In May 2014, a murder case occurred in Shantou, where a man abducted a crazy girl from the street late at night, hid her in a rented house and killed her before fleeing on a motorcycle. After the case, the police attached great importance to the deployment of a large number of police forces to search the city, and finally spent two and a half days to catch the murderer hiding in a ruined building in the original neighborhood.
It was disclosed that the murderer was mentally ill and rode his motorcycle in different areas to locate female lunatics, and that prior to this case he had already killed two crazy girls with the same technique and cooked and consumed them without anyone knowing.
After the report, there was a public outcry, and the case was dubbed the "double madness case" by the media because both the murderer and the victim were mentally ill.
In June, a news related to the case detonated in microblogging, a user said his friend also died two years ago in the murder of the neighborhood, and ultimately ended up with a suicide, "double crazy case" happened, she had a nightmare that her friend was also killed. Microblogging attached to a photo of the two, the eyes of the deceased was mosaic.
The tweet was retweeted nearly 10,000 times, creating bad publicity, and two days later the tweet disappeared and the blogger apologized.
In July, a girl named "Haley" by the netizen pointed the way to Shenzhen to find Fyren, said he is the blogger, I hope Fyren to help investigate the cause of death of his friend Helen, "Helen nature optimistic, it is unlikely that she would commit suicide."
Tired and frustrated from the Bat Cult case in Guangzhou, we needed something else to distract us, so we took the job, even if the pay wasn't great, and even if Fyren knew it would be a lot of work to investigate a case that had been closed for two years.
According to Haley's account, she and Helen have known each other for three years and share the same interests and are like sisters.
Late at night on March 12, 2012, Helen drowned in a toilet bathtub. It was later reported that she had committed suicide by taking sleeping pills after being drunk, and the parents of the deceased received a settlement paid by the developer of the neighborhood.
I asked Haley who was suspected if this was a murder. She shook her head at us, "Helen had a complicated social circle and was single before she died." We let Haley lead the way and moved to Helen's parents' house in Shantou.
Helen's father is a retired high school language teacher, and her mother is a homemaker who now devotes her full attention to her youngest son.
When Haley and Helen met, Helen was already renting an apartment, and this was the first time Haley went to Helen's parents' house. When she rang the doorbell, a little boy with one eye opened the inner door, and behind her a woman's voice asked in a doting voice, "Yangyang, who's here?" A moment later, a woman picks up the boy and looks at us through the bars, hesitantly asking who we are looking for.
Haley held up the prepared fruit basket and smiled, "Auntie, we're Helen's friends."
The woman was stunned for a moment and opened the door for us.
The house is on the fourth floor, the lighting is not good, the afternoon daylight is fierce, but the living room is dark. A set of mahogany sofa occupies two-thirds of the living room, a white-haired man in pajamas sitting on the sofa to boil water and make tea, the TV is playing Chaozhou opera, resounding drums and gongs.
Haley puts the fruit basket on the coffee table, "Hello Auntie and Uncle," we echo. The old man gives us a slight nod and the woman asks us in poor Mandarin, "Is there something you guys want to do this time when you come over?"
Haley sat down in the passenger seat, "I came over this time to find out a few things about Helen."
"It's been so long since it happened." The old man washed his cup and brewed tea, "You are Helen's friends, just come over and sit down, don't mention the sadness again. Come, drink tea."
Fyren had to ask the women to come all the way over to see Helen's room. I noticed that he referred directly to "Helen's room" instead of asking "Is her room still available?". The woman hesitated and stood up to take us there.
Sixteen square meters in size, plus a small balcony, the bed was covered with a straw mat, a thin pink quilt was folded over the bed, and there was a desk beside the bed. There is a picture of Helen on the wall, and the whole room is neat and tidy. The woman says, "I come to clean it up from time to time."
From the women, they learned that Helen was in a relationship in college and then separated when the boy studied abroad, and that this boy has not returned to the country today.
We went back to the kitchen and burned three incense sticks for Helen's ashes.
In the living room Fyren asks the women, "How old is Yangyang?" The boy compares five fingers to Fyren. The woman smiles and nods.
Before leaving, Fyren wanted to "have a word" and the women followed us downstairs.
"Auntie, I know you loved your daughter very much, and as good friends, we are here to find out the cause of her death. There was a murder some time ago, a girl died in the building Helen rented. We suspect that Helen did not commit suicide." Fyren changed the subject abruptly.
The woman stood still, her eyes now fearful, and almost without thinking, "It's suicide!" Realizing her outburst, she asked in a cold tone, "What the hell do you mean?"
"Auntie, after Helen's death, was the cause of death examined?" Fyren continued to press the issue.
"Get out!" The women changed their cordiality and shoved us with their hands, turned around and left quickly.
"With the money you lost from the developers, buy Yangyang." Fyren shouted at the women.
The women stopped.
"Auntie, Helen is your own daughter, we're really here to help." Fyren added.
The woman turned her back to us and wiped her tears, pointing to the pavilion in the distance, "Go over there and talk."
Helen rented a house located in the north of Shantou Haojiang District, "Hongteng District", after the accident, the developer quickly found her parents, to pay compensation of one million dollars, the condition is to recognize the verdict of suicide.
