Chapter 18
IN THE DARK ROOM, luminol glowed eerily wherever it had been sprayed. The floors, the ceiling, the cracks under doors—nothing was free of the large, overlapping patches. It was like a layer of dizzying wallpaper. Especially shocking against the otherwise spotlessly pale floor were the dried bloodstains under the couch; they’d never been cleaned up. Who knew how many years they had lain there before finally being bared again?
Soundproofing material covered the walls. A wall of photos in the living room displayed beautiful countrysides and natural landscapes. They would’ve seemed very tasteful, if not for the glowing, fluorescent luminol film that covered those photos too.
The bedroom, meanwhile, contained a portrait of a young shepherdess. The frame was around three feet tall and remarkably heavy. A forensic technician stared at it for quite a while, feeling as though something was off about it. When they took the portrait down, they found a camera hidden inside. It had been installed right behind the shepherdess’s eye, which instantly made the young girl’s serene smile much more chilling.
They found all kinds of knives, chains, and ropes in the locked storage closet next to the bedroom—so many different kinds, in fact, that looking at them was overwhelming. A forensic pathologist would probably have to come and identify them one by one.
But none of this compared to that horrifying photo pasted on the south-facing window.
“Deputy Tao, look,” said another forensic technician. “This window is the old-fashioned kind with two layers of glass. They put light-blocking fabric between the two layers and pasted the photo to the inside layer. That way, the fabric would cover the photo and keep light from penetrating, even if a solar storm broke out. And this photo was pasted here in a very particular way!”
The photo was blown up to an unusual and very precise size, apparently scaled perfectly to reality. If one stood in this room in the dark, it really would have been difficult to tell whether it was day or night. At first glance, a viewer would think they were just seeing the scenery outside the window: a thin, narrow road; sparsely scattered rows of old buildings; streetlights more than a hundred yards away; and a flower bed left to grow freely. In that flower bed, delicate flowers grew alongside weeds, but for some reason, a small section of the bed had withered and died. From this high angle, a small, faint light was visible through the withered stalks, an unknown light source reflecting on the window of that barely visible basement. And there, in the corner of that window, a young girl’s blurred face could be seen.
This was important evidence, so two technicians carefully removed the photo and windowpanes.
Tao Ran removed the light-blocking cloth and the outer layer of glass. His pupils constricted, and the sweat he’d worked up running around under the sun all day evaporated in an instant. He could see immediately that the leveling staves and rocks marking the site of Wu Guangchuan’s house matched the photo pasted on the window perfectly.
“Deputy Tao! Deputy Tao!” It was the police intern who’d been left behind to question the building manager. He ran up the stairs, skipping steps as he went. “They admitted that this is a group rental! But apparently people don’t stay here often, so they could all just be white-collar workers who come to nap at lunchtime or something. She said they don’t use the utilities much, so they don’t create any safety hazards, so—holy shit!”
✦ ✦ ✦
The intern’s eyes bugged out as he stared at the room bathed in the fluorescent shimmer of blood-detecting luminol. He was immediately subjected to a scolding from his colleagues.
“Careful—this is a crime scene!”
“Don’t just barge in without looking! Get out of the way!”
“‘They don’t create any safety hazards,’” Tao Ran repeated, staring unblinkingly out the window. “Can we contact the owners?”
“Th-the owners are abroad. We called them just now, but the number wasn’t in service, so we need to think of alternate options.” The intern suddenly remembered something. “Oh, right—Deputy Tao, Apartment 201’s parking spot isn’t empty. There’s an SUV parked there!”
Traffic police made quick work of identifying the car’s owner. It wasn’t the owner of Apartment 201, nor anyone else related to the case; it was a completely unrelated old man. Though his household was still registered in Yancheng, he’d moved away many years ago. When the police called him, he was at first completely baffled; only after they started asking about his license plate did he get a little panicked.
Further questioning revealed that the plate was his, but the car wasn’t. After retiring, the old man had gone to live with his children in a different city. He hadn’t needed his license plate anymore,10 so he’d rented it out for extra cash, since it was difficult to get one these days. That wasn’t much hassle; the old man just needed to lend out his ID when it was time for the annual checks, and the renter was willing to pay his travel costs if he showed up in person.
“Are…are you going to fine me? Or dock points from my license?” the license plate’s owner asked. He kept trying to reason his way out of trouble: “I really didn’t take much money, Officer. Only about two thousand RMB a year. If you don’t believe me, I can show you the contract…”
“You made a contract to illegally rent out your license plate?” Tao Ran didn’t know what to say. “So, who signed it?”
“Oh, a woman called Su…Su something? Oh, Su Xiaolan!”
A chill ran down Tao Ran’s spine. He spun around to issue orders to his colleagues. “Find out where this car’s been, starting from the day Qu Tong disappeared!”
“Deputy Tao, this car hasn’t got a GPS or dashcam, so all we’ve got to go on is traffic footage. The day before Qu Tong’s family received that recording, the car left the city via the South Airport Highway, then turned onto Yan’gang Highway. Two hours later, it merged onto the national highway, and half an hour after that, it exited onto an area where we had no cameras. The next day, it returned via the same route. At no point did it go to a gas station.”
That meant that after leaving the national highway, the car didn’t go far. “What’s near the spot where he pulled off the national highway?”
“A few villages… Seaside care homes, farm stays, and a village that’s a popular subject for oil paintings.”
Seaside…?
Tao Ran approached the living room photo wall. One of the photos depicted waves crashing into a sea reef at sunset. “We’re finding the locations shown in all these photos. Let’s go!”