Haley's bat tattoo on her lower back connects the dots between the "cult murders" in Guangzhou.
This same symbol appeared on the neck of Xi, who was bitten to death by a poisonous snake, and on the right arm of the masked man who ambushed us in the Pearl Building in Guangzhou.
They undoubtedly belong to the same criminal gang, and the leader is probably FuBian, who founded the "Bat Cult".
Because Fyren and I sabotaged his criminal plan in Guangzhou, he turned the tables and took revenge on us.
The masked man's ambush, Haley's commission, all came close to killing us, and I have a nearly 10-centimeter scar on my neck as a result.
Back in Shenzhen, I took some time off.
One day, Fyren told me that FuBian's revenge won't stop and that I should stop the rest of my work and take the initiative to find out where he is.
Fyren hypothesized that the criminal group must be backed by money.
Even though FuBian has a powerful compulsion, it is clear that his financial power alone cannot absorb such a group of offenders.
We returned to the Tianhe District of Guangzhou and went to the industrial park where FuBian founded the "Prisoners' Mutual Aid Association". We found the manager of the park and exchanged two Chinese cigarettes for a person's name, and he readily gave us the information about the tenant.
The monthly rent for the barn was sixty-seven thousand dollars, and the tenant was not FuBian, but a man named Yasin Chen, thirty-one years old, of American nationality, now living in Hong Kong. Like FuBian, he also studied management at Arizona State University.
Fyren used Facebook to contact a classmate who knew YasinChen and confirmed that Chen and Fu met while studying abroad, and that FuBian was so charming that YasinChen obeyed him.
We googled "Hong Kong" and "YasinChen" and, as expected, there were multiple entries, and surprisingly, the top one was a news story about a murder related to him.
In the early hours of October 27, 2014, two murders occurred in a villa in the southern part of Lantau Island, an outlying island of Hong Kong, where a man and a woman drowned in a pool in the backyard of the villa, the woman naked and the man's body wearing only a pair of boxer briefs, their mouths taped with black tape and their eyes covered with black cloth.
Before his death, he was attacked by thugs with sticks and had multiple bruises and wounds on his body.
The two men drowned quickly in the water because their hands and feet were tied with ropes. The room safe was searched and the estimated value of the lost property was between one million Hong Kong dollars.
Both deceased were celebrities.
The man is Yasin Chen's brother, Nathan Chen, the eldest son of the chairman of the board of directors of Thousand Morning Realty, who is thirty-four years old.
The woman's name is Yvonne, a former Asian beauty pageant winner who briefly entered the acting industry and won a posthumous award, before marrying Yasin Chen in 2012 and then retiring from acting.
YasinChen had a motive to commit the crime when his wife cheated on him with his brother, but after police lines up an alibi and clues left at the scene of the murder, the police quickly apprehended the suspect.
NathanChen had just gotten a new car before he was killed, and a week after the murder, someone posted a video of him and Yvonne car-shaking on the Internet, and netizens eventually concluded that the two were cheating on each other.
When the scandal broke, YasinChen had no choice but to hold a press conference, saying that his domestic violence was one of the root causes of the tragedy, and that he was ashamed of the two deceased and would strongly support the police in their case.
Celebrity, cheating, murder, this case has caused a stir in Hong Kong, and based on my knowledge of Hong Kong's paparazzi, the relevant personnel will surely be raked over the coals.
This will greatly facilitate our next investigation of YasinChen.
As for which port of entry, I naturally went to my predecessor, Ryan, who had brought me into the industry in Hong Kong before.
Ryan is a Hong Konger who often wears a plain gray T-shirt in the summer and a black trench coat in the winter, and his closet is stocked with many sets of the same clothes, partly out of laziness, and partly because paparazzi's work has to be low-profile.
He makes a living by providing information on Hong Kong celebrities, and his stalking skills are particularly impressive.
Before I was a doggie because I was forced by life and self-absorbed, but he truly loves it and is proud of it.
He would rarely look directly at people, at first to avoid being spotted by his stalking target, but later forming a habit of mostly glancing at people with his afterimage even when talking to his coworkers and friends.