"We strongly disagreed at first, but the lawyer there said they just didn't want to extend the repercussions. And according to the scene examination, Helen drank a lot of wine and ate a whole bottle of sleeping pills by the bathtub before she died, and there was no need for further autopsy. The lawyer said that it is possible to go through the legal process, but it will be time consuming and laborious, and if we break Helen's body, the conclusion will still be the same, and we will not only pay the lawyer's fee, but we will also not be able to get the compensation. We also consulted a lawyer who also thought the outcome was not promising."
The woman was in tears, "Customs over here emphasize the importance of having a beginning, an end, and completeness, and since our daughter is dead, we don't want to leave her in peace, and after careful consideration, we finally reached a settlement with that side."
"Regret?" Fyren tried.
"Can't figure out how my daughter could have killed herself and not left a suicide note. I often feel regret that I didn't stick to the investigation in the first place." She covered her mouth with her hand and cried.
On the way back, I was curious and asked Haley, "Did you tell Fyren that Yangyang was adopted?" Haley shook her head. Haley shook her head, Fyren said he just looked through the family photo album and noticed that in all the group photos, there is not a single one of the four together, "Helen died two years ago, Yangyang is five years old this year, the two siblings did not cross paths in the photos, which is not reasonable. Moreover, Helen and her parents are double eyelids, Yangy ang is a single eyelid."
"What makes you so sure her mom will bare the truth to us? What if she's enraged?" I still had my doubts.
"Because she still loves her daughter." Fyren analyzes, "Helen died two years ago, the room was kept in its original state, and judging by the fan and the folded comforter, her mother probably still sleeps in her daughter's bed regularly, so if she ever felt bad about her daughter's death, then in all likelihood she would have regretted it."
"Hongteng District" is an old villa building, a total of six five-storey, each floor a large suite, no elevator, because built in the riverside, unstable foundations, the northeast corner of the building 3 wall long cracked a large seam, the tenants moved away one after another, "Prosperity Properties" to take advantage of the opportunity to buy, planning for redevelopment. The "Prosperity Real Estate" took the opportunity to acquire, planning to rebuild.
A year after Helen's death, in October 2013, the neighborhood demolition, but just demolished building 3, the developer was arrested for bribery, the project was put on hold, and building 3 opposite building 6 was then also demolished part of the building, became a dangerous building, can not live.
Other than that, most of the rooms in the remaining four buildings are still being rented out at low prices. The "double madness case" took place on the top floor of building No. 4 in the south-west corner, where the murderer hid in dangerous building No. 6 after the murder, and when the police searched for him, he blew up the beams and columns with a homemade clay bomb, which led to the collapse of the entire dangerous building and crushed the neighboring building No. 5.
Now that all the residents of the neighborhood have been evacuated, Fyren and I arrived late at night, and the collapse of the two buildings has left the entire neighborhood covered in dust, as if we were walking into a relic.
Helen died on the second floor of Building 4, and when I opened the iron door with the faded word "Blessing" on it, I surveyed the layout of the room, which had three rooms and two bathrooms, covering an area of 140 square meters. No one has rented this room since her death, so the interior still looks like it did when she was alive. However, since the incident happened a long time ago, even if there was evidence at that time, it has basically disappeared.
The fifth floor was the scene of the crazy girl's murder, and according to reports, the room was rented by the killer at a low price, and the victim drowned in the master bathtub, her body gnawed and still unidentified.
Like the crazy girl, Helen died in the master bathtub, and in the middle of the wooden floor of the room, I found a scratch consisting of multiple shards in a bursting pattern, which, from experience, is the damage caused by someone standing and throwing glassware on the floor, and from the number of scratches and the angle of the openings, I can conclude that the force of the smash was not small.
The glassware was smashed in Helen's room, and assuming she did it, she must have been filled with resentment. What could have caused her to develop such extreme emotions in this private space? I have a hunch she wasn't single.
"A single girl, living alone in a suite this big." I mutter.
"What if you have a partner but don't disclose it, giving the impression that you're single?" Fyren set up the question.
"Helen may have been a third party, and the room was rented for her by the invisible partner." I speculated, but then I contacted the original owner of the house at the time and he informed me that the house was rented by Helen herself.
Helen's last job before she died was as an accountant at the Silverado nightclub.
As the only nightclub in Haojiang District, Shantou, "Yindu" was once a glorious moment, and then with the development of the times, young people turn to the entertainment, "Yindu" gradually appeared to be declining, and closed down in October last year.
David, the boss, was said to be a gang leader when he was young, but later made money and made a big charity in his hometown to clean up his act, and after "Yindu" closed down, he stayed at home, and because he was a celebrity, it was easy for us to find out where he lived - he had a couple of properties in the city but he was single and lived in a self-constructed building with his old mother. He has several properties in the city, but is single and lives with his mother in a self-built building.
When we arrived at the location, the roller gate on the first floor was wide open, and a white Land Rover was parked inside, which was used as a garage and a meeting place. Near the staircase, there was a set of mahogany furniture, a set of Teochew standard Kung Fu tea set on the coffee table, and the wall was plastered with David's photos with some government officials or celebrities, as well as news clippings about him.
