“Oh? Seems like it’s the latter. Tell me, what did you touch?” Zhao Yunlan kept his voice low. When she didn’t reply, he laughed coldly. “If you don’t tell me, you’ll be haunted by it for the rest of your life. Haven’t you ever heard that curiosity killed the cat? Some things shouldn’t be messed with.”
“A sundial,” Li Qian eventually said, breaking her silence. “It’s a family heirloom. It had already turned black from being there for so long. On the back, there’s a round plate with lots of inlaid stones that look like fish scales. They’re black crystal—similar to wujing stone, the elders said.”
Zhao Yunlan’s pen stilled. “A sundial?”
Li Qian nodded.
“The sundial goes around once a day; the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, over and over, symbolizing life’s endless cycle of reincarnation.” Zhao Yunlan sat deep in thought for a while before continuing. “But there’s another way of looking at it. Some people believe reincarnation is an endless cycle of killing, the old replaced by the new. What’s lost will be lost forever, and what has passed will never return. With a turn of the clock, one can look back, but not go back. With a turn of the reincarnation cycle, though, even if one tried to look back, they wouldn’t know which way to look.”
Behind him, unseen, a sudden tremor went through Shen Wei.
“What did you use it for?” Zhao Yunlan asked.
Li Qian bit her lip again.
“Okay, let me rephrase. Did you do anything bad with it?”
Her eyes grew wide. “I didn’t!”
Zhao Yunlan stared at her in silence.
“I really didn’t!” Li Qian curled up, reflexively trying to protect herself. “How could I use something passed down in my family to do something bad? You’re full of shit! You…” She coughed, worked up to the point of choking. More harsh coughs followed.
Shen Wei’s forehead creased. He walked over and blocked Zhao Yunlan’s penetrating gaze, patting Li Qian’s back. “Take your time. There’s no rush.”
To Zhao Yunlan, he said, “She’s just been through a significant shock. Whatever it is you want to ask, Officer Zhao, can you not push her too hard?”
Zhao Yunlan raised a brow. “Okay, I’ll stick to the most relevant things. One last question. After that, I’ll fuck off.”
He pulled a picture of the dead girl from his pocket. “Have you seen this student recently?”
Li Qian’s gaze swept over the picture. First, she shook her head. Then, as if suddenly recalling something, she grasped the photo and examined it carefully. Finally, she ventured, “I think… I think I saw someone who looked kind of like her yesterday…”
Zhao Yunlan’s expression turned serious. “Yesterday when? Do you remember what she was wearing?”
“In the evening.” Li Qian thought about it. “Last night, I’d just returned after the library closed. It was probably after 10 p.m. I left campus to buy some stuff. At the entrance, I think I saw someone who looked like her, but I don’t really remember what she was wearing… Oh! No, I do remember. She was in an Orientation Week T-shirt. I noticed because I have one too.”
“Were there a lot of people wearing that shirt yesterday?”
“Pretty much only students from our school,” Li Qian said. “I wouldn’t say a lot of people. Most students are at the new campus. There aren’t a lot of people here at the old one to begin with.”
“Were you wearing your matching shirt?”
“It hadn’t been washed, so I didn’t want to wear it against my skin. At first, I wore it over my own T-shirt. When the weather got hot later, I took it off and stuffed it in my bag.”
Zhao Yunlan considered that. “When you saw her, was anyone else around?”
“Yeah, there were a lot of people passing by, and cars too.” Li Qian, realizing he was trying to get at something, asked, “Why?”
“I wasn’t asking about the main road. I mean that little alley outside the side entrance to your school. That’s where she was walking, right? At the time, was there anyone else in that alley?”
Li Qian began to feel uneasy. Her gaze drifted to the side. She nodded, then shook her head, confused. “I… I don’t remember. Maybe…? I think she went that way, but I didn’t follow her. That alley’s a dead end. Only people who live in the dorms on the east side of campus would take the shortcut through there, so it’s usually fairly quiet…”
“You didn’t go that way?” Zhao Yunlan interrupted.
“Huh? Ah… I didn’t…”
“Why not? Don’t you also live on the east side?”
“I…” Li Qian didn’t know what to say. She mumbled to herself and then, panicked, she said, “I was taking the long way to go buy something…”
“Didn’t you just say you’d already finished shopping and had just left?” Zhao Yunlan interrupted again. His tone was harsh now. “Tongxue, there’s nothing I want more than to be a friendly neighborhood Mr. Policeman. I don’t want to scare you. But you need to do your part to cooperate with the investigation, so tell me the truth, okay?”
Freshly nervous, Li Qian clutched the hem of her shirt. “I-I am telling the truth.”
“Her name was Lu Ruomei. She was a graduate student at Dragon City University too. You’re asking me what happened yesterday? I’ll tell you: your fellow student was murdered last night.” Pausing after every word, focused intently on Li Qian’s expression, he said, “The estimated time of death is last night at 10 p.m. That means you may very well be the last person who saw her alive.”
Li Qian’s pupils contracted as the glass she was holding fell and shattered on the floor. She seemed as if she were in a trance: the corners of her eyes twitched nervously and her fingers, which she had unclenched unconsciously, were trembling. Her lips paled until they were nearly blue.
Zhao Yunlan leaned back and crossed his legs. Lacing his fingers together over his knee, he looked at her. “Why are you so shaken? If the victim’s death has nothing to do with you, and you didn’t even know her, why are you so afraid right now? Why did you take a detour last night instead of going through that alley?”
A short scream escaped her. Li Qian slumped down, fingers in her hair, and hid her face.
Taking one of her wrists firmly, Zhao Yunlan pulled her hand away. Sternly, he said, “It’s no use trying to evade this. Look at me and tell me exactly what you saw.”
Li Qian shoved his hand off. In her struggle, the hospital bed shifted. Its metal legs scraped the floor with a rough grating noise.
“I don’t know!” Hysterical, she kept yelling, “I don’t know! I don’t know! Don’t ask me! I don’t know!”
“Your campus isn’t very large.” Zhao Yunlan lowered his voice. “Perhaps you passed by her when eating breakfast one day. Maybe you’ve shared the same study room, borrowed the same book.
“Do you want to know how she died? When we found her, her corpse was lying all alone in the alley. Something sharp tore her open and half of her organs were dug out. We don’t know for sure what happened to them, but there was a chunk of her intestine with teeth marks on it, so it’s reasonable to think her killer ate them. All that blood… Tch, it was all over the ground. The bloodstains are still there. Also, did you know—”
Li Qian began to scream wordlessly.
Zhao Yunlan was unmoved, as if he had a heart of metal or stone. He didn’t let up. “She was still alive when her belly was ripped open. She had to see her own liver, kidneys, and stomach lifted out of her body. She would have been able to hear the chewing as her organs were eaten. Can you imagine what that must have been like?”
Already hoarse from screaming, Li Qian crumpled to her knees on the floor, curling into a ball with her arms around her head.
The doctor on duty heard the commotion and hurried over. “What happened? What’s going on?”
Zhao Yunlan thrust his work ID under the doctor’s nose, then reached out and shut the door in his face. “Sorry, police questioning. Give me another five minutes. Thank you.”
Folding his arms, Zhao Yunlan leaned against the door. He looked at Li Qian again and repeated himself a third time. “Tell me. What did you see?”
Abruptly, this time she answered him. “A… A shadow.”