Arriving in Hong Kong the day after New Year's Day 2015, we met at a coffee shop in Kwun Tong Plaza.
I spot Ryan in the middle of the bustling store. Going to his side, knuckles knocking on the tabletop, he raised his eyes to us and stood up to shake Fyren's hand.
"Sorry for the long wait." Fyren said.
Ryan says in broken Mandarin that he just got here too. I gesture to Fyren to pay up.
Ryan was unsure and I explained that when I entered the store Fyren saw two coffee cups sitting at your table and one was finished and thought you had been waiting here for a while and I thought you had just arrived so we made a bet and I won.
Ryan looks at me, "How can you tell I just got here?"
"You know that we are two people come, but still choose a two people seating small table, the location is the center of the store, and you are always used to sit in the corner. This coffee shop is full and seats are basically up for grabs, so you can see that you had a hard time finding this empty table, and you were already seated before the waiter had a chance to clear the table." I said.
"The fact that you asked us to come to this coffee shop suggests that it's quiet and suitable for talking, but now that it's so noisy, I'm guessing you didn't take the extra factor of the 'New Year's Day holiday' into account, so maybe next you'll suggest to us that we find a new place?"
"Not bad for a friend." Ryan patted me on the shoulder, "It does have that going for it."
We walked to the seaside gardens near the square and found a secluded spot to sit.
Ryan told us he quit being a reporter last June and opened a detective agency.
"There are specialties in the arts, and before that, my area of interest was celebrity cheating, but Cases were limited, so I became a detective instead. This pool drowning case originally had nothing to do with me, but in the middle of July this year, Yvonne had approached me to investigate her husband, her death, and I felt that things were not as simple as they appeared to be, so I've been following up."
Ryan remembers what Yvonne looked like when she approached him, a beauty pageant winner and movie queen, but in a state of emaciation.
On a hot day, she met Ryan in a jacket, sunglasses off, her right eye black and blue and bloodshot, she said she had been domestically abused by her husband YasinChen, rolled up the right sleeve of her jacket to show Ryan the scars on her arms, lifted up the back of her shirt, a gaping, oozing wound, and that YasinChen had often beaten her with a belt.
She'd read about Ryan and knew he had a knack for finding out about cheating.
Yvonne wants Ryan's help; she feels that her husband is seeing other women outside the home, and finding incriminating evidence against him will increase her leverage in the divorce.
"Yvonne was shaking when she talked to me, not with anger, but with fear. The tears wouldn't stop flowing, as if she didn't even know it.
After all these years of working, I thought I was cold enough, but seeing her fall into this state doesn't sit well with me." Ryan said, "I took the commission and gave Yvonne a push-button cell phone so she could contact me privately."
But Ryan doesn't find evidence of YasinChen's cheating, and just as he's getting burnt out, he receives a text from Yvonne that says, "Stop investigating, no more contact. Do not reply."
He hadn't heard from Yvonne since then, and when he pointed his telephoto lens at the window of YasinChen's house, he realized that the shade hadn't been pulled back since the beginning.
When he hears about Yvonne again, he doesn't realize that it's her murder.Ryan is very remorseful, "If we had looked into it, maybe Yvonne wouldn't have died."
"What?" Fyren asked.
"Yvonne cheated with NathanChen, this is very suspicious. It has been rumored in the circle that NathanChen is a homosexual, and the several girlfriends he has had are nothing more than his father's orders. His father has already had the will to retire, and I have heard that the condition for NathanChen to take over the job is, first of all, that he has to start a family and have children. Although these news can not be confirmed, but from his habit of living alone in the past few years and the industry's evaluation of him, I do not think he will cheat with his sister-in-law."
"This is all speculation.NathanChen could be bisexual too." Fyren said.
"Besides, there are videos of the two cheating on each other online." I added.
"Did you guys watch the video?" Ryan asked.
We shook our heads.