In the photo, he was wearing an inch hair, short, his facial features singled out are not good, small eyes, garlic nose, thick lips, but put in a square face, but magically revealed a kind of dunjun view.
A thin old woman, David's mother by the looks of it, was sitting in the doorway smoking a cigarette, and we explained why we were there. She glanced at us with her eyes, as if she knew David had a wide range of friends, not surprised, and told us to ring the third-floor doorbell ourselves, "David's still sleeping up there."
"Who is it?" An impatient voice came over the intercom.
"Hello Mr. David, I'm a reporter from Shantou Metropolis Newspaper, I'm here today to ask you about a girl who used to work at your Silverado Nightclub." Fyren answered.
There was a pause and his voice became level, "You guys are so well informed, you actually found me before the police did, and Yamy did work at my place."
"Who?" I was surprised to hear an unfamiliar name.
"That crazy lady, ah, Yamy, was an employee of mine here before." David said, "You guys wait for me, I'll talk to you downstairs."
David's misunderstanding of our intentions leads to an accidental identification of the victims of the "Double Madness" case. The fact that they died in the same building, in the same way, and in the same age group could be considered a coincidence, but now there's another clue: Yamy and Helen both worked at a nightclub, so there must be a connection between them.
"Sit down." David went downstairs, detached his mother, walked toward the main seat and sat down, boiled water to scald the cups, put in the Tieguanyin tea leaves, filled with hot water, scraped off the tea froth with the lid, brewed once, poured it out, filled with water again, steeped for a while, poured it into small cups individually, and delivered the tea to the coffee table in front of our seats individually with a cup fork, "Drink the tea."
We pick it up and drink it.
"What do you guys want to know?" David said, "I'll tell you what I know, please get your information together, the police will come back and ask so I don't have to go into detail with them, I don't like dealing with the police."
"Do you remember how long Yamy worked at your nightclub? What exactly did she do?" Fyren opened his book and recorder.
"I think it was two years ago, when I was an escort at a nightclub." David replied.
"How did you go crazy after that?" I asked.
"I heard it was getting a disease." David added, "Just got an STD. Her family was notified when she went crazy, but no one came to claim her."
"Do you feel responsible for her death?" I asked, turning the conversation around and staring David in the eye.Fyren, obviously not expecting me to ask this loaded question, coughed lightly.
David's eyes look upward for a moment and says, "I don't force everyone to work, and agreements are clearly signed beforehand, but I can't predict disasters, and all I can do is try to avoid them."
"And how do you feel about this murder?" I asked again.
"Young ladies, crazy people, and homeless people are all marginalized groups that no one cares about and are easy targets for criminals. The fact that this murder was solved so quickly, I honestly think it was the killer's bad luck." David said.
"Well," I lead, "since the victim was a former employee of yours, Mr. David must have known the case well."
"I just don't want to understand it, everyone's talking about it, it's impossible not to." David got back to me.
"The killer is said to be a psychopath." I said, "I always had a feeling that it didn't seem like something a psychopath would do."
"It sure doesn't look like it." David concurred, "The paper said he picked an abandoned neighborhood like that, rented the top six floors, chose to commit the crime in the bathtub for ease of cleaning, and did a series of acts to bait the police after the case was exposed, suggesting a counter-surveillance awareness, and a madman could do such a thing? More like a psychopath."
"The story goes that he was gnawing on the body when he was startled by a sudden return visit from the nanny, became suspicious, and quickly absconded." I pick up.
"When everything is ready and suddenly there's a knock on the door, and the cat's eye can't see, and you open the door and realize it's the nanny who quit, it's inevitable that you'll get suspicious. Psychopaths are cautious." David lowered his voice.
"And how do you feel about Helen's death?" I asked suddenly.
David's demeanor changed abruptly and his voice trembled slightly, "Who?"
"Helen," I raise my voice.
"Don't recognize it." David shrinks and swings his head, his movements stiff.
"She also worked at your nightclub, and died two years ago in Building 4 of the Hong Teng neighborhood, in the same manner as Yamy."
"There are so many people at the club, how can I know them all?" David's attitude changed drastically as he looked at his watch and walked towards the car, "I've said all I can about Yamy, I've got a few things to do, so that's it."
Two years ago, the "Prosperity Real Estate" people approached Tina to talk about the conditions of demolition, the old man was not moved, "I want to wait for death in this house. Either you demolish the house after my death, I have no children, I don't have to pay a penny. Or forced demolition, bury me here." The staff had no choice, did not expect the back of the "Hongteng neighborhood" demolition project just started, the boss was arrested for embezzlement.
Tina didn't expect to leave her house alive. After the "double madness" case, she was carried to the ambulance by the orphanage nurse. Every day, she stared at the orphanage, asking the caregiver, "What time is it?"
Fyren and I were looking for her because she was a resident on the first floor of Building 4, where two cases had occurred. Although she was blind and too old to give us any visual clues, we believed that we could dig up something else, following the rule that "blind people have good hearing".
She was sitting in a chair in the shadow of the orphanage hallway, her white eyes blinking, and we walked up to her, and before we could speak, we heard her say slowly, "Are you here to see me?"
"How do you know?" Fyren was surprised.
