"You mean...inside the box?" Luo Wenzhou didn't know what facial expression to pull together for Fei Du's idea. What he managed in the end was a teeth-clenching smile, "Are you sure Xu Wenchao is as psychotic as you are?"
"I find it quite interesting: how you 'normal' people perceive the ash box." Fei Du handed him Su Xiaolan's, "On the one hand you acknowledge it to be what remains of an ordinary person. On the other hand, you grant it extraordinary meanings, like holy, taboo, inviable, untouchable...regardless of what a person she used to be."
The tiny box weighed surprisingly heavy. Luo Wenzhou took a couple deep breaths then said: "The rituals and taboos are a result of reverence -- towards death, and life. Hear me now, Fei Du: if I open it and find nothing inside except the ashes, I'll stuff you in."
He laid down the small wooden box on the floor. Then, teeth gritting, he flipped open the cover. What emerged at first were some messy styrofoam and dehumidifier. Despite his gooseb.u.mps, Luo Wenzhou braced himself and dug in the ashes inside a cotton pouch.
Suddenly, his hand stopped. Under Fei Du's inquiring eyes he slowly and carefully pulled out a sealed plastic bag from the pile of ashes.
Fei Du smiled: "Looks like I won't be stuffed in there anymore?"
With his gloved hands, Luo Wenzhou carefully flicked off the remaining ashes from the plastic. What laid in front of them was a mini-notebook with the signature pink plastic cover that marked it as an object from the past.
Surprisingly, Su Xiaolan's hand-writing was quite good. She wrote like an adult. The margins were filled with doodlings -- skeletons drawn from blue ball-pens, "blood drips" from red fountain pens, and so on. It looked quite depressing. The pages were filled with exclamation marks and poor-grammar sentences.
"date, month, year. b.i.t.c.h let that fat one have me. She sat by the door and counted the money. Kill her! Rip her tongue out!! Crak her head open with the beer botle!"
This sentence popped into his eyes as soon as he opened the notebook. He took another silent deep breath, brows furrowed.
"date, month, year. Deng Ying is here! It rained and she came to borrow umbrella. She had been to my place before. A customer was here too. He was drunk! (followed but a whole page of messy ink stains) b.i.t.c.h and the drunk a.s.s dragged her into the room. She is a dead fish!"
"date, month, year. The Police came to our school today to look for Deng Ying. They asked many people but didn't ask me. Because I was home sick that day. Deng Ying is still in the bathroom. b.i.t.c.h said get rid of her, or we will all be dead."
"date, month, year. b.i.t.c.h put Deng Ying in the fridge and took her away. She told the neighbors she was going to the wholesale center to stock some ice-creams. The fridge stinks! I puked, and b.i.t.c.h hit me again."
Fei Du asked: "Who is Deng Ying?"
"Don't know." Luo Wenzhou's bushy eyebrows were tightly arched like bowstrings. He lowered his voice and said: "During this time Su Xiaolan was still in fourth grade. We didn't find any victim that fit the screening criteria from this period. If this were the first child victim, she may have accidentally stumbled upon the crime site so her case didn't show the signature characteristics as the rest."
24 years ago, a hot summer evening.
Fourth-grader Deng Ying was on her way home from school. It suddenly started pouring and she didn't have an umbrella. Her friend's home was just around the corner. She thought maybe she could stay there past the rain. The friend was also home sick that day so it's a good opportunity to pay her a visit too --
Large pedals of the sophora flower were chased away by the wind and battered by the rain. Their soft fragrance wallowed in mud.
The girl had no cell phone and couldn't tell anyone of her plan. Her split second decision to visit the friend led her down a h.e.l.lish detour -- and many others after her.
Luo Wenzhou: "So after that first incident, Su Xiaolan's mother discovered a new way to use her girl."
Fei Du refused to squat on the floor like a big monkey. Instead, he sat down beside Luo Wenzhou, propped one leg up, and rested the plastered arm on his knee. Casually, he leaned on the wall of ashes as if it was like any other regular wall.
Half of his attention was on the current event, but the other half of his mind was on Luo Wenzhou himself. Finding his reactions interesting, he suddenly asked: "What will happen to Su Luozhan?"
"Su Luozhan?" Luo Wenzhou's train of thought was suddenly interrupted. Puzzled, he turned to Fei Du, "What about her?"
Fei Du: "I mean, what kind of sentence would she get?"
"Oh, that. In the Juvenile rehab camp, yes. With her case, probably three years." Luo Wenzhou flipped over another page of the mini-note, and added emotionlessly, "And after that, we'll see. I will ask the local office to pay attention to her once she gets out."
"Three years." Fei Du raised one brow, "That's not even enough for college. I thought when she said "just for fun", someone was going to blast into the interrogation room and strangle her."
"The hot-headed ones were sent out for field work today. They weren't around."
