Are you accompanying?"
"Sometimes accompanied, but back there he said he wanted to spin alone."
"What do you usually go out for?"
"Just stays alone. After his paralysis he became cold in nature and didn't talk to people, which was the reason for going out early in the morning and late in the evening, when there were fewer people."
"What does he do at home?"
"Sometimes he stays seated, sometimes he reads a book. A couple of times I went to his room and found him crying; his son's death had hit him hard and he had been remorseful."
"I heard you're taking him to a rehabilitation center for the disabled on Saturdays and Sundays, did he say anything about his impressions of the place?"
"He liked it quite a bit and felt that the rehab helped him quite a bit, as well as the counseling."
"When did it go over?"
"It went over after Chinese New Year this year, February 25th."
"Thank you." Fyren stood up, "I'm sorry for your loss, we'll be in touch if we hear anything."
"By the way," I asked, "do you still have the car accident report from two years ago, please? Please lend it to me if you can."
"I'll get it." Rong walks into James' room and pulls out a file and hands it to me.
Ruling out Xi and Rong, and combining known clues, Fyren makes a preliminary profile of the killers:
Being able to commit the crime alone and arrange the body afterwards, the murderer is presumed to be male, strong and about one meter eight in height, based on the height of the crossbar at the scene. From the familiarity with various locations in Guangzhou, the probability is that he is a local.
"Do you think this man was in contact with James at the Disability Rehabilitation Center and gained his trust?" I asked on the way to the rehabilitation center for the disabled.
Fyren nodded, "James doesn't socialize with people, the killer only has access to him there."
With Rong's authorization, meeting the dean was easier than we thought; the murder was well known, and the dean was cooperative enough to get James' care, a woman.
Asked who James was usually close to, she replied that she had seen him interacting with a man on a couple of occasions.
"Tall, mid to late thirties, tied with a pigtail, wearing a pair of glasses, sometimes squatting, sometimes sitting on the grass in the garden, talking and laughing with Mr. James." Several more doctors and nurses were asked, and the answer was unanimous.
"Mr. James called him Fu." They thought it was a friend or relative of Mr. James, and none of them were sure of the man's identity.
"I see that you need to register your identity information to enter the main building, so what are the circumstances under which you can enter without registering your identity, except for employees." Though we had secretly taken pictures of the visitor's information book from those days to go back and sift through, Fyren thought that if the person had been conscious of committing a crime, they wouldn't have left the information behind, so she asked the dean one more time.
"The rehabilitation center is usually open for some nursing courses for relatives of disabled people to come and learn. The hospital will give these family members an entry pass, which saves them the trouble of having to register every time." The dean replied.
"Is the information entered on this access card the person with the disability or a relative of that person?" Fyren asked.
"The entry information is the person with the disability himself."
"Is there an expiration date on the entry permit?"
"What do you mean?" Dean frowned.
"Is this the license that has a specified expiration date on it?"
"No, it's all uniform."
"That is to say, if one were to take an entry permit from a few years ago one could also pass."
"Right."
"Can you give me a copy of all the disabled people who have had this license." Fyren said.
"All?" Dean grimaced.
"Right."
"That's not very nice, it's personal and there's quite a lot of it." Dean replied.
"Look at this." At a standstill, I pulled out my press card from earlier in Hong Kong and showed it to the dean.
"What do you mean?" The other man wondered.
"In layman's terms, I'm a paparazzi reporter who specializes in publishing gossip in major media outlets. How about making a deal, trading your privacy for the privacy of the patients in your institution?" I told him.
"What privacy do I have!" Dean's face flushed red.
"Do I need to be explicit about your little thing with the assistant?" I looked him in the eye, "We just need the list."
Dean sat paralyzed in his sofa chair, gulped, and used his landline to arrange for an assistant to print out the information for us.
Leaving the rehab center, Fyren wonders, "How did you conclude he was having an affair with his assistant."
"He has a picture of his wife on his desk, but when he was drinking water just now, he naturally picked up the glass of water that his female assistant had been drinking from." I said.
The list of persons with disabilities totals 438.
The only way to quickly screen out a target is to narrow it down layer by layer based on speculation and the suspect's characteristics that are available.
"What if this man's last name is made up?" I questioned the fact that James was approached at the rehab center by a man with the last name "Fu".
"I think it's true." Fyren analyzes, "If you're going to make up a fake last name, out of inertia, you'd usually go with a common last name, but 'Fu' is a rare last name. Let's look for it first, and then find something else if it doesn't work."
There are a total of 41 people with the surname "Fu" on the list, ranging in age from 28 to 74 years old. Based on the suspect's age of 30 and height of about one meter eight, if the disabled patient is his father, he should be over 50 years old and more than one meter seven, and with the Guangzhou hukou, there are five "Fu" people who meet the criteria. Together with the Guangzhou hukou, there are five persons with the surname "Fu" who fit the profile.
If the disabled patient is a sibling of the suspect, there are eight people between the ages of 20 and 40 who qualify.