"Walking noises toward me and carrying a gift wrapped in plastic, I'm guessing it's coming for me." Tina said in a single word.
Fyren raises an eyebrow at me, meaning it wasn't a wasted visit. He places the tonic next to the old man's seat.
"You're reporters, aren't you? Police footsteps are not this light." The old man turned his head sideways and said, "Young man, it's not a good habit to shake your legs."
Fyren stops shaking his leg.
"Looking for me because of the murder of the girl on the sixth floor some time ago, I believe."
"Grandma, do you remember the girl who lived upstairs from you two years ago? She died in her room too." Fyren asked, leaning down.
Tina's expression froze for a split second, thinking she'd misheard, and confirmed it to us again, "You mean the girl on the second floor, the one named Helen."
"Right."
The old man's body sagged and he looked sad, "At that time I said that the girl upstairs was not a suicide, but no one believed me. Think I was talking nonsense. In the past two years I've often thought back to this memory, thinking I could use it later to give her justice."
A floor away, upstairs, Tina could hear the voices clearly.
On March 12, 2012, at about 9:00 p.m., Tina heard a sharp sound of breaking glass upstairs, followed by an argument between a man and a woman. After the argument subsided, Tina went to sleep, and was later awakened by the sound from upstairs, where she heard the sound of leather shoes crunching on glass slag, which was unusually clear because of the wooden floor.
The chiming clock chimed exactly twelve times. Someone was sweeping up glass sludge upstairs, Tina felt something was wrong and listened intently, and after about an hour, there was the sound of a door opening, footsteps stepping down the stairs and starting the car to leave, and Tina assured her, "It was three footsteps."
That means that three outsiders were in Helen's room that night. These three people are, without a doubt, the suspects who murdered Helen and disguised the scene as a suicide.
"Based on the voices you've heard in the past, did the girl live alone before?" I asked.
"No," the old man shook his head, "there's a man who comes over a lot, usually at night and leaves during the day."
"What do you know about this man's identity?" I asked.
"I remember the girl used to call him 'zhong'."
"It's necessary to go to the Hongteng neighborhood again." I told Fyren as we left the orphanage.
I searched for Helen's suicide story on my phone, and it says she was naked, submerged in a bathtub full of water, with beer bottles piled up next to her and an empty can of sleeping pills bottles, and based on the clutter of toiletries near the bathtub, the investigators believe that she struggled before she died, but ultimately couldn't get out of it because the walls of the tub were too slippery and her brain was too muddled. It was accompanied by a picture of the scene, a messy view of the toilet.
The glass scratches on the bedroom floor were smashed on the night Helen was killed, and were later cleaned up and disposed of. When you smash glass objects vigorously on the floor, the shards will scatter in all directions, and some of them will inevitably erupt into the corners under the table. I found three brown clear glass shards in the corner of the room in the master bedroom, which I took out and compared with the beer bottles in the scene photos, and found them to be of the same color and texture.
The brand name of the beer was "Kingway", a popular beer in Guangdong at that time, which has been discontinued.
Helen, who was probably intoxicated at the time, got into an argument with the man called "zhong".
The "zhong" committed the crime on impulse, holding her down in a bathtub full of water, causing her to drown, and then called two other people to help clean up the scene.
Since Helen's relationship with "zhong" was not publicized, the only conclusion that can be drawn from the careful erasure of traces of "zhong" in the room is that the death in the house of a lone occupant, with no signs of a struggle at the scene, ultimately leads to a suicide.
It is imperative that we find the man called "zhong".
We're leaving building 4.
"Wait." At the downstairs exit, I stopped abruptly.
Fyren looks back at me.
Outside the door of the flat there was a row of iron cabinets erected, a row of mailboxes, rusted, and as I approached to look at them, Fyren stepped forward, "What's wrong?"
"Look at this." I pointed to the number on the mailbox.
"4-6, for Building 4, Room 6." Fyren repeated it.
I pointed to the mailbox numbers in front of me again, "4-1, 4-2, 4-3, 4-5, 4-6, there are five floors here in total, but the fourth floor was omitted because of its unlucky name, which means that above the third floor is the fifth floor and the top floor is the sixth."
"A lot of neighborhoods do that." Fyren wondered.
"Do you remember when old man Tina happened to mention the crazy girl murder this afternoon, and she said 'the girl murder on the sixth floor'?" I took out my recorder and pressed out Tina's recording from that time.
"What do you mean?"
I clicked on the "double madness case" report, all the news wrote that the murder building in the fifth floor. "Only people who are familiar with the "Hongteng neighborhood" will call the top floor 'sixth floor', last year the neighborhood demolition, many people have left, 'sixth floor' title is no longer in use, the reporter reported the crazy girl's murder, all wrote 'sixth floor'. The title is no longer in use, the reporter reported crazy girl murder, are written to the 'fifth floor', they do not realize that the top floor was once the 'sixth floor'."
"And then what?"
I pulled up another recording and played it: "The paper said he picked one of those abandoned neighborhoods and rented the top six floors. ..." It was the recording of our morning interview with David, who also referred to the top floor as "the sixth floor. He also referred to the top floor as "the sixth floor.
I'll pull up another recording of David: "Everything was ready to go when suddenly there was a knock on the door and the cat's eye couldn't see ..."