"Car recorder footage to the public, said video, in fact, just a recording, peach color news traditionally spread widely, because to meet the netizen's desire to snoop, and then after fermentation, into a deep impression. There are some bad-hearted journalists who will use such means to slander stars, even if the stars come up with strong evidence to prove their innocence, the netizens will take it as a public relations tactic." Ryan searched out the video in his phone and tapped it to show us.
The camera is pointed at a stretch of ocean, and the image doesn't move, it looks like the car is parked at a dock somewhere.
The time is 6 p.m. on May 6, 2014, and the video features a conversation between the two, with the male voice asking in Cantonese, "Where's Yasin?"
The female voice replied, "Went to Shantou, said she'd be back in a week."
The male voice asks, "Did he hit you again?" A sob is heard.
The male voice said, "Divorce him and live with me."
The female voice asked, "Would Daddy allow you to do that?"
The male voice said, "It's okay, I'll take care of it."
Then there was the sound of seats scraping, pants unbuckling, moaning, a slight shaking of the screen, and the female voice calling out "Nathan" several times in rapid succession, to which the male responded.
About half an hour later, the scene shifts and the car starts.
"A few short conversations, seemingly casual, actually carry information, giving names of people, character relationships, domestic violence, and fatherhood, less like a normal chat and more like scripted lines." Ryan noted.
"Conversations can be faked, voices can be faked. But not the picture."
After the video was released, Ryan watched it multiple times, noting that a yacht had passed in front of the car during this time, and the image was zoomed in and then sharpened to reveal the word "tiger" marked on the hull of the yacht.
Hong Kong is surrounded by sea on three sides, and private yacht culture is prevalent. Ryan, through his network of connections, quickly found the owner, and was going to ask the owner about the route the yacht had passed on May 6 at 6 p.m., but his logbook didn't have that date marked on it.
May 6 was a Tuesday, and the owner stated that he usually sails on weekends and did not sail on Tuesday.
"The people who benefit are the counterfeiters." Ryan said.
"I checked, YasinChen has a nightclub in Shantou, there was a fire in April last year, and he went over there from May 4 to 8 to clean up the mess, that's why he chose the 6th day to fake it, both to make this video more convincing and to prove that his wife has been cheating on him with his brother for a long time."
"YasinChen wasn't there the day it happened, do you think he had someone else do it?" Fyren searched.
Ryan nodded, "This murder has nothing to do with YasinChen, I even think his real target is his brother NathanChen, get rid of him and he'll be the only male left in the family, sooner or later the chairmanship will pass to him."
"Then one could have just killed NathanChen, there was no need to fake the two of them cheating on each other." I questioned.
"That's why my investigation never went anywhere." Ryan changed the subject, "By the way, are you guys here to check him out too?"
"A case with Guangzhou last year had something to do with him." Fyren sketched it out, he didn't want Ryan to know too much so he wouldn't get hurt by mistake.
"Just so we can investigate together." Ryan said.
"Why do you want to keep looking into it?" Fyren asked rhetorically.
"I don't like to do things halfway." Ryan said, "Yvonne had a commission at the time, and I only did half of it."
NathanChen has a well-known hobby, driving antique cars.
He had just purchased a 1970 Dodge Charger the week before he was killed.
The police later arrested the suspect, Glenn, based on clues at the scene of the murder. He is an employee of the "Kimberly's Antique Car Company", where Nathan Chen purchased his new car.
NathanChen's villa is covered with surveillance, the front door has both fingerprint and password verification, and the door locking system shows no signs of being tampered with, so the murderer should have been hiding in the room long ago.
The garage was on the first floor of the villa, and police found the trunk of the antique car inside unclosed, with a motor oil palm print left on the trunk lid that looked suspiciously like a cloth glove from the grain.
There is a small hole drilled in the lock plate, presumably the murderer hid in NathanChen's trunk beforehand, and when the time was ripe to open the trunk, because the garage and the villa's various rooms are connected, so they were able to sneak into the room and abduct NathanChen and Yvonne.
On the floor of Nathan Chen's room, the police found a note with the word "car dealership" written on it, which was supposedly a clue left by Nathan Chen after he was tied up with his hands behind his back and realized the identity of the murderer, and secretly left a clue behind his back by using his hand to fumble with the pen and paper on the table.