"If the patient is his mother or wife, the last name is not 'Fu', there are a ton of candidates that fit the bill, do you field visit them one by one." I asked.
"Right." Fyren nodded, "Investigations are just boring."
We investigated five "Fu" elders, three of whom have passed away, excluding one who has a daughter and no children, leaving two, one FuAnming, a stainless steel merchant who passed away last year, and whose company is now inherited by his eldest son, who is in his second year of college in Shanghai.
The other, FuYan, a professor of physics at Guangzhou University, died three years ago and had an only son who was studying in the United States.
Given the time of death, the former is more likely. We pretended to be businessmen visiting the company, only to find that the eldest son was thick-set and less than five-foot-seven, while the second son was in Shanghai on the day of the crime, with a clear alibi. Photos of the two men were shown to the eyewitness doctors at the rehab center, and both said they weren't the ones who approached James.
We then went to visit FuYan's former address, and a woman of about sixty years of age opened the door to a bright and spacious house where she was the only person living. We lied that we were FuYan's son FuBian's college classmates, and she warmly invited us into the house.
"Bian isn't back yet from the US." The woman said, "He's busy with work over there, and he usually comes back only once in the Spring Festival."
"Donovan, ring any bells, Bian invited us over to his place for a get together earlier." Fyren asked me.
"Oh, just been there once, let him organize it again this year when he comes back, we've all been busy since graduation and it's time to get together." I looked over at Fyren, "By the way, where was that place again?"
With that, we lassoed FuBian's place and took his picture at his mother's house, and the doctor at the rehab center looked at the picture and said, "Although the hairstyle is different and he's not wearing glasses, his face and features are very similar."
We immediately went to Room 903, Unit 2, Building 3, Huilongwan Subdivision, Zhongsheng Road.
There was a water bill taped to the door showing that the water bill from last November to May of this year was one hundred and thirty-four dollars, that it was occupied but used little water, and that there were a couple of advertising flyers stuck in the doorknob indicating that the door hadn't been opened in the last few days.
Fyren knocked on the door and shouted for the water bill collector, and I stared at the light-permeable cat's eye and the crack in the door for a minute long, not obscured by dark shadows.
FuBian is not in the room.Fyren takes out his lock picking tool and it takes him a long time to open the door due to the high level of the lock.
The inside of the room was empty, not empty in the sense that no one was there, but empty in the sense that it was empty.
The shoe closet by the door had two pairs of size 44 gray Nike running shoes, and the only thing inside the spacious living room was a treadmill with a dumbbell rack.
The bedroom held a bed, and inside the closet hung a few dark clothes of the same color and Levi's jeans.
In the paper dust in the kitchen's iron trash can, a ball of paper that hadn't burned all the way through was rummaged through.
Unfolded, it is a hand-drawn map, with the road as two parallel strips of lines and the houses as one long box, with no other textual description, and in one of the boxes, a star marker is noted.
We scanned this missing hand-drawn map into a topographic map and downloaded a map of the city of Guangzhou on the Internet at the same scale, and for the first time I saw an image with a memory of more than 1G, which I struggled to open.
Two people in the hotel each with a computer bit by bit comparison, spent the whole night, found two similar star mark shown address, one in Guangzhou Zengcheng District, one in Tianhe District.
Driving there, I ended up realizing that it was all ordinary people - not even remotely related to FuBian.
In the twilight, we were so exhausted that we found a stall on the street, and with a sense of exasperation, we ordered white cut chicken, stir-fried beef with kale, garlic cabbage, fried clams, pickled shrimp mayflies, eggplant casserole, oyster brand, and a beer.
"There's no reason for that, what went wrong?" Fyren pondered as she ate.
"The FuBian path didn't go through," I said, "but the Xi path seems to have some promise."
"What do you mean?"
"Didn't I ask Rong for James' crash report because I didn't think something was right about that crash. When I was comparing that hand-drawn map last night, I paid special attention to a few locations and noticed something." I looked around the stall and saw a bookstore across the street and stood up from my stool, "Wait for me."
I buy a map of Canton City and a red signing pen, go back to the stall, pull another folding table to put it together, and spread the map out on the empty tabletop, "Graphics are more instantly recognizable than text, and I don't know if this is the right guess, so mark it down and see if there's anything to be gained."
Before the accident, James lived in Baiyun District, Huangbian North Road, Yunshan Poetic District, and Xi after his release from prison, the first three workplaces are Huangbian North Road, automobile repair, Chentian Village, scrap car factory and Jiahe Street, "Jiahe Mall".
I marked these three locations with a red pen, and then connected these three points into a triangle, so that it can be clearly seen that in the center of the triangle, that is, James's house, the distance between these places is not more than three kilometers.
James' car accident report states that on June 1, 2012, at 4:20 p.m., James was driving Rong's car with his son in it, leaving the Harvest Mall, when he lost control of the car on National Highway 106 and crashed it into a concrete sidewalk wall, killing his son on the spot and leaving himself paralyzed.