My secret, after years of experience as a journalist, is to find out what interests the interviewing party in talking, get into his context, and he will talk more if he trusts you.
When I talked to David in the morning, I went along with his words, actually trying to win his favor and make him relax his guard. Inside the recording at the time, he used the Yamy murder case to unintentionally mention a lot of useful information, just that he was in the middle of this mountain at the time, and now he's pulling the strings.
"About Yamy's murder, David said too much in the morning, in the words revealed some details, he said 'the top six floors', but also said 'the cat's eye and can not see', at first I thought it was the details of the mistake, but the mailbox on the But the number on the mailbox shows that the fourth floor of the building in the "Hongteng neighborhood" is not called the fourth floor, and the fifth floor is collectively called the sixth floor. There's a detail here." I took Fyren up to the second floor and stood in front of the door, "Here on the second floor, I have another detail."
Fyren looks at the door to Building 2 and realizes what I'm talking about - a large, faded word for "Fortune" is taped to the upper center of the door, which just happens to cover the cat's eye on the door. cover the cat's eye on the door.
It is likely that David had been inside the door looking out and his view was obscured by the Chinese character for "福", so when he retold the story, he misremembered that the cat's eye of the whole building was broken, however, the door of the room on the fifth floor where Yamy's murder took place was clear when he looked out of the cat's eye.
"Helen worked under David, he dodged the subject when it was mentioned this morning with suspicious signs, and now we've found out he's familiar with the neighborhood," I look over at Fyren, "He had something to do with Helen's death."
Going back to David's house, the white Land Rover in the garage is not there, David's mother is still smoking on the first floor, telling us that David did not come home last night.
Obtaining her consent, we planned to wait downstairs for David to return, and not long after we sat down, the phone rang, and David's mother picked it up, and after a few answers, her face changed drastically, and she asked if we were driving, and if we could give her a ride to the fork in the road between Pearl River North Road and Darnum Road, where "the police said David had been in an automobile accident."
David drove his car through the bridge railing on Danan Road and plunged into the Hao River. When the car was recovered early in the morning, the man was already dead.
When we arrived, we found a light blue body bag on a stretcher in a vacant lot with a puddle of water pooling around it. We took David's mother out of the car and led her to a police officer outside the cordon, who confirmed that it was the deceased's mother and told her to get into the police car and wait.
We then accompanied the deceased to the police station as friends of the deceased, and in the afternoon the crash report came back with David's DUI and the time of death at about 5:00 am.
David was drinking alone in a bar last night at 11 p.m. Police summoned the owner of the bar, who confirmed that David had left around 3 a.m., and that a man was supporting him at the time. The man "wore a duck-tongued cap, the appearance is not clear", from the surveillance, is a thin body, about one meter seven men.
Who the man in the cap was is point one. It is doubtful that David was not driving in the direction of his home at the time of the accident.
It's too fishy for David to be in a car accident just as we've speculated that David had something to do with Helen's death.
Assuming this is a murder, what is the suspect's motive? The answer is that the suspect is probably Helen's murderer, "zhong", and David is the man he brought in to clean up the scene.
Because of our recent reopening of the investigation, zhong sensed that David was a danger, and fearing that his cover would be blown, he set out to kill him.
And it all started when Haley approached us to investigate, and as Helen's lifelong friend, she's currently in danger as well.
It was late afternoon when we got out of the police station, so I called Haley and learned that she was just getting ready to leave work, so I told her about David's situation and asked her to stay at the office for now until we got over to her.
Haley, an architectural and engineering data clerk whose company is on the seventeenth floor of the Kaiping Building, pushes open the glass door of her company to find her workstation empty and her bag still in place.
I called her and she said she was smoking in the hallway and that the smoking area was at the end of the hall, right out the door and across from the restrooms. False alarm, we went over and Fyren was smoking with her.
"Don't be nervous, I'll be fine." She exhaled a puff of smoke and said calmly.
"Did Helen ever mention a man named 'zhong'?" Fyren asked her from the hallway.
Haley shook her head.
"Helen was David's subordinate, she had an undisclosed partner who was the prime suspect in Helen's murder, and who knew David. now that David is dead, we're going to start with David's contacts from when he owned the nightclub and see if we can find out about a married man named ' zhong', a married man." I told Haley.
"Why a married man?"
"We suspect Helen has been a mistress."
Coming out of the building, I went to the bathroom and as I was washing my hands, I looked in the mirror and saw a gray, folk-like man come in.
Construction companies inevitably have engineering team of people, but I recalled in the police station to see David before the incident bar surveillance video, the duck-tongued man who assisted him to leave, the rear trouser leg is covered with white spots, at the time I thought it was a pattern, at the moment the two elements are suddenly connected to the trouser leg of those white dots is a mud point it?
With only a moment's lapse of concentration, I jerked my head up to look in the mirror and realized that the man had dived close behind me, and I didn't have time to react before my neck was tightened by the wire at the back of my head.
There is a force that pulls me backward, I am short of breath, in a panic, my right hand touched the flower pot placed on the sink, grabbed the edge and smashed it backward, the ceramic pot smashed the murderer's head, shattered, the wire ring is thus loosened, I fell to my knees to break free, my neck was strangled by the wire with a crack, the blood flowed like a stream of blood, the whole person dazed and dizzy, sitting on his knees and his hands covering the wound, the blood is still spilling out from the cracks of the fingers. I could not cry out.