It was difficult to make out the handwriting because it was written backhanded and blind and the strokes were distorted, but multiple fingerprints of NathanChen were detected on the note.
The murderer supposedly had no intention of killing NathanChen in the first place, which can be determined in three ways:
First, Nathan Chen may judge that he will not die. He recognizes the identity of the murderer as being related to the car dealership, and intends to kidnap and extort money from the family, so he takes the risk of leaving clues to the word "car dealership" in the hope of being rescued.
Two, Yvonne died more than an hour before NathanChen.
Three, before he was killed, NathanChen also made a call to his assistant, saying he wouldn't be going to the office tomorrow.
This is generally the modus operandi of kidnappers, and the only explanation for why they later killed NathanChen is that the killer realized that his identity was recognized by the other side.
"Jinli car store" store is not big, only a boss and three employees, the police according to the clues, access to the "Jinli car shop" personnel information.
Soon locked an employee named Glenn, Fujianese, single, twenty-one years old, came to Hong Kong in 2014, borrowed to live in his aunt's house, the address is located in a tenement building near Tsuen Wan Road.
The police went to the car dealership for a surprise interrogation, and the remaining three had alibis, except for Glenn's aunt, who was traveling in Japan at the time and lived alone.
Suspecting that he had accomplices, the police quickly applied for a search warrant for the suspect to lead a search at the house.
Two watches were eventually found behind the stove in the living room, HK$650,000 and US$100,000 were found under the bed in the bedroom, which were confirmed to be the contents of Nathan Chen's safe.
The police arrested Glenn on charges of intentional homicide and burglary and later detained him in the Lai Chi Kok Reception Centre.
Ryan introduced us to Glenn's defense attorney, Rex's firm. When Ryan was a paparazzo, he often acted as an "informant" for some of the lawyers, and had helped Rex gather the evidence he needed for his lawsuits. The two of them bonded over this.
Rex took over the case in mid-November 2014, and in his office, he walked us through the events leading up to Glenn's arrest.
In conclusion, "The suspicious aspect of this case is the absence of Glenn's fingerprints at the crime scene and on the stolen property recovered from his residence. These are, at best, circumstantial physical evidence and hardly form a complete chain of evidence."
We looked at photos of the scene, and there were clothes strewn on the bedroom floor, and the two had clearly been in a heated relationship before they were killed.
The two victims were floating in the pool with their hands tied behind their backs, sideways and naked, with bruises and cuts all over their bodies.
Yvonne was missing an incisor and an aluminum baseball bat was left at the scene, a non-cottage item.
The body of the stick was dented in several places, stained with the blood of the two men, and there was a tooth mark, which was later tested to match Yvonne's tooth mark, and it is assumed that the murderer swung the stick into Yvonne's teeth, causing her to lose her incisors.
Surveillance at YasinChen's villa shows him leaving in a Lamborghini at 10:15 p.m. on October 26, 2014, and Yvonne walking out the door at 11:07 p.m.
On the evening of October 26, at about eleven o'clock, YasinChen went to the company's warehouse to play mahjong with three employees.
At 2:10 a.m. on the 27th, YasinChen's car appeared in front of a bar on Kei Lung Street in Yau Tsim Mong District, and several people confirmed that he was inside the store.
The medical examiner presumed Yvonne's time of death to be between 0:00 a.m. and 1:00 a.m. and NathanChen's time of death to be between 2:00 a.m. and 3:00 a.m. on October 27th.
The hard drive of the security camera footage from NathanChen's villa was lost and has not been found.
According to the deposition of NathanChen's assistant and the recording of the telephone call, it was confirmed that at 2:01 a.m., NathanChen left a telephone message for Jason, which read, "Mr. Jason, I will not go to the office tomorrow and you will follow up on all matters. Do not disturb."
"Since there was an intent to kidnap, there was no need to also attack the victim with a club, right?" After reading the various clues, I quickly realized the problem.
"There's a suspicion of venting." Fyren said, "But Glenn didn't have a grudge against either of the victims, and the torture wasn't necessary."
