The box was rather heavy for its size. Grasping it, Luo Wenzhou took deep breaths. “Rituals and taboos exist to ensure that we respect life and death. I’m telling you, Fei Du, if I open this and there’s nothing other than ashes, I’m stuffing you in there too.”
Fei Du shrugged, uncaring.
Luo Wenzhou placed the urn carefully on the floor. Gritting his teeth, he opened the lid and pulled out some moisture absorbers and bubble wrap. Covered in goosebumps, he steeled himself, opened the little cloth bag inside, and reached into it. Then he froze. Looking up to meet Fei Du’s eyes, he pulled a sealed plastic baggy out of the ash.
Fei Du chuckled. “So I don’t have to get in there?”
Luo Wenzhou’s gloved hands dusted the ashes from the baggy. Inside, he found a tiny little diary that measured a bit more than three by five inches. It had a pink plastic cover, quite retro, and the name of the diary’s owner was written on its spine—Su Xiaolan.
Su Xiaolan’s penmanship was quite nice, actually, and she connected her strokes with a smoothness children seldom achieved. Mysterious doodles dotted the pages: skulls drawn in ballpoint pen, “blood splatters” in red ink. The pages were hard to look at, intense and disturbing; there were semi-coherent sentences and exclamation marks everywhere.
The day, the month, the year. That bitch got the fatty to come do me while she counted money by the door. I’ll kill her! Pull out her tongue! Smash her head in with a bear (beer) battle (bottle)!!!
That was the first thing Luo Wenzhou saw when he flipped the notebook open. He inhaled sharply, brow furrowing into a knot.
The day, the month, the year. Deng Ying came over! It suddenly started pouring, and she didn’t have an umbrella, so she came to wait out the rain, since she’d come to my place before. Someone was at home, but they were drunk! (An entire page of ink marks followed.) The bitch helped that drunkard dragg (drag) her into the room. It’s over for her!
The day, the month, the year. The police came to school, looking for Deng Ying. They asked lots of people, but they didn’t ask me, because I stayed home from school that day. Deng Ying’s in the bathroom at home. The bitch says we’re all in trouble if we don’t get rid of her.
The day, the month, the year. The bitch put Deng Ying in a cooler and took her away. She told people she was selling ice pops. The cooler stank so bad that I threw up, so the bitch hit me again.
“Who’s Deng Ying?” Fei Du asked.
“I don’t know.” Luo Wenzhou’s dark eyebrows were like an instrument’s taut strings. “Su Xiaolan would only have been in fourth grade at this point. We haven’t found any victims who’d fit that time frame. If Deng Ying was the first victim, then she probably stumbled across them by accident—she might not have the same traits as the victims who followed.”
On a midsummer evening twenty-four years earlier, fourth-grader Deng Ying had been walking home after school when a sudden storm broke out. She had no umbrella, so she jogged a few steps in a sorry state. Then she remembered that a classmate’s home was nearby, so she decided to go there to wait out the rain. That classmate had been sick that day anyway, and hadn’t come to school, so this meant Deng Ying could pay her friend a visit…
In the wind and rain, scores of blossoms fell from the pagoda trees to infuse the mud covering the ground with their soft fragrance.
Girls didn’t have cell phones in that day and age; they couldn’t call to tell anyone where they were going. Having come up with that sudden idea, Deng Ying ran past a fork in the road that she’d never return to.
Perhaps she hadn’t been the only one facing that same fork in the road.
“So, Su Xiaolan’s mother discovered another use for her daughter at that point,” Luo Wenzhou said in a low voice.
Fei-zong didn’t want to squat like an oversized monkey to look at the little notebook with Luo Wenzhou, so he just sat down on the floor, propping his injured arm up with one leg. Half of his attention was on the case and the other half on Luo Wenzhou, whom he couldn’t help but find interesting. “What’ll happen to Su Luozhan?” he asked, interrupting the sergeant’s thoughts.
“Su Luozhan?” Luo Wenzhou shot Fei Du a confused glance. “What about her?”
“Is she going to be sentenced?”
“Of course not. At most, she’ll be taken into custody and rehabilitated for…around three years, for a situation like hers?” Luo Wenzhou replied lightly, flipping through the notebook. “After that long, they’ll reevaluate her. I’ll ask the local station to keep an eye on her then.”
“Three years,” Fei Du said, arching a brow, “isn’t even long enough to earn a bachelor’s degree. In the interrogation room, when she said it was ‘fun,’ I thought someone would barge in and strangle her.”
Luo Wenzhou didn’t even look up. “I’d already sent my more emotional colleagues out on investigations. They weren’t there.”
“What about you?” Fei Du pressed. “You guys worked the whole night, then got ordered around by the victims’ families. You had to listen to them cry and curse at you all. To keep your cool and stay motivated to finish the investigation, you have to put yourselves in their shoes, right? And now that you’ve finally caught the suspects, not only are they not coming clean, one doesn’t even seem remorseful—and she won’t even be held criminally accountable. Don’t you have any opinions about that? Are you happy with it?”
Luo Wenzhou glanced at him again. “When I started working as a police officer,” he said lightly, “you were still watching cartoons, ‘intern.’”
“I never watched cartoons. I just gamed occasionally.”
Abruptly, Luo Wenzhou changed the topic. “Su Xiaolan didn’t mention in her diary how Su Hui got rid of the body. Do you have any guesses?”
Fei Du stared at Luo Wenzhou so hard that his gaze felt like a knife to Luo Wenzhou’s throat. He almost wanted to sew Fei Du’s eyelids shut. Then the younger man looked away and answered cooperatively, “Me? I’d chop the body up first. I have a car, and they couldn’t test DNA back then—so basically I’d dice it, buy a few bags of ribs, and mix the human remains with the meat. Then I’d toss it all in random places all over the wilderness. If I got unlucky and the pieces were somehow identified as human remains, the police would have a hard time figuring out whose remains they were.”
“No. If the body were chopped into pieces, Su Xiaolan’s diary would have mentioned that.” Ignoring Fei Du’s animated tone, Luo Wenzhou added rationally, “Besides, it’s hard to chop up a body. I doubt an alcoholic woman and a young girl could have managed it.”
“I’d find a way to bury the body, then. Ideally in a totally safe place—a place that would always belong to me, that no one would touch even after my death. If I were overseas, I could have buried it in my own backyard, but that’d be tricky here. Especially back when the concept of private property didn’t really exist. Burying a body would’ve been as risky as burying a landmine; it could’ve ‘exploded’ any day.”
Fei Du tapped his chin. “So, if it were me,” he continued, “I’d choose the next-best option: a place where a body would be difficult to dig up, or where—if a body were discovered—no one would be surprised. Like a secret graveyard in a rural area, or a high-risk flood zone with swamp vegetation. It’s not hard to find a ‘wild’ grave. Many villages still don’t cremate people. There’s always a grave surrounded by flowers somewhere. I’d find a new one, or one that was recently repaired, and bury the body there. No one would notice anything strange about the dirt, and no one would dig that area up again for a long while.
“For that to work, though, the culprit would need to know the area well. Tying a rock to the corpse’s ankles and then dumping it in a body of water might be easier. Over time, both the rope and the flesh would disintegrate, so there’d be no evidence of the weights the body had been tied to, and the bones would sink to the bottom and get tangled in the plants. That’s got great potential to become the next lake-ghost story. Everything leaves a mark in this world; however smart a murderer is, they’ll leave some kind of trace. Rather than fight the entire public security system, it’s better to follow one simple principle…”