Seeing that my strength was failing, the perpetrator looked around, lifted a fire extinguisher from the side of the door, ran towards me and smashed it over my head, I stepped back and ducked under the sink, and on the first stroke he smashed the extinguisher against the sink counter with a muffled sound, and I kicked him in the crotch with my right foot so hard that he retreated two metres away and curled up on the ground.
He was about five-foot-seven, with a skinny frame, and I concluded that he was no match for me. Taking advantage of the time that he fell to the ground, I hurriedly adjusted my mind, stabilized my breath, and took off the T-shirt that I was wearing, kneaded it into a ball to block the flow of blood from the neck wound, and stood up by holding onto the washbasin.
He also stood up shakily and moved to the doorway to prevent me from escaping. I held a shard of flowerpot china in my right hand, trying to take advantage of his energy in rushing toward me to collide with him and drive the sharp porcelain into his chest. I clutched the porcelain shard so tightly that my palm was cut and bruised. One move was all it took. "Come on!" I shouted hoarsely.
He lifted the fire extinguisher and ran forward once more, when the toilet door opened, Fyren heard a noise outside, became suspicious, and opening the door moments later, saw my naked upper body covered in blood, he quickly caught up with the perpetrator, and, taking advantage of his opponent's impetus, pushed him vigorously forward and slammed him.
The perpetrator was knocked against the sink and hit his head on the mirror with such force that the entire mirror shattered and shards of glass fell to the ground. The perpetrator rebounded and fell to the ground, his forehead swollen, and when he raised his head, blood flowed vertically down the bridge of his nose and dripped at the tip.
The fire extinguisher fell from his hand and was picked up by Fyren, who escorted me to the door and blocked the only exit from the restroom.
The perpetrator had to lean into the restroom, where he casually picked up a sharp shard of glass and pointed it at us. We confronted him.
He went forward, stabbed Fyren with glass, Fyren hit him with a fire extinguisher to the wrist, and then a side, his right hand quickly into the armpit of the assailant, holding his arm, his left hand holding his wrist, deep horse stance, the other side of the back of the force on the right shoulder, a force, and heavily over the shoulder to the ground, and then wringing the hands of the assailant, a break, the glass shards fell to the ground, Fyren kicked the foot to the far side. Fyren kicked his foot to the far side of the room. When he saw that he had overpowered the assailant, the assailant probed his head and was about to bite Fyren's arm, but Fyren let go of him and jumped away from the spot.
"You have no way out." Fyren stood toward the restroom door.
The assailant, his face livid and sinewy, like a mad dog, charged again, and Fyren laid the fire extinguisher across the room and struck the assailant hard in the face with the bottom of the bottle, causing him to lie backward, and in a moment to brace himself and rise again.
His face was bleeding from his nose, his right hand was broken by Fyren, his forehead was bumped and swollen, and his body was scratched by shards of glass on the floor, and he was winning. People on the same floor gathered around the door at the news, and the restroom door pushed open at that moment, and Haley came in and told us, "I've called the police."
Fyren said to the perpetrator, "Surrender."
The assailant stepped back and retreated to the restroom window, where he pulled it open with his uninjured left hand and, without pausing for a second, dove down.
Seventeen floors up, before we could react, we heard a dull crash downstairs, followed by a flurry of car alarms. At this point, the clothes I was covering under my neck were already wet with blood, my body was cold, and my consciousness was fading.
I woke up the next morning, lying in a hospital bed with eleven stitches in my neck and a ring of gauze wrapped around the outside of the wound.
Fyren, Haley and a nurse are around. I tried to speak but had a hard time vocalizing. The nurse interrupts me, "The wound was just stitched up, don't talk yet."
Fyren told me that the assailant was dead, and that the police had matched him to the man in the ducktail hat who had shown up at the bar that night to help a drunken David out.
He was indeed a construction worker for the construction company inside the Kaiping Building, but registered with a fake ID card. On him, the police did not search a single thing, he was a blank.
On top of that, the medical examiner detected that he had AIDS. This could be an explanation for his death.
Upon learning the news, Fyren went back to the hotel and took another fresh shower, throwing away any blood-spattered clothing.
"I learned an important clue from the coroner today." Fyren told me, "Two of the victims he autopsied recently, both with AIDS, one was the perpetrator and the other was that crazy lady Yamy."
"Things are getting complicated." Fyren said, "But I have a feeling the case is winding down. It won't be too late for us to look into it when you're better."
"If it wasn't for me, you wouldn't be okay. I'm sorry." Haley's eyes reddened.
I nodded to her that I didn't care.
For the next three days, Haley took care of me in the hospital. In order for me to get well, Fyren did the rest of the investigation alone.
He went to David's funeral, how to say David is also a celebrity, the row is very big, outside the lobby parked a number of luxury cars with various city license plates.