The accident was concluded that the driver was driving improperly.
Xi, at that time, happened to be the administrator of the underground parking lot of "Jiahe Mall". Less than a week after the accident, Xi resigned, ran to the southernmost part of Guangzhou, Nansha District, rented a room in a village, opened a dried seafood store.
A long red line connects the two places, "Golden Harvest Mall" and Jinzhou Farmers' Market.
"Why are all three of the jobs Xi got after getting out of jail in the neighborhood of James' house, and all of them automobile-related? Why was the parking lot where Xi worked one stop before James' car accident? Why did Xi quit his job on the fourth day after the accident and ran away to the faraway Nansha district? Why was the car in the accident the same Rong car on which Xi had painted 'slut'?"
It dawned on me, "That car accident was Xi's long planned revenge after she got out of jail. Xi is the one who killed James' son, caused James to be paralyzed, and made Rong's head turn white overnight!"
"Auto mechanic, scrapyard dismantler, parking lot attendant." Fyren mused, "All of these jobs, Xi prepared to create the crash."
"Do you remember when the shopkeeper at the auto body shop said that Xi used to take the car parts apart and look at them? He figured out how to do things covertly at the auto body shop, such as making the brakes slightly malfunction, or making the steering wheel lose its precision, and then at the scrapyard, he mainly collected the same type of parts as Rong's Peugeot, so as to prevent the car accident from being inspected, and then finally, he worked as a parking lot attendant at the Golden Harvest Mall, which was close to James's house. Lastly, he worked as a parking lot attendant at the Harvest Mall near James' home. He must have done some research beforehand and knew that James' family would often go to the mall.
On Children's Day 2012, when he finally waited for James to bring his son over for a playdate, Xi took the parts he had prepared in advance and created the unseen crash.
As recalled by his colleagues at the time, he often wore a hat at work just to avoid being recognized by Rong or James." I was agitated, "That's why Xi was running away when the police were investigating James' disappearance; he thought the police were here for the crash."
"The whereabouts of the two men are still unknown. If FuBian is James' murderer, is it possible that Xi is a member of his congregation?Fyren said, "Could FuBian have contacted James because he learned of the car accident that Xi had caused?Xi is thinly connected, and if the two of them know each other, it's possible that Xi is holed up in a residence provided by FuBian. "
"It's also that starred house inside the hand-drawn map." I sigh, "Too bad I didn't find it."
"That's because it's the wrong way to look for it." Fyren drained his mug of beer, "Go back and look again."
Satanism, inverted pentagram, Fyren suddenly realizes that the hand-drawn topographical map found at FuBian's house, on which the houses are marked by a single pentagram, was unproductive because we were looking at the hand-drawn map in the direction of the positive pentagram.
In other words, FuBian used the inverted pentagram markers he drew on James' body when he labeled the location, and the proper way to open that map would be to turn the pentagram upside down and look at it.
Flipping the hand-drawn map over, we re-compare the map of Guangzhou in the computer a little bit, and this time we each find a highly similar address, and when we both compare it, we realize it's the same place: Pingshan Yicun, Panyu District, Guangzhou City. It turns out that some of the routes in the hand-drawn map are shown as rivers in the map.
Fyren and I pre-arranged our plans in the car. Drove in the rain for over an hour to Ping Shan One Village. Parked the car at the bridge and got out of the car to put on a raincoat. It was already 00:11 am on May 18th.
It is a two-story tiled house.
The outside walls of the house were flaking off large patches of lime, the couplets on the doorframe had faded to white, and the wooden door was covered; Fyren looked through the crack, nodded to me, and pushed the door in, the shaft creaking.
The yard was overgrown with weeds and littered with rotting wooden furniture that smelled musty.
We shot our flashlights downward to the front of the room, the door was still unlocked and the room was pitch black. "You have good night vision, check out the layout inside." Fyren whispered to me.
I leaned down and looked into the doorway, suddenly I smelled a sour rotting odor inside and heard the buzzing of flies, "Smell it." Fyren sniffs, looks to me, nods, pushes the iron door all the way open, he shines up, I shine down, and on the floor directly in front of us lies a curled up body, with his left arm pressed underneath him, and two thin, deep, black holes in his right arm held upward, his legs sprawled out in the shape of a toad, and his face lying on its side, with hideous features, and purplish lips, and dried salivary froth around tightly closed teeth.
Humid days, the climate is sultry, the body abandoned for many days, the abdomen has swollen, emitting a gust of stench. Countless black dots danced in the flashlight beam.
The dead man was Xi, who had been bitten by a poisonous snake. A black inverted bat design was tattooed on his exposed neck.
I found the switch, turned on the light, and realized that there were still two dark shadows flying at high speed from the room shed, spurred on by the bright light and swooshing out the door.
"It's bats." Fyren said.
There was a piece of paper on the table with three words written on it, "I am guilty."