Chapter 12
“HELLO—IS THIS SU LUOZHAN? This is Wang-laoshi from the youth center—the one who gave out your registration cards when school started. Remember me?”
“Yes, Wang-laoshi. Good evening.”
“How come you’re up so late? Are your parents there? I’d like to speak to them. There’s something I need to ask you, but I’ll need their permission first.”
“Dad’s not back yet, and Mom’s sick, so she’s sleeping. I can’t wake her up. You can go ahead and ask.”
“Oh, I see… Okay. I’ve just got one simple question. You see, there’s this kid in our art class named Zhang Yuchen. She went missing after school today, but someone said that they saw you two playing together. Do you remember the last place you saw her?”
Silence.
“Hello? Su Luozhan? Are you there?”
“…Yes. Sorry, my place has bad reception. Who did you say it was from the art class?”
“Zhang Yuchen. She’s small, and she wears her hair in a braid.”
“Oh—I know her. We played in the park today. Lots of people were there, including kids from other classes. But after that, everyone just left. We didn’t know where she went.”
“I see. All right, then, you’d better get some rest. Don’t be late for school tomorrow.”
“Okay. Please let us know if you find her. I’m really worried too.”
Lang Qiao stopped the recording of the call. “That girl wasn’t being monitored by a guardian, and the other girls had given roughly similar accounts, so the teacher didn’t probe further. But what do you make of that conversation? I still find this theory hard to believe, but if the suspect really is a child, that would explain why Qu Tong was willing to get in a stranger’s car despite being terrified, and why Deputy Tao and I couldn’t find anything useful in the security footage. Still…what a chilling thought.”
Luo Wenzhou pushed Su Luozhan’s file toward Lang Qiao. “I’ll show you something even more chilling.”
In Su Luozhan’s emergency contact information was the name Su Xiaolan, labelled Mother.
A handful of police cars rushed to Su Luozhan’s registered address. It was in a fairly well-to-do residential area, where all was quiet this late at night. Startled awake, the dozing security guard stared at Luo Wenzhou’s badge, looking dazed.
“Do you have residents surnamed Su?” Luo Wenzhou asked. “A mother and daughter?”
The security guard stared so hard that he almost went cross-eyed. “I’m n-not…I’m not sure. I-I-I’m new here…”
“Get the list of registered property owners from the management office,” Luo Wenzhou quickly ordered his officers. “Be careful, though. If this girl really is the suspect we’re looking for, then we’re in a highly delicate situation. She’ll be less stable than an adult, and we don’t want to spook her. We should try to keep things from getting out of control if the victim’s still alive.”
“Unit 401 is the Su family’s, Sergeant Luo!” someone reported.
“Everyone clear? Let’s go.”
The police hid at the ends of the fourth-floor corridor. With his chin, Luo Wenzhou gestured for Lang Qiao to knock.
Trying to massage her facial muscles so that she’d look less like a Botox victim, Lang Qiao put on the friendliest expression she had ever mustered in her life, marched over to the door, and rapped on it. “Anyone home?”
No answer.
Lang Qiao’s heart had sped up slightly; she was accustomed to being vicious and imposing, but she wasn’t quite used to taking on a kindly guise. She tried again, using her softest, gentlest voice. “Is anyone home? I’m the new tenant from upstairs. Sorry, but can you tell me if any water is seeping into your unit? I think we might accidentally have caused a leak.”
There was still no answer.
The technician accompanying the team silently handed Lang Qiao a reverse peephole lens. Lang Qiao fixed it to the door’s peephole and bent down slightly to peer into the apartment.
No one was at the door. She could see all the way through into the living room, which appeared to contain the only light in the still, dark apartment. Peering closely, Lang Qiao noticed that the source of the faint light was an incense altar, on which two flickering red electric candles and prayer lamps were set up to either side of a black-and-white portrait. The dead woman in the portrait seemed to stare spookily straight into Lang Qiao’s eyes, her expression cold.
A chill ran down Lang Qiao’s spine, and she tipped her head back involuntarily. Luo Wenzhou shot her a questioning look. Lang Qiao shook her head quickly, shivering, and knocked again. “Anyone there? If you can’t come to the door, just give me a shout! I just want to know whether that water’s leaking.”
An awkwardness spread in the silence of the narrow corridor. Abruptly, Luo Wenzhou raised a hand to motion Lang Qiao back. “Open the door.”
Lang Qiao blinked. “Boss…?”
They had no evidence, no witnesses, not even a warrant. Everything hinged on a hunch.
“It’s fine,” Luo Wenzhou said, his voice low. “If anything happens, I’ll take responsibility. Open it.”
Crowding the door, the criminal investigation team and technicians quickly broke in. An indescribable odor surged forward to meet them—a peculiar mixture of incense, candle wax, midsummer humidity, and mustiness from poor ventilation, all of which seemed to have fermented into a stench two steps from rotting. The apartment itself was empty, though. No one was there.
It wasn’t a large unit, maybe just six hundred square feet—a standard single-bedroom apartment size. But with Su Xiaolan’s funeral portrait standing guard alone, the place felt strangely vacant.
The portrait faced a double bed in the living room, its silken bedspread dull and faded. A bottle of dark nail varnish and a half-empty pack of cigarettes sat near the bed. The adjacent bedroom was smaller and clearly belonged to a young girl. Across the single bed, a row of cheap, expressionless dolls was lined up, sitting shoulder to shoulder facing the door. Each wore a floral dress.
“Oh my god.” Lang Qiao opened the closet of the girl’s room to find the exact same thing: It was full of floral dresses. Even more eerily, each doll’s dress had a matching counterpart in the closet. Goosebumps rose on Lang Qiao’s arms. “How could anyone actually live here?”
Luo Wenzhou pulled on his gloves and rifled through the closet, discovering a small box under the clothes heap. He found the latch and popped the lid, and “Für Elise” began to play from under it. The music box’s batteries must’ve been running low, though; the piano music was a little out of tune, and it sounded sluggish and rather creepy.
Then the officers saw what was in the box, and Lang Qiao threw a hand over her mouth.
There was a naked doll inside. An arm and a leg had been detached from it and thrown haphazardly over a mass of bloody fabric strips—cotton fabric covered in vivid white flowers.
“That’s Qu Tong’s dress. Her parents showed us a photo of her wearing it. I remember how badly it was made—one side was poorly stitched and hid part of the pattern, so it looked uneven.” Trembling, Lang Qiao pointed at the stitching on one of the cloth strips. “Just…just like that.”
Luo Wenzhou closed the box, his face dark as night. “Bring it back for testing,” he instructed, then turned to check the bathroom.
The bathroom was damp, with thick circles of mold spreading freely over the walls. There were two toothbrushes in front of the chipped mirror in the carved frame, plus a row of lipsticks in different shades and several used cotton buds.
“What’d she tell the teacher again? ‘Dad’s not back yet, and Mom’s sick, so she’s sleeping’?” Luo Wenzhou looked around, then muttered, “There’s no sign that a man ever lived here. Who did she mean by ‘Dad’? Are you sure the call was traceable to here?”
“Sergeant Luo, we’ve found the phone she took the call on earlier.” One officer carefully fished a heavily scratched old cell phone out from under the coffee table and checked its log. “The teacher’s number is logged!”
That meant Su Luozhan had been here earlier! Luo Wenzhou whipped around. “But where is she now?”