"What about you?" Fei Du continued relentlessly, "All those sleepless nights; all those stressful encounters with the victim's family, the press, the public...Most of what you got in return were either tears or scolding. It takes great perseverance and empathy to keep on going, right? Now you finally nailed the suspect. But not only do they refuse to cooperate, but one of the key culprits show no shame and no regret of what she'd done. On top of that, she doesn't even get any real punishment for it. Don't you feel anything?"
Luo Wenzhou glanced at him, then brushed it off lightly: "When I started as a police, you were still at home watching cartoons, 'intern'."
"I don't watch cartoons." Fei Du replied, "I only play video games, occasionally."
Luo Wenzhou: "..."
He cleared his throat, then tried to change the subject: "Su Xiaolan's diary didn't mention how Su Hui dealt with the bodies. Any ideas?"
Fei Du stared at Luo Wenzhou mischievously, intending to embarra.s.s him. And he succeeded: Luo Wenzhou felt thorns on his back and had to fight the urges to sew the man's eyelids shut forever. Finally, Fei Du let him off the hook and cooperatively responded to his question: "Who, me? I would disa.s.semble the corpse first. Since I have a car, and since back then they didn't have the DNA technology, I would chop up the body and mix it with some pork ribs, and then toss the mixture in the mountains. Even if I got unlucky and someone discovers them to be human remains, it would be very hard for the police to identify the remains."
"If there were dismembering of the body, Su Xiaolan probably would have mentioned it in the diary." Luo Wenzhou ignored his excited tone and tried to state objectively, "not to mention that a drunkard woman and a little girl probably don't have the strength to dismember the body."
"Then find somewhere to bury it. The best option - an absolutely safe place - would be on my own property: somewhere that belongs to me indefinitely and won't be bothered at least before I die. In other countries you could bury in your backyard. But here, with our special land policy, burying a body is like burying a land mine that could go off on any day. It's too risky." Fei Du said, "So the next best option would be somewhere that's not likely to be excavated and, even if the body were accidentally dug out, n.o.body would care. For example, the unofficial burial lands in the countryside, or the water-weeds covered wetlands where drowning happens often."
"Even today, there are villages that haven't fully adopted the cremation practice. So you can still find fresh tombs in the middle of the farmlands. Find one of these new tombs -- or anywhere with newly dug soil due to construction -- and bury the body. This way, the color of the soil wouldn't attract attention and the same place usually don't get excavated again, at least not very soon. However, this requires the suspect to be very familiar with the landscape." Fei DU paused, then added, "What's easier would be to tie the foot with something heavy and let the body sink into the water. Even if the rope rots with time and the weight eventually detaches, chances are that the rotten body and the bones would already be entangled by the water weeds and become the main character of the next urban legend. The bottom line? All things leave traces. A wise man who was careful for a thousand times will miss the 1001st time. So, rather than trying to outsmart the whole public security system, it's better to abide by one simple principle of murder --"
Luo Wenzhou looked at him in silence.
"Do not let the body be discovered. If there are risks, then do not let the person who discovers it think there is a need to involve the police."
Hearing his theory, Luo Wenzhou nodded: "Sounds like quite a plan, but not without its flaws -- for example, seems that you can't bear the sight of blood. Speaking of...why are you afraid of blood again?"
Fei Du's mouth corner unnoticeably stiffened. As if the question choked him, he didn't answer until after a long, long pause. Then, he answered rather rigidly, "Wouldn't be so bothered by it if I knew the reason."
He refused to say more.
In one sentence, Luo Wenzhou successfully turned the master criminologist into a quiet flower vase. He let Mr. Eyecandy sit quietly beside him while continuing to flip through Su Xiaolan's diary in peace.
"Place the body somewhere with drowning risk...possibly." Luo Wenzhou murmured, "Su Hui came from the Ping Hai County which used to be the water source of Yan-cheng. There are lots of rivers and creeks there. She could...Huh?"
Luo Wenzhou was originally flipping through the diary rather quickly, skimming lots of repet.i.tive details about the ups and downs of a girl's daily life. But suddenly, his flipping slowed down.
There were a couple of pages about the happenings at school. Su Xiaolan was a very bitter girl, calling this one a 'b*tch' and that one a 'c*nt' as if she had been living on the planet of morons with no other species around. What caught Luo Wenzhou's attention was a picture between the pages. It must have been taken during a school performance. There were six girls lining up on the stage to do a curtain call, their long and skinny legs exposed underneath their lovely floral dresses.
The rest of the five faces were crossed out with a ball-pen. Su Xiaolan was in the middle. She stared into the camera with a slightly raised chin.
Floral dress -- yes, she hasn't mentioned the floral dress in the diary yet.
Luo Wenzhou quickly flipped back some pages.