David is a filial son, Fyren thought he died, David's mother will be heartbroken, but I did not expect her whole sober and firm, speaking on the stage, voice clanging: "David is even more superstitious than me, to open a company to look at the feng shui, think that the funeral is bad luck, seldom to attend, oh, two years ago he attended a funeral, and that night came back to the clothes worn by the body thrown away! David is even more superstitious than me.
He must not have expected so many people to come to his funeral, and I'll tell you all that he was very nice and did a lot of good things, so you don't have to throw away the clothes you wore today when you go back." The people at the bottom laughed at this.
Fyren finds David's previous driver at the funeral, who also finds David's death anomalous and believes that although David liked to drink, he valued his life and would never have been a person who would drink and drive.
"How long have you been driving for David?" Fyren asked.
"Eight years, the nightclub closed before I left." The driver said.
"His mom just said that David was at a funeral two years ago when you were his driver, do you know whose funeral it was?"
"I don't know." The driver shook his head, "I drove for him for eight years, and that was the only time he let me go home early."
"Do you remember the time?" Fyren was alert.
"March 12, I thought it was some kind of big day."
March 12, 2012, was the date of Helen's death.David didn't go to the funeral, he went to Helen's room.Fyren approached David's mother afterwards, "Do you remember the day of David's funeral two years ago?"
"He put all the clothes he wore that day in a black bag and when I bumped into him, he told me he had attended a funeral and asked me to help him get rid of his clothes and shoes. I saw that the clothes were still new and thought I could give them to a relative, so I hid them from him and kept them in the utility room on the first floor. Can't remember much of the rest."
"Have the clothes been given away since?" Fyren asked.
"And then it went out the window."
In the first-floor barn, David's mother rummages through a large black plastic bag containing a black jacket coat, a pair of suit pants, a pair of gloves, and a pair of brown leather shoes.
Fyren found some embedded glass shards in the sole of his shoe, which he picked out in full and placed in a Ziploc bag.
Tina recalled that on the night of Helen's death, there was an argument in the room, a bottle of Kingway beer was smashed, and later she heard the sound of a shoe stepping on broken glass.
Fyren pulls out the three shards of clear brown glass we found in the corner of the master bedroom, and comparing them reveals that they're identical to the ones on the soles of David's shoes. This basically confirms that he was one of the accomplices in Helen's murder.
In the inner pocket of the jacket, Fyren finds another piece of physical evidence, a crumpled piece of horizontal lined paper, and after reading its contents, Fyren connects all the dots and understands the mystery of Helen's death.
Helen had already resigned from the Yindu nightclub when she died. Fyren goes to Helen's house again and learns from her parents that she was preparing for a job at the local TV station and had already passed the written test and the interview, but she committed suicide at a critical moment, which is what Helen's mother can't figure out.
At that time, the personnel director of the TV station had already left the station, Fyren bounced around and found her, the personnel director contacted countless interviewees, but was impressed by Helen, "she looks sweet, Mandarin is very standard, outstanding language expression ability, is really the candidate we are looking for, unfortunately, the written test and interview have passed, I did not expect to get stuck in the last pass, our medical examination standards are in accordance with the civil service examination to come, she physical examination did not pass."
"For which test specifically did you fail?" Fyren asked.
"Even though I've left my job, I'm still bound by confidentiality, sorry." Personnel face apologized.
"Is it because of this?" Fyren unfolded the piece of cross-hatched paper found in David's coat pocket on the tabletop and moved it to the other man.
The other woman swallowed as she watched, knowing that Fyren was aware of everything and had come to her on this trip just to make a final confirmation.
Meanwhile, the night before I was discharged, Haley left the hospital room and did not return.
Fyren came to pick me up from the hospital. He went to Haley's work and house and looked for her. No one was to be found and the phone was off.
"Did you call the police?" My voice was still hoarse.
"She'll be fine." Fyren said.
The man in the cap works in Kaiping Mansion and usually keeps to himself, and his colleagues say they sometimes see him smoking in the hallway.Fyren is puzzled, as he works in the same company as Haley, he has plenty of chances to kill Haley, so why did he come to attack me that night instead? Besides, construction workers usually work outside, so it's strange that they come to the hallway specifically to smoke.
Fyren was on guard against Haley, and he privately found someone to recover the 10,000-transferred tweet posted by Haley. Discovered that there was something wrong with the photo she took with Helen.Fyren found the photo on the wall of Helen's room.The background and the characters were the same, but it was a selfie with Helen alone in it. "At that time, Haley mosaic Helen's eyes, it seems to respect the dead, but in fact, it is to cover up the problem that the two people's pupil light source point is not the same in the photo, that group photo is P." Fyren said.
"What was the purpose of her forgery?" I asked.
"To add credibility, let's get involved and ride the 'double madness case' and bring Helen's death into the limelight, when something has a broad mass base, we tend not to doubt its veracity." Fyren said, "I've asked Helen's coworkers and friends over the past few days, and none of them knew of Haley's existence.Helen's mother kept her daughter's cell phone number from when she was alive, and there was no Haley's number in her address book. She was not a friend of Helen's."
"Even if she wasn't Helen's friend, there's something really wrong with Helen's death." I was shocked at what Fyren said.
"Helen's death was a suicide." Fyren said, "It was a suicide that looked like murder. She knew that if we looked into it, we'd just hit a dead end."