"Hmm." Rex agreed, "There are three rooms on the first floor of the villa, and three others on the second floor in addition to NathanChen's bedroom, and while those rooms were closed that night, the perp went straight to NathanChen's bedroom, and there are no signs of the handles on the remaining six rooms being twisted."
"And the culprits were well aware of the possibility of infiltrating the house through the garage.NathanChen is a very private person and it is hard to believe that someone who has not crossed paths with him would be so aware of the inner workings of his villa."
"Look at this fingernail." Fyren pointed to a close-up photo of NathanChen's bound hands, a green substance staining the nail of his left thumb.
"It probably rubbed off on the back lawn, or else it scraped the moss off the pool wall when it was struggling in the pool." Rex speculated.
"Can I meet Glenn?" Fyren asked Rex.
"Yes." Rex said, "But I can only take one person."
We split up, Fyren went with Rex to the booking office to see Glenn, and I went with Ryan to the "Ginley Motors", where Ryan showed the owner of the dealership his detective's license and told him that he was following up on Nathan Chen's case.
NathanChen purchased the Dodge Charger at the same time he credited his BMW E93.0CSi to the owner.
The car is still in the store today, and after the cheating video went viral, the owner checked the car's recorder and realized the memory card was missing.
"The police came and asked before, and with so many people coming in and out of the store, it's hard to figure out who the suspects are for stealing the cards." The owner said.
We also asked NathanChen about his original purchase, and the owner said that because NathanChen was a regular customer, he would be notified in advance before any new stock arrived at the store.
That Dodge Charger he decided to buy with little hesitation, paying for it on the spot with a credit card.
"Drove off on the spot?" I asked.
"No, it came over two days later to drive away." The owner said.
"Was it Glenn who received him then?"
"It was another fellow who received it. It was about one o'clock noon and Glenn was in the back room on his lunch break.
He must have learned NathanChen's identity inside and sprung for criminal intent." The boss guessed.
The news that the police recovered incriminating evidence from Glenn's residence has been made public, and although the case has not yet been decided, the public's mind has already acquiesced that Glenn is the killer.
"Was Glenn at the store when NathanChen came by to pick up the car?"
"It was Sunday and I was the only one in the store." The owner replied.
On the way back, Ryan makes a conclusive counter-argument: assuming Glenn committed the crime, NathanChen purchased the car, and while it was parked in the store, he tampered with the trunk lock and was then able to sneak into the victim's cottage.
But he hadn't had any direct interaction with NathanChen, and it would be rash to decide to commit a crime on the basis of information he got in a short period of time outside the house.
"The kidnapped person would have to know the identity of the kidnapper with complete certainty to leave clues at the scene, because if they were wrong, they would greatly slow down the progress of the investigation and set themselves up to be disadvantaged." I analyze.
"NathanChen went to the car dealership twice without seeing Glenn. the night of the murder, NathanChen left clues about the 'car dealership', which basically rules out that he drew his conclusions from the personal characteristics of the offender's body, face and even voice, so where exactly did he draw the conclusion that the offender was connected to the 'car dealership'? Where did he conclude that the criminal was related to the 'car dealership'?"
"Could the perp be someone else at the dealership?" Ryan looks at me.
We went back to NathanChen's cottage.
After the murder, the villa is cordoned off by the police. Thinking Ryan had a good way in, he gave the barbaric answer of "over the wall."
"That's breaking and entering." I said.
"At best, it's a trespassing on an empty house. No one lives there, it doesn't count as a private residence." He parked the car as a pad by the fence in the villa's backyard.
"The power should be out inside the villa by now, it won't set off the alarm." He rummaged through the storage box and pulled out two masks, a roll of duct tape, and a hammer, handing me one of the masks, "Wear it, just in case."
And then he said to himself, "The fingerprint combination lock on the front door is inconvenient for access to the case workers, so I'm sure they'll lock the door with a deadbolt. Such a lock can be smashed off with a hammer. Duct tape is used to affix the glass, making it easy to break it."