"date, month, year. The dance teacher is such a c*nt. She asked us to buy our own performance dress because she didn't want to handle the money. 'Must have the dress to dance in the show', she said. b.i.t.c.h heard it and hit me with a beer bottle. Let b.i.t.c.h go to h.e.l.l! Let the dance teacher go to h.e.l.l!"
"date, month, year. Dress rehearsal is tomorrow but I have no dress. I saw the disgusting fatty outside of school. He had been scouting there for many days. I went with him. He got me the dress."
"So the first time that Su Xiaolang sold herself, it was for a floral dress." Luo Wenzhou double checked the date from the diary, "Twenty two years ago -- the time matches too. Since then, she turned from a pa.s.sive culprit to an active one. But why didn't she seek any help...What's that smile for?"
"Men, women, or kids of her own age, who should've her asked? To her, men were disgusting 'customers', women were 'b.i.t.c.hes' that forced and tortured her. As for kids in her own age...after Deng Ying died, out of fear she would naturally turn away from forming intimate friendships with the other kids...not to mention the hate and jealousy she had for the floral dress that the other girls obtain so easily. For a gloomy and bitter girl who happens to be pretty, do you think she'll have a lot of friends of her own age? When it comes to bullying, you'd be surprised at how crural and innovative the kids can be."
Towards the last pages of the diary, the angry doodling diminished. Because someone else appeared.
The precocious girl clearly liked him, especially after she discovered that he was her new teacher at school. Although Wu Guangchuan was also a "customer", he was different from the rest. He was cultured and gentleman-like. On the one hand he was a teacher; on the other hand he was poisoned by the sickly l.u.s.t. As if a plant that grew from the dark shady corner, he had a special sentimentality. He loved young girls. When with Su Xiaolan, he treated her caringly and lovingly like his real lover."
"date, month, year. I went to his home today. I won't let b.i.t.c.h know that I went. I didn't go for the money. He comes to my home twice a week so b.i.t.c.h won't find me other customers."
"date, month, year. I like him. He is my knight."
"date, month, year. He said he wanted to adopt me and he would help me get rid of b.i.t.c.h."
......
......
"date, month, year. b.i.t.c.h said he's been with us for half a year and it's about time to trust him with the 'lambs'. I bought tetramine today. I am going to kill her!"
"date, month, year. b.i.t.c.h gave him a 'lamb', and he took it! He took it!! I hate him!!!"
"date, month, year. I followed him to Lian Huashan."
"date, month, year. He was stalking someone. The little b.i.t.c.h wore a floral dress."
"date, month, year. He got sick and stayed in hospital overnight. I tricked the little b.i.t.c.h into his hotel room and tied her up like a lamb. Then I waited."
What followed was a big blob of messy ink. A couple pages were torn, and amidst the mess there was the scrambling word - "hate" - written here and there. Towards the end of the diary, there were no more coherent writings.
Drenched in the ink blob were the ghastly scream-calls and the severed floral dresses of the infamous serial abduction cases.
The floral dress costume that she paid for with her body had haunted her ever since. It was not a fetish of the pleasure seekers after all, but the endless repeats of how a girl's soul wallowed and drowned in a pool of mud.
Wu Guangchuan almost pulled her out once, but he eventually stomped her back into the abyss. The doomed dress that Guo Fei wore on that ill-fated day had turned into a shackle that, despite the pa.s.sing of years and the death of Su, was pa.s.sed down to the next generation.
The last page of the diary got stuck on the plastic back cover. Luo Wenzhou felt that there was something in between, so he carefully pulled on the page -- A dozen pictures fell out.
The photos were all taken at different times, probably sneaked. They were of a small room with sound-proof materials covering its interior. The heavy curtain was always pulled shut and the light was dim. On each picture there was a different girl and a different man. In each of the shots, the face of the human-skinned beast was recognizable.
But Fei Du picked up the only blurry one.
It was a very old photo, and the lighting was particularly poor. The skilled photographer tried hard but could only get a blurry silhouette. The short buildings in the distance blended in the night. The camera had a high angle and the focus was on the flower beds in the small garden. One of the short roses recently died, exposing a slit of the bas.e.m.e.nt window.
A skinny girl was pushed against the gla.s.s. Her hands were pressed helplessly onto the window pane. Her face was blurry. Behind her there was a towering man. "Was this a picture of Wu Guangchuan and Su Xiaolan that Xu Wenchao sneaked when he lived in the apartment at Xiang Yang road?"
Meanwhile, Tao Ran and a group of colleagues had opened the door of Room 201, Building 8 of the Xiang Yang Road.
En empty room. A complex and perplexing scent shrouded them.
Thick curtains were sealed shut and kept the lights out. Tao Ran opened the curtains to reveal the window that once faced Wu Guangchuan's windows. But instead, what he saw behind the curtains was a gigantic, life-size photograph.