In the inside pocket of David's jacket, Fyren found Helen's suicide note that he had not dealt with. The suicide note states that she was told by the TV personnel that day that she had contracted AIDS, and that she regretted being a mistress and being kept in the dark when she was infected by the man.
On that night of March 12, 2012, Helen had a big fight with her boyfriend in her room because she learned that she was infected with HIV. Later, she locked herself in her room to drink, got up a death wish, took a large amount of sleeping pills and drowned in the bathtub. Noticing something was wrong, the boyfriend took out his spare key and opened the door to find Helen dead. So he called David and another person to help clean up the scene, because his identity is not public, it is easy to erase their own traces, and Helen was a suicide, the police naturally did not suspect him afterward. "Haley was probably the third person in the room at the time." Fyren said.
They took the suicide note afterward because they didn't want the two messages revealed in it to come to light.
One is the name of his boyfriend, Zihong, a married, second-generation rich man who is the guest of honor at the Yindu nightclub. We had seen this name earlier when we were checking David's connections, but our thinking was misled by Tina on the first floor, who didn't realize that "zhong" was actually a portmanteau of "Zihong."
Another piece of information that needs to be hidden is AIDS. Helen committed suicide, and at that time, the "Hongteng District" had already been demolished and rebuilt - there was no possibility of the room becoming a murder house, so why did "Prosperity Properties" have to pay a high compensation to the parents of the deceased? "Why would Prosperity Properties pay an exorbitant amount of compensation to the parents of the deceased?
Because the developer, is Zihong's father. What this father really wants to cover up is the fact that Helen had AIDS. He blocks the parents of the deceased from conducting an autopsy and pays for the notification of the lover, because once it comes to light, the negative news of his son's HIV infection and his bad marriage will be in the press one after the other, which will be a blow to the family estate and Zihong's future life will be over.
"The Yindu Nightclub is a dance club, but everyone knows that there is a sex trade going on inside. In order to consolidate his position, David makes friends with various powerful people, including Zihong's father, the owner of "Prosperity Real Estate".
He figured out the playboy Zihong's preference, and chose a lady who would definitely be sent to Zihong's room on the first night as long as she matched Zihong's favorite type.
This also explains the similarity in the looks of the crazy girls Yamy and Helen: long hair, big eyes, melon-faced, tall, who contracted AIDS as a result of Zihong, one of whom went mad and one of whom committed suicide.
David and Zihong are in the same boat. A nightclub with an AIDS scandal could be closed down or retaliated against by someone he can't afford to mess with. This is a price David can't afford to pay, so he has to find a way to erase the fact that Helen has AIDS.
At David's funeral, the chauffeur told Fyren that it wasn't the market that caused Silverado to close.
Last August, a customer infected with AIDS, the police, finally broke. Police investigation based on this clue, found that the nightclub and the "Prosperity Real Estate" money links, so found out the "Prosperity Real Estate" boss bribe officials evidence, October, "Hongteng District In October, the demolition project of "Hongteng District" was shelved and Zihong's father was imprisoned.
The family path didn't lag behind, as Zihong went on to die of a drug overdose this past April, with the publicly announced cause of death being cancer.
"What role did Haley play? And who was the man with AIDS who attacked me and jumped to his death?" I spoke more sharply, tugging at the wound on my neck with an itchy pain.
Fyren shook his head, "Not sure yet. But Haley's aim, should be on both of us."
"You mean she knew someone attacked me in the restroom. She knew the perpetrator?"
"Right." Fyren told me, "That day when you went to the restroom, she said she had a video she wanted to show me, and I followed her to the workstation, and she told me to put on my headphones, and just as I was about to do so, I heard a noise from the restroom side. Now that I think about it, the company was already off duty, there were not many people in the room, and I had to put on the headphones to watch the video, probably to block the sound of the fight in the restroom. Including the back she ran into the toilet, said have called the police, now think of it, like saying to the perpetrator to listen to, the perpetrator listened to it and then jumped off the building."
"Wait." I stopped in my tracks, "When did you perceive these?"
"When you operate." Fyren said.
"Then, according to you, Haley is harmful to my suspicion, and you still let her take care of me alone in the hospital these days, aren't you giving her the convenience to do it?"
"Yeah, I was just waiting for her to do it." Fyren said with a smile despite my surprise.
Taking advantage of Haley's bathroom breaks at the hospital, Fyren installed a pinhole camera in the lamp across the bed from me. He paid the duty nurse a fee to take turns with her, watching Haley's every move from the duty room on the same floor. I wanted to catch Haley while she was on me, but I didn't expect to wait three days, find nothing, and let her get away.
"A companion can be used as bait if necessary." I teased him, "Could put that one in the nightwalker code."
"Actually, she went down on you." Fyren laid his cell phone screen across and showed me the video he'd taken.
The image is of Haley's last moments before she left the hospital room late the night before I was discharged. She stood up from the chair next to my bed, walked toward the sleeping me, leaned in for a hug, and nudged my cheek with her lips.
Moments after Haley leans over, Fyren pauses and points to her backside, where I see an inverted bat tattoo.
"Let's go, I'll buy you a marinated lion's head goose,"
Fyren tapped me on the shoulder, "Neck still hurt?"