We stood up on the roof of the car and went successively over the wall of the villa to see a dead, empty swimming pool - the place where the two victims had drowned - with a pile of fallen leaves floating on top of it, immovable by the wind.
The wall of the pool has not been cleaned for a long time and is covered with moss, which seems to be dotted with some red spots between the moss when carefully identified.
Rounding the pool, a garage gate painted dark green appeared, and looking up at the second floor windows, which were more than four meters above the ground, and all of which were barred, it appeared that breaking the second floor windows to get into the room was not going to work.
We walked up to the main entrance and found one of the two iron gates open to the outside, and underneath it, padded with a small rock as a barrier.
"Duct tape and a hammer won't work." Ryan shrugged and preceded.
The villa window grilles are stainless steel, prismatic and brightly lit by the afternoon sun.
When I looked up at the second floor window just now, I noticed dark shadows reflecting off the grill on one side of the room, and having already been subjected to two previous surprise attacks, I naturally couldn't afford to take it lightly this time around - even if it was just a case of misreading.
I took the hammer from Ryan's hand and signaled him to keep quiet.
The rooms were on three floors in all, the first and second being duplexes, and by means of a circular staircase we stepped softly up to the second floor, to the door of the room where the window bars reflected the dark shadows.
The door to the room was closed, I asked Ryan to stay outside the door, took a deep breath, quickly unscrewed the door, pushed forward, the person flashed sideways into the room, there was not an assailant standing by the door as I expected, and quickly opened the room's two two-meter-high white closets, which were likewise free of hidden people.
I pushed open the small door to my room's toilet, leaned over to look under the bed, pulled back the patio curtains, and both were empty.
I breathed a huge sigh of relief, the handle of the hammer already sweaty from my grip, and the scar on my neck tickled.
It seems the experience of being attacked has caused me to develop a stress reaction. I reassured myself that I was overthinking it.
This is the master bedroom, the room where NathanChen was killed.
The room is spacious and has a Japanese style, and by the floor-to-ceiling windows on the terrace, there are two one-meter-high pots of greenery, with lush foliage and vibrant leaves due to the sunrise of the windows.
The bottle orchid in the lean-to was not symmetrical in shape, and I noticed that a few branches and leaves had fallen out of the pot, which appeared to have been artificially torn off, judging by the breaks in the branches and leaves.
It tied in with some clue I'd seen between, and I was meditating on the counterpart when I suddenly heard a rolling rattle outside.
Fruity is really someone!
Not that I was paranoid, but before I went up to the second floor with Ryan, in the spirit of saving for a rainy day, I wrapped and tied the clear tape he'd brought with him between the bars on either side of the center of the stairs to form a tripwire.
Before we entered the villa, the person in the room hid in other rooms beforehand, and while we were checking in the master bedroom, he took the opportunity to go downstairs, ready to sneak out, but unexpectedly tripped over the mechanism I set up, and rolled down from the middle of the circular staircase to the bottom, firmly and solidly.
The moment he heard the ringing, Ryan was after him in a flash.
"Be careful!" I ran out after him, and saw that the man who had fallen down the stairs was a man wearing a black mask, around six-foot-five, with a black ducktail hat on his head that detached in the tumble, revealing a silver-white slate haircut.
He lay on the ground, apparently badly injured, and, seeing us in pursuit, struggled to his feet again and ran out of the house.
If he had intended to attack us, he would have had the opportunity to do so, but he made a move to flee, so he should be harmless.
With that thought, I picked up speed and ran down the stairs, crossing over the tripping tape place and chasing after the silver-haired person.
"Pack two!" Ryan shouted at me, running towards the villa gate himself.
The silver-haired man could not run fast enough due to an injury to his right leg, so he had to turn back into the backyard and run by the pool.
There was only two meters between me and him, "Stop!" I shouted after him, ready to lunge him forward.
That's when a flying kick came from his right side, and the running man was kicked in the right shoulder by Ryan, sending his entire body flying into the pool.
"Catch me!"
Ryan couldn't brake fast enough, I reached out to pull him back, missed, and his whole body fell into that cold pool of water filled with rotting leaves ...